Hashiveynu: A Smol Emuni US Reader for the Days of Awe
Foreword
Esther Sperber
Executive Director, Smol Emuni US
It is the first week of Elul, the month that brings the Jewish year 5786 to a close. During Elul our attention turns toward the coming Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, which will begin the new year of 5787. In this liminal time, between the year that has passed and the one yet to come, we are called to contemplate who we are, what we have done, and who we hope to become.
This reflection is especially urgent at a time when we are too often told that we must choose between Jewish safety and Palestinian safety, between Jewish peoplehood and universal humanism, or between our love for Israel and our obligation to pursue justice. We reject these binary choices. Our commitment to Jewish life cannot require indifference to Palestinian life. Our connection to Israel cannot demand silence about the actions of the Israeli government. Our love of Torah demands that we not surrender its teachings to those who would use them to justify domination, dispossession, and revenge.
Instead, we need to give voice to a Torah capable of seeing Palestinians as human beings created b’tzelem Elohim. We need a halakhah that responds to Palestinian suffering. We need a religious language that allows us to recognize our own vulnerability without making Jewish victimhood the center of our identity.
This is why Smol Emuni US is needed.
Smol Emuni US (Faithful Left in Hebrew) is a movement of Orthodox and observant Jews committed to justice, equality, and dignity for Jews and Palestinians. Rooted in Torah, we are building a courageous Orthodox Jewish voice for peace and to iend the occupation. Our work is grounded in the foundational religious principle that all people are created in the image of God. We consider the pursuit of justice, equality, and dignity for Jews, Palestinians, and all people to be a fundamental religious imperative. When Torah is invoked to make cruelty sacred, those of us who believe in a different Torah are obligated to speak up.
This reader emerges from that obligation and from the struggle to see, speak, listen, and accept responsibility. Its essays examine the meaning of teshuvah, suggesting that teshuvah is more than personal self-improvement. It also requires a collective moral reckoning that acknowledges what has been done in our name.
The work of teshuvah begins with truth. We cannot repent for what we refuse to know. Yet teshuvah also gives us hope: it promises that if we acknowledge our past and choose to act differently, forgiveness and a better future remain possible. May this new year give us the courage to undertake teshuvah: to see what we have avoided, acknowledge the harm we have caused, repair what can be repaired, and return to who we are meant to be.
Editor’s Introduction
Rabbi Zachary Truboff
Book Editor
As the third Rosh Hashanah since October 7 approaches, the work of these days has not gotten easier. The prayers of the machzor ask us to stand before God in truth, and truth is precisely what has become hardest to speak. This reader gathers essays for the High Holidays meant to force us to confront truths about the war, about our community, and about ourselves, because if we are not willing to do so during these days, then when will such a thing ever be possible?
The Rosh Hashanah section opens with my own essay, “Zionism in Crisis: The Call to Teshuvah,” adapted from my recent book. It argues that the sirens of October 7 were a summons that must serve as a call to teshuvah and that teshuvah begins with the realization that the war has shattered illusions about Zionism that we can no longer afford to rebuild. Esther Sperber’s “Teshuvah and Political Time” draws on the architectural theorist Mark Cousins and the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald to distinguish history, which is dead, from the past, which remains alive within us, and asks what it would mean for Israelis and Palestinians to transform the ghosts that haunt them into ancestors. Rachel Landsberg’s “Where is Your Brother?” turns to Genesis, reading Cain’s violence against Abel and Abraham’s covenant with Abimelech as two answers to that question: What does it mean to remain deeply committed to vvi the safety of our own people without becoming indifferent to the safety and dignity of others?
The Yom Kippur section begins with “For the Sins We Have Committed” by David N. Myers and Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, who offer a set of Al Chet confessions for this year that take into account the events of the last three years. In “The Withering of the Zionist Dream: Reflections on the Occupation in Its 60th Year,” Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller then makes the case that the occupation has undermined Israel’s own security, constitutes an ongoing hillul HaShem, and that atonement requires saying plainly that this is the case. Rabbi David Wolkenfeld’s “Praying with Sinners and Praying for Sinners” argues that our communities must make room for all Jews regardless of their views on Israel, including those who reject Zionism altogether, and that Yom Kippur is where that inclusion begins. Joanna Brown’s “Entanglement, Isaiah and Justice on the Yamim Noraim” moves from the root systems of her front yard to the pathways of Isaiah 58, finding in our entanglement with one another both the model and the mandate for the work of justice.
The Sukkot section features Melila Hellner-Eshed’s “The Peace That Will Be Born From the Spirit,” an account of twenty-five years of the Sulha peace movement’s listening circles between Israelis and Palestinians, grounded in the Zohar’s teaching that the Shekhinah dwells only where people meet face to face, and continuing even through the grief of this war.
Finally, we have chosen to publish three essays from Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel (1882–1945), translated for this reader, one for each holiday, and each closes its section. Rav Amiel served as a communal rabbi in Lithuania and Poland, then as rabbi of Antwerp, and from 1936 until his death as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Tel Aviv. He was one of religious Zionism’s leading thinkers and one of its sharpest internal critics. He saw with terrible clarity what happens when nations worship their own power, and he warned that a Jewish nationalism built on reverence for strength would become the very idolatry it claimed to leave behind. His Rosh Hashanah Smol Emuni US High Holiday Reader vii sermon asks why the Torah commands us to remember the broken cry of the shofar, and answers that the suffering we refuse to remember is the suffering we bring about. His Yom Kippur essay reads the book of Jonah as the most honest book we have, because everyone flees from God, and to flee from God is to flee from the human being in whom God dwells. His Sukkot sermon ends with the messiah giving all the nations a sukkah of peace.
May the essays gathered here help us do the work of these days honestly, and may the year ahead be better than the one now ending.
Table of Contents
Rosh Hashanah
Zionism In Crisis: The Call To Teshuvah by Rabbi Zachary Truboff
Teshuvah and Political Time by Esther Sperber
Where is Your Brother? by Rachel Landsberg
Zikhron Teruah: A Remembrance of the Broken Cry by Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel z”l
Yom Kippur
“For the Sins We Have Committed”: Reimagining Yom Kippur Liturgy in a Post-October 7 World by David Myers and Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller
The Withering of the Zionist Dream: Reflections on the Occupation in Its 60th Year by Chaim Seidler-Feller
Praying with Sinners and Praying for Sinners by Rabbi David Wolkenfeld
Entanglement, Isaiah and Justice on the Yamim Noraim by Joanna Brown
Those Who Flee from God by Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel z”l
Sukkot
The Peace That Will Be Born From the Spirit by Melilah Hellner-Eshed
The Festival of Sukkot and the King Messiah by Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel z”l
