Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?

As we enter the Days of Awe, our tradition demands honesty, courage – and a reckoning with the suffering before our eyes.

As a child in synagogue, the language of “judgment” and being “sealed in the Book of Life” filled me with the awe appropriate to the occasion.

As a parent, when we reached in the Yom Kippur service the verses of Unetaneh Tokef— Who shall live and who shall die, who by fire and who by water, etc. — I braced for my children’s wide-eyed looks.

As an adult, I’ve come to regard the High Holidays less as a time for a “divine accounting” and more as an invitation: to measure ourselves against our values, to confess where we have strayed, and to turn back toward what is just and right.

This process — called teshuvah — is never easy. It demands hard questions: How have I failed? How has my community failed? Where have we hardened our hearts? Where have we looked away?

As we reckon with our actions, there’s a tradition on Rosh Hashanah called tashlich, where we cast breadcrumbs into flowing water, symbolically releasing our sins.

This year, none of us can step into synagogue without carrying the unbearable weight of Gaza. The devastation and moral wounds before our eyes demand more than crumbs cast into a river. They call us to cast away our silence, our evasions, and our failure to act.

Rabbis across the country are wrestling with what to say. Some hear the plea not to “bring politics” into sacred space. Others feel the unshakable moral demand to speak out against the horrors unfolding before us.

I have said for many months: silence in the face of this level of human suffering and ethical transgression is not neutrality. It is complicity.

This is a moment of testing—for rabbis, for leaders, and for each of us. Do we choose safety, convenience, or approval—or do we speak the truth as we understand it, even at personal cost? Will we water down our message to avoid offense, or will we summon the moral clarity this moment demands?

Jewish voices across the spectrum have been calling us to honesty and courage.

• In his recent book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Peter Beinart warns that ethnonationalism unchecked will corrode the very soul of Judaism.

• Former Jewish Theological Seminary Chancellor Ismar Schorsch has asked: “Where is the religious voice today, so that long after today we can still proudly be Jews?”

• This summer, 80 Orthodox rabbis reminded us that Israel’s future depends not only on military strength but on “justice, righteousness, and peace for all people – even and especially in the hardest of times.”

The liturgy of the days ahead itself gives us no escape from this reckoning.

In the Vidui—the communal confession—we name sins both ours and not ours, personal and collective, individual and systemic. We strike our hearts for transgressions we may not have committed personally but on whose account we still bear responsibility.

We cannot say: This is not my doing; I am innocent.

Judaism teaches that responsibility is shared. Our tradition insists: Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh—all of Israel is responsible for one another. And in our age, with the power that Jews wield in Israel and in the United States, we must also reckon with our responsibility for those whose lives are shaped, diminished, or destroyed by that power.

Our sages teach that when the Israelites carried the Ark through the wilderness, it held not only the whole tablets of the covenant but also the shattered fragments of the first set Moses broke in anger. Both wholeness and brokenness traveled together.

So it must be for this generation. If we are to maintain a healthy community, we will have to balance our pride in our Jewish heritage with the brokenness of what is happening in our name.

That is the essence of the High Holy Days. We reflect, we confess, we ask forgiveness—not to wallow in guilt, but to take responsibility and begin again. As Unetaneh Tokef reminds us: Teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah—repentance, prayer, and righteous action—do not erase the decree, but they temper its severity. They do not undo the past, but they can shape the future.

I know I fall short.

My words have not always been right, nor my actions enough. People are suffering. Lives have been lost. And I must ask myself: could I have done more? Should I have done more? That, too, is part of my reckoning in the days ahead.

But this is not about despair. It is about honesty. It is about remembering that to save one life is to save an entire world, and to destroy one life is to destroy a world. When worlds are being destroyed daily, the question for each of us is urgent: what is within my power to save, to change, to repair?

My hope in these days of reflection is that our leaders—in pulpits, in boardrooms, in communal institutions—will also reckon with their responsibility, and have the courage to call our community to the same.

It is not enough to recite words of prayer if they are unmoored from action, not enough to fast if we do not also act to undo injustice. As the prophet Isaiah thunders on Yom Kippur: “Is this the fast I choose? … Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and to bring the homeless poor into your house?”

May we emerge from these Days of Awe having faced the hardest truths about what is happening to Israelis and Palestinians alike. May we recognize their shared humanity, their equal claim to life and dignity. And may we not only confess but commit—to repair, to renewal, and to living out the prophetic call at the heart of Judaism: to pursue justice, protect life, and honor the image of God in every human being.

Due to the High Holidays, our Substack Live schedule will be a little irregular over the next few weeks. We won’t have our regular Wednesday 4 p.m. Eastern call on Wednesday, Sept 24 (Rosh Hashanah) or Wednesday, Oct 1 (Yom Kippur).

The next two conversations to look forward to will be:

Friday September 26 - Special Edition: Ilan and Jeremy will provide rapid reaction to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s UN appearance

Tuesday September 30 - 11 am Eastern - Interview with Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute

We’ll be back with our normal Wednesday 4 pm Eastern time after the holidays.