We As a Jewish People Need to Collectively Atone this Season
For those of us who attend services on Yom Kippur, we’ll hear in the Haftora the prophet Isaiah railing: “Is such the fast I desire, a day for people to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush And lying in sackcloth and ashes? . . . No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke. To let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home. When you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin. Then shall your light burst through like the dawn and your healing spring up quickly.”
The fast is supposed to make us reflect on pressing issues of social justice. We say confessions not only for where we’ve missed the mark privately, but also collectively. I will be thinking, as I was last year, of Israel.
Writer and thinker Yuval Noah Harari has stated that we may be at one of the biggest inflection points in Jewish history since the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. What’s at stake, he says, is no less than the soul of the Jewish people.
For any of us who have been silent in the face of the travesties unfolding in the State of Israel, we need to atone for our complicity.
This is not to deny the crimes of Hamas or the fear and trauma of the Israeli people. That should not need to be said, but in the zero sum game we set up in this conflict, some need it articulated. It’s possible to have empathy for the people on both sides and to develop an understanding of the intergenerational trauma on both sides. However, in this season of repentance, I want to focus on our transgressions.
The facts are these: the Israeli military now admits that 73,00 people were killed in Gaza, most of whom were civilians, and many as we know, children. Over 170,000 have been wounded. Others have been killed indirectly by the destruction of medical facilities (against the Geneva Convention), housing and infrastructure, and the deprivation of food and clean water–such as in March 2025, when the Israeli government deliberately cut off the delivery of food to Gaza for 11 weeks. (“To share your bread with the hungry.”) Since the ceasefire last October, another 1,000 Gazans have been killed. We are now learning about the NAZA system by which AI targets Hamas operatives and in so doing can approve the killing of hundreds of civilians as collateral damage. The Israeli military controls almost 70% of the Strip. Two million Palestinians are confined to a third of the area, deprived of basic infrastructure. In fact, the Strip has literally been reduced to rubble. (“To unlock fetters of wickedness.”) The Palestinians are historically”our own kin.”
This is not antisemitic rhetoric. These are facts.
Psychologists teach us that our brains have evolved only so far as to be able to comprehend and empathize with the lived experience of the number of people in a small village. Beyond that, when we get into numbers of several tens of thousands, it all becomes abstract. Hard to compute. And yet we know that Judaism emphasizes that every person is created in the image of God–every person, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Thirty-six times in the Torah we’re instructed to love the other, the stranger, the foreigner, because we were meant to have developed empathy borne from our history as slaves in Egypt. We are taught over and over in text and midrashim to value human lives above all else–and especially the lives of children. In fact, we are excused from following a commandment if there is a need to save a life. Any life, contemporary rabbis agree, not just a Jewish life.
Perhaps all of the repetition is there because the Torah anticipated that as a people of intergenerational trauma, our tendency would be to repeat the trauma that was inflicted on us. Freud, himself a great Jewish thinker, taught us about the repetition compulsion: that we are wired to repeat the cruelty that was done to us, unless we make a conscious effort to break the cycle. Abraham learned this lesson when he determined NOT to sacrifice his own son, despite, according to legend, the history of abuse by his own father.
Historian Omer Bartov, an expert on genocide, argues that there was a concerted attempt after the tragedy of October 7 to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza. B’Tzelem, the Israeli Human Rights group, agrees with him. Government officials from Prime Minister Netanyahu to Defense Minister Gallant to Major Generals like Alian and Eiland have expressed their beliefs that Palestinians are animals and that Gaza should be made a place where no life could exist. Finance Minister Smotrich speaks of a “Decisive Plan,” which amounts to ethnic cleansing. Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir also espouses this idea.
We, who know so well the trauma of a society’s destruction, need to reflect this high holiday season on where we’ve looked away and what we’ve enabled. We shouldn’t be debating semantics. Whether it’s a genocide, mass murder, massacre or carnage–it’s a horror. And the horror of October 7 doesn’t excuse it. Two horrors does not a right make. And I applaud the brave rabbis and social justice activists who have been sounding the call.
Furthermore, the situation on the West Bank is only fractionally morally better. Civil rights lawyer Michael Sfard argues that an apartheid system exists, pointing to government policies of targeted assassinations, confiscation of land, house demolition, expulsion, collective punishment, arrests without trial and torture in underground prisons. As The Times of Israel itself reports, “the I.D.F. recorded 867 incidents of nationalistic crime and settler violence in 2025.”
I do not come to my conclusions lightly. I was raised by a mother born in Tel Aviv in 1937, to her father, a follower of Jabotinsky, a Revisionist Zionist, who as a nationalist believed in militant self defense. I was raised on stories of this beloved grandfather, who was indeed a family hero in that he persuaded his family to leave Poland before the Holocaust to emigrate to Israel. Were it not for him, I would not be here writing this essay. And I was educated in a Jewish Day School in the ‘70’s by beloved teachers, Holocaust survivors, and a faculty that taught me a Zionism of victims turned into heroes who could do no wrong.
Like we all do, I believed what I was taught by those I loved. The Palestinian narrative was not even mentioned. I believed the inherited narrative so strongly that when others I respected, like Rabbi Michael Lerner, z’l, founder of Tikkun Magazine and Beyt Tikkun, challenged those assumed truths, something deep within me resisted. In the 1990’s, when Lerner invited Rabbi Arik Asherman, Executive Director of Rabbis for Human Rights, to high holiday services to speak about home demolitions on the West Bank, I recoiled. This wasn’t the spiritual high I sought. My Jewish friends reported witnessing profound racism by Israeli Jews against Palestinians in Israel, and I assumed that they were less loyal to their Judaism than I was.
Along with so many others, I sobbed in heartbreak when Hamas brutally attacked Israel on October 7. Shortly thereafter, I felt like I was being stabbed in the gut when my own daughter–whom I’d sent to Jewish schools and camps, taught the tradition, had work side by side with at Hebrew school, and even tried to teach a more balanced dual narrative history of Israel and Palestine–told me that she believed Israel was on a path to committing genocide.
Yet, in part because of her perspective, and knowing that peers of hers had joined in demonstrations for an immediate ceasefire, I slowly started to open my eyes. Could all the condemnation of Israel really just be antisemitism, a conspiracy fueled by Qatari money going to universities? My daughter and her friends weren’t TikTok kids. They were educating themselves. I began to study in more depth the “other side” of the narrative, to read the work of Palestinian historians and revisionist Jewish historians. I watched documentaries and films depicting what was occurring on the West Bank and Gaza. I listened to Gabor Mate, who argues that the resolution of trauma is post-traumatic growth. And I came to recognize that Netanyahu’s continual manipulation of the Holocaust to justify committing atrocities is not growth.
I say all of this not to injure anyone or cause harm. I love the Land of Israel, the language, the food, the songs, the culture. I love my family there. I love the Jewish people. We have a historical link to the land that cannot be denied, and those who erase that link are as guilty as the government of Netanyahu. And yet, the Palestinians also have a link. And telling them that they already have a homeland–in Jordan–as I was raised to believe— is as dismissive and disrespectful of their history as are those who claim that Jews have no historic connection to our land. Furthermore, by no means do I mean to overlook the part played by Islamic fundamentalists. Reaching them is work that must be done by trained diplomats.
I’m told by Jewish friends that some things should not be spoken of in the public realm. That we should not air our dirty laundry to those who may use these facts against us. But the therapist in me says that it is only by owning up to the truth, owning where we’ve gone astray, making sincere amends through a truth and reconciliation process with Palestinians, that we can hope to move forward. When I counsel couples or family members, I counsel that each person needs to take responsibility for their part of the conflict. Though I’m no expert in international conflict, I have become expert in human relationships.
To my own Jewish family, at least, I can say that we need to own our part this season of repentance. We need to clean up our side of the street. For my part, I will continue to support the efforts of grassroot groups of non-combatants on both sides working towards dialogue, collaboration and peace–such as A Land for All, Standing Together, and Combattants for Peace. And I will advocate for an end to the sale of offensive weapons to Israel until this indiscriminate killing stops.
In Parshat Nitzavim, we read that “the [instruction] is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.” We need to open our eyes. We need to choose peace and we need to choose life.
May we all be sealed in the Book of Life for blessing and peace.