The Fog of War and T’shuvah

T’shuvah is a Hebrew word combining the domains of repentance, reflection, and change. It is most literally translated to English as “return.” Traditional liturgy states that t’shuvah in concert with fasting and charity are the three human acts that can annul divine decrees against us on Yom Kippur; or in more pedestrian terms, we possess the agency to get back to where we need to be by manifesting discomfort in our own physical being and giving unconditionally to those in need.

I’ve known about the Yom Kippur War in 1973 as long as I’ve known about Yom Kippur itself. I was just four years old when my parents heard the news about the attack on Israel while fasting and driving to shul. I was chilling with a matchbox car in the back seat. Now, more than 50 years later, Yom Kippur and war have merged even more deeply and forever.

In normal times, the act of t’shuvah, returning to one’s core through remorse and suffering and hope and connection to oneself and God and others, is a tall order. We prepare for an entire month for the moment when we all imagine ourselves standing like the high priest before the Holy of Holies in order to expiate our imperfections, and it’s hit or miss as to whether or not we make this spiritual process work.

This year, such a task feels like a silly, white collar luxury. When I think about returning, I don’t think about returning to myself or my spiritual core. I think about 101 people in tunnels with no exit from which to return home, another 1600 and more who can never return to this world, 80,000 in the North with maybe a remnant of a home to which to return someday, and the hundreds of thousands of people in this part of the world who see only rubble and violence wherever they turn.

We live in a time of frantic uncertainty, maddening violence, and – at least as I look into the hearts of the people and places I know best – miraculous strength and resilience steeped in a dull, aching pain.

It will not be hard to cry this year, to feel a sense of claustrophobia, to relate to questions of death by fire, water, strangulation, or the barrel of a gun. It will not be hard to cry out for mercy like a child. The hard part will be the days after Yom Kippur – Simchat Torah, of course, that day of jubilation forever marked in blood – but also the days after when we will ask if we even want to return to the world of a year ago. We may vaguely remember the division, spitting out hate, and relying on the arrogance and self-dealing of our leaders to guide us. The hard part is not feeling like we must make changes, it is affirming as a critical mass who we want to be now. To what world do we want our children and grandchildren to return? What will we see on the new page of the Book of Life when we finally have the chance to turn it?

If the liturgy is even close to right, we have the power, the agency, to decide if we want a world of mercy and healing, a world of reaching out to others, or a world of hearts that are closed. As we necessarily continue to eradicate the evil we have seen with our own two eyes everywhere we have turned this year, this Yom Kippur is another chance to get ready to get it right.