American Clergy Ponder Spiritual Priorities for the 2024 Jewish High Holiday Season
As Rosh Hashana approaches, faith leaders navigate the spiritual complexities brought by war, political strife, and rising antisemitism
(New York) From the perch of 2024, preparations for last year’s Rosh Hashana seem almost quaint, artifacts of a long-gone world. Arriving in mid-September, holiday concerns centered around such pedestrian matters as the preparation of meals, the drawing up of guest lists, the purchasing of new outfits, and the procurement of synagogue seats for prayer services. With the assumption of a secure Israel, progressive Jews took to protesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his proposed judicial overhaul weekly in major American cities, riding public transportation with Israeli flags and signs, unperturbed by anti-Israel protesters.
This year, the Jewish High Holiday season is fraught with emotional and spiritual intensity as it signals the approach of the first anniversary of the attacks of October 7, which ignited a seemingly endless war in the region that recently opened up a second front. The assault—and Israel’s subsequent military response—sparked worldwide anti-Israel and antisemitic actions with vocal groups taking over the American public square, most notably, college campuses. While security has been tight at synagogues and Jewish institutions for over a decade, extra precautionary measures are being taken this year with the release of last week’s FBI report that anti-Jewish hate crimes rose 63% over the previous year, the highest rise since 1991 when the FBI began monitoring hate crimes against Jews.
If that wasn’t enough to deal with, this year’s High Holidays also arrive a mere five weeks before the most contentious American presidential election in recent history, with the country split politically. While both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are vying for the Jewish vote, the latter indicated that if he lost, it would be due to the Jewish community’s lack of support. And over the past week, a cataclysmic hurricane hit the southeastern United States, devastating entire regions, killing hundreds—with hundreds more unaccounted for—and providing incontrovertible proof of the arrival of a new phase of the global climate crisis.
For Americans born into the sunny optimism of the postwar period and the latter half of the 20th century, the precipitous nosedive into instability has sparked widespread anxiety, dread, and sadness.
For many people, what’s true is that this past year has been destabilizing and unmooring
David A. Ingber, the founding rabbi of Romemu, the largest Renewal synagogue in the United States, and senior director of Jewish life and the Bronfman Center at 92NY, addressed the somber agenda of the present moment. “For me, it’s about reminding myself and others that we are still in mourning and in shock. Full stop. There’s brokenness and legitimate fear,” he told The Media Line. An honest engagement with the present reality is fully warranted, he said. “There’s no reason to tell people that their fears and anxieties are not founded; we know what we know. My first priority as a pastor is to name what’s true. For many people, what’s true is that this past year has been destabilizing and unmooring.”
Paraphrasing the writer Yossi Klein Halevi, Ingber said that two significant breaches in security happened over the past year for American Jews— the assurance of a secure Israel as a Jewish homeland and place of refuge and an America that was safe for Jews. “Both of those universes of safety were violated,” he stated. Approaching the 2024 High Holiday season means “coming to terms with what that means” for American Jews.
Theologian and author Elaine Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University, drew a deep sigh when asked about spiritual perspectives on the upcoming High Holidays. No stranger to personal suffering and trauma (her 2018 book, Why Religion, offered a meditation on the death of her young son and the subsequent loss of her husband in a hiking accident), Pagels spoke both personally and in broad strokes.
Prof. Elaine Pagels. (Mark Czajkowski)
“I’ve been quite devastated by the war there … our department (at Princeton) is constantly in touch with our colleagues there in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,” she told The Media Line.
As part of her forthcoming book, Pagels is writing about the artist Marc Chagall and his depictions of the crucifixion of Jesus, which depict him as an unmistakable Jewish martyr and stand-in for European Jews during Hitler’s Final Solution. She spoke about the urgency of the present moment, about opposing a presidential candidate who is promoting fascism, and about coming to terms with the strain of uniquely Christian antisemitism.
“Christians are largely ignorant and unaware of the way that hostility toward Jews is embedded in the stories of Jesus’s death … they are unaware that there is deep hostility toward Jews written into those stories in a way that is also entirely counterfactual,” she said.
Rabbi Ingber picks up on the present-day persecution of Jews under the guise of political discourse. There is, he said, a “dogged determination of the West to criminalize Zionism; not just criminalize the occupation of the West Bank … but the very existence of the Jewish state,” he said.
This holiday season, give to:
Truth and understanding
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They all said they cover it.
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We cannot allow it to go underground. We have to take it seriously.
Ingber states that his mission “as a community leader in America … is to really speak truth to power … and not just truth to power in one party but the Jewish truth that there is an assault, an affront that we cannot be complacent about. One of my priorities this year is to name the beast because it is going to get uglier. We cannot allow it to go underground. We have to take it seriously.”
Jesse Rojos is the director of Philos Latino at the Philos Project, an organization dedicated to promoting positive engagement in the Near East. His spiritual to-do list heading into the 2024 Jewish High Holiday season includes forging and strengthening existing friendships with Jewish friends and neighbors.
Jesse Rojos. (Latino Coalition for Israel)
Rojos, who grew up among Orthodox Jews in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood advocated for Israel with his church after October 7, hosting two visits to Capitol Hill. He spoke of the Latino community constituting a “growing voice” with a commitment to stand by its Jewish friends. He also offered his perspective on the present moment as a “civilizations conflict. If we don’t stand now to defend our values we may lose the fight,” he said. “We see what’s happening with Israel as well. We see a nation that to the eyes of the world can do nothing right and of course, we see our young people falling into the trap of not being able to develop moral clarity,” he said.
Regarding the domestic landscape heading into the presidential election, Rojos said that members of his community were highly anxious. “There is fear that no place is safe,” he said.
When political or interpersonal conflict seems overwhelming, the best approach is to “pay attention to the sacredness of human life,” Imam Muzammil Siddiqi told The Media Line.
Imam Muzammil Siddiqi. (Islamic Society of Orange County, Garden Grove)
The director of the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove, California, Siddiqi likes to direct one’s focus to what unifies people of different faiths. “God created us. God is our parent. We are all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. We share our humanity.”
At this moment of social and political fracture, Siddiqi states that “my message is we should all look at the other person as someone who is like me. ‘Do not do unto others what you would not want done unto you.’ The Golden Rule should be applied,” he said.
Siddiqi gave an example of a shared ethic between the Jewish and Muslim communities. “Killing one person is like killing the entire world. Saving one person is like saving the entire world. You find this sentiment in both the Quran and in Jewish sources as well,” he said.
Siddiqi criticized the war in Gaza, saying, “What is happening in Gaza has gone on for too long; it seems without end. … We have to think about stopping the bloodshed of innocent people,” he said, though his approach does not deny different perspectives on the Middle East or erase conflict. People of all faiths ought to direct their energies toward “the challenge of resolving conflict in peaceful ways,” he said.
Regarding the presidential elections, he advised that “we have to see that our leaders are those who love people and care about them. America has an important role to play in the world. … There is great responsibility in this role. You don’t want someone who is just talking about making America great but someone who is working on making the world a more peaceful place and who can commit themselves to solving hunger, the environmental crisis, poverty, lack of opportunity and access to education,” and other social ills, he said.
Mostly, said Siddiqi, the ethics that are “emphasized in our scriptures and sermons must put it into practice,” he said, wishing “the best for the Jewish community for their holidays … which are not just holidays but Holy Days.”
This is a season when there’s a natural instinct to reflect on everything that’s happened and everything that still needs to happen before we close out the year
People of other faiths can borrow Rosh Hashana’s significance as the start of a new spiritual year, “This is a season when there’s a natural instinct to reflect on everything that’s happened and everything that still needs to happen before we close out the year,” the Rev. Canon Leonard L. Hamlin, Sr., the Canon Missioner at Washington National Cathedral told The Media Line. “What relationships still need to be repaired? What good still needs to be done? Which broken parts of our lives need to be mended back together?”
Hamlin heads up the social justice/community outreach work at the National Cathedral and is also their primary interfaith liaison.” Our Jewish brothers and sisters offer the world a teachable moment in this season of reflection, repentance, and renewal. All of us can listen to our shared patriarch, Isaiah, who commands us to be repairers of the breach—in our own lives, but also in our communal life. This time of year offers us the chance to take stock and then get to work in fixing those broken places. Lord knows there’s plenty for us to do.”
Romemu’s Rabbi Ingber welcomes a collaborative perspective on the 2024 High Holidays as the dearth of allies over the course of the past year has been especially painful and troubling for him. “One of my sermons will be about promises broken … and the absolute moral decay at the heart of this moral confusion” about Israel, he said. The Jewish community needs to understand what it meant “that people could not stand with us on October 7,” he said.
David A. Ingber. (Romemu)
The abandonment of former allies only serves to underscore the importance of Jewish unity, and to “create a container” where Jews of different political leanings can find common peoplehood, said Ingber. “We are one people in the eyes of the enemy,” Ingber pointed out.
Hope during this troubling time comes for Ingber by recognizing the rich resources and tradition the Jewish community has. Also, that Jewish history has been replete with instances of crisis such as the present moment. “For 2,000 years before this moment, we remained steadfast in our beliefs … yearning for something that has not yet been achieved.” Our strength comes, he said, from the fact that “we have one another. We have been in places like this before, where we thought that things were as bad as could be, and found ways to emerge,” he said.
Latino leader Rojos’s cause for hope is based in scripture. “The Bible, from cover to cover, talks about Israel and shows God over and over again affirming Israel as his people,” he said.
Finally, Pagels offers another text-based cause for optimism. “I kept saying to myself: Why do I keep reading the Bible?” she mused. “The stories are so naive. And initially, I always skipped over the miracle stories.”
In her forthcoming book, Pagels said, she writes that what is captivating about the biblical stories, when they seem like “silly old folk tales, is that they always move toward hope. An enslaved people are liberated and build a great empire. Daniel is freed from the lion’s den, Jonah leaves the belly of the whale, Jesus is crucified and reborn. The paradigm is that all the stories in the Bible say that the world is a terrible place, but life moves toward hope.”
