Anachnu Chatanu: What We Owe Each Other
Rabbi Mónica Gomery
Yom Kippur
Sept 21, 2026
Watch
Shana tova.
In 1992, in a different set of dark and murderous times, the poet, feminist, and anti-war activist Adrienne Rich wrote the following:
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life…
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
(Ashamnu nigun, sung twice)
On Yom Kippur we are instructed to pray as an agudah achat, an interconnected collective. The Machzor’s central prayers are all articulated in the first person plural:
Avinu Malkeinu– our parent, our sovereign.
Al chet she’chatanu lifanecha– for the wrong we have committed before you.
Ashamnu, Bagadnu, Gazalnu, Dibarnu dofi– We have transgressed, we have betrayed Gd, we have plundered and stolen, our words and our actions have caused irreversible harm.
A story is told of Shmuel, a great sage, who sat through all of Yom Kippur services, perhaps tired, perhaps faint from his fast, yet when the prayer leader reached these words, aval anachnu chatanu, but we have transgressed, Shmuel rose to his feet. From this, the rabbis derive that communal confession is the liturgical centerpiece at the heart of Yom Kippur. [1]
Scholars notice that anachnu chatanu is redundant. In Hebrew, all that is needed is chatanu in order to say, “we have transgressed.” The addition of anachnu, we, adds vital emphasis. One could translate the phrase literally as “we, we, have transgressed.”
Jews confess in the collective, all together.
In the words of Rabbi Gordon Tucker, we pray for forgiveness “in the plural key.”
I myself arrive to this Yom Kippur urgently, with so much to pray for and a deep desire to be among my people. And I arrive here ambivalently. Unsure what it means to speak on behalf of the collective, today.
Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu. We have broken a sacred contract to honor all life. We have acted violently, faithlessly.
Ten times over the course of this 25 hour day we recite the Vidui, a litany of confessional prayers that enumerate our transgressions and the harms we have caused, together. The Arizal, Rabbi Isaac Luria, a renowned and legendary 16th-century mystic, put it this way:
A person must recite all the details of the confession, namely, “Ashamnu, bagadnu,” etc, even though she may know within herself that she has not done all of these things. It may therefore appear that she is speaking falsely, but there is no [real] concern about this. On the contrary, she is required to say it in this manner… on account of the principle of arevut, mutual responsibility. וְכִי כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל הֵם גּוּף אֶחָד. For the whole Jewish people constitute a single body, כָּלוּל מֵאֵיבָרִים רַבִּים, composed of many limbs. [2]
We have already spent hours together in this room doing just that. Sweating, swaying, and singing, our edges dissolving as a truth is revealed: that we are one organism. When it comes time to confess, we are a family system, an ecosystem, a porous and interconnected whole.
This practice is meant to dissolve the fiction of the individual self. Vidui is not confession in a private box, with a priest on the other side, and only God listening. In Jewish confession, everybody listens. And everybody’s guilty together.
But what do you do when ‘together’ is exactly what’s hard to access?
My chevruta, Rabbi Alex Weissman, described one version of the challenge to me this way: “I used to find that the collective nature of the Vidui decreased shame,” he told me. No one person needs to say aloud, I did it, when confessing their transgression. We hold the regret and the guilt all together. “Now,” he went on, “I find that the practice increases my shame.”
Am I really saying We alongside people whose actions in the world I vehemently oppose, who have caused immense and intractable suffering and destruction, and who believe so firmly and resolutely in what they are doing?
Day after day at Kol Tzedek we receive emails from people who are newly joining the community because it is values-aligned. And in equal proportion, we receive emails from people saying “I don’t know how to be Jewish given what the Jewish people are doing.” We crave Jewish community. And we are in crisis about our relationship to other Jews.
*
In the months after October 7th, 2023, after Hamas’s massacre of approximately 1200 Israelis, Israel began a genocide in Gaza, an expansion and intensification of the 75-year Nakba that preceded it, on a staggering scale [3]. One of the experiences I most remember from those early days and weeks was a near-constant sense of existential whiplash, struggling to know who to identify with and how.
Jews were grieving and in shock, a body politic I have always claimed and felt claimed by. My prayers for peace were al kol Yisrael, al kol Yishmael, al kol yoshvei tevel.
As Israel’s violence escalated, as the Israeli military and state slaughtered and starved and displaced the people of Gaza, as hospitals and schools were leveled and the death count rose to tens upon tens of thousands, the weight of that communal responsibility began to feel unbearable.
The existential whiplash I experienced was in either over– or under–identifying with other Jews.
When I over-identified, every Jewish action became mine to bear. Israel’s cruelty was my personal failure. Their actions my own, their settlers and soldiers, politicians and their supporters– my own grieving, raging, transgressing body. My family.
When I under-identified, I would convince myself that I could divest myself entirely. I am not them. I disown them. They are crazed extremists. We practice different religions. I am one of the “good ones.” I’m in this room today with the “good ones.”
What is the collective around which we draw our circle of prayer and confession, to whom we belong, and whose actions belong to us?
Paraphrasing a teaching from my colleague Rabbi Ilana Sumka, when it comes to our communal responsibility for the crimes and transgressions committed by the Israeli state, military, and public on the Palestinian people, two things are paradoxically true at once: on the one hand, those who commit actual harm are the ones responsible for it. On the other hand, kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh [4], all Jewish people are responsible one for the other.
Ashamnu, we say on Yom Kippur. Chatanu lifanecha. We have transgressed.
As the movement for a free Palestine has grown, Jewish participation in it has also grown. The Jewish Left is more visible and robust than it’s been before in our lifetimes. I remember an article published in The Nation in 2023, titled The Jewish Justice Movement is Being Reborn, with a subtitle, thousands of protesters made clear that they will no longer allow the suffering of the Jewish people to be weaponized against others. I remember the article included descriptions of Rabbi Ari Lev and other members of our community blowing their shofars when protestors took over the rotunda of a congressional building in DC, demanding an end to the violence.
Those of us in this room who identify with that movement are part of a bigger We than ever. Our Jewish world has never felt more imminently here. But we are also more polarized than we’ve ever been. The rest of the Jewish world has never felt so far away. We are living in paradox.
And if this is not where you locate yourself politically, I believe that the experience still holds for all of us, that across the Jewish world there is no one that isn't saying to themself: Oh God, how do I relate to THOSE people? Probably some of you in this room are saying it to yourself right now, about me. This is the moment we’re living in. We are in crisis about our collectivity, and about our collective responsibility.
*
In the book of Leviticus [5] we learn that one day a year, the priest was to atone for all the people, all Jews. This day, today. Biblically, the purpose of Yom Kippur was to ritually cleanse and purify the Mishkan, and later the Temple, from the spiritual defilement caused by the sins of the Israelites. Yom Kippur has always been about the collective aggregate of our individual mistakes, transgressions, and moral failures, swept together into something larger, shared across the whole of our people. In the absence of priests, today we atone for each other, as we are a mamlechet kohanim [6], a community of priests.
Al chet shechatanu lifanecha bivli daat,
We have transgressed before You by not thinking.
Al chet shechatanu lifanecha v’chachash u’v’chazav,
We have transgressed before You by denying and lying.
Part of the brilliance of these ancient prayers is that each wrong we articulate means something different to each of us. How I have lied and denied is not the same as how you have lied and denied. But surely we both have lies and denials to atone for this year. It is the expansive and elastic nature of these words that allows us to take them on authentically as our own, to confess the same transgression but mean something different from one another– different hypocrisies we’ve enacted, different gossips we’ve trafficked, different kinds of thoughtlessness steering our days.
Gazalnu, We stole, I say aloud, a chorus of we stole stammering out simultaneously around me. Though I did not steal this year, not consciously, anyway. On the other hand, I live on stolen, colonized land. I am a home owner in a city I wasn’t born in, built on the labor of enslaved people stolen and kidnapped to this place. I am a first generation occupier of someone else’s native homeland. Of course I stole this year.
So we continue down the list– yatznu ra, we’ve given bad advice, latznu, maradnu, niatznu, we have mocked, rebelled and insulted, ti’avnu, we have committed abominations. Tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.
Reciting these transgressions inspires each of us to find the place inside of ourselves where we did, in some way, do it.
*
Palestinian American author Sarah Aziza wrote in “The Work of the Witness,” an essay published in Jewish Currents in 2024, “The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.”
How could the Jewish collective be different? We will never be the same, we should never be the same. There are those who, in Aziza’s words, are “broken by what we see.” And there are those who refuse to see. There are those who see, and cheer on the carnage. There are those who see and are genuinely pained, but continue to believe there is no other way to keep us safe. We are shattered from the inside out, rupturing, breaking apart.
I confess to you all that when I set out to write this dvar Torah, I wanted to discover the source in our tradition that would absolve us, this Yom Kippur, from having to take responsibility for the actions of the people enacting the most hateful and violent expressions of our tradition. I wanted to find the limit on this imperative to confess as a collective, to unhook us from our tethers to movements and people many of us work tirelessly to differentiate ourselves from every other day of the year.
But I don’t want to do the mirror image of what’s been done to us.
In 2023, the editors of the Jerusalem Post published an article titled “No Longer Part of Us.” The tag line read: While they may still technically be Jewish due to their parentage or conversion, while they may lead superficially Jewish lives, we can no longer consider them part of Klal Yisrael.
At first the article identified that the– to use their own language,– “un-Jews” they were referring to were those who celebrated Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7, something I did not experience our own community taking part in. But the terms of the article quickly grew sloppy and ambiguous, lumping all pro-Ceasefire Jews, anti-Zionist Jews, Jews using the term genocide, and Jews standing in solidarity with Palestinians, together as “lost to our people,” and urging the rest of the Jewish world to “treat them as such.”
It is so tempting to me, to write other Jews out of my collective, to say we are lost to each other. But I don’t want us to do that, because it takes a page directly out of that playbook. How quick others have been, to write us out of their collective, to discredit our Jewishness, our authenticity, and our humanity. To throw us away by deciding that they are no longer responsible for us or bound to us at all, if they can simply erase our Jewishness in their own eyes.
This year, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia left Kol Tzedek and Congregation Leyv Ha'ir, a Reconstructionist shul in Center City, out of their annual citywide High Holidays guide, which is a change from previous years. We were removed from the record of where Philadelphia’s Jews can observe the holidays, because of our clergy’s activism for Palestine. I’m actually amazed that all of you are here, I don’t know how you found us! In all seriousness though, we are one of the most vibrant synagogues in the city, the shul with arguably the most interfaith and queer families… but we are not the Jews of Philadelphia, according to the people who claim to speak for us. We have been cast out of that circle.
I want us, in this room, to reach for something deeper and truer, when grappling with our shattered collective. Something with more spiritual integrity, and with more spiritual rigor, no matter how hard, even brutal, it feels to do so.
*
And as it turns out, the spiritual rigor I’m seeking appears in this afternoon’s Torah reading. Right there, in the Holiness Code [7] , which our community reads every year on Yom Kippur, Torah says the following:
לֹא־תִשְׂנָא אֶת־אָחִיךָ בִּלְבָבֶךָ– הוֹכֵחַ תּוֹכִיחַ אֶת־עֲמִיתֶךָ וְלֹא־תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְא [8]
Do not hate your kinfolk in your heart– [instead], rebuke – really rebuke – your kin; so you don’t bear sin on their account.
We are obligated, as a people, not to hate each other. Hate is dangerous. In the words of Pirkei Avot, “hatred of human beings removes a person from the world.” [9]
When you see your fellow Jews behaving in ways that would cause you to hate them, the Torah directs us, do not develop hatefulness in your heart. Instead, you are obligated to rebuke, to protest.
Three different times in the Babylonian Talmud, the Rabbis teach: כל מִי שֶׁאֶפְשָׁר לִמְחוֹת, Anyone who has the capability to effectively protest, לְאַנְשֵׁי בֵיתוֹ, לְאַנְשֵׁי עִירוֹ, אוֹ בְּכָל הָעוֹלָם כּוּלּו , whether it’s the sinful conduct of the members of their household, of their city, or even of the whole world, and they do not do so, they themself are held responsible for those sinful, harmful actions. [10]
When the Rabbis said kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh [3] – all Jewish people are responsible for each other– it seems they meant this. That we are commanded to rebuke, to express our peoplehood by interrupting each other’s harmful and wrongful actions, as best we can. It is only in the cases when we had the ability to protest, but didn’t, that we become liable for one another’s transgressions.
Ironically, it is through the mechanisms of protest and rebuke that we remain connected. We are bound to each other, even in our separateness. We are in relationship through differentiation.
There are Jewish settlers enacting extreme cruelty and depravity in the West Bank, and there are the former Israeli generals who came out over the month of Elul to publicly declare the settler movement a force of ethnonationalism and Jewish terrorism.
And this has always been the case. Throughout history, there have been Jewish slaveholders and abolitionists. Jewish slum lords and labor organizers. Jewish settler colonialists and anti-nationalists. Just as today there are Jewish supremacists and Jewish peace activists, Jewish MAGA supporters and Jewish progressives.
All religious traditions can be interpreted in radically different ways. In my most furious and self-righteous moments I have asked again and again, What part of lo tirtzach, you shall not murder, do these religious settlers not understand?
And according to Torah and to the Rabbis, our opposition is what we owe each other. Our protest is, paradoxically, an act of kinship itself. No matter how painful, lonely, or sad it can feel, to be so far apart from other Jews, it is our duty– not to hate each other. We are not permitted to hate each other. Rather, it is our duty to actively stand up for what we believe in.
If we are in fact of one body, we are obligated to try to steer that body toward liberation however we can. We cannot and should not stand idly by and enable people we are inextricably bound to to perform wanton and brazen acts of murder, theft, defamation, forced starvation, and displacement. [11]
*
So how do we avoid growing to hate each other, across such painful divides? How do we build the depth and resilience to keep doing the work of accountability without dehumanizing each other, without throwing other people away?
For this, we have Yom Kippur, and the Vidui is here to help.
Aval anachnu chatanu – for we have transgressed.
The Vidui calls on us to claim the We’s that we want to celebrate and venerate, that we are proud to be part of. And to claim the We’s that break our hearts and strain our values, that make us furious and ashamed.
In confession, if nothing else, we are not separate.
V’al chet she’chatanu lifanecha b’imutz halev, for we have transgressed against You through hardening our hearts.
Because when we split the world into “perfect us” and “monstrous them,” we generate within ourselves precisely the kind of hardened heart that produces Pharaohs and Hamans, Netanyahus and Trumps. With hardened hearts, we produce hatred.
“I am sick of monsters,” writes Molly Crabapple, “whether they belong to my group or any other. Because I know that we all have the capacity to be victims and tormentors, as well as bystanders, staring blankly at a burning wall.” [12]
We are commanded, this Yom Kippur, to turn to face ourselves, and each other, and confess the ways we have not done enough, the ways in which we are complicit, the ways we have caused harm. I pray that as we do so, we in this room recommit to fighting for life, for a world in which Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety are not mutually exclusive, but rather interdependent. To keep building together a Judaism that insists on all people's safety, dignity, and liberation.
The liturgy is an antidote to dehumanization. It pushes us to see fallibility in everyone and everything, and to see the potential for holiness in everyone and everything.
*
As a poet, I have to tell you one more thing about the Vidui, something I find crucial, and haven’t pointed out for this entire sermon, which is very unlike me. Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, dibarnu dofi. Alef, bet, gimmel, daled. As a liturgy, confession sings.
The Vidui is composed of prayers in form, poems, if you will. Both the Ashamnu and the Al Chet are alphabetical acrostics, implying that every transgression from A to Z, from earth to sky, from humanity’s head to toe, is shared. There is an undeniable music of mutuality to Jewish confession. On Yom Kippur we are a raucous symphony, a chaos of difficult sounds. The sounds of people crashing into one another. Of lying, bad mouthing, wailing. And repenting. The ruinous, beautiful, devastating, divine music of our togetherness. [13]
So we rise. 10 times in one day. And we recite this ancient liturgy, a liturgy that is in crisis about the collective, and will remain so for as long as the collective is in crisis.
Jewish confession teaches me again and again that I am not singular, that I am a link in a chain, that I have a context, a choral, fraught plural, a broken and ringing communal. My broken communal. To wrestle with and reckon with, to struggle against, to drag along, to push, to fight, to marvel at, to love, to love and grieve and protest and unabide, but not to hate.
Like Jacob wrestling the angel to the ground– the angel who was maybe also his own shadow or maybe too his brother– the two of them there fighting for life and drawing each other closer and closer. He was named for that night, for that fight. And then so were all of his descendents. Yisrael. God-wrestler. To wrestle with the We. And make it sing.
May our teshuva be a source of healing in this world. May we all be written in the book of life. Shana tova and gmar chatima tova. [14]
Footnotes:
[1] Talmud Bavli, Yoma 87b
[2] Sha’ar Hakavanot, 5:3
[3] Even among those of us who are united in our opposition to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, we do not all agree on the use of this term. My use of it here is rooted in what I believe, and supported by reports and resolutions made by numerous international organizations including The International Association of Genocide Scholars (additional reporting here and here), The United Nations, countless Palestinian organizations, and Israeli human rights organizations including B’tselem and Physicians for Human Rights.
[4] Talmud Bavli, Shavuot 39a
[5] Leviticus 16:29-34
[6] Exodus 19:6
[7] Leviticus 19
[8] Leviticus 19:17
[9] Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 2:11
[10] Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 54b; Sanhedrin 27b and Shevu‘ot 39b
[11] Aryeh Bernstein, Love, Rebuke, and Accountability: What Does it Mean to Have to Love Other Jews?, Halachic Left, 5784
[12] Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, postscript
[13] “God is the biggest ‘us’ there is, the most fundamental imagining of belonging in human culture, that which, at the deepest level, I, along with everything else in the world, am always a part of.”- Rabbi Ebn Leader
[14] Deep gratitude to Jon Argaman for their invaluable support on this dvar Torah. Tremendous thanks to my chevrutas, teachers, conversation partners, and editors: Abby McCartney, Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, Rabbi Alex Weissman, Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, Rabbi Ebn Leader, Josh Bloom, Danielle Feris, Shosh Ruskin, Aly Halpert, and Rabbis for Ceasefire.
Yom Kippur
Sept 21, 2026
Watch
Shana tova.
In 1992, in a different set of dark and murderous times, the poet, feminist, and anti-war activist Adrienne Rich wrote the following:
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life…
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
(Ashamnu nigun, sung twice)
On Yom Kippur we are instructed to pray as an agudah achat, an interconnected collective. The Machzor’s central prayers are all articulated in the first person plural:
Avinu Malkeinu– our parent, our sovereign.
Al chet she’chatanu lifanecha– for the wrong we have committed before you.
Ashamnu, Bagadnu, Gazalnu, Dibarnu dofi– We have transgressed, we have betrayed Gd, we have plundered and stolen, our words and our actions have caused irreversible harm.
A story is told of Shmuel, a great sage, who sat through all of Yom Kippur services, perhaps tired, perhaps faint from his fast, yet when the prayer leader reached these words, aval anachnu chatanu, but we have transgressed, Shmuel rose to his feet. From this, the rabbis derive that communal confession is the liturgical centerpiece at the heart of Yom Kippur. [1]
Scholars notice that anachnu chatanu is redundant. In Hebrew, all that is needed is chatanu in order to say, “we have transgressed.” The addition of anachnu, we, adds vital emphasis. One could translate the phrase literally as “we, we, have transgressed.”
Jews confess in the collective, all together.
In the words of Rabbi Gordon Tucker, we pray for forgiveness “in the plural key.”
I myself arrive to this Yom Kippur urgently, with so much to pray for and a deep desire to be among my people. And I arrive here ambivalently. Unsure what it means to speak on behalf of the collective, today.
Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu. We have broken a sacred contract to honor all life. We have acted violently, faithlessly.
Ten times over the course of this 25 hour day we recite the Vidui, a litany of confessional prayers that enumerate our transgressions and the harms we have caused, together. The Arizal, Rabbi Isaac Luria, a renowned and legendary 16th-century mystic, put it this way:
A person must recite all the details of the confession, namely, “Ashamnu, bagadnu,” etc, even though she may know within herself that she has not done all of these things. It may therefore appear that she is speaking falsely, but there is no [real] concern about this. On the contrary, she is required to say it in this manner… on account of the principle of arevut, mutual responsibility. וְכִי כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל הֵם גּוּף אֶחָד. For the whole Jewish people constitute a single body, כָּלוּל מֵאֵיבָרִים רַבִּים, composed of many limbs. [2]
We have already spent hours together in this room doing just that. Sweating, swaying, and singing, our edges dissolving as a truth is revealed: that we are one organism. When it comes time to confess, we are a family system, an ecosystem, a porous and interconnected whole.
This practice is meant to dissolve the fiction of the individual self. Vidui is not confession in a private box, with a priest on the other side, and only God listening. In Jewish confession, everybody listens. And everybody’s guilty together.
But what do you do when ‘together’ is exactly what’s hard to access?
My chevruta, Rabbi Alex Weissman, described one version of the challenge to me this way: “I used to find that the collective nature of the Vidui decreased shame,” he told me. No one person needs to say aloud, I did it, when confessing their transgression. We hold the regret and the guilt all together. “Now,” he went on, “I find that the practice increases my shame.”
Am I really saying We alongside people whose actions in the world I vehemently oppose, who have caused immense and intractable suffering and destruction, and who believe so firmly and resolutely in what they are doing?
Day after day at Kol Tzedek we receive emails from people who are newly joining the community because it is values-aligned. And in equal proportion, we receive emails from people saying “I don’t know how to be Jewish given what the Jewish people are doing.” We crave Jewish community. And we are in crisis about our relationship to other Jews.
*
In the months after October 7th, 2023, after Hamas’s massacre of approximately 1200 Israelis, Israel began a genocide in Gaza, an expansion and intensification of the 75-year Nakba that preceded it, on a staggering scale [3]. One of the experiences I most remember from those early days and weeks was a near-constant sense of existential whiplash, struggling to know who to identify with and how.
Jews were grieving and in shock, a body politic I have always claimed and felt claimed by. My prayers for peace were al kol Yisrael, al kol Yishmael, al kol yoshvei tevel.
As Israel’s violence escalated, as the Israeli military and state slaughtered and starved and displaced the people of Gaza, as hospitals and schools were leveled and the death count rose to tens upon tens of thousands, the weight of that communal responsibility began to feel unbearable.
The existential whiplash I experienced was in either over– or under–identifying with other Jews.
When I over-identified, every Jewish action became mine to bear. Israel’s cruelty was my personal failure. Their actions my own, their settlers and soldiers, politicians and their supporters– my own grieving, raging, transgressing body. My family.
When I under-identified, I would convince myself that I could divest myself entirely. I am not them. I disown them. They are crazed extremists. We practice different religions. I am one of the “good ones.” I’m in this room today with the “good ones.”
What is the collective around which we draw our circle of prayer and confession, to whom we belong, and whose actions belong to us?
Paraphrasing a teaching from my colleague Rabbi Ilana Sumka, when it comes to our communal responsibility for the crimes and transgressions committed by the Israeli state, military, and public on the Palestinian people, two things are paradoxically true at once: on the one hand, those who commit actual harm are the ones responsible for it. On the other hand, kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh [4], all Jewish people are responsible one for the other.
Ashamnu, we say on Yom Kippur. Chatanu lifanecha. We have transgressed.
As the movement for a free Palestine has grown, Jewish participation in it has also grown. The Jewish Left is more visible and robust than it’s been before in our lifetimes. I remember an article published in The Nation in 2023, titled The Jewish Justice Movement is Being Reborn, with a subtitle, thousands of protesters made clear that they will no longer allow the suffering of the Jewish people to be weaponized against others. I remember the article included descriptions of Rabbi Ari Lev and other members of our community blowing their shofars when protestors took over the rotunda of a congressional building in DC, demanding an end to the violence.
Those of us in this room who identify with that movement are part of a bigger We than ever. Our Jewish world has never felt more imminently here. But we are also more polarized than we’ve ever been. The rest of the Jewish world has never felt so far away. We are living in paradox.
And if this is not where you locate yourself politically, I believe that the experience still holds for all of us, that across the Jewish world there is no one that isn't saying to themself: Oh God, how do I relate to THOSE people? Probably some of you in this room are saying it to yourself right now, about me. This is the moment we’re living in. We are in crisis about our collectivity, and about our collective responsibility.
*
In the book of Leviticus [5] we learn that one day a year, the priest was to atone for all the people, all Jews. This day, today. Biblically, the purpose of Yom Kippur was to ritually cleanse and purify the Mishkan, and later the Temple, from the spiritual defilement caused by the sins of the Israelites. Yom Kippur has always been about the collective aggregate of our individual mistakes, transgressions, and moral failures, swept together into something larger, shared across the whole of our people. In the absence of priests, today we atone for each other, as we are a mamlechet kohanim [6], a community of priests.
Al chet shechatanu lifanecha bivli daat,
We have transgressed before You by not thinking.
Al chet shechatanu lifanecha v’chachash u’v’chazav,
We have transgressed before You by denying and lying.
Part of the brilliance of these ancient prayers is that each wrong we articulate means something different to each of us. How I have lied and denied is not the same as how you have lied and denied. But surely we both have lies and denials to atone for this year. It is the expansive and elastic nature of these words that allows us to take them on authentically as our own, to confess the same transgression but mean something different from one another– different hypocrisies we’ve enacted, different gossips we’ve trafficked, different kinds of thoughtlessness steering our days.
Gazalnu, We stole, I say aloud, a chorus of we stole stammering out simultaneously around me. Though I did not steal this year, not consciously, anyway. On the other hand, I live on stolen, colonized land. I am a home owner in a city I wasn’t born in, built on the labor of enslaved people stolen and kidnapped to this place. I am a first generation occupier of someone else’s native homeland. Of course I stole this year.
So we continue down the list– yatznu ra, we’ve given bad advice, latznu, maradnu, niatznu, we have mocked, rebelled and insulted, ti’avnu, we have committed abominations. Tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.
Reciting these transgressions inspires each of us to find the place inside of ourselves where we did, in some way, do it.
*
Palestinian American author Sarah Aziza wrote in “The Work of the Witness,” an essay published in Jewish Currents in 2024, “The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.”
How could the Jewish collective be different? We will never be the same, we should never be the same. There are those who, in Aziza’s words, are “broken by what we see.” And there are those who refuse to see. There are those who see, and cheer on the carnage. There are those who see and are genuinely pained, but continue to believe there is no other way to keep us safe. We are shattered from the inside out, rupturing, breaking apart.
I confess to you all that when I set out to write this dvar Torah, I wanted to discover the source in our tradition that would absolve us, this Yom Kippur, from having to take responsibility for the actions of the people enacting the most hateful and violent expressions of our tradition. I wanted to find the limit on this imperative to confess as a collective, to unhook us from our tethers to movements and people many of us work tirelessly to differentiate ourselves from every other day of the year.
But I don’t want to do the mirror image of what’s been done to us.
In 2023, the editors of the Jerusalem Post published an article titled “No Longer Part of Us.” The tag line read: While they may still technically be Jewish due to their parentage or conversion, while they may lead superficially Jewish lives, we can no longer consider them part of Klal Yisrael.
At first the article identified that the– to use their own language,– “un-Jews” they were referring to were those who celebrated Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7, something I did not experience our own community taking part in. But the terms of the article quickly grew sloppy and ambiguous, lumping all pro-Ceasefire Jews, anti-Zionist Jews, Jews using the term genocide, and Jews standing in solidarity with Palestinians, together as “lost to our people,” and urging the rest of the Jewish world to “treat them as such.”
It is so tempting to me, to write other Jews out of my collective, to say we are lost to each other. But I don’t want us to do that, because it takes a page directly out of that playbook. How quick others have been, to write us out of their collective, to discredit our Jewishness, our authenticity, and our humanity. To throw us away by deciding that they are no longer responsible for us or bound to us at all, if they can simply erase our Jewishness in their own eyes.
This year, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia left Kol Tzedek and Congregation Leyv Ha'ir, a Reconstructionist shul in Center City, out of their annual citywide High Holidays guide, which is a change from previous years. We were removed from the record of where Philadelphia’s Jews can observe the holidays, because of our clergy’s activism for Palestine. I’m actually amazed that all of you are here, I don’t know how you found us! In all seriousness though, we are one of the most vibrant synagogues in the city, the shul with arguably the most interfaith and queer families… but we are not the Jews of Philadelphia, according to the people who claim to speak for us. We have been cast out of that circle.
I want us, in this room, to reach for something deeper and truer, when grappling with our shattered collective. Something with more spiritual integrity, and with more spiritual rigor, no matter how hard, even brutal, it feels to do so.
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And as it turns out, the spiritual rigor I’m seeking appears in this afternoon’s Torah reading. Right there, in the Holiness Code [7] , which our community reads every year on Yom Kippur, Torah says the following:
לֹא־תִשְׂנָא אֶת־אָחִיךָ בִּלְבָבֶךָ– הוֹכֵחַ תּוֹכִיחַ אֶת־עֲמִיתֶךָ וְלֹא־תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְא [8]
Do not hate your kinfolk in your heart– [instead], rebuke – really rebuke – your kin; so you don’t bear sin on their account.
We are obligated, as a people, not to hate each other. Hate is dangerous. In the words of Pirkei Avot, “hatred of human beings removes a person from the world.” [9]
When you see your fellow Jews behaving in ways that would cause you to hate them, the Torah directs us, do not develop hatefulness in your heart. Instead, you are obligated to rebuke, to protest.
Three different times in the Babylonian Talmud, the Rabbis teach: כל מִי שֶׁאֶפְשָׁר לִמְחוֹת, Anyone who has the capability to effectively protest, לְאַנְשֵׁי בֵיתוֹ, לְאַנְשֵׁי עִירוֹ, אוֹ בְּכָל הָעוֹלָם כּוּלּו , whether it’s the sinful conduct of the members of their household, of their city, or even of the whole world, and they do not do so, they themself are held responsible for those sinful, harmful actions. [10]
When the Rabbis said kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh [3] – all Jewish people are responsible for each other– it seems they meant this. That we are commanded to rebuke, to express our peoplehood by interrupting each other’s harmful and wrongful actions, as best we can. It is only in the cases when we had the ability to protest, but didn’t, that we become liable for one another’s transgressions.
Ironically, it is through the mechanisms of protest and rebuke that we remain connected. We are bound to each other, even in our separateness. We are in relationship through differentiation.
There are Jewish settlers enacting extreme cruelty and depravity in the West Bank, and there are the former Israeli generals who came out over the month of Elul to publicly declare the settler movement a force of ethnonationalism and Jewish terrorism.
And this has always been the case. Throughout history, there have been Jewish slaveholders and abolitionists. Jewish slum lords and labor organizers. Jewish settler colonialists and anti-nationalists. Just as today there are Jewish supremacists and Jewish peace activists, Jewish MAGA supporters and Jewish progressives.
All religious traditions can be interpreted in radically different ways. In my most furious and self-righteous moments I have asked again and again, What part of lo tirtzach, you shall not murder, do these religious settlers not understand?
And according to Torah and to the Rabbis, our opposition is what we owe each other. Our protest is, paradoxically, an act of kinship itself. No matter how painful, lonely, or sad it can feel, to be so far apart from other Jews, it is our duty– not to hate each other. We are not permitted to hate each other. Rather, it is our duty to actively stand up for what we believe in.
If we are in fact of one body, we are obligated to try to steer that body toward liberation however we can. We cannot and should not stand idly by and enable people we are inextricably bound to to perform wanton and brazen acts of murder, theft, defamation, forced starvation, and displacement. [11]
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So how do we avoid growing to hate each other, across such painful divides? How do we build the depth and resilience to keep doing the work of accountability without dehumanizing each other, without throwing other people away?
For this, we have Yom Kippur, and the Vidui is here to help.
Aval anachnu chatanu – for we have transgressed.
The Vidui calls on us to claim the We’s that we want to celebrate and venerate, that we are proud to be part of. And to claim the We’s that break our hearts and strain our values, that make us furious and ashamed.
In confession, if nothing else, we are not separate.
V’al chet she’chatanu lifanecha b’imutz halev, for we have transgressed against You through hardening our hearts.
Because when we split the world into “perfect us” and “monstrous them,” we generate within ourselves precisely the kind of hardened heart that produces Pharaohs and Hamans, Netanyahus and Trumps. With hardened hearts, we produce hatred.
“I am sick of monsters,” writes Molly Crabapple, “whether they belong to my group or any other. Because I know that we all have the capacity to be victims and tormentors, as well as bystanders, staring blankly at a burning wall.” [12]
We are commanded, this Yom Kippur, to turn to face ourselves, and each other, and confess the ways we have not done enough, the ways in which we are complicit, the ways we have caused harm. I pray that as we do so, we in this room recommit to fighting for life, for a world in which Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety are not mutually exclusive, but rather interdependent. To keep building together a Judaism that insists on all people's safety, dignity, and liberation.
The liturgy is an antidote to dehumanization. It pushes us to see fallibility in everyone and everything, and to see the potential for holiness in everyone and everything.
*
As a poet, I have to tell you one more thing about the Vidui, something I find crucial, and haven’t pointed out for this entire sermon, which is very unlike me. Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, dibarnu dofi. Alef, bet, gimmel, daled. As a liturgy, confession sings.
The Vidui is composed of prayers in form, poems, if you will. Both the Ashamnu and the Al Chet are alphabetical acrostics, implying that every transgression from A to Z, from earth to sky, from humanity’s head to toe, is shared. There is an undeniable music of mutuality to Jewish confession. On Yom Kippur we are a raucous symphony, a chaos of difficult sounds. The sounds of people crashing into one another. Of lying, bad mouthing, wailing. And repenting. The ruinous, beautiful, devastating, divine music of our togetherness. [13]
So we rise. 10 times in one day. And we recite this ancient liturgy, a liturgy that is in crisis about the collective, and will remain so for as long as the collective is in crisis.
Jewish confession teaches me again and again that I am not singular, that I am a link in a chain, that I have a context, a choral, fraught plural, a broken and ringing communal. My broken communal. To wrestle with and reckon with, to struggle against, to drag along, to push, to fight, to marvel at, to love, to love and grieve and protest and unabide, but not to hate.
Like Jacob wrestling the angel to the ground– the angel who was maybe also his own shadow or maybe too his brother– the two of them there fighting for life and drawing each other closer and closer. He was named for that night, for that fight. And then so were all of his descendents. Yisrael. God-wrestler. To wrestle with the We. And make it sing.
May our teshuva be a source of healing in this world. May we all be written in the book of life. Shana tova and gmar chatima tova. [14]
Footnotes:
[1] Talmud Bavli, Yoma 87b
[2] Sha’ar Hakavanot, 5:3
[3] Even among those of us who are united in our opposition to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, we do not all agree on the use of this term. My use of it here is rooted in what I believe, and supported by reports and resolutions made by numerous international organizations including The International Association of Genocide Scholars (additional reporting here and here), The United Nations, countless Palestinian organizations, and Israeli human rights organizations including B’tselem and Physicians for Human Rights.
[4] Talmud Bavli, Shavuot 39a
[5] Leviticus 16:29-34
[6] Exodus 19:6
[7] Leviticus 19
[8] Leviticus 19:17
[9] Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 2:11
[10] Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 54b; Sanhedrin 27b and Shevu‘ot 39b
[11] Aryeh Bernstein, Love, Rebuke, and Accountability: What Does it Mean to Have to Love Other Jews?, Halachic Left, 5784
[12] Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, postscript
[13] “God is the biggest ‘us’ there is, the most fundamental imagining of belonging in human culture, that which, at the deepest level, I, along with everything else in the world, am always a part of.”- Rabbi Ebn Leader
[14] Deep gratitude to Jon Argaman for their invaluable support on this dvar Torah. Tremendous thanks to my chevrutas, teachers, conversation partners, and editors: Abby McCartney, Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, Rabbi Alex Weissman, Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, Rabbi Ebn Leader, Josh Bloom, Danielle Feris, Shosh Ruskin, Aly Halpert, and Rabbis for Ceasefire.