An accounting of souls

You don’t get to t’shuvah just by accounting. You have to earnestly commit not to keep causing harm, and start working for repair.

Peace activists Aziz Abu-Sarah and Maoz Inon. Photo credit: Gili Getz.

One way that Jews prepare for Yom Kippur is “cheshbon ha’nefesh,” an “accounting of the soul.” The word cheshbon in Hebrew conveys both financial accounting and the broader work of accountability – a bit like the job of Comptroller – so the idea resonates with me.

An accounting of the soul is always challenging. This year, it was agonizing.

Much of that work, of course, is in our own personal lives. But the work of accountability and repentance on Yom Kippur is not just individual. The Vidui, the core confessional prayer, is said in the first person plural. Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu. We have trespassed, we have betrayed, we have stolen …” It is a form of collective accountability.

Yom Kippur is not just an accounting of one soul. It’s an accounting of souls. Who shall live and who shall die. Who by water and who by fire. Who by hunger and who by thirst.

But there is a dilemma here: We are taught that every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image. That each person is a spark of the divine. Our sages teach: Kol ha-me’abed nefesh aḥat, ma’aleh alav ha-katuv ke’ilu ibed olam maleh. “Whoever destroys a single life, it is as if they have destroyed a world. And whoever saves a single life, it is as if they have saved the whole world.”

But if each soul has infinite, divine worth, how can you possibly account for them?

And yet, we know, in our bones, that some kinds of destruction are uniquely horrid. And that one of those is killing people because of who they are. Trying to eradicate them as a people.

That’s why we recoiled in horror two years ago today, when Hamas killed 1,200 people, and took 250 hostage, people from all around the world, but mostly Israeli Jews, living their lives on their kibbutzim, and at the Nova music festival. The most Jews killed on a single day since the Holocaust. On Sunday, I joined UJA, JCRC, and thousands of others, as we listened to Yair Horn, from Kibbutz Nir Oz, who was taken hostage two years ago today. He was released after 498 brutal days – but his brother Eitan remains in captivity in Gaza. He heard from Omer and Roni Neutra, who believed their beloved son Omer, who grew up on Long Island, had been taken hostage – only to learn last December that he had been killed in the attack. Now, they are fighting to get his body back.

That’s why we recoiled in horror on Thursday, when we learned about the Jews killed attending Yom Kippur services in Manchester, England. And those killed in Boulder, Colorado, and Washington, D.C. attending Jewish communal events.

And that is why recoil in horror at what the Israeli government has been doing to Palestinians in Gaza, and the West Bank also, for the two years since then. Over 65,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 20,000 children – like Wissam and Naeem Abu Anza, five-month-old twins, whose mom Rania had waited 12 years and undergone three rounds of fertility treatment to have them. More than 70 killed on Yom Kippur, more than 100 today. So many entire families. With bombs funded by our U.S. taxpayer dollars. In the name of the Jewish state – but in desecration of Judaism.

Food has been used as a weapon, starving children to death. All of Gaza has been destroyed, its hospitals, its mosques, its stores, its homes. Two million people are displaced. “What could be less Jewish,” as Spencer Ackerman asked, “than making people into refugees?”

When Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and Zionist who escaped the Nazis himself but lost 49 family members in the Holocaust, developed the term genocide, he was giving us a kind of accounting tool – chesbon ha’nafashot – an accounting of souls.

Lemkin wrote that “genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation … It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

While he was acutely aware of the Holocaust’s singular character, he recognized that other peoples had suffered similar catastrophes – he cited events as diverse as the ancient Roman massacre of early Christians and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, European and American colonial crimes, and the World War I-era massacres of Armenians.

He knew it would be hard for Jews to use the term for other situations – even if he didn’t know quite how hard it would be for us to use in situations in which Jews were causing it. But he developed the term, in part, to help us do exactly this accounting.

In reading Lemkin’s words, it’s clear to me that he would have seen the attack of October 7th as genocidal in its intent, given Hamas’ stated goal of wiping out Israeli Jews. And also that he would see what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza as a genocide – forcible transfer, killing of families, destruction of health and social infrastructure, mass starvation (which he saw as especially egregious).

And so, on Yom Kippur, I added a few lines to my Al Cheyt prayer (our longer confession) this year:

Al chet sh’chatanu l’fanecha …

For the sin we have committed against You, by failing to redeem the captives.

For the sin we have committed against You, by waging a war of revenge.

For the sin we have committed against You, by failing to speak up courageously for our people.

For the sin we have committed against You, by failing to speak up courageously for other people.

For the sin we have committed against You, by not doing enough to dissent from the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, that the Israeli government is perpetrating, in our name.

You don’t get to t’shuvah, to repentance, to return, of course, just by accounting. You have to earnestly commit not to keep causing harm, and start working for repair. There are many ways to do this.

Through a contribution to the In Our Name Campaign, a Jewish effort to raise money for Palestinian-led relief efforts. Or to World Central Kitchen’s famine relief efforts in Gaza.

Contribute as well to the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, working tirelessly to bring the hostages home, and to support them afterward, or to rebuilding K’far Aza or other communities.

Call on your Congressmember to support the “Block the Bombs” Act, to stop sending Israel the bombs it is using in Gaza.

Join the Israelis for Peace vigil tonight in Union Square to mark the two-year anniversary, grieve both Israeli and Palestinian lives lost, and demand an end to the war, the return of the hostages, immediate humanitarian aid, the rebuilding of Gaza, an end to the Occupation, and a pathway to mutual recognition and peace.

As we reach the two year anniversary of that dreadful day, and of this dreadful war, there is, thankfully, some reason for hope on the horizon, with negotiations underway. I pray fervently for this deal to take hold – for the bombing to stop, for humanitarian aid to flow in and people stop starving, for Eitan Horn and all of the hostages to return home to their families.

The accounting of souls will still be far beyond agonizing – and our collective accountability going forward will be immense (read this powerful Jewish call for reparations to Gazan families).

But as we move into the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, when we are commanded to dwell in temporary huts, we are reminded that – in this precarious world – safety comes best not from making war or building permanent walls to keep people out, but from being good hosts and guests, from sharing food with neighbors, from remembering that we are small and fragile, from worshipping what is holy.

Ufros Aleinu, sukkat sh’lomecha.

Holy One, spread over us Your shelter of peace.