Finding Positive Reasons to be Jewish in 5786 (Yom Kippur)
Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 3 October 2025
One of the most thought-provoking new books that I read this year was by historian, Alec Ryrie. It’s called The Age of Hitler – but it is not really a book about Hitler. It is a book about the way in which human beings in our society approach the world. Ryrie argues that, if you went back in time 100 years in the United Kingdom and you asked people how they grounded their morality – who was the figure they looked to who might provide moral inspiration – who might help them to comprehend right from wrong – the likelihood is that they would say Jesus.
Ok, maybe not if they had been in the Alyth tent. Maybe they would have said Moses – the most humble person who ever lived, the Jewish legislator, the individual who more than anyone has handed down to us our sense of what is right and what is just.
And these answers – Jesus, Moses – were hundreds, if not thousands of years old.
And yet, Ryrie argues, if you were to go back just fifty years in the history of the UK or even Europe, and you asked the same question, you would be less likely to hear these positive answers – these references to paragons of virtue and righteousness. Rather, he says, now we have only a negative foundation. Rather than holding up exemplars of good, we instead goad each other with the image of evil.
He mentions George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and its depiction of a society that enjoys its daily ritual of 2 minutes of hate – only Ryrie says really it should be 140 characters of hate. Orwell’s prediction came true in the form of X (formerly known as Twitter).
As Progressive Jews who live in this world, we are not immune to these general cultural shifts. Indeed, we are not immune to those 140 characters of hate online.
To live in the Age of Hitler, Ryrie argues, is to live in the shadow of evil, even when the specific evil being referred to is no longer there. Hitler himself does not pose any danger to me personally now. But the threat of the evil his image represents is what now holds the moral fabric of our society together – or at least has done in Western Europe and North America for the last few decades. As Ryrie puts it: ‘we have replaced a positive exemplar with a negative one’. [1]
And this fact, Ryrie argues, is a dangerous one. He says that the moral consensus that has defined our Western societies for the last few decades is ‘unmistakeably fraying’ and that, as a system, it ‘was always more unstable than it looked’ anyway.[2]
The question of whether we agree with Ryrie we can put aside. As with many great books and great ideas, there is just as much value in provoking us to think, reflect, and ask questions – and his book did provoke me to reflect deeply on the state of the Jewish world in this moment.
And my reflection was this: Famously, Jewish thinker Emile Fackenheim, grappling with how Jews respond theologically to the reality of the Shoah, proposed a 614th commandment: the commandment that we do not hand Hitler a posthumous victory by giving up on being Jews and erasing Judaism.
In similar vein, many more people have discovered or re-discovered their Jewish identity since 7th October. Their feelings of solidarity with the Jewish people have become wrought and strengthened by the fire of that day. And these feelings of solidarity (for many, though not all of us) will have been strengthened further by the reactions of many around us in the UK who have reacted with words and actions that seem to support the terror unleashed by Hamas, rather than condemning it as we might hope they would.
But.
If our reason for being Jewish is purely that antisemitism exists in the world, are we reducing our religious, ethnic, cultural identity to victimhood?
How can we allow solidarity in the face of antisemitism to be a start, but not the whole, of our Jewish identities?
Do we have a positive image of Judaism and Jewish life that we can paste up on our walls and strive towards as a religious collective? Or are we simply bound together as a community simply by our fear of the outside world?
In his sermon at the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Colin listed the things that he was carrying with him into this year of 5786. On his list – his league table as he called it – was included antisemitism.
‘It is on my list – but only as a reminder that it must have no part in fashioning my Jewish identity.’
Please may the solidarity we feel with other Jews as victims not be the end of the story. For a people held together by outside animosity will end up either consumed by their fear or consumed by each other – as we turn our fear onto each other, and start to attack those within our Jewish community who don’t share our political views.
This is the logic of the Age of Hitler. If all we have to guide us is a negative image – if the moral imperative is to reject evil and not also to embrace good, then what we do in the world comes to be defined by who we identify as the enemy – and sometimes it can be easier to identify the enemy within rather than the enemy without.
A last quotation from Alec Ryrie: ‘Vilifying your opponents, wishing they would vanish, hoping that the obvious wrongness of their views will eventually become inescapable and the tide of history will simply wash them away – all of this can be fun, but it doesn’t work.’[3] We can’t just be against; we have to be for something.
Competitive victimhood is not enough.
None of this is to deny that Jews were victims of the Holocaust. Of course we were – and we continue to be. None of this is to deny that Jews (and others) were victims of the atrocities on 7 October.
But it becomes a disaster if the recognition of victimhood turns into a competition. As Rabbi Hannah taught us on Rosh Hashanah, it must be possible for us to hold in our hearts compassion for our own suffering as well as that of others. It is this imperative that calls us to heal the whole of the world, and not just our small corner of it. The imperative to look outside of ourselves. And this day of Yom Kippur is an opportunity to remind ourselves that we have the power to do that.
And, for us as a Jewish people, it is to say that that cannot be the end of the story.
In 2002, the journalist Daniel Pearl was in Pakistan, working for the Wall Street Journal, when he was kidnapped and brutally murdered by jihadist militants. His last words before he was killed were: ‘My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.’ These final words became famous. Just the words ‘I am Jewish’. So much so that Daniel’s parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl, edited a book called I am Jewish.
The result is an inspiring collection of positive reasons to be Jewish from across the Jewish spectrum. We should all be grateful for this book – and for the words of Daniel Pearl – for the fact that it forces us to think about his statement and the question that lies behind this: why are we Jewish? The answer is not easy. And the thing I am saying today is that I hope the answer is simply because people hate Jews.
This answer puts the power and the responsibility into the hands of others. And as Rabbi Josh reminded us last night, our Jewish tradition teaches us to take responsibility for our own moral action. For im ain ani li mi li – if I do not take responsibility for myself and my own behaviour, who will?
It is fear that often gets in the way of us when we should be taking responsibility. And the irony is that in taking responsibility and by acknowledging our own power, we can gain hope.
We have become so used to being scared – to fear the power we do have to change and to be different – in other words, we have even started to fear ourselves and our own power … scared of a Judaism that is more expansive than our shared fear.
The message of this day of Yom Kippur is that we do not need to be.
Our Jewish tradition makes this day of Yom Kippur a day of hope. But where does hope come from? From a number of places, but today I suggest that it comes from the knowledge that things can be different, and that we have the power to change things – to know our power – to know that we have the power to make things different.
Our Jewish tradition gives us tools to hope. What are these? We will sing them in our Musaf service: teshuvah, tefillah, tzedakah ma’avirin et roah hagezerah.
Teshuvah – turning – the ability to look critically at ourselves and understand where our lives need to change. Not to congratulate ourselves. Not to pat ourselves on the back. Not simply to say that others need to change, but that we also may need to change. But to say that we have the ability to be better.
Rabbi Naama Kelman is a teacher at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem and the descendent of ten generations of rabbis. In her contribution to the book I am Jewish, she wrote: ‘I am Jewish because I have learned to ask tough questions.’ And this imperative to ask tough questions means challenging both the world around us and ourselves. Recognising that we do not, as yet, have all the answers.
Tefilah – prayer, literally petitioning – interposing ourselves between the world and the divine. Could we think about tefillah as reaching out beyond ourselves? If teshuvah is the first phase, might we realise that turning and changing is hard to do on our own – that we also need community, and something even beyond that – Elohim, Adonai, El Shadai, HaMakom, God, the Divine, whatever name we give to that thing, being, entity, presence that we speak to when we sit here for hours in prayer and contemplation. (I think there is a reason our Jewish tradition gives us so many names that we might invoke!)
Debbie Friedman was a singer and songwriter, who composed many of the melodies that we sing in Shabbat and Festivals services. In her contribution to the book I am Jewish, she wrote: ‘I am a Jew because I know that it is not meant for me to do this work alone.’
Tzedakah – we translate as ‘charity’, but I would say this is too narrow as a definition, since what we mean when we say it is much wider. It also includes acts of loving kindness towards one another. But it is even more than that: it also includes a consideration for those we do not know – a consideration for the whole world. And this is what brings me to my final concept – one we have been studying for the last month in our Alyth Chavruta Project: the concept of tikkun olam, the repair of the world.
In the course of our study we have seen how different thinkers throughout Jewish history have defined this term. But there is a thread that runs through all definitions, which is that the world we inhabit now does not exist in an ideal state, and that we have the power to change that – to literally repair the world by putting things back together, to change unjust laws where they are currently oppressing people, to enact our ritual tradition in a way that will heal the supernal realms.
Our liturgy is giving us a ladder to climb here. We have to start on the rung of teshuvah – of acknowledging that things can be better. Without that step, we are nowhere. Once we have done this, we have to acknowledge that it is best not to do this alone – and we need to find our partners in change, whether that is God or other people, tefillah is the recognition that we need to reach out. (This is perhaps the part that we most often miss out!) And the thing that is motivating us to step on those first two rungs is the ultimate prize: tzedakah, the enactment of justice, the repairing of our world.
Tonight will be the end of the High Holy Days – but it will still be the beginning of the new year. May this year of 5786 be a year in which we tackle antisemitism, but more importantly one in which we discover (if we have not already) positive reasons to be Jewish. And if we already have reasons, may it be a year in which to discover more reasons to be Jewish. May we draw upon the resources of our tradition, on teshuvah, on tefillah, and on tzedakah in our pursuit of realising a world that is closer to healing than the one we inherited from last year.
Shanah tovah
Gmar Chatimah Tovah
[1] Alec Ryrie, The Age of Hitler (2025), p. 98.
[2] Ryrie, Age of Hitler, p. 64.
[3] Ryrie, Age of Hitler, p. 145.