Sermon Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York, October 2, 2025

This Yom Kippur message began on July 31st, when Yeonsoo Go, a 20-year-old Purdue sophomore and 2024 Scarsdale High School graduate, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a routine visa hearing in Manhattan.  Handcuffed and sent to Louisiana’s Richwood Correctional Center, Soo, as she’s known, was labeled an “illegal alien” for allegedly overstaying a visa — a claim her family disputes.

Soo arrived four years ago on a religious dependent visa, accompanying her mother, Reverend Kyrie Kim, the first woman ordained in the Seoul Diocese of the Anglican Church of Korea.  Rev. Kim was expressly invited to New York to strengthen the Episcopal Church’s ties with Asian communities.  Our local interfaith clergy association, of which I’m a past president, proudly embraces Rev. Kim as one of our own.  

If you want to know the definition of “upstanding,” look up this family:  Kind, generous, invested in the community’s welfare.  They are not anti-Israel protesters or political activists.  They are not criminals, gang members, scofflaws or reprobates.  They are likely to be found helping out in a homeless shelter when not in church, school, or the neighborhood.  Our neighborhood.

So when Soo disappeared into ICE custody, our local churches and synagogues sprang into action.  Within hours, priests and pastors, rabbis and cantors, exchanged urgent messages and calls.  Soon, our local elected officials, including WRT congregant, New York Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, were on the case.  Days passed with little word from Soo, later revealed to be held in squalid conditions.  By Sunday, with the support of our Scarsdale Village leadership including WRT congregant, Mayor Justin Arest, we had organized a community-wide vigil to take place in Chase Park on Thursday, one week after her apprehension.  By this point, we had it on good authority that members of the US Congress of both political parties were working on her release.

It finally came on Monday, five days after her detention, with a tearful family embrace upon her return to New York. 

A happy ending?  Not quite.  Soo’s case remains unresolved, with no acknowledgment of error from authorities. The trauma Soo and her family endured lingers, as does the fear this incident (and countless like it) sows among immigrants and guests to our country, regardless of their legal status.  Intentional or not, the message that comes across to millions of law-abiding people is:  You are not like us.  You are Other.  You do not belong here.   

The biggest question — Why? — looms large, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, “the cruelty is the point.”¹ 

We Jews know from cruelty.  In Torah, it first appears in Exodus, Chapter 1:  “The Egyptians worked the Israelites with cruelty.”²  The Hebrew word פרך, meaning ruthlessness, brutality, cruelty, defines our slave labor in mortar, brick, and field, and is repeated in the next verse for emphasis.³ 

Cruelty is Pharaoh’s calling card.  By chapter’s end, even forced labor proves insufficient to satisfy his malice, as he escalates to infanticide:  “Every boy born you shall throw into the Nile.”⁴  

The cruelty is the point.

Ten years ago, I traveled to Israel with a group of rabbis — Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox.  We arrived at the height of the Syrian Civil War and refugee crisis, with 1.3 million Syrians seeking asylum from the brutality of the Assad regime (which would collapse this past December) and a simultaneous resurgence of ISIS, the terrorist Islamofascist entity whose ideology mirrors that of Hamas.   

One encounter, seared in my memory:  a critically injured Syrian rebel fighter, recovering from his wounds in a hospital bed in a makeshift underground ward of Israel’s acclaimed Galilee Medical Center.  

The CEO of the hospital, Dr. Masad Barhoum, a Palestinian Arab and Israeli citizen, explained the hospital’s mission to treat all, a commitment born of Israel’s humanitarian spirit and in fulfilment of the medical profession’s Hippocratic Oath, which does not discriminate when it comes to human life and health.  

So why the basement?  Why the secrecy?  

Because if his comrades-in-arms were to learn that a devout Muslim combatant had obtained medical treatment in the Jewish State, he’d have yet another target on his back.

When confronted with the world’s worst cruelties, the Israel I know and love has time and again rushed in to help and heal, with compassion blind to the patient’s color, country, or creed.  

That is why I appreciated hearing this summer from Dr. Dan Turner, a pediatric gastroenterologist and deputy Dean of the School of Medicine at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Through the Israel chapter of Physicians for Human Rights, Turner provides medical care to Palestinians, documents abuses, and advocates for policy changes, like ending the practice of handcuffing prisoners during medical treatment, which Turner describes as both unnecessary and cruel.

Turner’s willingness to treat an enemy injured in war, or suffering from malnutrition and disease, has earned him more than a few enemies of his own.  He has been called a traitor, a self-hating Jew, a terrorist sympathizer.  He has received death threats.    

He remains steadfast.  Listen to his own words.  For Turner, treating a patient, even an enemy, is “not about excusing their actions; it’s about maintaining our own humanity.  …Treating [our enemies] humanely doesn’t weaken us — it strengthens our moral core.”⁵  

Referencing the same Biblical Hebrew word for the cruelty of Pharaoh, Turner says:  “We can’t let fear justify פרך.”  Torah isn’t abstract; it demands action.  Every time I advocate,” he adds, “I’m reminded… : ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’⁶  That includes the neighbor across the border.”⁷

So when we see cruelty enacted as policy, cruelty for its own sake, we recoil — not in the name of a political party, not because we call ourselves Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, or any other modifier, but in the name of Judaism itself.  

When cuts to USAID are already implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands from complications related to treatable conditions like HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia, with the potential for millions more to die in the next five years⁸; when pictures of crying migrants are posted on social media for laughs, and refugees are barred (unless they happen to be White South Africans); when religious zealots burn down mosques or villages or olive groves in the West Bank; when the State Department denies visas for Gazan children to receive medical treatment; when hate-filled extremists on both left and right decide to air their grievances with guns and explosives; when it becomes clear that the cruelty is the point, Judaism itself is violated, and Jews, affronted.

Judaism loathes a Pharaoh: anyone who punishes the weak, the lonely, and those brave enough to stand up and speak out.  Whether the King of Babylon or the Emperor of Rome, the Pope in the Crusades or the King and Queen of Spain in the Inquisition, the Cossack warlords or the Führer of the Reich, the Soviet despots or the Mullahs of Iran, we know all too well the danger of cruelty wedded to power.    

So what lesson ought we learn from our experience with the Pharaohs of Jewish history? To watch our backs? To secure our borders? To wage war against our enemies, when life and home, sovereignty and self-determination are under siege?  All of these, of course:  complicity with terror goes against Jewish survival and Jewish morality.  Our refusal to be history’s victims comprises the essence of “Never Again.”  We must keep guard against the Pharaohs of the world. 

Yet we must also keep guard at all times against the Pharaoh within. 

The word פרך — cruelty — the defining feature of the Pharaoh — comes up a second time in the Torah, in the Book of Leviticus.  Only this time, the tables are turned.  This time, the Torah warns us not about the danger of Pharaoh’s cruelty against us, but rather about the danger of the cruelty we might inflict upon others, especially when we have the power to do so.  

Three times in the space of ten verses⁹ the Torah warns about treating a hired laborer with פרך, cruelty.  Three times it warns us not to subject a worker to the conditions of Egyptian slavery.  Any one of us, the Torah is saying, has the potential to become a Pharaoh in miniature.  

Time and again research into human psychology has borne out the same conclusion.  In the early 1960s, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a groundbreaking psychological experiment at Yale University to explore obedience to authority, inspired by the atrocities of the Holocaust and the question of how ordinary people could commit horrific acts under orders.  Participants were instructed to administer what they believed were increasingly severe electric shocks to a “learner” (played by an actor) for giving incorrect answers, with an authority figure urging them to continue despite the “learner’s” apparent distress. 

Shockingly, 65% of participants complied fully, delivering what they thought were lethal shocks, revealing the power of authority to override personal morality.  Left to our own devices, if we have power, we tend to exercise it, not restrain it.  What Milgram proved was how easily the Pharaoh within can emerge from the shadows of the human subconscious.

As Professor Turner, the Israeli physician, puts it: “[C]ruelty dehumanizes everyone — victim and perpetrator.  To fight [it], we must choose humanity, even when it’s hard.  The Torah teaches us we were slaves in Egypt [in order] to learn compassion, not to repeat oppression.”¹⁰

The Torah teaches us this, again and again and again, in a thousand different ways, because it must be said, again and again and again, in a thousand different ways.  Not just the general principle, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but the detailed, practical applications, the innumerable variations on a theme:

• When you see your enemy’s ox wandering astray, return it to him.¹¹ 

• When you see your enemy’s donkey lying helpless under its burden, raise it with him.¹²

• When a poor person resides among you, do not harden your heart; do not close your hand, but give generously.¹³

• When you lend money to the poor, exact no interest.¹⁴  

• When you reap the harvest of your land, leave the corners of your field unpicked and do not gather the fallen sheaves; leave these for the poor, the needy, the stranger.¹⁵

• When foreigners reside among you, do them no wrong; treat them as natives born among you.¹⁶

• Do not afflict a widow or an orphan.¹⁷

• Do not detest an Egyptian, for you were an alien in his land.¹⁸

• You must not remain indifferent.¹⁹

Beware the Pharaoh within.  For cruelty can seize hold of any human being, even the best of us.

Yom Kippur calls us to this awareness:  that any one of us has the power to cause hurt and harm, to be cruel.  We all do it, all the time — and worse, we do it to the people we love the most, over whom we have the power to inflict pain, because we know all their vulnerabilities.  

The Pharaoh within speaks not in ancient Egyptian but in a universal language that each of us knows all too well.  The Pharaoh within is quick with a snarky putdown, laughs at another’s weakness, withholds forgiveness, bears grudges.  The Pharaoh within mocks others on social media, abuses other drivers with unwarranted road rage, refuses to give the benefit of the doubt.  The Pharaoh within turns an indifferent eye to the plea of the needy, dismisses a coworker’s ideas, leaves messes for others to clean up.  The Pharaoh within doesn’t think twice before humiliating another person.  The Pharaoh within spreads gossip, rolls eyes at others’ earnestness, berates and belittles.  

The Pharaoh within is a real jerk!

The Rabbis had a name for this Pharaoh within.  They called it yetzer ha-ra, the “Bad Inclination” — meaning an inborn attribute, part of our human nature.  The Rabbis associated the yetzer ha-ra with appetite, ambition, desire — natural human impulses that can be destructive even as they also lead us to build and create and even procreate.  

But the dark side of the yetzer ha-ra concerned the Sages, and Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, a leading figure of the 19th century Jewish Mussar movement which focused on character development, explained why:

“The human soul is a battlefield where the yetzer ha-ra wages war through arrogance and indifference to others’ pain. Just as one must wage war against external enemies to protect the nation, so must one uproot these traits from the heart through constant vigilance and Torah study.  Cruelty toward the weak is the yetzer ha-ra‘s greatest weapon, for it severs the soul from God’s compassion.”²⁰

We’ve come here on this Yom Kippur, this day of ultimate reckoning, feeling smaller and more helpless than ever.  Our powerlessness in the face of tyranny, our impotence in the face of large-scale cruelty, mocks us.

But we might, in this new year, yet summon the moral steel to get back to keeping the Pharaohs — within and without — from getting the best of us.

Because if there’s anything we know from the Torah’s great story of our people, it’s that even a Pharaoh is no match for the power of our God, and that as surely as a Pharaoh dwells in every human heart, so too God, the One whom our tradition names Ha-Rachaman, the Compassionate One; Yetzer Tov, the Good Inclination; and, this, the most beautiful of Divine names:

:הָרֹפֵא לִשְׁבוּרֵי לֵב וּמְחַבֵּשׁ לְעַצְּבוֹתָם

The Healer of the Broken-Hearted, Who binds their wounds.²¹

Dear God, enter our broken hearts.  

Bind our wounds, our sources of sorrow and pain.  

Let our compassion curb our capacity for cruelty.

Remind us that whenever and wherever vulnerable people are suffering, that is our business.

Open our hearts to a Torah that teaches:  You cannot remain indifferent.

We have to be the answer to the deficit of love in our shabby and hurting world.

It all starts here.  

There’s no time to lose. 

• G’mar Chatimah Tovah

1. Phrase attributed to author Adam Serwer. ↩︎
2.  Exodus 1:13. ↩︎
3. Exodus 1:14. ↩︎
4. Exodus 1:22a. ↩︎
5. Comments by Professor Turner taken from “What Matters Now to Prof. Dan Turner: Treating our enemies humanely makes us human,” What Matters Now (podcast), August 13, 2025. ↩︎
6. Leviticus 19:18. ↩︎
7. Turner, Ibid. ↩︎
8. Angela Matthew, “USAID cuts have caused more than 330,000 deaths worldwide, BU professor estimates,” published in The Washington Post, July 1, 2025, reposted online at https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/media/som/news/news-logos/BU-researcher-warns-of-367,000-deaths-from-halted-USAID-programs_.pdf. ↩︎
9. Leviticus 25:43, 25:46, and 25:53. ↩︎
10. Turner, Ibid. ↩︎
11. Exodus 23:4. ↩︎
12. Exodus 23:5. ↩︎
13. Deuteronomy 15:7. ↩︎
14. Exodus 22:25. ↩︎
15. Leviticus 23:22. ↩︎
16. Leviticus 19:33-34. ↩︎
17. Exodus 22:22. ↩︎
18. Deuteronomy 23:7. ↩︎
19. Deuteronomy 22:3.  Passages cited here encompass direct and partial citations as well as paraphrases. ↩︎
20. R. Simcha Zissel Ziv, Hokhmah u-Musar, Vol. 2. ↩︎
21. Psalms 147:3. ↩︎

Sermon Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York, October 1, 2025

My senior year at Amherst College, I studied the Civil War with Professor David W. Blight, now a Yale historian whose biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. This summer, I found his Civil War class online as a free podcast — a reminder that we live in an age in which the boundless annals of human knowledge are only a click away.  

At the same time, objective truth is under siege.  Feelings posture as facts.  Armchair experts peddle opinions as axioms, amplified by our echo chambers.  AI, capable of crunching vast arrays of data, can “hallucinate” plausible falsehoods and convincingly pose as a person posting inflammatory garbage online.  Social media has produced a condition that philosopher Sam Harris likens to “mass psychosis.”  On Instagram and TikTok, Hamas propaganda competes for eyeballs with makeup tutorials.  It’s… a lot.  

So I appreciated that Blight published a timely op-ed this spring, taking to task a recent executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” in which he asserts:  

“The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom — in the form of curious minds — of anyone who seeks to understand our country by visiting museums or historic sites.”  

“Even if you agree with some of the executive order’s positions,” he adds, “do we want our cultural centers and repositories of America’s history to be subjected to a litmus test that requires history to be presented in the most positive terms?”  

“Many Americans do care about the country’s past,” he notes; “they can handle the truth: conflicts, tragedies, redemptions and all. They actually prefer complexity to patriotic straitjackets.”¹

I read this, and thought, “Well, can we?  Do we?”  And I recalled A Few Good Men (1992), in which Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessep roars at Tom Cruise’s Lt. Kaffee one of the iconic lines in cinematic history:  “You can’t handle the truth!” 

So the title of my sermon this evening is:  You Can’t Handle the Truth!  (Or Can You?)

Now of course no political party has a monopoly on truth — or lies.  Both sides have asked us to ignore our eyes and ears and brains, whether about our elected officials’ fitness for office, the origins of Covid, or our nation’s fraught history with indigenous peoples, slavery, civil rights, women’s rights, antisemitism, the LGBTQ  community, immigrants… you know; it’s a long list.  Truth should not be beholden to political agendas. Yet the assault on objective reality at this moment feels particularly fierce and consequential.

This, in and of itself, is nothing new — surely we are not the first generation to have reason not to believe everything the government tells us.  Consider the German-Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.  Imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933 for researching antisemitism, it is she who observed that “The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed.”  In her landmark opus The Origins of Totalitarianism from 1951, Arendt asserted that authoritarian regimes thrive when “the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”  She warned not only about a regime’s assault on truth, but also about the public unwittingly going along, gradually becoming unable to tell truth from lies.  Sound familiar?

I believe civilization’s future hinges on whether we pursue truth with rigor. So tonight, I ask not how politicians should act, but how we should respond — as Jews.

Maimonides said:  ושמע האמת ממי שאמרה, “Accept Truth from whatever source it comes,” a remark made in order to substantiate his appeal not only to traditional Jewish wisdom but also to philosophy and science.²  (Recall that Maimonides, who lived more than 800 years ago, was not only a rabbi but also a doctor, a fact that must have made his mother kvell.)

When religion and science clash, he taught, it’s our understanding of religion that needs updating — not empirical truth.  For him, pursuing truth was the ultimate religious act, glimpsing God’s “Active Intellect,” the animating force of the Universe.

This echoes U’netaneh Tokef, the signature prayer of the High Holy Days, which twice invokes emet, truth, in its opening verse: “Your throne is established in truth.  In truth, You are judge and plaintiff, counselor and witness.”  Many musical settings play up the word emet, truth, to underscore its centrality to the text and to Jewish theology.  (Fun fact: a few years back, a child born in our WRT family was given the name Emmet to honor the commanding way in which Cantor Stephen Merkel of blessed memory used to sing Emet in the U’netaneh Tokef.)  

Emet affirms order and meaning even amidst life’s chaos. When a loved one dies, we say, בָּרוּךְ דַּיַּן הָאֱמֶת, “Blessed are You, Judge of Truth,” acknowledging death as part of God’s eternal plan.  Death may just be the one true thing we know in this life. 

The Talmud puts it this way:  חוֹתָמוֹ שֶׁל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא אֱמֶת, “The seal of the Holy One is Emet – Truth.”³  Seeking truth is a way to draw nearer to God.  It illuminates the Divine presence in the everyday workings of the world.  God and Truth, Ultimate Reality, are indistinguishable from each other.

At the same time, the truth hurts, doesn’t it?  A world in which everyone spoke the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, all the time, would be annoying at best, and — to tell the truth — unlivable.  Judaism gets this.  Sometimes, other values, good Jewish values, must take precedence.  Lying to save a life (pikuach nefesh) is not only permitted but mandated.  Tact — which is really just socially enforced lying — is almost always a good idea, especially when it will spare another person from embarrassment.  Judaism considers humiliating another person tantamount to shedding blood.⁴  It’s traumatic, so liberties should be taken with the truth in order to avoid it.   

Judaism even encourages a so-called “white lie” for the sake of marital and household harmony, what we call shalom bayit or “shalom in the home.”⁵  The social order depends to some degree on kicking truth out of the room, to make some room for compassion. 

A midrash imagines the angels debating God’s decision to create humankind.  They broke into factions, some saying: “Don’t do it!” and others saying, “Go for it!”  

“You should totally create human beings for the sake of kindness and righteousness,” went one argument, “because they will be capable of such incredible compassion and nobility.”  The other group countered, “For the sake of peace, and especially, if You care at all about truth, please, God, whatever you do, do not create people.  They will mess everything up with their fighting and lies.”

So what did the Holy One do?  God took truth and cast it to the ground, even over the objections of the angels who pointed out that “God’s very seal is truth.”⁶  (The angels were great at quoting Talmud.)  Ever since, human beings have been amazing at a lot of things, but telling the truth, or hearing the truth, have not been foremost among them.

As for why God chose to exile truth, the Talmud never says.  

Maybe because truth is our greatest struggle.         

Can we handle the truth?  Not so much.  

Illusions about ourselves or our beliefs are comforting, difficult to give up. When confronted with hard truths, we cling to our security blankets, avoid the cold, hard facts, blame others.  Combine this with the forces presently arrayed against truth — pervasive propaganda, algorithms curating everything we see and hear and read — and we risk a world in which any podcaster with a mic can sway millions with emotionally charged falsehoods. 

The problem isn’t just the powerful; it’s us, if we don’t question everything we’re fed.

This isn’t abstract.  Lives and livelihoods are at stake.  As the planet heats up, there are lots of ways to formulate thoughtful policies that acknowledge the delicate balance among industry, environment, and economy.  But denying the science will lead only to ignorant decisions.  When conspiracy theorists with no medical training dismiss accepted science, the best of our intellectual capital will be alienated and bring their skills elsewhere.  Even more, when scientific truth is denied or ignored, diseases will spread, and the vulnerable — children, the elderly, the poor — will suffer and die.  My mom’s life was saved in 1955 by the polio vaccine, available just weeks before her diagnosis.  For me — indeed, for all of us — this is personal, not political.

Judaism’s embrace of science and reason, unusual if not unique among the world’s faith traditions, further amplified by Reform Judaism’s founders, like Rabbi Abraham Geiger, is one of its greatest strengths.  In 1836, Geiger criticized teaching biblical stories as fact, advocating for a “scientific” study of texts and critical reasoning over blind dogma.⁷  It is with Geiger as my inspiration that I have, throughout my rabbinate, tried to hold fast to this maxim:  “Never teach children anything they will later have to unlearn.”  

This relentless pursuit of truth must be restored, especially in academia, where truth — and Jews — sometimes feel exiled.

Many of you share a feeling that along with truth, we Jews have been, in a sense, cast out from the same venerated institutions that generations of American Jews held up as the pinnacle of merit and achievement.

Over the last year, as a proud alum, I’ve joined the recently formed Amherst Alumni Alliance Against Antisemitism (that’s five A’s if you’re counting).  In what is either a bizarre coincidence or proof of God having a sense of humor, I am one of at least thirteen (!) practicing rabbis to have graduated from Amherst College, a fact that defies statistical probability.  (I guess something must be in the water up there because Rabbi Platcow attended UMass just down the street and look what happened to her.)  

Over the past year, I’ve enjoyed regular dialogue with the College President, the Alliance, my fellow alumni rabbis, and, best of all, a wonderful group of Jewish students making their way through the complicated post-October-7th landscape on campus, with whom I got to share a memorable Shabbat in March as the invited guest of Amherst Hillel.  

That visit bolstered my hope in the next generation of Jewish learners and leaders.  These students inspired me with their open-mindedness, their sense of belonging among the Jewish People, their love of Jewish tradition, their willingness to be “out and proud” as Zionists, and their probing thoughtfulness in negotiating the complexities of their Zionism while a brutal war in Gaza rages.  If these students represent our future, even in part, we ought to devote our energies to strengthening their resolve and their opportunities to thrive on campus as Jews and Zionists, and not fall into panic or despair.

Thanks to the concerted efforts of concerned alumni, positive steps taken at Amherst include the Board rejecting divestment from Israel, adopting clearer protest policies, holding mandatory trainings and faculty workshops on antisemitism.

But challenges remain.  Amherst has a small Jewish student body, few Jewish Studies faculty, and no Jewish Studies major.  A course on the History of Israel has not been offered since 2016.  Moreover, a narrative that pervasively frames Israel as a “settler-colonial state” can be found across curricula, including in my beloved English department.  Truth emerges through repeated testing, skepticism, and refining ideas based on evidence.  Without a robust exposure to viewpoint diversity, how can students test ideas to find truth?

Reviving “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” on our campuses shouldn’t involve government overreach or financial penalties that harm research and exploit antisemitism for partisan ends.  Instead, alumni like us can hold our institutions accountable.  We can interrogate curricula, support Jewish students, and demand rigorous debate.  What I have learned from my experience over the last year is that any one of us who cares about what’s happening on the campuses where we once studied, or where our children and grandchildren presently attend, has the ability to get involved and insist that our academic institutions focus their mission on the pursuit of truth.

Can we handle the truth?  Out there, truth is under relentless assault — in the halls of academia, where facts are twisted to fit the ideological agendas of the left; in the public square, where they are subjugated to the ideological agendas of the right; and, of course, online, where they are just twisted.

But the battle for truth begins not out there, but in here.  On Yom Kippur, as we turn inward in teshuvah, we confront hard truths about ourselves — the flaws we’d rather not bring to light, the unspoken regrets, all the ways we’ve just missed the mark.  No hiding. No excuses. Just the truth.  

So many of life and literature’s great heroic figures pursued and learned the truth, even at great personal peril:  Socrates, Galileo, Malala Yousafsai, Hester Prynne, Luke Skywalker, Elphaba.

So many tragic figures just couldn’t handle the truth, to their ultimate ruin:  King Saul, King David, King Lear (it’s a lot of kings come to think of it); Javert, Madame Bovary, Michael Corleone.

And now it’s Yom Kippur.  The day to face the truth.  It’s in the unfiltered, unflinching, inward gaze that true growth begins, paving the way for repentance, renewal, and a heart made whole. 

Then we can emerge with integrity made stronger, our deeds more aligned with our values, ready to carry the light of our truest selves into a new year and a world starving for honesty.  

After all, we can’t really expect truth out there if we won’t face the truth in here.  

When the angels saw that God, putting together all the pieces that would build a human being, had cast truth out, they protested.  “You would undermine Your byword, Your very seal?!”  

They begged God to take Truth back. They screamed into the cosmic void:

!תַּעֲלֶה אֱמֶת מִן הָאָרֶץ

Let truth rise up from the ground!

This year, let’s help our better angels make this prayer come true.  

Let’s recommit to help truth rise up from the ground.  

Let’s get off of social media and spend more time reading books. 

Let’s have some good conversations with real people where we can respectfully debate well-considered ideas and maybe even concede that none of us has all the answers.

Let’s be more willing to hear the truth even when we don’t like the source.

Let’s look in the mirror and face what we see.

Let me leave you one of the truest things I know.

It comes from my considerable experience driving to Jewish cemeteries across the tri-state area:  

When you get lost, there’s no shame in asking for directions.

O God of Truth, whose seal is truth, guide us in truth.

We have lost our way. 

Help us find our way back home.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah

1. “Trump Cannot Win His War on History,” New York Times, March 31, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/opinion/trump-war-history.html ↩︎
2. Maimonides, Introduction to Shemonah Perakim (Eight Chapters).
   ↩︎
3. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 55a. ↩︎
4.  “כׇּל הַמַּלְבִּין פְּנֵי חֲבֵירוֹ בָּרַבִּים, כְּאִילּוּ שׁוֹפֵךְ דָּמִים” – Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 58b. ↩︎
5. See Midrash Vayikra Rabbah 9:9 on Genesis 18:13. ↩︎
6. Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 8:5, translated & adapted by J. Blake. ↩︎
7. Abraham Geiger, “The Youthful Rebel,” published in Michael A. Meyer and W. Gunther Plaut, editors, The Reform Judaism Reader: North American Documents.  New York: URJ Press, 2000, p. 7. ↩︎