Because of the unusual nature of the Jewish calendar—part lunar, part solar—the Jewish holidays fall on different dates in the Gregorian calendar each year.
This can sometimes be a blessing. Perversely, Hamas’s massacres, rapes, and kidnappings of October 7, 2023, coincided with the joyous Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. Among the many greater horrors of that day, I’m sure I wasn’t the only Jewish person to wonder if that holiday had been tarnished forever.
Yet the date of October 7 has, like January 6 and September 11, come to be the way in which the atrocities are remembered, and this year that date fell a few days before Yom Kippur, which is a better fit. Perhaps, I wonder, more than we even understand.
In its traditional form, Yom Kippur is the climax of the season in which Jews reflect on their misdeeds of the last year, apologize to those they have harmed, and, depending on their theologies, introspect, confess, repent, atone, or commit to return to a better version of themselves.
Yom Kippur is also known, in Jewish liturgy, as the “Day of Death.” One reason for this is that penitents forego the pleasures of life: food, sex, sociality, dressing well. In Ashkenazi communities, the customary garb for the day is a kittel, the plain white death shroud in which traditional Jews are buried. Another reason is the well-known myth that God seals our fates on Yom Kippur, inscribing us into the book of life or book of death. According to one version, reflected in the haunting prayer Unetaneh Tokef (well paraphrased in Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire?”), God even decides how we will die, a heterodox theology born out of a history of deep pain and intense persecution.
What have we learned in the last year? That “progressives” will wink at mass murder and rape. That “religious” people will call for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Progressive Jews have generally abandoned this grim view of the world. Its anthropomorphic deity seems childlike: a cosmic Santa Claus rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. It seems at odds with reality, in which wicked people prosper all the time, not to mention with the notion of free will. Though written hundreds of years before Jonathan Edwards, it casts us as fickle sinners in the hands of an angry god whom we must supplicate if we are to live.
A year on from October 7, this dark view of human nature seems a bit more resonant.
What have we learned in the past year? That “progressives” will wink at mass murder and rape. That “religious” people will call for ethnic cleansing and genocide. That our tribal allegiances trump both our moral instincts and our capacities to reason. Though we may or may not rest in God’s angry hands, our species has shown itself, over the last year, to be gravely broken, and not up to the task of living in a globalized world.
Really, nothing has gone well since that day. Israel’s reprisal has been as cruel as expected, causing the deaths of at least 20,000 Palestinian civilians (like everything else, the exact numbers are disputed) and displacing over a million. Israel’s stated objectives—crush Hamas, free the hostages—seem ever harder to believe, as cities are leveled and extremists in Israel’s government openly advocate ethnic cleansing. Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar have rejected deals that would bring a ceasefire to Gaza and a return of all remaining Israeli hostages (though not the death of Sinwar). They have more to gain from war than peace.
And, as feared, the war has metastasized. Iran’s other surrogate in its war against Israel, the widely loathed (except among American leftists) theocratic militia Hezbollah, apparently had invasion plans of its own which Israel foiled. Having failed to invade, it rained rockets on Northern Israel instead, forcing mass evacuations. Israel has now responded both with targeted assassinations and a wave of mass bombing of Southern Lebanon. Iran has responded with missiles against Israel. It’s not clear how this ends.
A year on from October 7, a dark view of human nature seems a bit more resonant.
At least Americans have responded with unity, empathy, and a shared commitment to peace.
Just kidding. It took less than a day for opportunists on all sides to weaponize the murder of about twelve hundred Jews for their own purposes, from outrageous pro-massacre statements on the left to traumatized invocations of the Holocaust on the right. Words like “genocide,” “antisemitism,” “apartheid,” and “Nazi” have been drained of their meaning and tossed back and forth like rhetorical volleyballs. Extremists have dominated the discourse.
On the left, the rational, pro-peace left—supportive of Israel but not of the way the war in Gaza has been prosecuted—has been drowned out by better-funded maximalists on the far left, who tolerated open antisemitism in their midst and demanded an end to Israel itself, which would entail unspeakable violence and displacement. Voices of nuance, compromise, and dialogue were all canceled or judged to be complicit in genocide. Jewish students were shouted at, Jewish institutions were picketed, and “Zionists” were banned from soccer teams.
And on the right, security hawks and internationalists were drowned out by MAGA ideologues like Rep. Elise Stefanik, who used Roy Cohn–like trick questions to entrap university presidents and force three of them (so far) to resign, and by anonymous rich people behind “doxxing trucks” that exposed pro-Palestine activists to harassment. The Anti-Defamation League abdicated its vital role as arbiter of antisemitism, defining any anti-Israel protest as ipso facto antisemitic. Bari Weiss’s Free Press platformed misinformation and incitement, terrifying a population that once prided itself on education and intellectualism. Fearful Jews began to circle the wagons.
This has been a trying year for anyone who believes in the better angels of our nature, those faculties of the pre-frontal cortex which moderate the primal impulses of the amygdala and “reptilian brain.” Everyone has been furious. Families have been torn apart. Jewish Israelis (whose media rarely report on the death of Palestinians) have moved even further to the right, convinced that their implacable enemy must be destroyed, or at least subjugated. Many Palestinians have lost everything.
Our inadequate humanity is not only in evidence regarding Israel/Palestine. Our species seems to be incapable of saving itself from massive climatic disruption, thanks to the human ability to deceive ourselves and others when wealth, or even convenience, depends upon it. Then again, American democracy may destroy itself first, thanks to our animal instincts for group homogeneity and against rapid change. Human beings still create beautiful works of art, powerful connections of love, and profound expressions of spirituality. But in the aggregate, our species is just not up to the challenges of the new millennium.
I don’t believe that Yom Kippur has the answers. Conservative theology holds out the promise of regulating our most unruly instincts, but in practice, it often does the opposite: the more religious one is, the more likely one is to be particularist, fundamentalist, and even violent. Conservative theologies also require more faith than I have, and tend to oppress people like me as well.
But even if it lacks the answers, Yom Kippur may ask the right questions. Is there any way for us to work with instincts that were once evolutionarily valuable but which now are part of the problem? Can we speak better, act better, and pursue justice here on Earth? There may be no solution, but this old-fashioned theology, in which people are deeply flawed beings capable of great evil, does get the problem right.