Of all the 9/11 memorials, observances, and commemorations marked this past week, there is one of deep significance that, so far as I know, passed entirely without notice.
Al Qaeda terrorists had hijacked four airplanes, murdering nearly 3,000 people. The national mood was a combustible mixture of grief, shock, fear, and anger. Congress had already authorized the use of military force. President Bush would sign that authorization the following day, and three days later, stand before a joint session of Congress to lay out the nation’s response.
The drumbeats of war were sounding. And within our own national fabric, another danger was emerging: vigilante assaults against Muslim Americans and against others, including Sikhs, who were being mistaken for Muslims. Resolute as he was about the course ahead, President Bush also understood the need to make clear that America’s war would be directed against those who perpetrated the attacks, not against Muslims writ large. As Bush recounts in his memoir, seeing his Secretary of Transportation, Norman Mineta – who, at age ten, had been forced from his home and interned with other Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor – reminded him of the government’s responsibility to guard against the hysteria that turns fellow citizens into enemies. Our country had been down this road before. It was from what journalist Samuel Freedman called a combination of “historical perspective and visceral decency” that Bush decided to instruct his staff to arrange a visit to a DC mosque.
On September 17, President Bush entered the Islamic Center of Washington. He removed his shoes, met with leaders of Muslim American organizations, and then, with Muslim leaders beside him and the mosque’s Islamic architecture as his backdrop, addressed the country. He distinguished the terrorists from the faith they claimed to represent. He quoted the Koran. He spoke of Muslim Americans as doctors, lawyers, members of the military, mothers and fathers, citizens who loved their country and deserved its protection. And then he spoke directly to the moral danger of the moment: “In our anger and emotion,” the president said, “our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.” The message of the visit was not just a “one and done.” Press Secretary Ari Fleischer explained that the president urged other leaders to speak out and to remind America that Arab and Muslim Americans were fellow citizens and that violence directed against people because of ethnicity, religion, or appearance was unacceptable. Even, and perhaps especially, when hurt, enraged, and fearful, we remain responsible for what we do next.
Twenty-five years later, September 17 deserves to be remembered for the visit itself, and also for the deeper lesson of the day. America had been viciously wounded. Our anger was real. Our cause against those who had attacked us was just. And yet on that day, the President modeled something very important about what it means to be human. We have agency. The events of the day may be beyond our control, but the choice of how we respond remains, nevertheless, within our control. Whatever the year and years ahead would bring, a subject that continues to be debated to this day, on that particular day the world bore witness to the refusal to let national rage become license for indiscriminate blame, to allow our hurt to justify everything, to become grounds for excusing the actions we take. In a world off the rails, we still have the guardrails of our humanity, and even in our “anger and emotion,” we remain, nevertheless, responsible for what we do. September 17. An anniversary well worth remembering.
Ever since the very beginning, the human condition has been characterized by two contradictory impulses. First, agency, the God-given ability to distinguish right from wrong and to make choices accordingly. And second, given our tendency to make the wrong choices, an almost inexhaustible capacity to assign blame to anyone and anything except, God forbid, ourselves. It is a story whose roots lie, quite literally, in the Garden at the beginning of Genesis. The young couple are placed in Eden, granted permission to eat the fruit of every tree, save one. Adam eats from that forbidden tree, is confronted by God, and in a single sentence manages to assign blame both to Eve and, not so subtly, to God: “The woman whom You gave me, she gave me of the fruit, so I ate.” God turns to Eve, who follows suit in the finger pointing: “The serpent duped me, and I ate.” An inauspicious start to the human story.
Next chapter: Cain is resentful that God has accepted his brother Abel’s offering but not his own. God reminds Cain that it is within Cain’s power to master his frustration. We know what happens. In his anger, Cain rises up and kills his brother. “Where is Abel your brother?” God asks. Cain’s infamous reply: “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Rabbi Milton Steinberg, one of my distinguished predecessors, wrote a sermon on the scene entitled “Only Human – The Eternal Alibi.” Our instinct is to deflect and redirect blame anywhere, even and especially, with the excuse that we are just human, forgetting that it is precisely because we are human that we are responsible.
From these two scenes a straight line can be drawn through the biblical narrative. Esau, who sells his birthright to Jacob, only to blame his brother later for having taken it from him. Shimon and Levi who, in Genesis 34, take brutal vengeance on those who have taken their sister Dina captive, justifying their violent action by their rage over their sister’s honor. Or Aaron, present at the Golden Calf as his brother Moses descends from the mountain, offering the weak and well-worn alibi of “it happens.” The people gave me their gold, I threw it into the fire, and somehow, “out came this calf.” And then there is David, who takes Bathsheba and arranges for his general, Bathsheba’s husband Uriah, to be placed in the front lines, where he will be killed. When the prophet Nathan then relates to him a parable about a rich man who takes a poor man’s only lamb, David is outraged at such a person. Only then does Nathan turn the mirror back on David. “Atah ha-ish, you are that person.” Again and again, the instinct is the same: it just happened; look what they made me do; it was deserved. The guilty party is always someone else. Our own failures: explained by circumstance. Other people’s failures: due to their character. Our rage, our shame, our embarrassment are the tools with which we excuse our behavior, past, present and future
Ein ḥadash taḥat ha-shemesh, there is nothing new under the sun, teaches Ecclesiastes. Like Wile E. Coyote in his imagined lawsuit against Acme, ours is an age in which we are prepared to litigate against anyone and everyone: the faulty equipment, the manufacturer, the system, anyone but us, the “coyote” who ordered the rocket, lit the fuse, and pointed it in the wrong direction. Think about the cases that have captured our attention this past year. Acts of violence explained, defended, even celebrated because the victim represented a so-called unjust system. The system may indeed be imperfect. But somewhere along the way, explanation has become confused with exoneration, a means to confer innocence upon wicked conduct, a world where red cards somehow become not red cards. Each case is different. The circumstances, the offense, the defense. But the underlying temptation – the thread that runs through it – is one and the same: to locate responsibility everywhere and anywhere except in the person who did the deed. I am reminded of Sadie and Abe Goldstein who, after years of fighting, finally visit their rabbi, seeking counsel. Abe unloads his laundry list of everything Sadie has done wrong. The rabbi asks, “And Abe, what have you done to contribute to the problem?” Abe thinks for a moment. “I married her.” The names change. The alibis do not.
It comes from the right; it comes from the left. Populism, in historian Jon Meacham’s formulation, is a politics more about pointing fingers than positive motion forward. Anger, to be sure, can be good. From the biblical prophets to Maimonides to Heschel, anger is our moral response to evil, our safeguard against indifference. The question is what our anger moves us to do. On the right, there is anger directed at Washington, at smug elites, at a “rigged” system believed to have left people behind. I am reminded of the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s remark during the 2012 campaign: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Little did he know then what we know now. And so, too, on the left, where attention to genuine inequalities of power and opportunity harden into the morally reprehensible defense that “people who hurt . . . hurt,” that grievance excuses any conduct undertaken in its name. The horror of October 7th lies not only in the atrocities committed by Hamas, but in the willingness of so many to find justification in them, turning Israel from victim into defendant. Or September 11 itself, the vile moral contortionism voiced by those who would reframe, qualify and contextualize rather than naming terrorism – flying airplanes into buildings – for the evil that it is. The grievances differ and the circumstances are not the same. The moral temptation, however, is all too familiar: to become so practiced at identifying who is responsible for the world’s ills that we lose the moral clarity to say, “This is wrong.”
And nobody knows this pattern better than us Jews. One of the most persistent and pernicious features of antisemitism is not merely the hatred it expresses, but its reflex to assign blame upon the Jew in order to deflect attention from the real and unresolved issues of the day. It could be Germany after World War I. Locate the enemy not in failed leadership or the upheavals of the age, but in the Jew, cast interchangeably as capitalist exploiter or a communist subversive. It could be the modern Middle East. Plagued as the region is by authoritarianism, economic stagnation, and political repression, the Jewish state becomes a convenient explanation for troubles it did not create and cannot solve. It could be here in America. Amidst economic inequality, cultural anxiety, and political fragmentation, why undertake the difficult work of addressing those problems when you can listen to Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes discuss how “organized Jewry” is responsible for America’s ills? And it could be right here at home. As New Yorkers grapple with the mounting pressures facing our great city, why not just make outrage toward the Jewish state the substitute for the harder work of addressing our shared domestic concerns. From the left, from the right, from the Egypt of Pharaoh and the Persia of Haman right up to today. The pattern endures. Efficient, time-tested, and tragically reliable: When things fall apart, blame the Jews.
All of which makes it that much more curious, and troubling, that we Jews, historically the targets of indiscriminate blame, can ourselves, at times, fall prey to the temptation to leverage our own hurt as a shield against moral accountability. One need not be a political scientist to see how the trauma of October 7th has resulted in the rise of unchecked settler extremism in the West Bank. Israel was attacked, the enemy remains unrepentant, and therefore whatever is done in response is justified. This past summer, I had the honor of spending a month in Jerusalem at the Shalom Hartman Institute, where I studied with a number of scholars. One of them, Rabbi Zachary Truboff, introduced me to the concept of the “Fantasy of Innocence.” Roughly defined, the Fantasy of Innocence is the way a person, community, or nation preserves a sense of its own innocence by locating responsibility somewhere else. Our hurt, our humiliation, our shame, our rage become the grounds for excusing the actions we take. On an interpersonal level, the fantasy of innocence is ever-present, a means to invoke our own hurt to exculpate ourselves from any responsibility for the he said, she saids of the year gone by. As Jews we do it on a collective level as well: the claim that, because Israel has been grievously wronged, which objectively it has, it therefore forgoes moral responsibility for how it exercises its power, forgetting that the whole point of Jewish sovereignty is that we finally possess the agency and ability to make moral choices in the exercise of Jewish power.
I find myself returning to an exchange between two of the great Jewish voices of the last century, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg and Elie Wiesel, both of blessed memory, friends, and both, needless to say, lovers of the people and State of Israel. It was 1988, during the First Intifada, and Hertzberg wrote an open letter pressing his friend Wiesel on a painful question. Wiesel had spoken forcefully against Arab terrorism. But why, Hertzberg asked, had he not brought that same moral voice to bear on Jewish extremists? Could it be, perhaps, that Wiesel’s ahavat Yisrael, love of the Jewish people, was, for all its nobility, muting his moral voice, that love itself had become an alibi of sorts. The obligation of Jewish leadership, Hertzberg insisted, was not merely to defend the Jewish people against its enemies. To be a Jew means calling out the dangers of zealotry, even, and especially, when it comes from within our ranks
Taking agency for our actions is, quite literally, what it means to be a Jew. Another scholar I studied with this summer, Tal Becker, pointed out that our very name – Jews; in Hebrew, Yehudim – is rooted in the biblical figure of Yehudah, Judah, whose story is, at its core, a journey toward responsibility. Judah’s tale begins somewhat ignominiously. Joseph’s brothers are set on killing Joseph when Judah, “stand up guy” that he is, makes the “generous” suggestion that they sell Joseph into slavery instead. The following chapter, one we generally do not teach bnei mitzvah students for reasons I can explain offline, involves Judah’s liaison with his daughter-in-law Tamar. That story’s denouement comes when Judah is confronted and acknowledges not only Tamar’s righteousness, but his own role and responsibility in the matter. The decisive scene comes years later, toward the end of Genesis, when Judah’s youngest brother Benjamin is threatened with enslavement, and Judah offers himself in Benjamin’s place: “Let your servant remain instead of the boy.” It is, in a sense, the bookend to the beginning of the story, a transformed Judah willing to take responsibility in a way he failed to do earlier. On a deeper level, the scene is a bookend to Genesis itself. Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Judah answers, “Yes. I am.” That is, according to the rabbis, why we are called Yehudim, Jews. Not because Judah was innocent, perfect, or anything close, but because he learned to take responsibility for his actions. Judah’s willingness to exercise agency is why his tribe merits kingship; it is the quality to be passed down to Moses, Deborah, Mordecai, Esther, to so many of Judah’s descendants – and to each of us.
Every day, a Jew is asked to wake up with the same two words on their lips: Modeh ani. More often than not, we understand the words to mean, “I give thanks.” Modeh, from the same root as todah, gratitude for a new day. But we would do well to remember that the Hebrew root for gratitude, yud-dalet-heh, is also the root of vidui, agency or confession, and it is also the same root as Yehudah, Judah, our eponymous ancestor. This is not wordplay; it is the essence of who we are and what it means to be a Jew. To wake up in the morning and give thanks to God for the gift of life. And with that gratitude, the obligation to take responsibility for all that we do between the modeh ani of one morning and, please God, the next. As Jews we are called on to fill our days with mitzvot, positive acts of Jewish identification. Why? Because to live a life of mitzvot is to accept what it means to be a Jew: a spiritual regimen reminding us that who we are is defined by our deeds, a discipline of human agency, a discipline called Judaism. A day full of choices: what we do, what we refrain from doing, what we eat, what we say, how we spend our time and our money, how we treat the stranger, how we honor our parents, how we respond when someone needs us. Every choice, a reminder that we have the capacity to choose.
And of course, everyone should commit, all the more so on Yom Kippur, to move the needle on mitzvot in the year to come. To pray more. Learn more. Observe more. More Shabbat dinners, more Torah study, more tzedakah. But the charge extends well beyond the ritual sphere. Because if the ill of our age is the readiness to deflect blame and shirk agency, then the calling of the day is to live lives that are more Jewish precisely because they are filled with more acts of agency. Nothing in this world just happens. Things happen because people make them happen. You want to see Israel reach its hoped-for future as a secure, Jewish, and democratic state? Then do something. Get involved. Show up. You want to fight antisemitism, strengthen democracy, see leadership in office that reflects your principles and politics? Then stop pointing out what everyone else is doing wrong and start taking responsibility for what is yours to do. You want a more vibrant Jewish future – here at Park Avenue Synagogue, on campus, in whatever corner of the Jewish world you call home? Then be an example. Learn. Lead. Show up. Invite others. What force, other than your well-rehearsed excuses, is stopping you? You want Judaism to speak more forcefully to questions of justice, climate change, and tikkun olam? Then make it speak – through your choices, your commitments, your deeds. You want a Jewish community that is truly a house of prayer, a house of learning, a house of gathering, rooted in an ancient past and reaching toward an ambitious future? Then help me build that house. The point is not that any one of us can do everything. The point is that none of us gets to hide behind the claim that we cannot.
Activism, activism, activism! It is so easy to sit on the sidelines and kvetch. To criticize, to accuse someone of suffering from this or that derangement syndrome, to explain why everyone else is getting it wrong. To insist that someone else lead, to pontificate about what someone else should do or give. As the old joke goes: What is the only thing two Jews can agree on? How much the third should give to tzedakah. Enough! In a place where there are no upstanders, be one. See something, say something, and most of all, do something. To be Jewish, to be a descendant of Judah, is to turn grievance into responsibility, excuse into agency, and conviction into action. To resist the fantasy of innocence that is so ready to find fault in others, and instead ask, “How am I responsible and what is mine to do?” That is agency. That is responsibility. That is what it means to be a Jew.
And yes, because it is Yom Kippur, I would ask you – urge you actually – to take this message into your heart and into your home. This room, this world, is filled with so much hurt. Siblings who are no longer on speaking terms. Spouses whose hearts have turned cold. Friendships that have been derailed. Parents and children who have become strangers to one another. We carry these hurts through the world, rehearsing the same arguments, returning to the same grievances. What they did. What they failed to do. What they said. What they never said. It’s always on them. And perhaps they did. Undoubtedly the other person bears responsibility. But not tonight. Not in this room. Not on Yom Kippur. Tonight, we stop making the case against everyone else and turn the mirror onto ourselves. Ashamnu. Bagadnu. Aviti. Pashati. We have been guilty. We have betrayed. I have done wrong. I have transgressed. It is the charge of the day, in the words of the poet Robert Burns, “To see ourselves as others see us.” We are not, as the prayer book says, so insolent as to claim we have not sinned. For we have sinned. Sins of commission. Sins of omission. Sins committed knowingly and unknowingly. The words we should not have spoken. The words we should have spoken but did not. The apology withheld. The call not returned. The kindness we knew was needed but somehow never found the time to offer. No different than in the Temple of old, today we atone for them all. Yom Kippur as the corrective to the human urge to assign blame elsewhere. Tonight, we do what we spend the rest of our year avoiding. We own it. Modeh ani. I acknowledge. I confess. I take responsibility. And then, with contrition in our hearts, we turn to our loved ones, our colleagues, our friends and our God, and we seek forgiveness.
There is a story in the Talmud about a man named Eliezer ben Durdaya. He came from a fine background, and a great future was predicted for him. However, he strayed from the righteous path, and his life was derailed by his own shortcomings. One day he heard a voice from heaven tell him, “Eliezer ben Durdaya, you have no share in the world to come.” He was moved to repentance, and he cried out,“Harim bikshu alai raḥamim, O ye mountains, plead for me.” When they refused, he said, “Shemesh v’yareaḥ, sun and moon, plead for me.” They also turned him down. He then said, “Kokhavim u-mazalot, stars and planets, plead for me,” and they too refused. Finally, Eliezer sat down and, after much soul searching, he melted in tears and whispered, “Ein ha-davar talui elah bi, it depends on nothing except me.” With that, a voice from heaven proclaimed, “M’zuman hu l’ḥayei olam ha-ba, he is now ready to take his place in the world to come.”
Yom Kippur is our bridge to tomorrow. The tools to get there are here, in this community, in our families, within each and every one of us. Modeh ani. Let us reach within and grow, take agency for who we are and who we might yet be, and together step forward into the year to come.