On the High Holy Days, “we use this time to refocus and to recenter ourselves,” says Rabbi Rena Rifkin. “Our lives are full of small gems. But on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are reminded to see the entire cave..”
“What is going on in our schools? The task of the best educational institutions is not to tell students what to think, but to give them the tools how to think,” said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch on Yom Kippur. “A liberal can never be so certain and dogmatic about the application of general moral truths to real-world dilemmas. We need our best teachers to guide us on the right path.”
“Were the Ten Lost Tribes truly lost, or were they destroyed?” wonders Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch on Erev Yom Kippur. “For some, exile is coerced. Others just drift away from our people until there is no return. As long as you can still hear the roaring river of Judaism, it is not too late. If you want to be found, we will find you.”
“If there is one lesson to absorb from the Holocaust, it is that when someone proclaims an intention to exterminate the Jews, believe them,” says Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, recalling a harrowing story from Auschwitz this Rosh Hashanah. “The ideology of antisemitism focuses not on the Jewish person, but on the Jewish people; this is why it is so dangerous.”
“There is a kind of myth that we can hold onto balance for even more than a short time, but to be alive is to be in motion,” says Rabbi Samantha Natov this Erev Rosh Hashanah. “In prayer, we call to something infinite that unifies us beyond time and space. Tonight, we get to start again.”
“The increasing tendency in 21st-century America to affirm one acceptable answer is profoundly illiberal, even if it comes from the Left,” says Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch on Yom Kippur. “For years we have allowed the foundations of liberal democracy to crumble. We must be willing to fight — and reject extremism on all sides.”
