Yom Kippur 5787: Antizionism: A Distinct Form of Anti-Jewish Hate

A version of this sermon was delivered on Yom Kippur Morning 5787 at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation in Wantagh, NY.  

The ritual begins at dawn.
Great crowds converge from far and near
upon the Temple,
until its courts are filled to overflowing
with priests and Levites, men and women,
young and old.
The High Priest has prepared himself for seven days.
How can he intercede for others if he is impure himself?
All night he has rehearsed the sacred ritual.
Robed in gold,
he burns the incense, offers the sacrifices,
dispatches a goat into the wilderness,
The goat a symbol of the people’s longing to be rid of sin.[1]

The scapegoat ritual in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem was performed once a year on Yom Kippur, as commanded by God in Leviticus.  This ritual allowed the people to see their sins put upon the animal and watch them disappear over a cliff, or into the distance, into an abyss, to Azazel.  The goat was a physical symbol for people to atone and to spur them to teshuvah, as if to say, according to Maimonides, “we have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, have cast them behind our backs, and removed them from us as far as possible,”[2] now we can move forward in righteousness.

The celebration began at 5:00 p.m.
Crowds converged from near and far.
A candle lighting, by the sea,
celebrating rededication at a beach, symbolic of the land.
By 6:40 the gunmen have parked.
At 6:42 the bullets fly through the air.
The beach, filled to overflowing, empties
as young and old, men and women,
flee for their lives, shelter for their safety.
The shooters have prepared themselves for days, years.
All night they rehearsed their macabre ritual,
clothed in terrorist rage and keffiyeh.
By 6:48 there are 15 victims bleeding,
goats carrying the alleged sins of the people.

When I went to Bondi Beach, on my stop in Sydney, I said Kaddish for the victims, to honor their memory and sanctify God’s name, even in the face of senseless murder.  The young Rabbi leading the short service spoke of light and life, of goodness overcoming evil, before reading the names of the victims, and then leading the small crowd of about 30 people in sanctifying God’s name…Yitgadal v’Yitkadash…

What an irony for our people that, time and again, our ritual for spiritual purification and reconciliation with God has been twisted against us.  We have been scapegoated throughout our history, and what is happening to our people now, under the term antizionism, is on the one hand the same as has happened to our people before.  Corporate guilt, exclusion from society, danger to Jews.  On the other hand, antizionism is different from what we have been through before in ways that it is incumbent upon us as Jews and those who love us to understand, if we are to confront it and God willing send it to Azazel. 

At Bondi, the targets were not IDF soldiers or reservists, they were not Israeli government ministers or representatives from Israel, as if that would be ok.  They were Jews.  Jews celebrating Chanukah in their hometown.  It was not the perceived sins of the Jewish people laid upon them, warranting their deaths, in the sick calculations of the shooters.  Instead, it was the perceived sins of the world’s one Jewish state, put upon all Jews everywhere, resulting in the deaths of these 15 people, including a 10-year-old girl named Matilda. 

The massacre at Bondi Beach solidified for me that antizionism is a distinct form of anti-Jewish hate, and that we are in a new era of animus against our people that we are underprepared to combat.  Unfortunately, this new hatred does not mean the old one has gone away, making distinguishing one from the other even more complicated.

Before I continue, I recognize that this is a charged topic and that there are a wide variety of opinions about Zionism.  Yes, there is historical precedent for Jews being against Zionism.  These early non-Zionists, like the Bund, had a difference of political opinion about how best to protect Jews.  The Bund thought that by eschewing Zionism, they’d be safe.  They all ended up dead, too.  Today’s antizionists, spelled purposefully without a hyphen and without a capital letter, are not that.  Their vitriol against us is not a difference of opinion, and their goal is not Jewish safety or saving Jewish lives.  This is not critique of Israeli policy or strategy.  This is denial of Israel’s right to exist, uniquely among the family of nations.

Antizionism is not antisemitism, though it shares characteristics in form.  Antizionism is in many ways an inversion of what we understand antisemitism to be, at least according to writer and anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein, who founded the Movement Against Antizionism.  Using anthropological methodology, Louis-Klein posits that: “Antizionism represents a political inversion of classical antisemitism.”[3]

If traditional antisemitism said, “Jews can never really belong here,” antizionism makes a different claim: “Jews can belong here as individuals or as a religious group, but they should not have a nation of their own.”  Antisemitism treats Jewish identity as a problem; antizionsim treats Jewish national sovereignty as the problem.  This results in a reversal of the old stereotype: Jews go from being portrayed as a powerless minority that does not belong and must be purged, to being portrayed as a powerful majority that is itself a colonizer that must be purged. 

The foundation of both is a hatred of Jews.  And, sadly, the end result is the same.  More businesses vandalized and forced to close, like Avner’s bakery in Sydney, Australia, closed after 2-years of harassment; more Jews excluded from salons, like Jessica Watson in Alexandria Virginia, who was denied service for being Israeli; coffee shops, like Poetica Coffee in Brooklyn, which banned Congressman Dan Goldman and libeled him a genocide supporter on social media after all he did was buy a coffee while stopping in with his daughter; pride parades, like the Chicago Dyke march excluding Jews; publishing houses, where Jewish- and Israeli-themed and authored book deals are down up to 75% from 2023; and progressive spaces, like California State Senator Scott Wiener who was verbally harassed and forced to leave the San Francisco Trans March. 

The result is also more hurt Jews, more vandalism against Jewish targets like the Hatzola ambulances firebombed in London, and, as we know from Sydney, more dead Jews.

And because the results are the same, and the foundations are the same, it is easy to conclude that antizionism and antisemitism are the same.  Or that antizionism only becomes antisemitism after a line nobody can point to has been crossed.  Debating when antizionism becomes antisemitism, or if it ever does, obfuscates that just because something is not classically antisemitic, doesn’t mean it isn’t hateful toward the Jews.  Understanding that antizionism is a distinct hatred empowers us to be ready to combat it. 

For our people’s safety, for our survival, it is incumbent upon us to know the differences, see the differences, and understand that where we are now didn’t just happen after or because of October 7, 2023.  October 7 happened because of Islamist antizionism, which never accepted Jewish sovereignty over any part of the Middle East.  The hatred directed against Jews that raged on October 8 was spurred on because of left-wing and academic antizionism.  The left-wing-Islamist alliance poses significant dangers for Jews and for western democracies who allow this ideology to run rampant and violent in their streets, lest they be labeled racist or Islamophobic by daring to confront this hatred head on.

Antizionism is not new, though it is newer to us.  It is the product of Soviet and Islamist propaganda.  Soviet antizionism dates back to Lenin, and it led to the cultural erasure of Soviet Jews, stripping them of their identities, their names, their histories.  Islamist antizionism traces itself back to the Nazi-Arab alliance, and led to the ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Jews from the Arab world and North Africa, including my mother and her family.  Antizionism has always been dangerous for Jews.  The campus and left-wing antizionism we see today is the result of 20 years of Qatari influence and money pouring into institutions of higher learning, leading to a generation of professionals and academics who have been taught and trained to see Israel as the sole evil in the world that must be eradicated, the scapegoat for all the world’s wrongs. 

Israel is reframed, reinterpreted, and taught about not as a liberated nation, not as a miraculous example of decolonization and a displaced people’s return to their indigenous land.  Instead, Israel is a guilty settler-colonial state, like the United States or Australia, that must be decolonized.  Antizionism “has appropriated the language of…liberation to justify oppression, transformed anti-racism into a racist accusation, and turned hatred of Israel into a global ritual.”[4]

How does it do this?  By using the same playbook as previous iterations of anti-Jewish bigotry: libels.  Not just lies, but libels.  What is the difference?  Libels make hatred or violence against a group seem justified.  They defame an entire group and therefore justify exclusion, discrimination, and violence.[5] 

Historically, the Jews have been the scapegoat for the worst sins a culture could imagine.  In the Middle Ages, when religion reigned supreme, deicide, the libel of killing God, led to taxes, forced conversions, expulsions, and massacres.  In the 20^th century, when race and eugenics ruled, the libel of race-mixing and blood pollution led to the Holocaust.  In the 21^st century, the libel of genocide led to the massacre at Bondi, the shooting in Washington, D.C., and more attacks on Jews and synagogues than there is time to list.  If we don’t stop it now, and name it for what it is, there is no question where this is going.

Antizionism is an anti-Jewish hate movement and we have to understand it to stop it.

Antizionism shares some characteristics with antisemitism, of course.  In the same way that antisemitism shares characteristics with medieval anti-Judaism.  A singular focus on Jews, for one.  But also, a sense that Jews are liars, manipulators, and deceptive, and that Jews are aligned with power and domination.[6]  A belief that Jews are bloodthirsty, especially for children.  In the Middle Ages, the blood libel, accusing Jews of using blood in our matzo, led to the massacres and martyrdom of many of our people.  These lies and their repercussions continued well into the 20^th century.  In the 21^st century, Israeli snipers target Gazan children and Israeli bombs target Gazan hospitals.  Israel starves children by denying aid.  There are common threads, to be sure. 

Ultimately, however, it is the differences between the two sister hatreds that render antizionism its own phenomenon, with distinct origins and ideologies.  Antizionism is predicated on three libels: genocide, colonization, and apartheid.  These are the great sins of our age. 

Apartheid, or institutionalized racism, is used as a libel to boycott and sanction Israel or Israeli businesses.  A tactic practiced as the Nazis rose to power, seeking to undermine Jews’ economic stability and force them to leave.  While Israel has its issues, there is no apartheid in Israel, no segregation by race or ethnicity or religion.  Separation between Israeli society and Palestinian society and strong border controls are a result of terrorism, not their cause.

Genocide and settler-colonial theory go hand in hand.  In order to understand these libels, we have to first appreciate that the definitions of these words that we think we know no longer apply for the folks screaming them in our faces.  Unfortunately, this means that too often, we are having a conversation, or more likely an argument, with folks using the same terms but understanding them differently. 

Colonization is not something from the past, it is ongoing.  The colonizer libel understands colonization as predicated on the displacement of native populations, not on economic desires and drives.  It understands that settler-colonial nations, Australia, Canada, and the USA, for example, are responsible for the destruction of indigenous populations, not in the past, but in an ongoing manner. 

The colonizer libel frames all Israelis and therefore all Jews as white and European, interlopers on a land belonging to Arabs.  It erases Jewish indigeneity and peoplehood.  If Jews are not indigenous, or if Jews are solely a religious group, Zionism is merely an extension of the European colonial project, and any historical or archeological claims thew Jews have to the land are either illegitimate or lies. 

The destruction of populations in this settler-colonial argument is labeled genocide.  The logic then leads as follows: “If settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure and not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps everyone) that sustains a settler-colonial society today is also genocidal.”[7]  Settler-colonial theory defines genocide more broadly than I imagine most of us would, especially since if you are listening carefully, it means that you and I are perpetuating genocide both in Israel and here in the USA.

Some scholars of this pseudo-science go so far as to claim that no one needs to die for a genocide to take place.[8]  As Jews, for whom the term genocide was coined in the aftermath of the gas chambers and ovens of Europe, it is especially hateful and dissonant to accuse us of genocide.  Israel’s declaration of independence offers protection to any citizen regardless of religion, race, or sex.  The Hamas charter seeks the full annihilation of Israel and all the Jews.  Yet it is Israel who is labeled, and libeled, as genocider.  Antizionism inverts genocide onto the Jews to libel us and present us as so evil that we must be stopped, even violently.

With this understanding, it doesn’t matter what the casualty numbers actually are in Gaza, it is defined as a genocide, because the settler-colonial Israelis are the perpetrators.  And not only that, Israelis as colonizers are destined to be genocidal because all colonizers are predestined to it.  This is why the protestors on October 8 were already chanting against genocide, before an IDF soldier even entered Gaza.

Antizionism is an anti-Jewish hate movement that claims that all Jews are guilty of Israel’s original sins of racism, colonization, and genocide, and that Israel’s inherent evil sullies all Jews who are guilty by association, and must be purged. 

We have to know what it is to be able to fight it.  And we have to fight it in our own homes and communities, too.

So many of our young people have been caught up by this propaganda.  So many of our young people see antizionism as the new way to show their progressive bona fides, standing up for the oppressed Palestinians. 

We teach our young people to stand up for the oppressed and the vulnerable.  We teach our young people to cry out for justice and that their voices matter and are powerful.  We have universalized Judaism in ways that are beautiful and important.  And, we have been remiss in teaching our young people their history and how to stand up for themselves.

Antizionism is not pro-Palestinian, no matter what campus leaders, activists, or the mayor of New York City might say.  It is, in fact, focused in the wrong direction.  It is not about making life better for anyone in Gaza or Judea and Samaria.  It is not about seeking peace between neighbors.  It is not about a two-state solution.  It is about hatred for and destruction of a nation of people, not the creation of anything.  Antizionists are the ones seeking genocide in its literal sense, not Israel.  Antizionism is anti-progressive because it is founded on a belief that sees the best days behind us, not ahead of us.  It is anti-progressive because it demands hatred of a group of people because of their national origin and/or their religion. 

And yet, we cannot convince them to change so easily, because the arguments are emotional and they believe that they are standing up for the oppressed minority, even though a quick zoom out shows that Israel is the actual democratic minority in a sea of Muslim ethno-state autocracies and monarchies.  We cannot throw our young people out of the tent or our families without trying to fight for them, without trying to bring them back to sanity and love for our people, not by arguing, but by disagreeing firmly, actually knowing the facts and the history, and standing our ground. 

We can challenge their assumptions, but only if we know what we’re up against and what they believe.  We can tell them how we feel.  We can ask them to logic their way through the arguments.  Where are the Jews supposed to go when the land from the river to the sea is freed?  Will the countries that kicked us out welcome us back?  How will Palestinians ever be free and safe with Hamas in power?

We see the new scapegoat before our eyes: the Jewish nation, Israel.  Only by understanding can we begin to be ready to combat.  If we don’t start pushing back, I fear the consequences for our people.  Elie Wiesel reminds us that we should, “never say that society will not do this or that,” and to not delude ourselves into thinking that “history will know when to stop so as not to destroy itself.”  Legacy institutions are a generation behind.  America’s young people are 50/50 on support of Hamas.  The hour is late, and there is still time.

The animal scapegoat of Yom Kippur symbolically removed the sins from the people of Israel.  Human scapegoats are an expression, not of their own shortcomings, but of those that choose them.[9]  The antizionist movement is dangerous for Jews, even as it says more about the people who have joined it.  It is the newest iteration of the hatred that has been with us for thousands of years. 

With the scapegoat of Israel before us, and armed with new understanding of what we are facing, let us heed Maimonides and, freed from our previous understandings, let us be spurred to righteousness. 

Because the cause of Israel is righteous, and so are we when we support it.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah

---

[1] Stern, Chaim, Gates of Repentance. P 421

[2] Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed part 3; 46:20

[3] Louis-Klein, Adam. “Antizionism is a distinct Anti-Jewish Bigotry.” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, Vol 9, No. 1 Spring 2026, p 64.

[4] Louis-Klein, Adam. “The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism.” The Atlantic.  June 18, 2026.

[5] Based on Louis-Klein in JCA p 63-4

[6] Based on Louis-Klein in JCA p 71

[7] Kirsch, Adam. On Settler Colonialism: Ideology Violence, and Justice. 2024 Norton. p. 23-4

[8] Ibid. p 25-26.

[9] Rabbi Jonathan Perolman

Seventh Day Passover 5785: Caught Between

 A version of this sermon was delivered at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation, Wantagh, NY on Shabbat 7th-day of Passover 5785 (April 18, 2025)

Tonight on our calendar, we arrive at the last day of Passover.  Tonight, we also commemorate the crossing of the sea.  Tradition tells us it was on the night of the seventh day that God parted the waters to allow the Israelites to walk on dry land toward their freedom and the promised land.

Just before the Israelites leave Egypt, after the commandment about the pascal sacrifice and how it will be offered in the future and by whom, we read, and not for the only time: “תּוֹרָה אַחַת יִהְיֶה לָאֶזְרָח וְלַגֵּר הַגָּר בְּתוֹכְכֶם There shall be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you.”[1]  We hear this idea over and over again in our Torah, that there is to be one law for the citizen and stranger alike.  We are not supposed to oppress the strangers for we know what it was like to be oppressed strangers in the land of Egypt.

The Haggadah reminds us that we are each supposed to see ourselves as if we were personally freed from Egypt, because of what God did for me, when God brought me out of Egypt.  So tonight, on this fateful anniversary, we put ourselves in the ragged sandals of the Israelites.  Let us imagine that we have witnessed the plagues, that we have put the blood on our doorposts, and that we hurriedly packed our dough and our timbrels in our sacks just a week ago.  We are amidst the mixed multitude that took their first free steps on the 14^th of Nissan and has been walking now toward an unknown destination, only remembered in dream and in song.

Imagine what it must have felt like to be in that crowd, on the shores of the sea, and to suddenly learn that Pharaoh has changed his mind.  To feel so trapped, surrounded, caught between the choices of a return to slavery and bondage or certain death in the waters of the sea.  How do we even decide in that moment what to do?  How do we decide when the answers on both sides are equally terrible?  How do we get out of the stuck?

In the Torah we know the answer.  God calls on Moses to raise his staff in his hand and for the waters to part.  We don’t have to choose between bondage and drowning because God gives us a third option.

This feeling of being stuck between two bad choices is made most real in our sacred and powerful story of redemption.  The Jewish people being caught between two bad options is not reserved for the Torah, or for our history.  Today, we are again caught between two bad options as American Jews.  On one side, we have the rising and ongoing antisemitism of our society and the world.  On the other side, the current government’s fight against antisemitism, which brings with it a disdain and a disregard for the rule of law and due process rights.

Like the commandment in the Torah, due process is granted, according to our constitution, to all people.  The language of the Constitution is clear in the Fifth Amendment: “No person…shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”  The 14^th Amendment goes on to add that no state has the right to: “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”  The Constitution doesn’t say citizens.  The Constitution doesn’t say Americans.  The Constitution doesn’t say anything about race, national origin, or immigration status as a disqualifier for these rights.  Nor does it say that one’s faith or religious practices or beliefs disqualify someone from these legal protections.

As Jews we know personally what it means when rights are stripped from a group of people by a supremacist regime.  We know what it means when the protections of a state are capriciously taken away or denied, when those protections we believed would keep us safe are trampled on and forgotten.  A new pharaoh arose over Egypt who did not remember Joseph.  The unsaid ending of this verse of Torah is that the new Pharaoh went back on an agreement and undid the decree allowing Jacob and his family to dwell in Egypt in peace.  Throughout Medieval Europe, Jewish communities lived at the pleasure and under the protection of local lords and nobles, until those nobles tired of the Jews or owed them too much money, and so changed their minds, and terrorized them and kicked them out.  In the 20^th century, German Jewish citizens’ rights and protections were stripped from them by the Nuremberg Laws, solely because of their Judaism.  Jewish citizens of Arab nations were expatriated and deported from lands in which they’d lived for centuries and generations.  It is in part thanks to the due process rights guaranteed to all people that Jews have been able to thrive as we have in this nation.  It’s what has made this nation different.  No one can take anything away from us just because of who we are, where we come from, or what we believe.  At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. 

Today, in this nation, students whose beliefs are unpopular with the regime have been denied and deprived their due process rights.  Other strangers who live among us have been snatched off the street without court or tribunal and sent to prison camps in another country to languish.  The reason behind much of this is allegedly to fight against antisemitism.  In order to keep the Jews safe, the reasoning seems to be, we need to take away the rights of a few, select others.  In order to keep the Jews safe, we have to do away with the rule of law.  This is a false choice that we have been asked to make. 

This false choice has been called out this week by a statement from the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements in America as well as HIAS and the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.  This statement reads, in part:

“In recent weeks, escalating federal actions have used the guise of fighting antisemitism to justify stripping students of due process rights when they face arrest and/or deportation…Students have been arrested at home and on the street with no transparency as to why they are being held or deported, and in certain cases with the implication that they are being punished for their constitutionally-protected speech. Universities have an obligation to protect Jewish students, and the federal government has an important role to play in that effort; however, sweeping draconian funding cuts will weaken the free academic inquiry that strengthens democracy and society, rather than productively counter antisemitism on campus.

These actions do not make Jews—or any community—safer. Rather, they only make us less safe.

We reject any policies or actions that foment or take advantage of antisemitism and pit communities against one another; and we unequivocally condemn the exploitation of our community’s real concerns about antisemitism to undermine democratic norms and rights, including the rule of law, the right of due process, and/or the freedoms of speech, press, and peaceful protest.”

The pretexts being used against students to deny them their rights now extend to anyone suspected of being here illegally, anyone with the wrong-looking tattoo, or anyone born in another country, or with brown skin. 

Remember not to oppress the strangers for you were strangers in Egypt.  No person shall be deprived due process of law.

We are stuck, as Jews in America, today.  Between those purporting to be on our side and “fighting our enemies” with us or for us, and the laws of this land which have kept us safer than anywhere we’ve ever lived other than under our own sovereignty.  The rule of law has made it possible for us to call ourselves Jewish Americans rather than Jews in America.  The rule of law is why, when a synagogue is attacked or a Jewish Governor’s residence is firebombed, we can expect justice.  Due process is why our religion cannot be used as evidence against us.  We are being put into this position between the sea and the Pharaoh and what are we supposed to do?  Where is God to part the waters and lead us on dry land?

Whether or not any of these students have done things that put their immigration status in jeopardy is a legitimate question to be taken up by an immigration court and judge, with appropriate legal representation for the accused.  Whether or not we agree with these students and believe that some of them should be deported ought to be secondary to our belief in, advocacy for, and dedication to the rule of law and due process.  I don’t like what Mahmoud Khalil believes, what he says, or what he stands for.  And I believe that he deserves the same rights as anyone else and everyone else. 

There shall be one law for stranger and citizen alike.  No state shall deprive any person of due process of law. 

I am proud to be a member of the CCAR who joined in authoring and promoting this statement.  I am a believer in the promise of America and our rules and laws.  Or at least I have been.  We are in early dangerous stages of a shift in the very foundations of this nation, and it must be called out for what it is unkind, and ultimately un-American and unconstitutional.  These immigration raids and deportations in the name of Jewish safety have left us once again with no good options.  If we call out and fight for the rule of law, we are cozying up to antisemites and being a party to our own destruction, no better than kapos. 

If we allow for the degradation of the rule of law, we put ourselves and our families and communities at more risk and peril, perhaps not today, but certainly soon.  The point of the powerful and overused ‘first they came for” poem is not who they came for first.  The point is the last line.  “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”  Will you say something before it personally affects you?  That’s the question inherent in the poem.  When the laws stop applying to some, when the law is exercised with prejudice and based on whims of preference, ultimately no one is safe.  When legal residents are mistakenly sent to El Salvador and there’s no check and balance, no empathy, and no attempt to right a wrongful deportation, not one of us is safe.  When immigration agents are judge and jury, no one is safe.

A false choice is put before us.  We can and should fight antisemitism in all its forms, from left, right, and center with vigilance and determination.  As the CCAR statement makes clear: “It is both possible and necessary to fight antisemitism—on campus, in our communities, and across the country—without abandoning the democratic values that have allowed Jews, and so many other vulnerable minorities, to thrive.”

This is the path on dry ground.  This is our third option.  Not to allow for antisemitism nor to allow for the decay of our legal foundations.  The way through the waters to the promised land is paved with our voices and our belief that we can have and deserve both a nation and a society in which we are safe and in which our lives are protected under the shelter of due process. 

It was not Moses or his staff that parted the waters that day.   It was a man, Nachshon the son of Amminadab, who looked around and said that there must be another option.  Neither willing to die at the hands of the Egyptians nor willing to drown, Nachshon believes deeply that God will ultimately come to save.  So, he takes the first steps into the water, before anyone else, and he keeps going until the water is up to his nostrils.  Only when he is almost fully engulfed does God finally part the waters for all the people.  Nachshon had such deep faith to take those steps, and real courage.  To take the steps onto a third path is not easy.  It can be overwhelming and scary.  It requires a lot of courage and the expectation of discomfort.  But we have no choice; our other options are untenable. 

We all have to be Nachshons, declaring that there is a dry path before us, if only we take it.  We all have to be Nachshons believing in the promise of a better future and willing to do the work to get to it.  Willing to say that neither of the easy paths is safe for us, so we will forge a new path.  When we take those first steps, when we live by the rules of our tradition which work in tandem with the rules of our free society, we call upon God’s presence to be at our side and ultimately to redeem us. 

There shall be one law for stranger and citizen alike.  No state shall deprive any person of due process of law.  

We are at the border of the sea.  The Pharaoh is behind us and closing in.  Do we have the courage to take the first steps?

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach

[1] Ex 12:49

Kol Nidre 5785: Less iPhone; More I-Thou

 A version of this sermon was delivered on Kol Nidre, Erev Yom Kippur 5785, at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation in Wantagh, NY.

            I know it’s Yom Kippur, but the fast only just started, so I don’t feel so bad that my story tonight starts with dinner.  Picture it, Vilnius, this past summer.  There I was, getting off the train, worn down from a difficult day of sightseeing in Kaunas, and the mass murder site, the Ninth Fort, just outside that city.  I walked the 15 minutes from the train station thinking deeply about how those tracks which carried me between these cities were probably the same ones that carried my grandfather a century ago.  I got to the restaurant, asked for a table for one and was shown to a beautiful table outside under a tree.  The sun was low, the temperature was pleasant, if a little muggy, owing to the rain that day.  It was Friday, and my Shabbat plan was to enjoy a nice dinner to counteract the hard day.

I placed my order, poured my beer, and began to watch what was going on around me.  A family to one side.  A group of Russian tourists that look like an extended family at two tables pushed together, loudly interacting with each other, but more their devices.  A couple of friends waiting for another friend to join them and starting with some wine.  A couple on a date.  I take out my notebook and begin to journal a little bit about my experiences that day, to try to write my immediate reflections, and so that I don’t forget what I did and saw. 

As I’m writing, I overhear a discussion at the entrance.  Another gentleman, by himself, has asked for a table for one, in a German-accented English.  Alas, the restaurant only has tables inside, they tell him.  His response sounds disappointed as he tries to get a sense of how long the wait might be.  I have only just placed my order, and I’ve got a table to myself, I realize.  I get the host’s attention and offer to share my table with this stranger and fellow single traveler, if he is willing.

I motion to him and he sits down.  As he does, I introduce myself and I guess, because his voice reminds me a little bit of Arnold Schwarzenegger, that he is Austrian.  And I’m right, so I have impressed him, and we get to talking.  He tells me about his Belarussian wife and how he’s alone because you can only get to Belarus on land, and Vilnius is the closest major city, so she went to see her family and he stayed behind because his Russian can only last him about two days, so he’s let his wife go on ahead.  We chat.  We toast to traveling.  We share about what we’ve seen.  When the inevitable question of what we do comes up, I decide that I will tell him—because I don’t tell everyone—that I am a rabbi. 

He is flabbergasted.  “I’ve never had dinner with a rabbi before!”  He tells me he lives in Vienna not far from the Jewish Museum that some of us here visited together a few years ago.  I know that this means he lives in the old Jewish quarter, and I also know that the questions I want to ask about who the building he lives in used to belong to are probably not ideal for our cordial Shabbat dinner. 

My food arrives and we continue to chat.  We each order another beer and I share with him about my life and he shares with me about his life.  His food arrives just as it begins to gently rain again.  As I’m under the tree, and about done with my meal, I decide to rough it out for a few minutes, but he chooses to go eat indoors.  We shake hands, wish each other well, and part ways.

This is one powerful interaction that I had, and I could tell you about the gentleman from South Carolina I met on my tour of the Alpine castles who was traveling with his two daughters who were always on their phones.  I could tell you about the German family from Hamburg I met in Munich on their way to New York for their very first family trip here.  The excited daughters spent a lot of time on their phones and asked me about things in New York that are TikTok famous and which, therefore, I have never heard of.  They’re staying in Queens, and I don’t have the heart to tell them how long their subway ride will be into the city.  I could tell you about the French couple or the Portuguese man who I met on a van tour of the Lithuanian and Latvian countryside, or the Turkish woman who I toured part of Dachau with.

All of these encounters, fleeting yes, but deep and meaningful moments of connection, happened not just because of my sparkling personality.  These interactions, these powerful moments of connection and encounter happened, I firmly believe, because I took social media off of my phone and because I made a point this past summer to not experience life through a screen. 

Yes, I took pictures; and I’ve shared some of those with you.  And I kept my phone away, as much as possible.  This helped me to recognize and to understand that while our smartphones are powerful, important devices that do much good, they are also a tool whose effects we are only just learning. 

The combination of smartphones and social media that hit our pockets a little over a decade ago has changed the world and the way we interact with it.  They can, if we are not careful, prevent us from fully encountering the world, IRL, in real life, as God created it.  They can, if we are not careful, prevent us from the deep interactions that are required for society to survive and to which Judaism calls us.  They can, if we are not careful, cause us to separate into bitterly divided factions, capable of believing the worst about our neighbors.  They can and they do lead to mental health crises. 

In his book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt describes what he calls “the great rewiring of American childhood.”[1]  These devices and the social media platforms that they connect us and our children to are detrimental to development, learning, and functioning in society.  In a great irony, Haidt assesses that many parents today spend too much time protecting their children from possible discomfort and difficulty in the real world and not enough time protecting them from the many harms in the virtual world. 

Haidt describes the effects of this rewiring.  While his research focuses on children who are most affected as their brains continue to develop, the effects on adults are similar.  If we do the work this day asks of us and consider our relationships over the last year, many of us would recognize these effects in some ways. 

Smartphones connected to social media cause social deprivation.  Since 2009, there has been a precipitous decline in the amount of time people of all ages spend with their friends in face-to-face interactions.[2]  Facetime is not the same as time actually looking into another person’s face while in conversation, which humanity has evolved to need.  

Smartphones also cause what Haidt calls attention fragmentation.  This has affected me, and I have seen how it affects my family, our students, my friends, and colleagues.  You probably know it from those times you’re in the middle of something and you hear that ding or feel that vibration, and suddenly your mind is pulled away from whatever it is you were doing.  Or maybe you even feel a phantom vibration.  And then, somehow, you’ve spent an hour scrolling.  Haidt cites one study from 2023 that shows that at the high end, a phone pings an alert up to 192 times a day, up to 11 a waking hour.[3]  I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but I assume that at least some of us here in this room right now are doing everything we can not to take out our phones, not to look at the score, not to see what text or email or like just came through. 

It’s more than just the notifications that cause distraction and pull us away from each other.  Studies also show that even having the phone nearby damages our ability to think at our highest level.  In one experiment, students were best able to remember and recall, and better able to complete math problems, when their phones were in the other room compared to the phones being in a pocket or on a desk next to them.  Our brains work differently when these devices are nearby.[4]  All of this is why our school here at TBT has banned phones during religious school.  And let me just commend our Religious Education committee and our parents for understanding why we made this decision and agreeing to it.  More and more school districts are banning phones, and they are seeing reversals of some of the trends, particularly around attention fragmentation, relatively quickly.

On the first day without their phones during their 15-minute break, our High Schoolers almost didn’t know what to do.  By the second week, they were talking to one another, interacting with each other, and planning to bring in some games and cards to have something to do together.  A year ago, high school break was a bunch of teens in our beautifully renovated youth lounge, all sitting near each other, but all on their phones.  Some with earbuds in.  None of them interacting with each other.  None of them learning about their classmates or sharing about themselves.  None of them navigating the social-emotional growth that is so necessary at their age.  Now, they look each other in the face.  They engage with each other and encounter each other.  This is not just a choice for their physical and mental health, it’s also in keeping with what Judaism values.

Face-to-face interaction is at the heart of how Judaism has always understood the deepest of relationships.  God tells Aaron and Miriam that only Moses gets to speak to God face to face, owing to the depth of their relationship.  Classical Talmud study is done in what is called chavruta, where you sit across from your study partner and you engage with each other and with the arguments, fully immersed in the text.  The Talmud even says that when two are engaged in the study of Torah, the divine presence rests between them.  Two people studying together are, indeed, able to accomplish and learn more than if they each worked independently.

The most powerful of blessings, the Priestly Benediction, taken from the Torah, is centered around God’s face shining God’s light toward us.  Face-to-face encounters lead to blessing.  And face-to-face encounters lead us to feel God’s presence.  Martin Buber, one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 20^th century, describes God as present in relationships.  In his famous work, I and Thou, he defines the world of relationships in two ways.  We have experiences with others, I-it interactions, and we have encounters with others, I-Thou interactions.  Experiences are low-level interactions and are not necessarily bad.  These involve some kind of judgment or use.  In these interactions, we are observers, objective, analytical.  We catalogue and categorize the other.  We describe and define.  And if these are the only kinds of relationships we have, our lives are incomplete.  In order to actually live, we have to find deeper connections. 

“All actual life is encounter,”[5] Buber writes.  To have an encounter is to move from I-it to I-Thou in part through God’s grace.  But it involves being fully present with the other, seeing the depth of the other person, giving from our fullest selves, and striking the balance between maintaining our identities and fusing them.  It is in these moments of mutuality, in these moments of full mutual encounter with the other that we feel God’s presence—because God is the eternal Thou.  We seek to encounter God as we work to encounter others. 

Unfortunately, these I-Thou moments are fleeting and hard to come by.  They are made all but impossible if there is a screen between us or when a phone distracts us.  How can we be mutually engaged with another person if, while we are talking, we take out our phones to check who just pinged us?  How can we be fully present if our minds are wondering how many hearts we will see the next time we use our faces as a password rather than as a conduit to the divine?  We need to look each other in the face.  We need to encounter the world, not just experience it.  We need to spend time with each other without the whole world beckoning us from our pockets.  We need to put down our iPhones and focus on I-Thou!

For sins between a person and God, Yom Kippur atones.  For sins between a person and their fellow, Yom Kippur does not atone.  Our smartphone-addicted lives lead us to sin against each other and to sin against God.  We sin against each other when we fail to look in another’s face and fully encounter them. We sin against each other when we live a life of experience and never seek encounter.  We sin against each other when we’d rather reach one more level on the game.  And when we sin against each other by treating each other as expendable and not seeking encounter, we sin against God because we prevent God from coming into our lives.

When Moses comes down from the mountain after his encounter with God, the Torah tells us that his face is radiant with a glow of light.  Everyone can tell that it is the glow of the divine which emanates from his face.  It is so powerful and overwhelming that he must cover his face from the community.  Each of us has a small part of that divine glow in our faces.  Each of us is capable of seeing that divine light.  We have to want to see it.  It takes work to see it.  We have to seek out encounter.

We have just under 24 hours ahead of us to consider every action, reaction, and interaction from this last year.  Look back.  What did you experience?  What did you encounter?  We have just under 24 hours to consider how we will choose to live in this year ahead.  Will it be a year of experience or a year of encounter?  Will we seek to share our tables and truly meet others, or will we ignore those alongside us for the pings of our apps?  On this night, let us commit to seeking to meet others face to face rather than face to phone.  Instead of the glow of our phones, let us seek out the divine glow in faces of those around us.  And in so doing, may we summon the divine to dwell amongst us, to rain blessings upon us, and to seal us in the book of life.

Amen.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah

 

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[1] Haidt, Jonathan.  The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.  2024.  Penguin Press; USA.  See pages 3-4, 7.

[2] Ibid, see chart on page 121

[3] Ibid, see page 126

[4] Ibid, see page 128

[5] Buber, Martin, I and Thou. 1970 Translation, Touchstone Press 1996 printing, p 62.