Ashamnu

On July 27, 1656, the Portuguese Jewish congregation of Amsterdam laid upon Baruch Spinoza a cherem, the ban that cuts a Jew off from the community, for the heresies the sentence accused him of practicing and teaching. Spinoza was 23, spoke Portuguese at home, and had not yet published a line. Written in that same language, the sentence declared him cursed when he lay down and when he rose up, and it remains in force three and a half centuries later, in the keeping of the heirs of those who pronounced it. In December 2015, some five hundred people filled a hall in the city to debate lifting the cherem, although the chief rabbi, Pinchas Toledano, had already decided to uphold it. His argument dispensed with theology and fit on a death certificate, since it came down to recalling that Spinoza had died in 1677 without asking forgiveness and had been buried in a Protestant church in The Hague. In 2021, the congregation’s rabbi, Joseph Serfaty, declared the cherem valid forever and barred a Johns Hopkins professor from the synagogue compound, alleging that he spread the outcast’s ideas. The Amsterdam community was founded by Jews who fled the Portuguese Inquisition so as not to be judged for their own faith, and it still judges Spinoza for his.

On Monday, September 21, in the middle of Yom Kippur, in a society where no majority needs a formal ban to punish those who will not follow it, I went to work by choice, a choice as personal and as much my own as that of anyone who spent the day in synagogue. The law does not forbid us to drive on that day, and still the roads stand empty out of custom, out of solidarity with those who fast, and out of a motive few will admit, fear. That fear forced people all over the country to spend the night of Kol Nidre at work, many of them in jobs essential to the lives of others, and I refused to give in, though I asked no one else to do the same. When the morning-shift nurse has to sleep at the hospital so as not to risk a stone through her windshield, the right name for what almost everyone calls tradition is coercion.

By 2012, extremists had for years been stoning the drivers who used Hebron Road in Jerusalem on the night the fast began. That year, hundreds of them hurled stones at cars in the city for hours, damaged dozens of vehicles, and, according to witnesses, acted in front of police officers who merely looked on.

Leniency came before the escalation, and in the West Bank the escalation began to earn the extremists the protection of those charged with restraining them. In January 2025, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the release of the seven Israelis held on suspicion of violence against Palestinians, arguing that it was better to see the settlers’ families happy than the families of the freed terrorists. In the first half of 2026, the security forces recorded 660 incidents of Jewish nationalist crime, 63 percent more than in the previous six months, and only about 3 percent of cases end in a conviction.

In the days before this Yom Kippur, Ynet published Rabbi Yehuda Brandes’s guide to the twenty-five hours. Leather shoes stay in the closet, riding bicycles and watching movies are to be avoided, though they are not among the gravest prohibitions, and right after that, in the same tone, the guide reminds us that throwing stones is also forbidden and graver still, because it may wrong another person and, in some cases, endanger life. No one forbids what does not happen, and the sentence, squeezed between the shoes and the bicycles, treats a crime as a rule of the fast, while on any day of the year the penal code prescribes up to ten years in prison for anyone who throws a stone at a moving vehicle and endangers the people inside. On Yom Kippur itself, Jerusalem’s Reform synagogue Kol HaNeshama was vandalized once again, and that same day religious teenagers were filmed as they threw stones and spat at an Armenian monastery in the Old City. We have learned to count the stone among the things of the day, alongside the silence of the roads and the children pedaling across the asphalt, as if it all belonged to the same liturgy.

The Ashamnu is the confession repeated ten times over Yom Kippur, and it runs through the entire Hebrew alphabet, we have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have slandered. Its verbs are in the first person plural because, after the destruction of the Temple, the sages ruled that every Jew should take upon himself the faults of the whole community. The extremist who walks out of the synagogue with a stone in his hand has just beaten his breast for the driver’s sins, and he must change the person of the verb to raise his arm, since no one can stone a we.

Some will say that an engine running on a silent street is a provocation, but no provocation splits anyone’s head open, and a stone does. The passage of Isaiah that synagogues read on the morning I went back to work warns that a fast kept for strife and for striking with the fist of wickedness makes no voice heard on high.

Before anyone condemns me, or goes looking for another stone, I declare myself a man of faith. I do not believe in God, I prefer Darwin’s explanation, and yet I find nature divine, especially when I contemplate the sea or the variety of human faces and am moved by the mystery of knowing that I am without knowing what I am. My faith lies in solidarity, in kindness, in science, and in vaccines, and above all in doubt, which makes me revise my ideas before they harden into certainties, and which teaches me to distrust anyone who never doubts. I respect other people’s faith because only the believer knows its measure, and it took me a long time to realize that my insistence on saying I do not believe sounded to religious people like a declaration of war I never made. In return, I ask for the same respect, which is in far shorter supply among us than faith.

I carry so many contradictions that at times I feel like a population of thoughts, with an inner fauna no one has yet managed to classify, and I live with all of them without throwing a single stone. Anyone who shelters such a crowd within learns to say we without effort, and so I, who do not pray, take the Ashamnu more seriously than the extremist does. I confess that we have been guilty of treating the stone as normal, because I will not accept a country that recites all its faults in alphabetical order and leaves out precisely the intolerance shown on the Day of Atonement.