Click Here to Read the Full Interview in Jewish Currents
By Avigayil Halpern
Chevruta is a column that aims to address the ethical and spiritual problems confronting the left. For each installment of the column—named for the traditional method of Jewish study, in which a pair of students analyzes a religious text together—Jewish Currents will match leftist thinkers and organizers with a rabbi or Torah scholar. The activists will bring an urgent question that arises in their own work; the Torah scholar will lead them in exploring their question through Jewish text. By routing contemporary political questions through traditional religious sources, we hope to discover new and unexpected avenues for inquiry into today’s most pressing problems. You can find a stand-alone source sheet for group study here.
Over the last months, there has been a transformation in the organized Jewish community about the morality of the brutal assault on Gaza, with liberals increasingly speaking out against the war. These newfound opponents include the Reform movement, rabbis of a variety of denominations, and other liberal thought leaders and organizations. This shift has left many long-time opponents of the genocide feeling uncertain about how to relate to those newly joining our camp and struggling with the very idea of what it means to do teshuvah for genocide. While many on the left are angry that it took liberals so long to oppose Israeli actions in Gaza, many also hold the truth that our movement is not in a place to reject those who wish to join our ranks. There is also a sense that focusing on others’ misdeeds makes it hard to take accountability for our own.
In this conversation, I consider these questions with Audrey Sasson, the executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), who, like me, has been struggling with ideas of complicity and atonement amid this high holiday season. In texts by Maimonides—whose “Laws of Repentance” supplies the core source about teshuvah in the Jewish canon—as well as from the Mishnah tractate Horayot, and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentance and Repair, we grapple with whether leadership bears different responsibility than the laity in matters of teshuvah, and the difference between approaching teshuvah individually versus communally. As we enter Yom Kippur, we hope that this conversation will be an opportunity to reckon with how we might relate to our leaders and communities that have acted destructively, as well as to reckon with the ways we ourselves have fallen short in the monumental task of opposing this unfolding horror.
— Avigayil Halpern
Avigayil Halpern: Audrey, what’s bringing you here today?
Audrey Sasson: We’re two years into the genocide in Gaza. We think we’ve seen the worst, and then a new worst finds its way to our screens. Recently, it seems we have reached some sort of tipping point, with various liberal Jewish leaders and organizations newly reckoning with what has been done in our name, with our tax dollars, with our support.
As we approach Yom Kippur, I am left wondering: What does repentance look like as we try to move forward, both as a Jewish community, and also as part of the human community? How do we understand our own complicity and the specific ways we each need to be held accountable? For those of us who have opposed the genocide since its beginning: How do we relate to people who had been more reticent to speak out against Israel but are doing so now? We know that for hundreds of thousands of people, this reckoning is far too little, far too late. And still, this is not an intellectual exercise. For me, this question matters insofar as it can help hasten an end to the genocide, which needs to be our primary focus right now.
Avigayil: It’s such a hard question. So many people I know who have been opposing the war for so long have been navigating feelings of frustration. I know you’ve been out there, Audrey, with JFREJ, naming what’s happening, attempting to stop it. On the one hand, it’s such a relief to see so many people in the Jewish mainstream finally agree that this is bad. And on the other, it’s painful, because it feels like such a small intervention so late into the genocide. Moreover, those of us who have long opposed the war faced incredibly harsh opposition within the Jewish community and beyond, and it’s frustrating that people with more social capital are only speaking out now when it’s less risky.
And also, in my frustration at others in my community, I’m trying to ask myself: In what ways am I actually feeling frustration at myself? When I’m craving someone else’s teshuvah, in what ways am I mad at myself for not doing better? And how can I both communicate that frustration and also let it spur me to examine my own deeds toward taking more action against the genocide?
To give us more language to think through these questions, I have brought some traditional Jewish sources. This first piece is from Maimonides, from his great code of Jewish law, the Mishnah Torah, in which he codifies the “Laws of Repentance” and lays out the steps for doing teshuvah.
Audrey reads.
What constitutes teshuvah? That a sinner should abandon their sins and remove them from their thoughts, resolving in their heart, never to commit them again as [Isaiah 55:7] states: “May the wicked abandon his ways.” Similarly, they must regret the past as [Jeremiah 31:19] states: “After I returned, I regretted.”
[They must reach the level where] the One who knows the hidden will testify concerning them that they will never return to this sin again as [Hoshea 14:4] states: “We will no longer say to the work of our hands: ‘You are our gods.’”
They must verbally confess and state these matters which they resolved in their heart.
Avigayil: I’m curious how this lands for you as a comprehensive picture of repentance.
Audrey: Maimonides helpfully lays out several concrete steps that must be taken: You have to abandon your past ways, regret what you have done, commit to not doing those actions again, and, lastly, verbally confess your wrongdoing. I think it’s telling that confession comes at the end of this process, after one has “resolved in their heart” not to sin any longer. And I think this raises the question of at what point one must be public about their teshuvah for it to be meaningful. I am thinking about this line: “We will no longer say to the work of our hands, ‘You are our gods.’” This seems to refer to worshipping our previous actions and deeds. We are committing to not being in service of these gods that led us astray any longer. We are committing to the possibility that our hands can be in service of something else. In this case, the thought of corrective action is the precursor to the change in behavior.
Some of us—and I’m including myself here—may be craving a public reckoning from Jewish leaders, but perhaps it’s the private work that’s more important at the moment, to make sure the public work is actually meaningful. Perhaps right now the confession is less important than what might move people to action.