Rabbi Wasserman’s Message on Yom Kippur
[This drashah was given on October 12, 2024]
Our reading from the Torah this morning began: “The Lord spoke to Moshe after the death of Aaron’s two sons, who had come close to God and died. . . .” Then God tells Moshe to instruct his brother Aaron about the ritual of Yom Kippur, which he is to perform. In other words, the service of the High Priest on Yom Kippur is to be, in some way, a response to the death of Nadav and Avihu, who – as the book of Leviticus tells us – had been consumed by divine fire.
As the Hasidic masters tell the story of Nadav and Avihu, the holy fire that had consumed the two young priests was the fire of their own spiritual passion. Their hearts were aflame with the desire to serve God. They were full of what the Hasidim called hitlahavut, the quality of being spiritually on fire, full of spiritual intensity. The Hasidic masters deeply valued that quality, and taught their students to aspire to it. To that extent, they saw Nadav and Avihu as spiritual heroes. But the fatal mistake of Nadav and Avihu, as the Hasidic masters understood it, was that, in their desire and passion to serve God, they relied entirely on their own spontaneity. As the book of Leviticus tells us, they offered “strange fire, which God had not commanded.” They disregarded the rules of priestly service, the ritual guardrails that keep spiritual passion grounded and contained. Their devotion had no boundaries. It conformed to no structure. It had no discipline to limit and contain it, and therefore their own inner fire consumed them.
The message of this morning’s parashah, then – as the Hasidic masters read it – is that the purpose of the complex choreography and structure of the service of the High Priest on Yom Kippur was to save Aaron from the same fate as his sons. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, the day when Aaron would come closest to God and his heart would burn with spiritual devotion, he had to keep the fire within him bounded by a regulated ritual, grounded in a sacred discipline, so that that fire would not consume him. The service of the High Priest was a set of guardrails to contain hitlahavut, religious passion, to structure it, to keep it tethered to community, to the world of other human beings, so that it would be a source of blessing and not a curse.
The Talmudic rabbis taught the same lesson in a different way. They taught that Torah – by which they meant Judaism as a whole – has both the power to heal and the power to destroy. They made that point by way of a piece of wordplay. When we lift and tie the Torah after reading it in shul, we quote the verse from Deuteronomy: “V’zot ha-Torah asher sam Moshe lifnei b’nei Yisrael – This is the Torah that Moshe placed before the children of Israel.” The word “sam” in that verse, which means “placed,” can also mean “drug.” The rabbis understood that double meaning of the word to teach that Torah is like a drug. It can heal but, in the wrong hands, it can also kill. What they meant, I think, is that the sacred impulses that Torah reawakens in us – the yearning to reach up to God, the yearning to repair this broken world – can have terrible effects if we don’t keep those impulses contained. To contain our spiritual passion, we have ritual guardrails. The laws of Jewish prayer, for instance, which allow us to say the most sacred prayers only in the presence of a minyan, keep our devotion grounded in community, in responsibility to those around us. They keep us anchored in the world of other human beings. To contain our moral passion – our passion to repair this broken world – we have moral guardrails, also built into the Torah itself. In the verse from Deuteronomy, “Tzedek Tzedek tirdof, justice, justice shall you pursue,” why does the Torah repeat the word “justice?” The rabbis answered that it is to teach that you may pursue justice only by just means. Though you may yearn intensely to repair and purify God’s world, you can’t pursue that goal by any means at all. Your yearning to redeem the world, not matter how intense, does not give you permission to do anythingyou think that that requires. You have to ground that sacred impulse in moral restraint. You have to limit it within moral guardrails. Otherwise, your passion to redeem the world can become cruel and inhuman. The fire within you can consume, not just you, but others as well. It can burn up the very world that you are trying to save.
All of the great faith traditions of the world, I think, have recognized the same thing. That is why they all have set up ritual and – more importantly perhaps – moral fire lines to keep religious passion from burning out of control. When spiritual intensity is regulated and contained, when it is grounded in the world of human relationships, where people have to find a way to live with one another, that passion brings warmth to all of us. But when spiritual passion jumps those fire lines, when it loses touch with common human decency, it become a source of violence and destruction. All of the great religions have their ways of teaching that, to serve God, we must pay attention to the means, not just the ends. We cannot let the fire burn uncontrolled.
But even so, there have always been periods in human history when religious zealots have claimed the right to cross the fire lines built into their own traditions, and to turn to extreme means. Usually they have been periods of spiritual crisis. We seem to be living in such a time today. That makes this century different from the one that came before.
The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history. Two world wars and catastrophic revolutions killed tens of millions of people. But religion was not the main culprit. The ideologies behind the terrible bloodshed of the twentieth century were mainly secular ideologies: nationalism, fascism, communism. Religion had little to do with it.
But in the twenty-first century, religion has become a major source of violence in the world – as it often was in the centuries before modernity. Today a lot of the most savage violence in the world is committed in the name of God.
Here is one example of that shift, an example that matters particularly to us as Jews. Think of how the enemies of Israel have evolved from the last century to the current one. In the twentieth century, during Israel’s three wars of survival – in 1948 to 49, in 1967 and in 1973, and the periods of terrorism in between – the leaders of the anti-Israel bloc – Nassar, Asad, Arafat and others – were secular Arab nationalists, who saw themselves as modernizers of the Middle East. Their enmity toward Israel was a secular enmity, not a religious one. But in the twenty-first century, the movements that most threaten Israel, Hamas, Hezbolah, the Islamism of the Ayatolahs in Iran, are religious movements, movements that preach violence in the name of God. That makes them even less amenable to compromise.
We can see the same shift toward religious violence in the world as a whole. Since 9/11, the whole world has become familiar with violent strands of Islam: Al Quaida, the Islamic State, the Taliban. But Islam is not unique at all in that respect. The upsurge of religious violence in this century is much broader. You can see it in every major faith tradition. In America, Christianity has produced its own, home-grown brands of violent extremism. Christian Nationalism, in its various forms, boils down to the belief that white Christian men should rule American society by force if necessary. That passionate belief inspired many of the insurrectionists who stormed the US Capital on January 6. You could see it in the flags and other symbols that many of them carried. Christian Nationalist ideas have also played a role in motivating bombings and mass shootings – the mass murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, and many others.
On the other side of the world, Hinduism and Buddhism have also generated their own forms of violent extremism. They too produce zealots who kill and destroy in the name of God. In India, Hindu extremists attack and persecute the Muslim minority, and burn their mosques. In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, violent Buddhist extremists attack Muslims and other religious minorities.
You can find religious violence everywhere today, from North America to Southeast Asia. Though extremists represent a small minority of every faith community, they can be found – it seems – in all of them.
Extremist movements understand themselves in different ways, depending on which faith tradition they draw inspiration from. But whichever faith they claim to represent, they all embrace some version of the same logic: that, when it comes to serving God, nothing can be out of bounds. Moral limits, even those taught over centuries by their own faiths, do not apply because we’re living in a time of crisis. The work of serving God is so important that it justifies whatever means are necessary. In times like this, it is the holy fire that matters most. It must be allowed to burn freely, no matter how much damage it might cause.
We Jews often like to imagine that the spirit of religious violence that has infected every other faith today has somehow left our own untouched, that – perhaps because we have suffered so much from religious violence at the hand of others through the centuries – we must be immune to the disease. But we are not immune. We have our own violent extremists too. It is a hard thing to talk about – at least it is hard for me to talk about it. But I feel that we need to. And if you’re wondering why – Why bring this up on Yom Kippur?, or maybe, Why bring this up at all? What does this have to do with us? – I hope that you will bear with me and listen, even if it’s hard. I will do my best to answer the question, and, in the end, I hope that you will understand.
Jews who preach and practice violence in the name of God can be found in various corners of the Jewish world. They are a tiny minority, as they are in every other faith tradition, but, as in every other faith, they cause harm out of proportion to their numbers. The most extreme of the extreme can be found on the fringe of the settler movement in the West Bank, territory occupied by Israel since 1967, where almost three million Palestinians live. The settler movement as a whole teaches that, by extending Jewish sovereignty and projecting Jewish dominance throughout the biblical land of Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, they are helping to usher in the messianic age. The radical fringe of the settler movement takes that a step farther. They believe that that messianic project is so vital and so urgent today that it justifies whatever means are necessary to pursue it. When it comes to bringing the Mashiah, how can anything be out of bounds? How can anything be forbidden? How can one quibble about moral limits when we are talking about ultimate redemption? For the most radical of the settlers, messianism not only justifies religious violence but it mandates it. It turns violence into a mitzvah.
And they act accordingly. They attack Palestinian farms, burning olive groves, or terrorizing the farmers so that they will be too afraid to harvest the crop, in the hope that they will abandon their property. They terrorize Palestinian villages, violently threatening the residents, smashing their water supplies and holding guns up to the heads of their children, until the residents flee their homes. Since the beginning of the war in Gaza last year, some 16 shepherding villages in the West Bank have been emptied out in that way. In larger towns, they storm in, en mass, by the dozens or the hundreds, many of them masked, to terrorize the population, burning houses and cars. In Duma, they left three dead (a baby and her parents), in Huwara, one dead, in Jit one dead, in Al Mughayyir, two dead, in Turmusaya, one dead, and so on – plus the many injured. Outside the towns, they attack travelers. This past August, four Bedouin women (citizens of Israel), with a two-year old child in the car, took a wrong turn on their way to Nablus and drove onto land claimed by the settlement of Givat Ronen (a settlement that is illegal under Israeli law). Settlers pulled the women out of their car, beat them, broke their ribs, and burned the car.
Incidents like this are not isolated events. They are part of a persistent program of intimidation that has been going on for years. Before the war began last year, attacks by settlers on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank averaged about three per day. Since the beginning of the war, that number has gone higher. The perpetrators do all of this l’shem shamayim, for the sake of God, and in the name of Torah. They are not afraid of setting the West Bank on fire, even at a time when the Israeli army is fighting on two other fronts. They would welcome war in the West Bank as well, since they believe that it would move their messianic project forward.
General Yehuda Fuchs, the officer who was in charge of all Israeli military forces in the West Bank until his retirement this past summer, gave a speech to his soldiers in July as he was getting ready to leave his post. In his speech, he denounced the violence of the radical settlers, and he also criticized local Jewish leaders in the West Bank, both secular and religious, who lacked the courage to denounce the violence. I think, at some level, he was also expressing regret that he had not done more himself to stop it. This is some of what he said.
“Nationalist crime has reared its head under the cover of war and has led to revenge and sowed calamity and fear in Palestinian residents who do not pose any threat. To my dismay, the local leadership and the spiritual leadership for the most part did not see the threat as we did. It is intimidated and has not found the strength to come out openly and act in accordance with the values of Judaism. . . . Even if the perpetrators are few in number, those who have remained silent have failed to isolate them and their actions from the majority. This isn’t Judaism in my eyes – at least it’s not the one I grew up with in my father’s and mother’s house.”
What General Fuchs was saying is that, even though the vast majority of Israelis reject the violence of the radical settlers, they have not done what they could to stop it. When the moral guardrails that a faith tradition has established over centuries to keep religious passion from burning out of control are violated by a radical minority of the community, it is up to the decent majority to rebuild those guardrails, to redraw the lines. It is up to them to do it because no one else can. A religious tradition can only be repaired by those who are inside it. Outsiders cannot do it.
As American Jews, we too share in the failure that General Fuchs described, because we too have an obligation to define the boundaries of our faith. Even though we live further away, we also have a role in declaring that there are moral limits to what Judaism can allow. We have also failed to do our part to rebuild our religion’s guard rails.
Let me give you a concrete example of what that failure looks like when you see it. Actually, it is a mirror image of the failure that I am talking about, since it comes, not from our own community, but from the other side of the conflict. But sometimes a mirror image is what it takes to show us ourselves.
Many years ago, from 2001 and 2004, I was a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. I was participating in a three-year program that involved regular trips to Jerusalem, where I studied with a cohort of about 15 other rabbis. Those were the years of the Second Intifada, during the worst of which cafes and buses were regularly being blown up by suicide bombers in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the country. I remember the eerie feeling in the city at those times. The hotels were empty. The tourist shops and plazas were deserted. The restaurants were locked down with security.
One evening at the Institute, during the worst of the Intifada, we met with a Palestinian academic – I believe he was a professor at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah – and he talked with us about what life was like for Palestinians in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. He told us about the daily humiliations of living without rights, of having their movements monitored and restricted, of being searched at checkpoints. He spoke about how soul-crushing it was to have to live that way. We listened respectfully because we understood that Palestinians have legitimate grievances too. And we listened also because we recognized him as an honorable person. Everything about him – his manner, his tone, his words, the fact that he was talking with us at all – told us that he did not subscribe to hatred or support violence. It was clear to all of us that he was a decent human being.
But we wanted more than just to feel that he was a decent human being. We wanted to hear him say it. So at one point in the conversation, we asked him to do just that. We asked him if we would denounce the suicide bombings. Was he willing to come out and say to us that it is wrong to blow up buses and cafes?
He hedged and evaded and deflected and changed the subject. He kept coming back to the suffering of his own people. But we pressed him. We told him that we understood that there were two sides to the story, and that Palestinians were suffering too. But could he please just say to us that violence was not the way to deal with it? Could he please just say that blowing up innocent people in coffee shops was wrong? But no matter how we asked, he would not say it. He kept avoiding the question.
We came away from the conversation frustrated and disappointed. None of us believed that he supported terrorism. So why couldn’t he just say it? Why was it so hard for him to do that?
But of course we knew why. In a time of bitter conflict, a time when people close ranks with their own and back up into their collective corners, he could not bring himself to denounce his own people. It would have meant breaking solidarity with his community. He had gone as far as he could by meeting with us in the first place. Condemning his own people in the middle of the conflict would have been a step too far for him.
So, in the end, we had to conclude that he was part of the problem. When decent people will not draw a basic moral line, when people who know better, who should be moral leaders, choose to put communal solidarity ahead of moral clarity, it is hard to see a way forward.
And we were right to feel that way. The test that we were asking him to meet – Will you denounce your own extremists? Will you call out the worst of your own people? – is the critical test. The only way that a community can repair its broken guardrails is for the decent majority to call out the violent minority, to redraw the community’s red lines, and to do so out loud. It doesn’t matter what outsiders say. The repair has to come from within.
We were right to hold him to that standard. But now it’s time to hold the mirror up to ourselves. If we are honest people, we must hold ourselves to the same standard. And that is where we often fail – we and our communal leaders as well. Too often, when we are confronted with the fact that our own people are committing crimes against the innocent, we do the same thing that that Palestinian professor did. We deflect, we evade, we hedge, we qualify. Instead of simply saying, “Yes, it is wrong to terrorize and maim and murder innocent people so that we can take their land” period, full stop, we add a “but.” We say things like: “Yes, but there will always be a few bad apples,” as if it were no big deal. Or “Yes, but the settlers live in a dangerous area,” as if that were an excuse for what they do. Or “Yes, but what about Hamas? What about Hezbolah?,” as if the fact that other people commit worse crimes could absolve us of our own. Or we say: “Yes, okay, I know it’s bad, but why on earth are we discussing this when we’re at war with people who want to destroy us?,” as if the standard that we apply to decent people on the other side should not apply to us.
That makes us part of the problem. Because what is true of other communities is also true of ours. When Judaism’s moral guardrails need repair, the only way to fix them is for the decent majority to redraw the lines, to denounce the violent minority and do it clearly and decisively, with no hedging, no “but”s. and no “what-about”s. When the moral integrity of Judaism is threatened by people who commit crimes in the name of Torah, in the name of us, we have to defend our faith from those who claim to represent it. We have to declare that the Judaism that we believe in does have moral limits. No one else can do it for us.
Hitlahavut, the inner fire of spiritual passion, can be a great source of blessing. It can bring warmth and meaning to a world that, otherwise, is cold and empty. It can mend that which is broken. I believe that that is why we are here, in this room right now, on this holiest day of the Jewish year – because we’re searching for a way to light that inner fire, to rediscover our own spiritual passion, to feel more spiritually alive. But we also know that when religious passion jumps its guardrails, when the fire burns uncontrolled, it brings destruction and death. In this new era of religious violence, as in so many other eras like it in the past, it falls to decent people of every faith community to mend the broken fences that define the boundaries of their faith. May we, together with our people everywhere, meet that challenge in the year ahead.