Yom Kippur 2026: The Blame Game

YK 2026

The Blame Game

© 2026 Rabbi Adina Lewittes

It's Yom Kippur, the day we set aside to take responsibility for our actions and to own our mistakes. That isn't easy for many of us. Personally, I've always tended to blame other people for my problems rather than take responsibility myself. It's not my fault; it’s because of the way I was raised.

(Ba-dum ching.)

Ok, I’ll try another one. It’s a little ironic that this day of internal reckoning is so core to our Judaism when the Torah’s opening chapters tell a story that’s exactly the opposite. Caught in the Garden of Eden after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent, and the serpent doesn't have a leg to stand on.

(Oy.)

In all seriousness, though, the story of blame doesn't stay in the Garden. When God asks Cain where his brother Abel is, Cain answers with a question of his own: "Am I my brother's keeper?" In a sense, the rest of the Torah is one long answer to that question. Yes. Yes, you are.

It gets worse. Sarah, overhearing the promise that she'll bear a child at ninety, laughs to herself, but when God asks about it, she denies it, avoiding responsibility because she's afraid. Abraham, and later Isaac, lie to foreign kings that their wives are their sisters, protecting themselves, avoiding responsibility, and leaving the fate of the women they love in the hands of strangers. Nice. 

These are our ancestors, the very people whose merit we'll invoke again and again in today's prayers. The Torah doesn’t hide their failures from us, teaching us that avoiding responsibility isn't a flaw found only in bad people. It's deeply human, and even the best of us fall prey to it.

This afternoon we'll read the story of Jonah who runs away from the mission God gave him to help redeem the people of Nineveh. When a storm overtakes his ship, he asks the sailors to throw him overboard. There's something heartbreaking in that moment. Jonah is willing to take the blame for the storm, but not the responsibility for the task. 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l, saw this same pattern unfold through all of human history. He wrote: "The story of humanity has been, for the most part, a flight from responsibility. The culprits change. Only the sense of victimhood remains. It wasn't us. It was the politicians. Or the media. Or the bankers. Or our genes. Or our parents. Or the system, be it capitalism, communism or anything between. Most of all, it is the fault of the others, the ones not like us, infidels, sons of Satan, children of darkness, the unredeemed. The perpetrators of the greatest crime against humanity in all of history were convinced it wasn't them. They were 'only obeying orders.' When all else fails, blame God. And if you don't believe in God, blame the people who do. To be human is to seek to escape from responsibility."

Our own moment is saturated with blame. Op-eds and TikToks, Instagram posts and Facebook reels so often celebrate the righteous victim, the one who has been wronged, who can do no wrong, and who bears no part in their own indignation. Victimhood has become a kind of social currency. It buys attention and status, and the price is very affordable. All it takes is a muted conscience.

But the real price is much higher. Victimhood breeds what the psychologist Martin Seligman called learned helplessness, the sense that nothing we do will make a difference. Over time that helplessness tends to harden into depression, anger, and rage. We see it all around us, and if we're honest, sometimes we feel it ourselves.

I want to be gentle here, because blame often comes from a genuine place. Blame is sometimes what pain does when it doesn't know where else to go. Blaming someone else can shield us, at least for a while, from grief, from shame, and from the frightening thought that we might have hurt someone. That's understandable. It's just not where healing lives. Far from repairing the breaches between us and others, blame only widens them.

Some of this happens without our even noticing, shaped by technologies that have changed how we relate to one another. The last two weeks have had many of us anxious about AI being used to engineer a deadly virus. The psychotherapist Esther Perel worries about a quieter danger: that AI is diminishing our curiosity about one another, and feeding a fear of the unknown that too often turns into blame.

The algorithmic perfection of the content we consume tells us how to dress, how to speak, how to raise our kids, and how to do business, until we expect ourselves, and each other, to show up in the world flawlessly. We grow less tolerant of our own imperfections and uncertainties, and of other people's differences and limitations. That has real consequences for friendship and for intimacy. As we lose our capacity to handle what is unknown and imperfect, we become avoidant. Instead of leaning into difficult, complicated moments, we disconnect. We blame. We cancel.

Life, Perel reminds us, is full of paradoxes to be managed, not problems to be solved. We can't always agree or resolve our differences, but if we try, we can learn to live with them.

We are flawed people, she says, living inside a false picture of flawlessness. Imperfect and unpredictable as we are, what we need is a psychology of complementarity rather than superiority. Instead of blaming each other, we need to ask each other: Why did you do that? Explain your thinking to me. Help me understand you. On this day when we stand in judgment, we need to stay curious about one another, and to be slower to judge.

The culture of blame doesn't only widen the gulfs between us. It also separates us from ourselves. When we routinely implicate someone else for what's hurting us, we avoid facing our own failures. We avoid our own guilt. And the Rabbis have a special message for those of us who do that.

But first, let's step back and ask: what exactly is Jewish guilt? And no corny jokes about mothers, please. 

Jewish guilt doesn’t just say, “You sinned”. It says "You sinned, and after everything I did for you." Jewish guilt is about what you did, what you didn't do, what you were thinking of doing, and what your cousin did that brought shame on your whole family.

Of all our teachings about guilt, especially the ones that blame the destruction of the Temples on our own failings, there's one that might make you laugh if it weren't so haunting. The Jerusalem Talmud teaches that any generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt is considered as though it had destroyed it.

Seriously? We're personally on the hook for something that happened in the year 70? You? Me? The Church says you inherit original sin. We inherit an unfinished construction project. And every year it's not done, it's on us. It is the longest-running "Nu?" in recorded history.

And we institutionalized it. Three weeks of mourning. Fast days. A glass broken at every wedding. At the happiest moment of your life, you’re reminded about the unfinished renovation. "Mazel tov!! Also, the Temple. Just so you know. Congratulations again!"

I think the Sages understood something profound when they made every generation answerable for the Temple it didn't rebuild. They taught us that guilt isn't only for what you've done; it's for making peace with what you haven't done. It's like saying to a friend: "I'm not mad that you forgot my birthday. I'm mad that you were okay with forgetting my birthday!"

The teaching summons us to own all the rebuilding we know we should be doing and aren't. It jolts us out of complacency. It refuses to let us settle into the moral and spiritual laziness that sets in when we blame everyone else for what's broken.

This year, the culture of blame poses a particular danger to us as a Jewish community, and I want to speak about it with care, because so many of us are hurting. We are living through relentless assaults on Jewish dignity and Jewish safety. The hatred is real and well documented, and for many of us it has become deeply personal. Our resentment is legitimate. And precisely because it is so legitimate, it has become dangerously easy to lay all our troubles at the feet of antisemites and anti-Zionists, and the ignorant and spineless crowds who support them, and to set aside the harder work of facing our own shortcomings. There is so much evil to look out at in the world that we can forget to look in. When we feel as deeply done-to as Jews feel today, it can distract us from the rest of the work of teshuvah that is still ours to do. But as the saying goes, when you point a finger at someone else, three fingers are pointing back at you.

Long ago, Rav Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel, taught that the faults we see in others serve as a divine mirror. When we notice someone else's failings, we should hear in them an urgent invitation to examine our own. So often, the very flaws we're quickest to accuse others of are the ones we can't bear to see in ourselves.

Let me be clear. Jews are not responsible for antisemitism. And however strongly you may oppose some of Israel's actions, or those of its leaders, Israel is not to blame for the blatantly biased anti-Zionism raging across the world. But none of that releases us from the work of teshuvah, this year or any year.

I remember so vividly a conversation with the philosopher Moshe Halbertal, one of the authors of the IDF's code of ethics. Someone asked him why the Israeli army has always worked so hard to fight fairly and responsibly, when so many other armies commit ethical violations as a matter of course. His answer was that the IDF, and by extension the Jewish people, doesn't measure itself against anyone else's moral code. We hold ourselves accountable to our own Jewish ethical standards. I've always found that answer both demanding and deeply dignifying. It means we always have our own work to do, whatever anyone else is doing.

Let me also be clear about something else: blame does have a place in teshuvah. Part of the "return" in teshuvah is going back to the painful moments we may have caused, so that we can seek forgiveness from those we've hurt. But teshuvah also means returning to a moment when someone wronged us, and opening a conversation that may lead us to ask them for an apology. The Rambam teaches that when someone hurts us, we shouldn't hate them silently in our hearts. We should go to them and say, "Why did you do this to me?" That kind of honest naming, offered in the hope of reconciliation, is a sacred part of the work.

So the question isn't whether we ever assign blame. It's what our intentions in doing so are. If it's to divert our attention from our own responsibility, we need to rebalance. If it's to attempt to heal a relationship with someone who hurt us, it's a legitimate step toward repair. That's true for each of us as individuals, for us as a people, and even for an army.

This morning's Torah reading shows how deeply the Torah understands our instinct to blame, and how it tries to redirect that instinct toward a holier purpose. It describes the goat sent into the wilderness, the se'ir la-Azazel.

In his book The Scapegoat, the French literary critic and anthropologist René Girard traces an ancient and enduring impulse. A divided society in crisis comes back together by heaping all the blame for its suffering onto one person or group. Everyone joins in, and because everyone joins in, the blame feels justified and the victim's guilt seems beyond question. That's why, Girard observed, no one ever believes they have a scapegoat. They truly believe they've found the culprit. The mechanism only works as long as people don't see what they're doing.

Later in his life, Girard added a troubling twist. In a world that competes for victim status, as ours does, scapegoating can be turned around. In the name of concern for victims, people begin persecuting others, using the very same mechanism, now dressed up as justice.

The Yom Kippur ritual turns all of this inside out. When the Kohen Gadol confesses the sins of the people on the head of the goat designated for the wilderness, no one imagines that this animal is guilty of any of them. Everyone knows that the sins are the doing of the people themselves. Girard’s scapegoat carries the sins of people who refuse to name them as their own. Sending that goat into the wilderness banishes not only the people's own wrongdoings, but any temptation to pin them on someone else.

I'm proud to say that no animals were harmed in the writing of this sermon or the leading of these services. But there is something about that ritual we are sorely missing today: the honesty to name our failings as our own. North American Jews, our families and communities, our institutions and advocacy groups, are more polarized than ever over domestic politics, over the war in Gaza, and over Zionism itself. Israeli society has been so badly fractured by the last four years that President Herzog has warned repeatedly of political violence and civil unrest. Much of what makes Jewish life here and in Israel so painful right now is this very question of blame. Let me try to explain, as carefully as I can.

In some Jewish circles, it remains controversial to ask whether the IDF overextended its military power in Gaza, causing more destruction and loss of life than was reasonable or necessary, in a war we didn't start and had no choice but to fight; a defensive, just war. But a recently released British film by the Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor reframes that question more aggressively, and more dangerously, than ever before by stating it as an outright accusation of IDF approved AI-assisted targeting in Gaza leading to massive civilian casualties.

As galling as these accusations are to so many of us, there's another danger that it provoked. Some Israeli politicians are using the film to silence, or at least to quiet, longstanding questions coming from across ideological sectors about the government's role in October 7, its avoidance of a state commission of inquiry into that horrific day, the inflammatory statements some of its senior ministers have made in the years since, and about the prosecution of the war. When blame becomes a shield against a real national conversation about responsibility and accountability, it doesn't only neglect the work of today. It endangers our hope for a strong and vital tomorrow. As Rabbi Sacks taught, blame keeps us stuck in the past, while responsibility carries us toward the future.

Less controversial, and even more disturbing, is the near-impunity with which West Bank agitators have, for months now, inflicted terror, destruction, and even death on Palestinian villages and their residents. Jews around the world - of all backgrounds and political persuasions - are repulsed and mortified, as much by the government's unwillingness to hold these criminals accountable as by the crimes themselves. No amount of bias against Israel or against Jews, and dare I say, no amount of violence against us, justifies allowing such behavior to go unpunished. It is a gross violation of Israeli law, and an abomination in the eyes of Jewish ethics.

Rav Kook warned that the fractures within a society aren't healed by calling out someone else's violations. They're repaired when each faction commits to improving its own conduct and fixing its own mistakes. That's as much a rebuke to the current Israeli government as it is to each of us. We can't let other people's failures distract us from the work that is ours.

On Rosh Hashanah I mentioned Rabbi Danny Gordis's interview with Rabbi Doron Perez of the World Zionist Organization. Rabbi Perez described an Israel today overflowing with blame. It's gotten so bad, he said, that this Yom Kippur, instead of beating our own chests during the confessional prayers, we might find ourselves beating each other's, for the sins we're so sure the others have committed.

You'll recall that Rabbi Perez lost one son on October 7, and his other son was wounded. And yet he has found a way to move forward with his life, his family, and his faith in the promise of Israel. His grief and his sadness, he said, never turned into anger, and because of that, they never turned into blame. He's keenly aware of how fine the line is between righteousness and self-righteousness, and how easily blame can blur it. "The truth doesn't begin and end with me," he says. Anyone who has ever been in a meaningful relationship knows that it's never really about being right. It's about learning how to live together in peace.

It's his very refusal to blame that preserves his agency, his power to keep building the Israel he believes is possible. And herein lies the deepest risk of a culture, or a personality, built on blame and victimhood: it quietly gives that power away.

As Rabbi Sacks explained, those who present themselves as victims believe it gives them power, when in truth it leaves them powerless. He wrote: "Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility. The victim, ascribing [their] condition to others, locates the cause of [their] situation outside [themselves], thus rendering [themselves] incapable of breaking free from [their] self-created trap."

Compassion for those who suffer, empathy, and kindness are precious Jewish virtues. But they never come at the expense of responsibility. They walk alongside it. A culture of victimhood drowns in the questions "Who did this to me?" and "Why me?" A culture of teshuvah asks something else: "What can I do about this, and how can I grow stronger for the future?"

Rabbi Sacks contrasted our Jewish culture of guilt, which separates the sin from the sinner, with the ancient Greek culture of shame, which defines a person by their action and condemns them for it. Because we can hold that separation, because we believe a person, or a people, is always more than the worst thing they've ever done, ours is a culture of moral sustainability. Through honest introspection and accountability, we take the residue of sin and failure and transform it into the energy with which we build a more just and loving future.

In the end, victimhood and blame are anathema to Jewish values because they deny the very essence of our tradition, which is the call to human responsibility. It is one of the most ennobling, dignifying things our tradition says about us: that we are capable of owning our actions, expressing remorse, seeking forgiveness, and changing our ways. Kapparah, atonement, this whole Day of Atonement, is the greatest expression of our freedom, our capacity to change ourselves and the world around us. It is the greatest show of faith in the future.

And it is also the greatest show of faith in us.

Every morning, Rachel Goldberg-Polin wakes to a world without Hersh and recites the words of gratitude we're taught to say the moment we open our eyes:

מוֹדֶה אֲנִי לְפָנֶיךָ מֶלֶךְ חַי וְקַיָּם, שֶׁהֶחֱזַרְתָּ בִּי נִשְׁמָתִי בְּחֶמְלָה. רַבָּה אֱמוּנָתֶךָ Modeh/Modah ani lefanecha melech chai v'kayam, she-hechezarta bi nishmati b'chemlah, rabbah emunatecha. Thank You,, for mercifully returning my soul to me. Your faithfulness is great

After all the pain Rachel has endured, she hears something more in those words. Your faith in me is great. You gave me back my soul because You believe I'm not done. In spite of everything, You trust that I still have more to do here, and more to give.

So does each of us. And teshuvah, the work of owning our mistakes and repairing them, is the precious gift of a tradition that believes in us and in our power to do more and better.

But remember, there is no magic here. None of the words we recite today, none of the blessings, none of the confessions, none of the rituals, will miraculously turn our vices into virtues. None of them will do the work of healing the ruptures we've caused. Just as we can’t blame God for all our suffering, we mustn't mistake religion for control, or lean on it to soothe our anxiety about an uncertain future.

The temptation is real, and even the liturgy invites it. Ki hineh ka-chomer b'yad ha-yotzer: we are like clay in the hands of the potter, who shapes us or breaks us. In Unetaneh Tokef we pass like sheep before the Divine Shepherd, who decides and records our fate. Avinu Malkeinu, we plead, inscribe us in your book of merit.

But in truth, we are the authors of our own books and the architects of our own destinies. Moshe spent an entire book of Torah trying to plant this in our heads and hearts before we entered the land of Israel. He was less concerned with how we would conquer the land than with what it would take to remain there. We would have to use our newfound power and independence to build a society devoted to justice and peace, to caring for the needy, to honesty and integrity. God's role was to bring us out of slavery and give us the gift of freedom, along with holidays and rituals that keep the lessons of our suffering alive, so that we would ease the suffering of others. God modeled for us, human beings created in the divine image, what it means to be free and to use that freedom to free others. God did not, and does not, do that work for us.

Just as we once had to learn how to use our power as a people, and just as we are still learning that, today each of us reconnects with our own power to bring healing and hope to ourselves and to those around us. Whatever relationship any of us has with God, it's meant to be a source of inspiration and strength. Religion is a sanctuary we draw courage from, not a place to hide from the work that awaits us.

We began in the Garden, with a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a tender question from God, Ayeka, "Where are you?", and a chain of pointing fingers. Adam and Eve hid, and then they blamed. Forty years into the wilderness, standing at the edge of the land, Moshe brings us back to that same moment. "See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. Choose life." It's the same good and evil from the Garden, set before us now as a call to responsibility. With that invitation, Rabbi Sacks suggests, Moshe redeems the moment in Eden and restores us to the possibilities of paradise.

And lest we find the burden too great to bear, Rav Kook brings us home even more gently. “Even when a person sees no way to repair their past,” he wrote, “and even when the road ahead is full of obstacles, the will to be good is the breeze of the Garden of Eden blowing through the human soul.”

My teacher and colleague, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, points out how beautiful this image is, because the Torah does mention that breeze, but in the very moment of Adam and Eve's sin:

וַֽיִּשְׁמְע֞וּ אֶת־ק֨וֹל יְהֹוָ֧ה אֱלֹהִ֛ים מִתְהַלֵּ֥ךְ בַּגָּ֖ן לְר֣וּחַ הַיּ֑וֹם וַיִּתְחַבֵּ֨א הָֽאָדָ֜ם וְאִשְׁתּ֗וֹ מִפְּנֵי֙ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֔ים בְּת֖וֹךְ עֵ֥ץ הַגָּֽן׃

They heard God moving about in the garden at the breezy time of day; and Adam and his wife hid from God among the trees of the garden.

Here is how Rabbi Tucker hears Rav Kook's message to all of us: “Come out of hiding. There is always a channel for teshuvah and for change. God saw to that by planting the longing to return in our souls. And that longing is exactly what the cool, comforting breeze of Eden has always been.”

Enough blame, hevre. Enough distractions and diversions. Let the gentle winds of change instead carry you home to the deepest, most authentic, most beautiful expression of who you really are.

Shanah Tovah.