Dvar Torah: Seven Annulments, Seven Affirmations | Kol Nidrei 5786

When we move to a new country, there are many elements to adjust to: from the most basic things, like finding out how to do the recycling, what the good brands are in the supermarket, and the unwritten rules of driving; to more subjective concepts, like how to show affection without crossing personal boundaries, or what issues can be openly talked about and what needs to be whispered only with people you really trust.

Among the most prosaic aspects of being a newcomer to South Africa is learning its calendar. Some might say it is the basic Gregorian calendar used in most of the world, and indeed, it is. But every country adds its own flavour to the way it relates to the calendar. In South Africa, I am learning about its holidays and their history, which are a reflection of South Africa’s past, as you know much better than I do. Brazil, with a very different history, doesn’t have a Day of Reconciliation, a Heritage Day or a Freedom Day. Other national holidays come from religious contexts, such as Good Friday and Christmas in South Africa, or Rosh haShanah, Yom Kippur, Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot in Israel. There are also dates that were created, or at least encouraged, by entrepreneurs interested in profiting from them. I don’t know the history behind South Africa’s Children’s Day, but in Brazil it is observed on the 12th of October and, while existing on the books since the 1920s, it only became a real phenomenon in the early 1960s, when toy manufacturers decided to invest heavily in marketing campaigns advocating for families to give presents to children on that day. When I was born, in 1971, it was already a huge success.

As a child, I always wanted a remote-control car, but I never got one. When I was, perhaps, six years old, I was walking with my mother and I saw a remote-controlled car in a shop window. I started screaming and crying that I wanted it… so my mother did what many parents would do in that situation: she deflected the issue. “I will give it to you on Children’s Day”, she told me, without any intention of keeping that promise once the day arrived and hoping that I would have forgotten the issue by then. Immediately, I stopped crying, happy that my tantrum had achieved something. Many months later, but still in the same year, I remember my mother getting home and I ran to greet her at the door. “Where is it?” I asked. “Where is what?” she asked, confused. “Where is my gift? The remote-control car you promised me for Children’s Day. TODAY is Children’s Day!” My mother had clearly forgotten her promise, but I hadn’t. In that instance, she dealt with the issue head-on: “If I promised, I ‘unpromise’ now!”

I think I have blamed this incident for never having got a remote-control car and, more importantly for our purpose tonight, it might have led me to radically oppose the possibility of “unpromising” something, which is, to some extent, the purpose of the ritual we just experienced.

For nearly twelve centuries, this ritual cancelation of vows has been a source of profound conflict. [1] At its core, Kol Nidrei—“all vows”—is an Aramaic legal formula designed to annul oaths and promises made rashly or under duress. In the pre-modern world, a vow carried a cosmic weight. [2] Words had the power to alter reality. The impulse behind this ritual, likely born not in the great academies but among the common folk, was a deeply human one: to seek release from the promises we couldn’t keep. [3]

Yet this practice immediately drew the ire of the great rabbinic authorities of Babylonia, the Geonim. They saw it as a dangerous legal shortcut that undermined the sanctity of one’s word. Rav Amram Gaon dismissed it as a minhag shtut, a “foolish custom”, and demanded it be stopped. [4]

But the people refused to let it go.

This prayer, this formula, became a rebel. It survived because it spoke to a deep, popular need that outweighed the objections of the legal scholars. To save it from being completely outlawed, the rabbis had to find a way to make it work. It was Rabbenu Tam, the grandson of Rashi, who performed a brilliant act of legal jujitsu. If annulling past vows was impossible, he argued, let’s change the tense. Let’s have Kol Nidrei annul the vows we might make in the coming year. This clever shift from the past to the future allowed the ritual to survive and flourish in the Ashkenazi world. [5]

But it was the melody that truly cemented its place in our hearts. That melody, rising and falling like a human sigh, became the soul of the service. It gave voice to a history of pain and longing that Yom Kippur otherwise lacked. It became so powerful that we no longer came for the Day of Atonement service; we came for the Kol Nidrei service. [6]

The conflict, however, was far from over. As our Progressive movement emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, Kol Nidrei became a source of intense embarrassment. For centuries, this text had been used as antisemitic ammunition. This led to the humiliating practice of the more judaico oath, forcing Jews in court to take an additional, often degrading, oath swearing that their testimony was not subject to the Kol Nidrei annulment. [7] For the early reformers, who were desperate to prove their loyalty and ethical standing, the prayer was a moral and public relations disaster. In 1844, an assembly of progressive rabbis in Braunschweig, Germany, voted to remove it from the prayerbook. [8]

Across the Atlantic, the American Reform movement followed suit. Its Union Prayer Book omitted the text entirely. And then, in the 1940s, as a result of the great waves of Eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States, a strange thing happened. Many congregations longed for the emotional resonance of the tradition they had left behind. They wanted Kol Nidrei back. The committee revising the prayerbook was deeply divided. And then, in what seems like a story straight out of a novel, the traditional Aramaic text was accidentally included in the first printing of the new edition in 1945, a mistake attributed to the chaos of wartime printing.

Rabbi Samuel Cohon, a passionate opponent of the traditional text, was horrified. He demanded they stop the presses. But the response came back, dictated not by theology, but by cold hard economics. Scrapping the 30,000 copies already printed would cost tens of thousands of dollars. And so, in a moment of sublime irony, the binding machine defeated the theologians. Kol Nidrei had once again stubbornly refused to die. [9]

For the next printing, Cohon did something revolutionary. Instead of simply removing the text, he wrote an English substitute that was a complete inversion of the original. Where the ancient formula sought to annul our vows, Cohon’s prayer asked God for the strength to fulfil them. [10] It transformed a ritual of release into a moment of profound commitment.

Tonight, we are the heirs to this entire, messy, beautiful history. We are not here to find a spiritual loophole or to press a cosmic reset button that wipes our slate clean. We are here to do the opposite. We are here, in the spirit of Samuel Cohon’s radical inversion, to declare what truly matters to us. We are here to make commitments, not annul them.

The traditional Kol Nidrei annulled seven kinds of vows made between a person and God. [11] Tonight, we replace those annulments with seven sacred Jewish commitments. Seven affirmations that define who we are, what we value, and what we resolve to build in the year ahead. [12]

First Commitment: To Aspire

We commit to aim high. Kol Nidrei invites us to take promises seriously, not to avoid them. We name the ideals that shape a life of holiness, patience, compassion, justice, and honesty, and we reach for them with courage. Torah commands, “קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ, be holy,” [13] and the prophets distil this into walking humbly and doing what is right. [14] We affirm that holiness is within human reach. We will set a high bar for ourselves, believe that growth is possible, and keep choosing the better path even when it is hard.

Second Commitment: To Forgive

We commit to forgive. Aspiration guarantees that we will sometimes fall short. Forgiveness is the practice that keeps a community whole and a soul supple. Our tradition teaches the attributes of divine mercy, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and rich in kindness. [15] We will hold bold expectations and meet failure with gentleness, towards others and towards ourselves. This is not the refusal to name harm. It is the choice to repair trust, to make space for return, and to carry one another forward.

Third Commitment: Pride in Progressive Judaism

We commit to walk our Progressive path with confidence. We belong fully to Am Yisrael. Our Judaism is rooted in Torah and the wisdom of generations, informed by history and science, and accountable to human dignity. “אֵלּוּ וָאֵלּוּ דִּבְרֵי אֱלֹהִים חַיִּים, these and those are God’s living words,” [16] reminds us that principled disagreement can be sacred. We affirm gender equality and LGBTQ+ dignity. We honour tradition by engaging it honestly and letting it speak to the moral questions of our time. This is authentic Judaism, thoughtful, joyous, and alive.

Fourth Commitment: Communal Co-Creation

Drawing from one of my recent Shabbat drashot, we commit to co-create this community. The theological basis for this is the radical idea that the Torah is not in heaven, but “in your mouth and in your heart”, [17] empowering each of us with the agency to shape our Jewish lives. We are not religious consumers; we are builders. At this stage we have few committees and programmes, which is an invitation rather than a deficit. This year we will give better form to our care for one another, shaping teams that welcome, visit, sing, teach, organise, and serve, so that our shared home reflects the gifts and responsibilities of all who gather here.

Fifth Commitment: Lifelong Learning

We commit to taking Jewish learning seriously, for ourselves and for future generations. As we discussed in another recent Shabbat drashah, we reject the phenomenon known as “paediatric Judaism”, where Jewish knowledge ends at bar or bat-mitzvah. [18] The goal of adult Jewish learning is to become as sophisticated in our Jewish lives as we are in all other realms. [19] It is to realise that Judaism has relevant insights for the most crucial moments of our lives, not only for what happens inside the sanctuary. In 5786 we will work on an adult learning programme that fits our community, with spaces to question, to encounter classic texts, and to explore contemporary issues through a Jewish lens. What we learn ourselves can kindle others, and what we teach one another can steady us for the work ahead.

Sixth Commitment: Tikkun Olam, Repairing the World

We commit to act on our values. Tikkun Olam is not a slogan, it is the natural outcome of internalised Jewish ethics. Living in South Africa, a reality of extreme inequalities, our responsibility is undeniable. I am inspired by the words of our sister congregation, Beit Emanuel, which affirms that, “in this land we have experienced the best and worst of the human spirit. We have plumbed the depths of racism, violence, and injustice, and we have soared the heights of grace, reconciliation, and renewal.” [20] We will turn compassion into concrete practice, joining neighbours, learning from those already doing the work, and showing up reliably. Service and justice belong together. Meeting immediate need and addressing root causes are both part of our Jewish responsibility, here in Johannesburg and beyond.

Our Seventh Commitment: Sustaining Our Community

Finally, we commit to sustaining our community, grounded in the ancient wisdom of Pirkei Avot: “אִם אֵין קֶמַח, אֵין תּוֹרָה, If there is no flour, there is no Torah.” Prayer, learning, care, and service require time, skill, and financial support to endure. Bet David is blessed with rental income, but it is not enough. In some communities abroad, members contribute between 1% and 2.5% of their income as dues. [21] We are not there yet, but this is a conversation we want to start among ourselves. Tonight, we ask each of you to consider: What can you give? Not as a fee for services, but as an investment in the Jewish future. Our ancestors built the infrastructure of this community in much harder times. We commit to honouring their legacy by keeping this sanctuary alive and thriving—for ourselves, and for those yet to come.

This is our Kol Nidrei. Not an escape clause, but a covenant. Not an annulment of vows, but an affirmation of commitments. We stand here tonight, witnesses to our own shortcomings, but also to our deep and powerful desire to be better. The haunting melody that filled this room was not a song of release, but a call to commitment. [22]

The tools we need to flourish—the wisdom to choose, the capacity to act justly, and the power to co-create our sacred future—are not distant. The capacity for an ethical and vital Jewish life is right here. It is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, for you to do. [23]

May we have the courage to make these commitments, and the strength to live them.

Ken Yehi Ratzon. May this be God’s will.

Shanah Tovah! Gmar Chatimah Tovah!

[*] Unless otherwise noted, all the articles mentioned in the footnotes are from All These Vows: Kol Nidre, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011). 

[1] Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre: Anatomy of a Conflict".

[2] Jonathan Magonet, "What If Cleverness Is Foolishness and Righteousness an Illusion?". See also Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Morality, Meaning, and the Ritual Search for the Sacred".
[3] Tony Bayfield, "At Least Credit Me with Being Compassionate".

[4] Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, "The Kol Nidre Mirror to Our Soul". See also Eliezer Diamond, "Kol Nidre: A Halakhic History and Analysis".

[5] Eliezer Diamond, "Kol Nidre: A Halakhic History and Analysis". See also Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre from Union Prayer Book to Gates of Repentance".

[6] Ellen M. Umansky, "Ritualizing Kol Nidre: The Power of Three". See also Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Introduction".

[7] Andrew Goldstein, "Memories of the Past, Guidelines for the Future". See also Annette M. Boeckler, "The Magic of the Moment: Kol Nidre in Progressive Judaism”.

[8] Annette M. Boeckler, "The Magic of the Moment: Kol Nidre in Progressive Judaism”.

[9] Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre from Union Prayer Book to Gates of Repentance”.

[10] Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre from Union Prayer Book to Gates of Repentance". 

[11] Rachel Nussbaum, "Over-Promise, Under-Deliver … and Then Forgive".

[12] Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre from Union Prayer Book to Gates of Repentance."

[13] Lev. 19:2.

[14] Micah 6:8.

[15] Ex. 34:6.

[16] Talmud Bavli, Eruvin 13b.

[17] Deut 30:14

[18] Jonathan Magonet, "What If Cleverness Is Foolishness and Righteousness an Illusion?".

[19] Ruth Durchslag, "Words Mean Everything, Words Mean Nothing—Both Are True”.

[20] Beit Emanuel’s Prayer for South Africa.

[21] https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/can-synagogues-live-by-dues-alone

[22] Jonathan P. Slater, "Release beyond Words: Kol Nidre Even on a Violin".

[23] Aaron Panken, "Courting Inversion: Kol Nidre as Legal Drama”.

Between the Wound and the Healing: Reflections for Parashat Ha’azinu – Two Years After 7 October

Yehuda Amichai begins one of his most beloved poems with the line:

“A person doesn't have time in his life to have time for everything.” [1]

Many rabbis, myself included, have turned to this poem in moments of contradiction, when joy and grief collide in sacred space. Over the years, it has become a go-to text for wedding ceremonies held shortly after funerals, for baby blessings after miscarriages, for any moment when celebration and sorrow come too close to separate. But over the past two years, since that terrible day on 7 October 2023, Amichai’s words have taken on a deeper, more haunting resonance.

“A person needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes…

to make love in war and war in love.”

The Jewish calendar doesn’t avoid contradiction, it crystallises it. On that day, Simchat Torah, as we were dancing with scrolls, singing with children, and kissing sacred words, our people were being attacked, in what would become the most brutal assault on Israeli civilians in a generation. Simchat Torah, the “Joy of Torah”, remained written on the calendar. But something inside many of us broke open. And now, two years later, we are still living in the echoes of that collision: between what should have been and what was; between joy and grief, presence and absence, comfort and terror.

This week’s parashah, Ha’azinu, comes to us in the form of poetry as well. It is Moshe’s final song, a deeply layered, often stark poem that summarises Israel’s journey with God. In last week’s column, I wrote about the emotional force of music and memory, and the Torah’s invitation to “write this song” and place it in our mouths and hearts. Ha’azinu takes up that invitation in full.

But the Torah’s poem is not just a farewell, it is a tapestry of warnings, lament, and hope. Near its close, God says:

“I deal death and give life; I wound and I will heal” (Devarim 32:39).

We have been living in that verse. We have buried and we have blessed. We have sat shivah and danced under chuppot. And we mourn, not only for Israelis murdered and soldiers fallen, not only for hostages still in captivity and families torn apart, but also for Palestinian civilians killed, for children bereaved, for communities shattered. Every human life is of infinite worth, created in the image of God. Our grief must not be reduced to a ledger, nor measured in competing sorrows.

To say this aloud is not to blur moral responsibility; it is to insist on another kind of moral clarity, that compassion is not a scarce resource, and Jewish conscience does not permit dehumanisation. We can condemn cruelty and still pray for the protection of all innocents. We can pursue security and still yearn for a future where no child goes to sleep afraid. This, too, is something the Torah’s poem models: poetry capable of holding covenantal joy and searing lament in the same breath.

And now, we return to Amichai’s poem, which ends with this image:

“He will die as figs die in autumn,

Shrivelled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches pointing to the place

where there’s time for everything.”

This week, may we give ourselves permission not to resolve the tension but to honour it. May we hold the wound and the hope together. May the songs of our lives carry the names of those we love and those we have never met. May our prayers reach toward healing: for the injured, the traumatised, the bereaved on all sides. And may we remember that our lives, like our Torah, contain both prose and poetry, and that sometimes the only way forward is through song.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] https://shira-ovedet.kibbutz.org.il/cgi-webaxy/item?2478

Dvar Torah: From Paediatric Judaism to a Lifetime of Learning

Many of us here are parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We want the best for the children in our lives. We want them to be well-read, so we encourage them: we give them books and we ask often, “Have you done your reading yet?” But a fascinating 2018 study on this very topic revealed a profound truth. Children have an uncanny ability to detect hypocrisy. One child in the study said of his parents, “They don’t do any reading, they just ask me and then I have to go do it.” Another put it simply: “He doesn’t read himself really.” The researchers concluded that when encouragement is not backed by example, it rings hollow.

This simple truth from the world of literacy is a powerful mirror for our own Jewish lives. How often do we treat Jewish learning as something exclusively for the young? This results in what we might call a “paediatric Judaism.” Imagine if our entire experience of literature never progressed beyond Curious George and the like. We would be missing the richness of the novels, the poetry, the drama that give life meaning. And yet, so often, this is what happens with our Jewish knowledge. We mature into sophisticated learners in every other area of our lives, our careers, our hobbies, our understanding of the world, but when it comes to Judaism, many of us remain stuck at a 13-year-old’s level. Our faith becomes a set of stories and rituals that one graduates from, like primary school. This is the danger we face.

Our own tradition understood this profound psychological truth centuries ago. A person once asked Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk how they could encourage their children to dedicate themselves to the study of Torah. Menachem Mendel replied: “If you truly wish to do this, then you yourself must devote time to Torah, and they will follow your example. Otherwise, you will not dedicate time to Torah, but merely tell your children to do so. And that is how it will remain.”

And that is how it will remain. A faith for children. A faith that cannot sustain us through the complexities of adult life.

It is into this very challenge that our parashah speaks with such astonishing wisdom and foresight. The text provides the perfect antidote to this problem of a hollowed-out, paediatric Judaism. Listen to this verse from D’varim: “Gather the people, men, women, children, and the strangers in your communities, that they may hear and so learn to revere the Eternal your God and to observe faithfully every word of this Torah.”

Let us pause and absorb the radical inclusivity of this statement. The instruction is not “Gather the children.” It is not “Ensure your children have a Bar/Bat-Mitzvah education.” It is “Gather the people.” All of them. Men and women, young and old. The children, who are not just our future, but our partners in the present. And, perhaps most strikingly, “the strangers in your communities.” Every single person is to be included in this great assembly of learning.

This is a profound statement about the nature of Jewish education. It is not something to be confined to the classroom. It is not a task to be completed in childhood and then set aside. It is a lifelong, communal endeavour. The Torah is not meant to be a dusty scroll, revered from a distance by adults while being force-fed to children. It is meant to be heard, learned, and internalised by everyone, together, until it shapes the very way we see the world. The goal is twofold: to learn to revere God, and to observe the Torah faithfully. The reverence and the observance are intertwined, one flowing from the other. And it starts with the adults showing up.

But this grand instruction begs a fundamental question. If this learning is for everyone, what is this Torah that we are all meant to know? Is it the 613 mitzvot in all their intricate detail? Is it the complex tapestry of Talmudic debate? Many adults shy away from Jewish learning precisely because they imagine it to be an insurmountable mountain of arcane rules, something best left to the rabbis or the especially learned.

Our tradition, however, provides us with some beautifully concise and powerful answers. Perhaps the most famous is the story of a person considering becoming a Jew by choice who came before Shammai and Hillel. He approached Shammai with an impossible request: “Teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Shammai chased the man away with a builder’s ruler. It was an absurd request.

But then the man went to Hillel. Hillel, renowned for his gentle nature, did not dismiss him. He stood the man on one foot and said, “Do not do to your neighbour what is hateful to you. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”

“The rest is commentary. Now go and study.” In this one, brilliant statement, Hillel encapsulates the very essence of adult Jewish learning. He does not say the commentary is unimportant. But he says it is all an elaboration of a single, foundational principle: empathy. The core of the matter is to see the other, recognise their humanity, and treat them with dignity. The intricate laws of Shabbat and kashrut are the “commentary”, the frameworks through which we practise and refine our ability to live out that core principle. Hillel’s message is clear: start with the heart, with the basic principle of human decency, and from there, the study of the rest will have context and meaning. This is an entry point for any adult, at any level.

This focus on the ethical core is a recurring theme. Consider the debate between Rabbi Akiva and Ben Azzai over the klal gadol baTorah, the most important verse in the entire Torah. Rabbi Akiva proposed the famous verse from Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” It is a powerful choice, a call for active love and compassion.

But Ben Azzai disagreed. He chose an even more foundational verse from Genesis: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. On the day that God created man, in the likeness of God He made him.” Ben Azzai argued that this was greater because our ability to love our neighbour as ourselves can be subjective. It presumes that what we want for ourselves is what our neighbour wants, but people are very different from each other. Sometimes the best way to treat someone with dignity is not to think of them as being just like us, but to recognise and honour our differences. And what if, on a given day, you do not love yourself very much? Ben Azzai’s verse, however, establishes an objective, unshakeable truth: every single human being is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. Their value is not dependent on your feelings towards them. It is inherent. This principle compels us to honour the humanity in everyone, even our enemies.

What is striking is that in identifying the core of Torah, none of these sages pointed to a ritual precept. They all pointed directly to the realm of interpersonal ethics. They all understood that the ultimate purpose of the Torah’s intricate system is to shape us into a certain kind of person. It is to mould us into a mensch.

Mensch is a Yiddish word that, although often translated as “person”, means a lot more than that. A mensch is someone of integrity, honour, decency, and compassion. A mensch is a real human being. This is the goal of a Jewish education, and it is most certainly not a paediatric goal. Becoming a mensch is the work of a lifetime. It is an adult curriculum.

This brings us to a stark teaching from Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers: “וּבְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ” — “In a situation devoid of humanity, strive to be a human being.”

This is a profound ethical demand. It is easy to be a good person when surrounded by good people. But what do you do in a moral vacuum? What happens in a workplace where gossip is the norm? Or in a political climate where decency is mocked? The Mishnah tells us: in that place, you must strive to be a mensch. When no one else will stand up, you must. This requires an adult morality, an internalised ethical framework that does not depend on external validation. This is what Jewish learning is for.

And so, we return to where we began. We cannot ask our children to build this deep ethical character if we are not actively engaged in building it ourselves. We cannot expect them to love a tradition that they see us neglect. The command of our parashah is our guide. It is a call to intergenerational, communal learning. It is a call for adults to model what a life of learning and striving looks like.

Let us, therefore, answer that ancient call. Let us gather, all of us, and commit ourselves to this learning. Let us show our children, and each other, that Judaism is not a subject to be passed, but a life to be lived. Let us learn together what it means to be a mensch, so that our children do not learn from our hypocrisy, but are inspired by our example. In doing so, we not only honour our past, but we build a more humane and compassionate future for all.

Ken Yehi Ratzon, may this be God’s will.

Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah!

Write This Song: On Music, Memory, and Meaning

Music has always played a significant role in my life. I’ve never played a musical instrument, and I don’t pretend to be a gifted singer, but from a very young age I found great joy in singing. I still remember performing at a talent show in a hotel I visited with my parents when I was six. Apparently, I had no trace of stage fright! Later, as a teenager, I parodied a well-known Brazilian protest song to suit my then-rebellious worldview. Where the original called out, “Come, let’s go, for waiting is not knowing; those who know make the moment, they don’t wait for it to happen,” my version sang: “Come, let’s go, for studying is not knowing; those who study waste their time and don’t know what it is to live...”

Yes, I was once that teenager. Please don’t share this with your children, and especially not with mine!

Despite the questionable lyrics, I loved music. I still do. Music was, and remains, far more than entertainment. It has often served as a kind of emotional time machine. There are songs that instantly transport me to the back seat of my mother’s car in the early 1980s, to the burning passions and heartbreaks of adolescence, and to the tense political atmosphere of Brazil’s final years under military rule. Music has that power: to help us feel before we are ready to think; to reveal truths our minds may resist; to connect us with moments and people long gone.

I sometimes bristle when the Torah is described merely as a “book of law”. Of course, it contains laws, but for me, especially as a Progressive Jew, it is first and foremost our people’s sacred narrative. It tells the stories from which I’ve drawn so many of the values that shape my life. Chief among them is the image of humanity created in the Divine image, read on the second day of Rosh HaShanah and again on Simchat Torah. There’s no explicit law in that passage, but from it flows the profound Jewish commitment to the dignity of every single human being.

This week’s parashah, Vayelech, sets the stage for the powerful poem that will follow in next week’s parashah, Haazinu. Moshe is instructed to prepare a song that will be delivered on the last day of his life, summarising Israel’s relationship with God, past, present, and future. The text commands: “Now, therefore, write this song for yourselves, and teach it to the children of Israel. Put it in their mouths, that this song may be My witness against the children of Israel” (Devarim 31:19). Moshe's legacy is not just law; it is also music and memory, a testimony designed to be internalised emotionally and carried forever in our hearts.

On this Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of Return, may we allow the songs of our own lives to accompany us on our journey. May they bring us not only nostalgia but healing, connection, and the strength to keep walking towards the future we still long to compose.

Shabbat Shalom and Shannah Tovah!

Dvar Torah: Giving Life to Our Metaphors for God | Rosh haShannah 5786

(A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Dando vida às metafóras sobre Deus. Rosh haShaná 5783")

I want to begin with a Chasidic story that I love to teach, and which I came across in a book by S. Y. Agnon [1], the Israeli author awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966.

One day a chasid visited his Rebbe, the Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk, during the days between Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur, and asked whether he could watch how the Rabbi performed the kapparah.

For those unfamiliar with the term, kapparah is an old tradition in which a person’s sins are transferred to a chicken on the eve of Yom Kippur by waving the animal over the person’s head. The animal is then slaughtered, along with the sins of the person, and donated. Over time, and with concern for animal welfare, some people have done a version of this ritual in which the sins are instead transferred to money, which is then donated. Let it be clear that these practices are no longer observed by the great majority of the liberal Jewish world.

The Rabbi’s answer surprised the chasid somewhat:

“I am honoured that you wish to see me carry out the mitzvah of kapparah, but I must tell you that in this particular mitzvah, my performance is nothing extraordinary. If you want to see someone who does it in a special way, go and see Moishe, who runs the hostel.”

On the morning before Yom Kippur, the young chasid went to Moishe’s home to observe how he did kapparah, peering through a window.

Moishe began by sitting in a wooden chair in front of a small fireplace in his living room, with “his two books of teshuvah” by his side. Moishe took the first book and said:

“Ribono shel Olam [Master of the World], the time has come for us to settle accounts for all our transgressions of the past year, for kapparah applies to all Israel.”

He opened the first book, read what was written very carefully, and began to weep. The young chasid listened closely while Moishe read a list of sins (all apparently rather minor) that he had committed in the previous year. When he finished reading, Moishe took his notebook, soaked with tears, held it above his head, then threw it into the fire. He then took the other book, much heavier than the first, and said:

“Ribono shel Olam, before I listed my transgressions; now I will recount all the transgressions that You have committed.”

Moishe immediately began to list all the episodes of death, suffering, disease and destruction which had occurred over the previous year to members of his family. When he finished listing them, he said:

“Ribono shel Olam, if we were to calculate precisely, You owe me more than I owe You. But I do not wish to be so exact in our accounting, for today is the eve of Yom Kippur and we are all obligated to make peace with one another. Therefore, I forgive all Your transgressions against me and my family, and You also forgive all my transgressions against You.”

With that, Moishe took the second book, also soaked with tears, held it above his head, and threw it into the fire.

He then poured vodka into his cup, made the blessing, said “L’chaim!” loudly. He sat down with his wife and had a good meal in preparation for the fast.

The young chasid, shocked, returned to his Rebbe and recounted the heresies Moishe had spoken to God. The Rabbi said to him:

“Know this: in the heavens, every year God and all the Divine court gather to hear with keen attention the things Moishe says. And as a result, there is joy and satisfaction in all the worlds.”

As I said, I love teaching this story because there is in it a fundamentally Jewish element of protest which we have allowed to fade over the past century and a half. When I offer the first class in an Introduction to Judaism course, I tell the students that whereas, in most other religious traditions, being a devout person means saying “Yes, Sir” to the Divine message, in Judaism a committed Jew responds to God’s call with “how dare You ask me such a thing?!”. That was how Avraham, the first patriarch, responded when God instructed him to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah [2]; that was how Moshe responded when God said He would destroy the people after the episode of the Golden Calf [3]; that was how the rabbis responded when God attempted to intervene in one of their rabbinic debates [4]. The name most often given to the Jewish people in the rabbinic tradition, Yisrael, reflects this perspective: “one who wrestles with God”. The most amazing thing is that God does not seem disturbed by our questioning of God’s actions; on the contrary: in one story in which God's opinion is rejected by the rabbis, God comes away smiling and saying “My children have defeated me” — proud, like a parent whose daughter defeats him at chess.

When I teach the story of Moishe performing his extraordinary kapparah, people seem to appreciate it, and I think the reason is that they admire his conduct. But the truth is I believe they also identify with the chasid, who thinks it (what Moishe is doing) is heresy.

We want a new model of relationship with the Divine, yet we have immense difficulty giving up the current model, even when it deeply troubles us.

In preparation for this sermon, I was reading a book called God the What? What Our Metaphors for God Reveal about Our Beliefs in God, by Carolyn Jane Bohler. Early in the book, the author offers a questionnaire about our beliefs and suggests that readers fill it out before reading the book, and again after finishing it.

Personally, after all my years in rabbinical seminary, I consider myself someone with a sophisticated Jewish education; someone whose understanding of God is in no way based on what I call “Santa Claus God” — the long white-bearded image, sitting on a throne in the sky, watching every detail of our lives. My understanding of the Divine is fluid, but much closer to Mordecai Kaplan’s, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement (who defined God as “the power that makes for salvation”), or to those who see God as a process; or to Maimonides’, the rationalist philosopher for whom humanity could never assert with certainty what God is, only what God is not — for example, that God does not have a body. And yet, by the end of Bohler’s questionnaire (which includes statements like “God continues working in us, shaping us”, and “God and humanity share power and responsibility”, and “God takes what is and, again and again, seeks to create the best with what He has”), I was surprised to find that most of my responses still assumed “Santa Claus God”, the God I don’t believe in. I asked myself: why is that, if that is not how I believe the Divine to be?

Because the context that surrounds us matters, and repeated context matters even more. Perhaps some of you followed a few years ago the controversy around the live-action Little Mermaid film, in which the title role is played by Halle Bailey, a Black actress. On one side, fans upset that the Little Mermaid in the film would not have the almost-white skin of the original cartoon version. On the other, Black children moved to see that their hero would be portrayed looking like someone similar to them. I have never met a mermaid, nor do I know anyone who has. I do not know what colour her skin or hair would be, her height, or her tone of voice — and even without knowing a mermaid, no one complained when Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th-century character was portrayed as a red-haired white woman in a Disney cartoon. Without denying that many of the complaints had racist inspiration, there is also the truth that, after being portrayed white and red-haired in many children’s movies, that image becomes engraved in our consciousness. Dolls, Disney animations and other studios’ productions, clothes, many items hammering that idea into our heads since 1989, when the animated feature was released. That repetition of an image turns what might once have been only one possible way to read the character’s appearance into the only way people feel it must be.

The same phenomenon occurs with our theological perceptions. Within the Jewish world, whenever we recite a brachah we use the formula “Baruch Ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-Olam” — “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe.” Many aspects of the Divine are implicit in this short formula: God is “other”, whom we address as Ata (You) — and so is not part of us. God is male. God is hierarchical, our King and of the whole universe. In the wider culture, when God is a character in a film, it is in the vast majority of cases portrayed as an old white person with a deep voice. Even the comedians who deconstruct religious tradition, who question religious perspectives, portray God this way — other, male, hierarchical. When God is presented outside that mould — and there have been several attempts in recent years — the reception is like Moishe’s kapparah: it’s heresy!

Some time ago, I led workshops with groups of educators and students: I asked them what attributes they would ascribe to God based on the way God is depicted in the Torah and in Jewish liturgy. Most of the responses were far from welcoming: “punitive”, “egocentric”, “dogmatic”, “fearsome”, “violent”, “misogynistic” were some of the words used. However, when I asked what they personally believed about God, I received entirely different answers: words about being welcoming, partnership, horizontality. From the texts we read, the prayers we say, the cultural reality in which we live, we have come to accept that the “correct” perspective of God is one in which many of us no longer believe.

“No longer believing” also needs qualification, because it is implied in that phrase that once Jews believed in this God literally. Rabbi Larry Hoffman is one of the principal — if not the foremost — experts in Jewish liturgy in the liberal Jewish world. He challenges the idea with which we have been convinced: that our ancestors believed these texts literally. In his words:

“Complicating matters is our still very poor understanding of our ancestors, whom we envision as humorless saints who did not have to suffer the problems with prayer that plague us. But what if they were more like us than we think? Did the same prayers that bother us bother them – an all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing God who lets innocent children die, for example? When they encountered these liturgical claims, did they take them literally? Or had they already come to terms with the inexpressibility of the profound? Did they have to await modern literary criticism to develop what we now call “readership strategies”—or did they already know enough to read the way we do, recognizing the poetics of simile, hyperbole, personification, and the rest? That they lived in medieval times makes them neither childishly naïve nor mentally incompetent, after all. Some of them were geniuses like Maimonides, who denied God’s corporeality and anticipated our unease with prayers that treat God as if God were an all-too-human judge requiring pacification by prayer and petition. But was Maimonides the only one who thought such “heresies,” or was he just a particularly prominent person who dared say them out loud? Great writers do not always provide ideas that no one has ever entertained so much as they couch them in words that evoke knowing nods from readers who more or less suspected these truths anyway but had no way of expressing them.”

“What shall we say, similarly, about the authors of these prayers? How would we know if they wrote ironically, rather than literally, for example? Their Hebrew was unvocalized, leaving us, the readers, to guess at punctuation like commas and periods, but also exclamation points for intensity, question marks to denote rhetorical uncertainties, and quotation marks to warn against a literal understanding of what they bracket. What if we have been getting all this wrong? We can see, for example, how frequently they cited the Bible; but if their primary concern was quoting, how would we know if they intended the quotes as literal truths? We quote Shakespeare‘s “seven ages of man” to get across the idea of human development, but not to say that there are specifically seven such ages that “men,” say, bur not women, go through. If someone writes “divinely,” we do not mean they really write like God. What if our most gifted writers of prayer almost never took their writing literally? What if they were gifted the way writers are today—able to stretch language imaginatively enough to convey what ordinary conceptual thought will never quite arrive at?” [5]

Some time ago I read an article reporting that a skeleton was found in Borneo, Indonesia, with a leg amputated between knee and foot 31,000 years ago. The marks on the bones show that this was not an accident, but a surgical amputation. The surgery took place when the individual was 14 or 15 years old, and he lived until about 20. According to the article’s author:

“What seems obvious to me is that this discovery will force scientists to reconsider the technological and cultural development of those peoples. Since these populations did not know writing and did almost not build architectural works, all we know about them comes from excavating the places in which they lived and studying bones, paintings, remains of food, and the few artefacts found. With so little information, it is natural that we underestimate the progress of those societies. A discovery like this will force us to re-evaluate the knowledge and the technologies these people already mastered.” [6]

For more than 30,000 years, human beings were already capable of surgical amputation, but we continue to imagine that our ancestors believed the Torah literally and that our rabbis composed the Jewish liturgy without any poetic licence, without use of metaphor, without irony. All of those would be modern techniques to escape a theological reality with which we cannot quite reconcile ourselves.

In her book Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, Sallie McFague argues that reading religious texts as if they had a single literal meaning is to engage in what she calls the “idolatry of religious language”:

“The ancients were less literalistic than we are, aware that truth has many levels and that when one writes the story of an influential person's life, one's perspective will color that story. Our is a literalistic mentality; theirs was a symbolical mentality.” [7]

What if a symbolic reading were within our reach? What if we allowed ourselves a generous and radically metaphorical reading of the liturgical poems we will read in these Days of Awe, the Yamim Noraim?

In the book about religious metaphors that I mentioned earlier, the author suggests techniques for us to use these metaphors intentionally, without feeling that we are submitting to a theology that is not ours — and also to recognise that some of these metaphors do not work for us, that we should seek others. In one example where the reinterpretation was possible, she discusses the image of God as a potter, which is part of the liturgy of Yom Kippur—and which used to be dear to me, yet also troubling. I was troubled by the idea of God as a potter because it placed me in a passive, clay-like role, without agency, subject to the will of my Creator. Carolyn Bohler relates in her book that her son works with clay, and what she learned from him is that many attempts are required before the final product is ready. She continues, saying that the Divine Potter enjoys being creative, editing us, shaping us, giving us form.

With such a generous reading — not violating the sense of the text but nor presuming that its authors intended we adopt a literal reading — I have been able to see a way in which the Divine, dwelling within me, in a non-hierarchical way and without assuming any gender, helps me to transform all the time, in dialogue with me, as together we strive for me to become the best version of myself. The author herself recognises that not all metaphors leave room for this kind of symbolic seeking. In the book of the prophet Hoshea, for example, God compares Godself to an abusive husband — an image perhaps impossible to reclaim, especially for survivors of domestic abuse. Many others, however, have been thrown out like the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

In the best sermon I have ever read, Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig depicts God as an old woman waiting for her children to visit on Yom Kippur. At one point, God complains about the postcards her children send, with printed words written by others, in which they merely sign their name — toward the end of the text, it becomes clear that these postcards are the pages of the machzor, the High Holiday prayer book of Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur — words we repeat as if they were ours, as if we meant what they express, without even stopping to reflect upon their meaning.

Moishe, the hostel-owner, showed the radical courage to perform cheshbon hanefesh, accounting of the soul, both for himself and for God — thereby giving meaning to the ritual of kapparah. Could we too find that kind of radical courage, and transform the experience of these awe-filled Days into something truly meaningful and transformative?

Shanah Tovah! May the year 5786 be transformative and very sweet for all of us.

[1] S. Y. Agnon, “The Account,” Yamim Noraim, Part II, ch. 22.
[2] Genesis 18:25.
[3] Exodus 32:11-13.
[4] Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b.
[5] Larry A. Hoffman, “Prayers of Awe, Intuitions of Wonder,” in Who by Fire, Who by Water: Un’taneh Tokef, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010, pp. 4-12.
[6] Fernando Reinach, “A mais antiga perna amputada”, Estado de São Paulo, 17 de setembro de 2022.
[7] Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, p. 23 (e-book).

Dvar Torah: The Courage to Rise | Rosh haShanah 5786

Yesterday, we spoke of t’shuvah as a deeply personal act of self-creation, of turning away from the paralysis of shame and toward the agency of authorship. Today, our focus shifts. We must now speak of t’shuvah as a collective act of hope, of turning toward a future that feels fractured and uncertain.

Before we speak of turning, we must be honest about where we are turning from. We stand today weary, perhaps even wounded. The last few years have demanded a reckoning with profound trauma, sorrow, and deep, often paralyzing, rage. We have weathered the grinding psychological weight of a global pandemic. We were plunged into new depths of anguish after the horrific Hamas attack on October 7th, a day of unspeakable cruelty that shattered the fragile sense of safety for Jews worldwide. This was followed by the devastating Israel-Gaza war, an ongoing tragedy that has brought profound suffering and division to our homes and hearts. In this moment, we are asked to hold multiple griefs at once, and the image of God in every life. Simultaneously, we are confronting a frightening resurgence of antisemitism and hate. We see oppression, inequality, and environmental degradation, problems that seem intractable. Our shared sense of truth is badly eroded as, it seems, is our capacity to engage diverse opinions without demonizing those with whom we disagree. And on top of it all, many of us have had to face our own private family ills and personal tragedies. When faced with such monumental suffering, the spiritual task of finding hope can feel not just difficult, but irresponsible, or perhaps utterly impossible.

It is easy to sink into despair. And a moment of despair is understandable; it is human. But our tradition teaches that to remain there is the greatest sin against life. The work of Rosh haShanah is to find the courage to get up again. Judaism gives us the spiritual framework for rising. The very word for hope in Hebrew, tikvah, comes from the root for a line or cord. It reminds us that hope is not a gentle feeling; it is a stretched rope, something taut and enduring, that we hold onto to pull ourselves out of the depths.

To grab hold of that rope, we must first look at a very strong metaphor for our time: the Broken Tablets. When Moshe descended Sinai and saw the Golden Calf, he shattered the luchot, the tablets he was carrying. It was a moment of absolute despair, the ultimate fall. Our collective tablets feel shattered today. Our faith in progress, in safety, in a shared sense of humanity—so many of our certainties lie in pieces at our feet. The temptation is to believe that because the tablets are broken, the covenant is void. The story is over.

But what did our ancestors do? The Talmud [1] teaches that the broken fragments were gathered up and placed in the Holy Ark, carried alongside the second, whole set. This is a very profound Jewish metaphor for hope. Hope is not about pretending the brokenness didn't happen. It is the sacred and difficult work of carrying our broken pieces with us, right next to our wholeness, as we build a new future. To rise, we must first have the courage to gather the shards.

This journey of gathering the shards happens in what storytellers call the Second Act. [2] It is the difficult middle, the moment when we are in the dark, too far from the start to turn back, but not yet close enough to see the light. This is the desolate space where the Israelites wandered for forty years, carrying an ark filled with both wholeness and brokenness. It is where we find ourselves now.

This is not a new challenge for us. For generations, in our darkest moments, we have held onto our stories as tools for survival. The scholar David Arnow reminds us that Judaism possesses a "deep reservoir of resources—ideas, texts, practices, and stories—that have helped the Jewish people over the ages to choose hope over despair." These narratives are not mere fairy tales; they are potent spiritual technologies. Enslaved peoples in the Americas, hearing our story, sang of Moshe and Pharaoh, finding in our liberation a promise for their own. The story of Exodus—of a people moving from absolute degradation to freedom—became a universal hope narrative, proof that the tyrant does not get the final word. Our entire history is a collection of these stories: Abraham and Sarah having a child at an impossible age; Esther saving her people from a planned genocide; the Maccabees achieving an improbable victory. These stories, as the psychologist Shane Lopez explains, help us see pathways where others see brick walls. They are the tools we use to navigate the darkness. [3]

So, how do we navigate this darkness, using the tools our tradition has given us?

First, we must be honest about the stories our fear is telling us. In the darkness of the Second Act, our first instinct is to tell a story of absolute despair: "The world is entirely against us," or "Nothing will ever be right again." We must get this story out of our heads, speak it aloud, and see it for what it is: a raw, messy, emotional first draft, not the definitive truth.

Second, we must fight against what some call "comparative suffering." [4] It is easy to dismiss our own pain by saying, "My sadness is nothing compared to the loss experienced by others." But compassion is not a finite resource that gets used up. Every time we honor our own struggles and the struggles of others with empathy, we open the gates of healing wider for everyone.

Finally, in this Second Act, we write a new ending. This is the revolution of hope. It begins by reclaiming our agency. As the Czech dissident and president Václav Havel once wrote, “hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” [5]

Our hope is not dependent on a guaranteed outcome. It is rooted in the meaning of our actions. We find that meaning in the foundational principle of our faith: olam chesed yibaneh—the world is built on loving-kindness. [6] This is a radical declaration. It asserts that despite all evidence to the contrary, the fundamental building material of the universe is goodness. Our task is to act in a way that aligns with that goodness, to become builders alongside God. If loving-kindness is the world’s building material, hope is our willingness to lay the next brick.

Our faith requires us to act. When the Israelites were trapped at the Red Sea, with the army closing in, God did not say, "Wait for a miracle." God said to Moshe, "Why are you crying out to me? Tell the people to move forward." [7] Our task is not to wait for salvation, but to be the inspired action.

Elie Wiesel expressed this idea in poetry:

Created in the image of [God] who has no image, it

is incumbent upon

our contemporaries to invoke and create hope

where there is none.

For just as only human beings can push me to

despair, only they can

help me vanquish it and call it hope. [8]

Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world, and this year, it feels like we are being asked to help rebuild it from its broken foundations. The fall was real and it was brutal. But our capacity to rise is just as real. When we stand up again, we are transformed. We carry the broken tablets with us, and they make us not weaker, but wiser and more compassionate.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks made a crucial distinction: optimism is the passive belief that things will get better. Hope is the active belief that together, we can make things better. [9] Hope is a Jewish virtue precisely because it is born not of certainty, but of courage in the face of uncertainty. That courage is contagious. When we choose to rise, we inspire those around us.

This year, let us take the hard-won wisdom of our collective falls. Let us step into the new year, carrying our broken pieces not as a burden of despair, but as a testament to our resilience. And with that resilient strength, let us begin to write a better, truer, and more compassionate next chapter to our story.

May we have the courage to gather the fragments, the resilience to rise from the fall, and the commitment to transform our losses into goodness and light for the year to come.

In the shofar we hear our path: tekiah—the wholeness we long for; shevarim–teruah—the fractures we carry; tekiah gedolah—the long breath of a people who refuse to stop at broken.

Shanah Tovah!

[1] Talmud Bavli Bava Batra 14b

[2] Brené Brown, Rising Strong

[3] https://reformjudaism.org/blog/choosing-hope-times-trial

[4] Rising Strong

[5] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/vaclav_havel_392717

[6] Psalm 89:3

[7] Exodus 14:15

[8] https://reformjudaism.org/blog/choosing-hope-times-trial

[9] https://rabbisacks.org/quotes/optimism-and-hope/

Dvar Torah: From Judgment to Self-Creation | Rosh haShaná 5786

Here we are, together, standing at the threshold of a new year. Rosh Hashanah arrives, and with it, the awesome task of t’shuvah — that heroic act of turning, which demands of us a profound cheshbon haNefesh, an accounting of the soul.

But let’s be honest with each other. For many of us, this intense season of introspection can feel less like a path to spiritual renewal and more like a dreaded summons. We are called to stand before the great metaphor of the Book of Life, holding our breath, waiting to see if we’ve measured up. The anxiety is palpable. It can feel, if we’re not careful, a bit like that strange holiday from the show Seinfeld — Festivus — where the main event is the "Airing of Grievances," and a father gathers his family just to tell them all the ways they have disappointed him.

Sometimes, the weight of our tradition can make the High Holidays feel like a spiritual Festivus. It can feel like we are being called into the principal's office, knowing we’ve done something foolish and are about to be reprimanded. This feeling of a looming, external judgment feeds a profound spiritual danger: the fear that our mistakes define us, that our fate is sealed, and that we are powerless. It suggests a rigid, predetermined world that erases our agency and undermines the very purpose of t’shuvah itself.

Today, I want to suggest that we have a choice. We can challenge this paralyzing perspective. And we can begin by understanding the critical distinction between the productive fire of guilt and the destructive poison of shame.

The renowned researcher Brené Brown, who has spent her life studying vulnerability, gives us the modern language for this ancient distinction. She identifies guilt as that uncomfortable but deeply productive feeling that says, “I did something bad.” It focuses squarely on an action, a transgression. It’s specific, and it’s repairable. Shame, on the other hand, is the devastating, identity-based attack that whispers, “I am bad.”

Why is this distinction so crucial for us today? Because shame paralyzes. It is correlated with addiction, aggression, and despair. Brown’s research reveals that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we can change and do better. After all, if we believe we are fundamentally broken, why would we even bother trying to return? Shame is a form of self-annulment, allowing a momentary failing to define and erase our entire worth.

This is not just psychology; it is deep Jewish wisdom. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught that Judaism is a quintessential guilt culture, not a shame culture. A shame culture is obsessed with public image and conformity. A guilt culture emphasizes our individual responsibility before God, before our own conscience. This ethic is so powerful because it allows for the essential separation of the sin from the sinner. Our deeds can be rectified without erasing our essential dignity.

So while guilt is uncomfortable — that inner dissonance that tells us we’ve strayed — that discomfort is precisely what motivates meaningful change. It is a signal to act, not a verdict of worthlessness. The sacred task of Rosh Hashanah is to learn how to transform the anxiety of guilt into a productive curriculum for our own growth.

This journey begins with a powerful truth our tradition gives us for comfort: we are not alone in our imperfection. In fact, we are in the very best of company.

Shame thrives on the myth of perfection, on the isolating belief that everyone else has it all figured out. But our Torah, with radical honesty, tells us otherwise. The human condition begins with a story of failure. After their transgression in the garden, Adam declares, “I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.” This is the classic expression of shame — it leads to hiding and blame-shifting, not the accountability that guilt demands.

And this theme of human struggle continues through the flawed, beautiful lives of our ancestors. Their stories are our stories. We remember Sarah’s jealousy, Avraham's terrifying faith, and even the tension in God’s role in these narratives. Our texts remind us that spiritual strength is not found in avoiding the struggle, but in having the courage to engage with life in all its messiness. As Theodore Roosevelt once said, “The credit belongs to the [one] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” Our patriarchs and matriarchs were in the arena. And so are we.

This idea — that our mistakes do not define our essence — is not just in our stories; it is embedded in our most dramatic rituals. In biblical times, on Yom Kippur, two goats, nearly identical, were brought before the High Priest. One was offered to God, representing our true, pure, essential self. The other, the scapegoat, symbolically carried our mistakes away into the wilderness. The message is breathtaking: your sins are real, but they are not you. They are a doppelgänger, an identical-looking self that can and must be separated from your true core. Our tradition insists that the part of you that strives, that loves, that connects — that is the real you. The rest is just a story that can be sent away.

If Rosh Hashanah sometimes feels like a fatalistic judgment, it is because we have become stuck in a single, powerful metaphor: God as Judge, passing down a verdict to be inscribed in a sealed Book of Life.

But a metaphor is not a fact; it is a lens. It is a tool for understanding. And, yet, as the linguists Lakoff and Johnson teach, the metaphors we live by don't just describe our reality; they create it. Think of the "war on drugs" — that metaphor focuses us so intensely on conflict that we fail to consider vital paths like treatment or economic aid, because those simply aren't moves you make in a war; the metaphor itself traps our thinking. In the same way, when we overuse the metaphor of the Book of Life, it powerfully highlights Divine power, but it also hides our own agency and our role as partners with God, creating a spiritual fatalism that can remove our very incentive to transform.

What if we had the courage to choose a different metaphor for this day, one also rooted deeply in our tradition?

What if, instead of the courtroom, we chose the metaphor of Hayom Harat Olam — Rosh Hashanah as the birth day of the world? A birthday is not about judgment; it is about potential. It is about celebrating a new beginning. This metaphor highlights our capacity to bring newness into the world, to be creators ourselves.

Or what if we embraced the metaphor of God’s coronation? A sovereign is not a sovereign without a people who freely choose to crown them. This metaphor highlights our power. It suggests that holiness is not just imposed from above; it is something we actively bring into being through our choices and our commitment.

By choosing the lens of creation and partnership over judgment, we reclaim our agency. We shift from the terrified question, “What will be written for me?” to the empowered declaration, “I am ready to help write the Book of My Life.” This choice unlocks the most revolutionary idea in Judaism: that t’shuvah is not about fixing a mistake, but about self-creation. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik taught that the penitent becomes, in the eyes of our tradition, “a different person.” This is the ultimate antidote to shame, which tries to hold us captive to our past.

This resonates with what the psychologist Carl Jung wisely said: “I am not what happens to me. I am what I choose to become.” When we assume authorship of our own stories — even the chapters marked by pain or failure — we regain the power to write the ending. We are no longer merely characters in a story written for us; we become the authors.

So how do we walk this path? How do we become the authors of our own renewal? Our tradition gives us a plan.

First, we need a structure. Maimonides provides it: regret, confession, and resolve. These are concrete actions. But Rambam, with his profound understanding of the human soul, offers us a subtle but crucial insight in the very order of his words. He teaches that the first step is to face the future — to resolve to change our path. Only after we have set our intention forward does he mention the need for regret. It’s a brilliant psychological move. He is telling us: Don't get stuck looking in the rearview mirror, or you will crash. First, turn the wheel. Point yourself in a new direction. Only then, once you are moving toward hope, can you safely and productively reflect on the path you've left behind.

Second, we cultivate a tender heart. Rabbenu Yonah Gerondi, a Spanish rabbi from the 13th century, speaks of a “holy sensitivity,” a bushah as an essential toward real and transformative t’shuvah, an awareness before God that softens the heart and deters repetition. This is not the toxic shame that crushes us, but the quiet, inner sense of unrest that recognizes the gap between who we are and who we could be. It is the purifying awareness that kindles a real return.

But this sensitivity must be fiercely protected. Our Talmud is unequivocal: to publicly shame someone is like shedding blood. This is why our communal confession, the Ashamnu, is in the plural — we have erred — protecting each individual from public degradation.

Finally, we must learn to manage the messy drama of our own faults. Brené Brown talks about the first, unfiltered story our fear and anger tell us when we fail. A story of blame, of self-protection, of catastrophe. The first step toward healing is to get that story out of our heads, perhaps by writing it down. This simple act helps us see it for what it is — not reality, but a first draft. We can then look at it with compassion and ask, “What is really going on here?” And we can begin to write a more honest, more courageous second draft.

Ultimately, this work requires us to choose vulnerability — to take off the “armor” of perfectionism and allow ourselves to be truly seen. This is the central challenge of the New Year: to step into the arena of our own lives, accept our imperfections, and courageously commit to becoming the person we want to be.

We began this reflection confronting the anxiety of the Book of Life. We conclude it by recognizing that our inscription is less about a passive verdict imposed from above, and more about the radical, active choice we make in this moment. Rambam teaches that when we stand before God in prayer, God relates to us not as a knower of the future, but as a knower of our hidden, innermost hearts right now. Your sincere desire for change, your heartfelt commitment to turn, in this very moment — that is what creates the inscription.

The promise of our prophets remains: “My people shall never again be ashamed.” T’shuvah offers restoration, not disgrace. As Jung reminded us, we are defined not by what happens to us, but by what we choose to become.

This Rosh Hashanah, let us seize our power. Let us reject the paralysis of shame, harness the productive call of guilt, and choose the path of courageous self-creation. By doing the inner work — the difficult, vulnerable, and often messy process of reckoning and repairing — we affirm that we are fundamentally worthy.

May we be inscribed in the Book of Life, not because our fate was predetermined, but because we, in this sacred moment, chose life, chose transformation, and chose to create ourselves anew.

Shanah Tovah.

[1] https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/metzora/the-power-of-shame/
[2] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.
[3] https://www.yu.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/Understanding%20the%20Teshuva%20Process%20of%20the%20Yamim%20Noraim.pdf
[4] https://www.sefaria.org/Sha'arei_Teshuvah.1.21?lang=bi
[5] https://www.yu.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/Understanding%20the%20Teshuva%20Process%20of%20the%20Yamim%20Noraim.pdf
[6] Joel 2:26–27