Are we really being set up for success for this whole teshuvah business? We might commit to doing all the preparation—journaling, going to shul, talking to therapists, chatting with rabbis, calling up hurt family and friends, New Year’s resolutions, etc.—and it still feels inadequate. Am I actually morally transformed? I am some infinitesimally small fraction of a hypermodern, global, complex network. My actions bear consequences for people on the other side of the globe I will never meet and whose names I will never even know. I still need to bring teshuvah to bear on my most intimate relationships,  but is this millennia-old process suitable to the messiness and uncertainty of modern moral life?

This seemingly modern plague of angst and cynicism is actually described in ancient Jewish texts, albeit in different terms. A halakhah in reads:

הגוזל את הרבים חייב להחזיר לרבים. חמור גזל הרבים מגזל היחיד, שהגוזל את היחיד יכול לפייסו ולהחזיר לו גזילו, הגוזל את הרבים אין יכול לפייסן ולהחזיר להן גזילן.

One who steals from the masses is obligated to return [the object] to the masses. Stealing from the masses is more severe than stealing from just one individual, because one who steals from just one individual is able to appease that individual and return to him his stolen object. [In contrast,] one who steals from the masses is unable to appease them and to return to them their stolen objects.

This text addresses the severity of stealing from a broader community, which consists of many unknown people. Here are some contemporary examples: using an accessible parking space without a placard, holding onto a library book indefinitely, and riding the subway without paying the transit fare. These cases constitute theft from the masses in the broad sense—I don’t know my victims and have no idea how to make proper amends.

But once we identify the essential quality of this wrongdoing against unknown—and unknowable—victims, we can find more frequent occurrences than these. For instance, active or tacit engagement in political causes that, I’ve realized upon reflection, have actually had adverse impacts on others. Consumption of products that were produced in unethical and harmful ways. Actions taken that led to needless environmental devastation, felt by communities thousands of miles away. In trying to fathom the sheer number of unknown victims of my actions, whether in my own neighborhood or anywhere in the world, I might be convinced that I am truly awful and unworthy of teshuvah, thereby succumbing to an intense moral nihilism about my impact and the broader world.

Another passage from the Tosefta () has something powerful to say about this kind of response:

הגבאין והמוכסין תשובתן קשה, ומחזירין למכירין, והשאר עושין בהן צרכי רבים.     

“Charity and tax collectors—their teshuvah is hard. They return [stolen objects] to the people whom they know, and as for all the rest, they put it toward public needs.”

When this passage is cited in the Talmud (), Rashi makes clear that these are charity and tax collectors who defrauded the public and have no record of who they have wronged. The text affirms that their teshuvah is indeed hard. This simple wording from the Tosefta may be exactly the language we are looking for to describe our own situation: in modern society, our teshuvah is also hard. While not an endorsement of outright nihilism, there is a healthy acknowledgment of legitimate despair concerning living a righteous life in the face of moral complexity. Being in relationship with so many unknown people around the world is unfathomably hard; and despite our most serious efforts, teshuvah in that context is very hard, too.

Without dismissing or belittling this challenge, the Tosefta tempers this despair with a necessary measure of optimism. Even when teshuvah is hard, we must nonetheless return stolen items to the people whom we can identify as victims and give back broadly to public need. Rashi describes an example of the latter in which an individual helps build a cistern to provide fresh water to the community. While it may fall short of repaying the people I’ve specifically wronged, it enables me to engage in a kind of reparative mirror; I can positively and constructively engage in a moral act that will help people I don’t know and will never meet. This is a far cry from the heroic righting of wrongs I nobly imagined when I first embarked on this process. But it is something I can do and a deeply positive action worth holding onto.

In the spirit of these texts, bring this nuanced mindset entering into this holiday season: pursue teshuvah for all your wrongdoing, while being honest about the inexhaustible nature of this work. Be kind to yourself when acknowledging the many constraints and limits that lead to some moral failures and make up for them—however imperfectly—through heartfelt gestures of communal involvement and civic action. In short, turn teshuvah into a sacred opportunity to humbly affirm all the inherent joy and pain of what it means to live as human.

The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l). 

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Part of the JTS High Holiday Webinar Series, “Standing Together: Prayer, Presence, and the Power of Community”

This session is based on this essay in our current High Holiday Reader.

With Dr. David Kraemer, Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, JTS 

The Amidah for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur presents a striking, even radical, vision: a world where God alone reigns, where all people—Jewish and not—live in peace, and oppressive regimes vanish. In this vision, the Jewish people are neither erased nor centered. Instead, they are part of a broader human hope. 

As we prepare for the High Holidays, this is a thoughtful exploration of this universalist liturgical vision and what it asks of us today. In this webinar, Dr. David Kraemer, Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, JTS, guided us through the theological and ethical dimensions of the High Holiday Amidah. Drawing on themes from his recent book, Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora, Dr. Kraemer argued that diaspora life—far from being a compromise—is essential to realizing the Amidah’s expansive spiritual goals. It is through living among and engaging with our non-Jewish neighbors, he suggested, that we help bring this vision into the world. 

�鶹ԭ�� the Series

The High Holidays invite us into a season of profound reflection—not only on who we are as individuals, but on how we show up for one another and the world. This three-part webinar series explores the emotional and spiritual heart of this sacred time, focusing on the themes of vulnerability, responsibility, and connection. 

Together, we’ll consider what it means to pray with presence, to engage meaningfully with others—even across difference—and to see these days not just as a personal journey, but as a call to collective transformation. Whether you are returning to familiar rituals or seeking a new way in, this series offers space to reflect, connect, and prepare with intention. 

In our present-day communities, where we finish the Torah every year, the section of Leviticus that includes the curses naturally falls before Shavuot. Parashat Ki Tavo in Deuteronomy—where Moshe again offers the blessings and curses to the Israelites before they enter into the Land—also naturally falls before Rosh Hashanah in the calendar.

However, for the Jews of the Land of Israel, who in ancient times completed the Torah in three years, Ezra’s decree must have been quite jarring. Presumably, these communities would have had to take out a second Torah scroll and read the curses in addition to the parashah of the week on the Sabbaths before Rosh Hashanah and Shavuot.

At any rate, Ezra’s mandate presents us with a question: Why did Ezra believe it was critical that the Jewish people read the blessings and curses before Rosh Hashanah? Asked differently, in what ways might hearing this section of the Torah be important for our spiritual work during this season?

On the most visceral level, reading the blessings and curses at a time when we are focused on imagining new and nobler versions of ourselves and our communities highlights the stark consequences of our choices. If we make good choices, good things will happen. If we make poor choices—well, less good things await us. Our behavior and choices really do have consequences in the world. Using the liturgy to confront the darkness that is promised if we do not choose well may keep us on the right path. I think there is something to this, but I believe there is a richer and more meaningful connection between the blessings and curses and Rosh Hashanah.

The Talmud—in the name of Abaye—suggests a more optimistic answer to our question: “So that the year may end along with its curses.” As we finish the year, we read all of the curses—putting them behind us, as if to say, so should our troubles be behind us. Then we can begin the new year with a clean slate, fresh for our new ways of being in the world, without any negative baggage. Indeed, this is a lovely framing for the end of one year and the beginning of another. But I still believe there is more behind Ezra’s insistence on reading the blessings and curses in public as our communities move into Rosh Hashanah.

A curious geonic (7–10th century) tradition referenced by Maimonides provides deeper insight into Ezra’s decree. Most often, when we read the blessings and curses of Deuteronomy we experience them as promises of reward for loyalty to the Covenant and threats of violent consequences for rejecting God. However, Maimonides shares a tradition that conceptualizes the blessings and curses in a completely novel way.

Maimonides suggests that hearing the blessings and curses in Parashat Ki Tavo, which come when the Israelites are about to enter into the Land of Israel before the original conquest, constituted the fulfillment of an actual mitzvah! (Kelal shelishi in Sefer Hamitzvot) This is a startling assertion, transforming the blessings and curses from a series of promises and threats to the level of commandment. But what was this mitzvah?

In a very provocative remark, the Talmud suggests that prior to entering into the Land of Israel, the nation as a whole was held accountable only for the public misdeeds of individuals. If a person sinned in private, only the individual who misbehaved was held accountable. But as the nation prepared to cross the Jordan River, something changed. From that moment onward, the entire community of Israel became culpable for even the private misdeeds of other people ()! We are commanded to recognize our interconnectedness. Blessings would be earned and experienced by the group. Communal calamity would be the price for individual destructive decisions. Thus when the Israelites stood at Mount Gerizim and Mount Eval, they heard the blessings that await those who listen to God’s commandments and the punishments promised to those who disobey—but they also heard a message that transcended all of these specifics. The entire nation was asked to understand itself as radically interconnected and to appreciate the imperative that emerges from this realization.

The mitzvah embedded in these verses of the promises and curses, then, is the mitzvah of arevut: seeing the profound interconnectedness of the Jewish people. Each Jew is the “guarantor” (arev) of every other Jew. That is, each Jew is fundamentally responsible for all other Jews. Through the blessings and curses of Parashat Ki Tavo, the Torah is saying, we are in this project of living together.

Areveut—feeling and acting on a sense of responsibility for those around us—in Judaism does not fall under the category of altruism. Helping someone else is not an act of kindness. It is bound up in a fundamental responsibility that we must all feel toward others. Just as I am responsible for my own ethical life, I am responsible for that of others as well. If my neighbor falls and fails, it is my pain and my failure too. And if I receive blessing, it is not simply because I as an individual have earned it; the group also shares responsibility for my success.

I like to think that these ideas stand behind the reasons for Ezra’s decree to read the blessings and curses before Rosh Hashanah. At a time when many of us are focused on our own individual growth and betterment, we are reminded of the profound interconnectedness of all our communities and lives. I can’t be a better person if I ignore the state of the individuals in my community. This is the mitzvah of arevut that I personally need to hear as I move into this holiday season.

This commentary was originally published in 2017.

The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Download Sources

Part of the JTS High Holiday Webinar Series, “Standing Together: Prayer, Presence, and the Power of Community”

This session is based on this essay in our current High Holiday Reader.

We begin our High Holiday webinar series with guidance for how to engage more meaningfully in the prayer part of High Holiday services. Famously long and repetitive, services on these days may sometimes feel overwhelming, boring, or even alienating. In this session, Rabbi Jan Uhrbach, Director of the Block / Kolker Center for Spiritual Arts at JTS, offered practical strategies for participating more fully, and insight into what these services really ask of us and what they offer—especially in tumultuous uncertain times. Along the way, Rabbi Uhrbach will share some of her favorite passages in the Conservative Movement’s Machzor Lev Shalem, for which she was a member of the Editorial Committee. Whether you’re a seasoned prayergoer or showing up with hesitation, this session will help you begin the High Holiday season with openness, intention, and agency.

�鶹ԭ�� the Series

The High Holidays invite us into a season of profound reflection—not only on who we are as individuals, but on how we show up for one another and the world. This three-part webinar series explores the emotional and spiritual heart of this sacred time, focusing on the themes of vulnerability, responsibility, and connection. Together, we’ll consider what it means to pray with presence, to engage meaningfully with others—even across difference—and to see these days not just as a personal journey, but as a call to collective transformation. Whether you are returning to familiar rituals or seeking a new way in, this series offers space to reflect, connect, and prepare with intention.

Mondays, September 8, 15, 29 
1:00–2:00 p.m. ET  

The High Holidays invite us into a season of profound reflection—not only on who we are as individuals, but on how we show up for one another and the world. This three-part webinar series explores the emotional and spiritual heart of this sacred time, focusing on the themes of vulnerability, responsibility, and connection. 

Together, we’ll consider what it means to pray with presence, to engage meaningfully with others—even across difference—and to see these days not just as a personal journey, but as a call to collective transformation. 

Whether you are returning to familiar rituals or seeking a new way in, this series offers space to reflect, connect, and prepare with intention. 

All of the session in this series connect with essays from our current High Holiday Reader, “To Be More Fully Human: Reflections on Hope for the Days of Awe 5786.” The specific essays are linked below.

Sources for Rabbi Jan Uhrbach’s September 8th Session

Mondays, September 8, 15, and 29
1:00 – 2:00 pm ET

The High Holidays invite us into a season of profound reflection—not only on who we are as individuals, but on how we show up for one another and the world. This three-part webinar series explores the emotional and spiritual heart of this sacred time, focusing on the themes of vulnerability, responsibility, and connection.

Together, we’ll consider what it means to pray with presence, to engage meaningfully with others—even across difference—and to see these days not just as a personal journey, but as a call to collective transformation. Whether you are returning to familiar rituals or seeking a new way in, this series offers space to reflect, connect, and prepare with intention.

Sources for Chancellor Shuly Rubin Schwartz’s September 29, 2025 Session

Vayera

All Class of 2025 Senior Sermons

Beyond the realm of prayer in particular, this elusive “right relationship” between persons and words is central to our ability to have relationships at all. “Words have become cliches, objects of absolute abuse. They have ceased to be commitments. We forget that many of our moral relationships are based upon a sense of the sacredness of certain words…”

What Heschel worried about in 1958 is even more true and even more concerning in 2024. Human communication, the commitment to taking words seriously and to viewing the words we write and speak as serious commitments, has become even more imperiled in an age where our words are mediated through the technologies of social media, artificial intelligence, and the crippling social phenomena of political polarization and widespread mistrust.

Heschel’s sense that there is a deeper ethical significance to the notion of taking prayer seriously echoes a statement found in Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers). Pirke Avot is an ancient compendium of moral aphorisms and a foundational work of Jewish ethical thought. Throughout Pirke Avot, special attention is given to the power of words. In Avot 2:18, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, the ancient Jewish rabbi and mystic, turns to the words we speak in prayer, and cautions us to be “extremely careful in… prayer.” Seriousness prayer, according to Rabbi Shimon, is linked to compassion and mercy. He concludes his statement about taking prayer seriously with a moral imperative to be a virtuous person. For Rabbi Shimon, being a virtuous person entails being self-reflective and true to ourselves. Virtue begins with “not being a bad person in our own eyes.” Rabbi Shimon thus connects taking prayer seriously with an ethics of compassion that begins with an ethics of honesty and self-awareness.

Heschel’s 1958 lecture on prayer builds on this ancient rabbinic tradition connecting serious prayer with a deeper moral seriousness. He argues that taking seriously the words in our liturgy is a step in a broader process of reclaiming the gravity of words. This means that we must know what the words in our liturgy mean, and, when we say them, that we “must learn to establish the right relationship between the heart and the word we are about to utter.” From prayer and liturgy, Heschel believed this morally important relationship to words would permeate our lives more broadly.

This High Holiday season is an ideal time to work on reclaiming our relationship with words, beginning with the liturgy in our Mahzor. To that end, I want to call attention to a liturgical poem that appears in the Amidah on both Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, a series of three paragraphs that each begin with the word “��’v������” (ובכן) Typically translated as “and therefore” or “so then,” I leave the word untranslated, because according to an old Jewish tradition it is a much more significant word: not a conjunction, but a name of God, or, in a similar but alternative tradition, it is the alphanumerical equivalent of a phrase that refers to the divine-human relationship itself.

These paragraphs were introduced into Jewish liturgy in the geonic period, as attested by siddurim from that era. The first of these three paragraphs begins “��’v������ ten pahdekha” (ובכן תן פחדך). It was this very paragraph, where we envision a human world completely united in its awe and fear of God, that inspired the Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto, who spent Yom Kippur in the year 1911 in a Jewish synagogue in Morocco, to describe, in The Idea of the Holy, the Yom Kippur liturgy as “a liturgy unusually rich” in hymns that express his concept of “the numinous,” or the profound and non-rational experience of feeling the presence of God as a tremendous mystery.

In this paragraph, it is the fear and awe of God that leads “all of God’s creatures” to collectively submit to God, and to become “bonded together as one” to do God’s will “with a full heart.” For Heschel, this very paragraph in the High Holiday liturgy reflects the broader essence of all prayer, in general, not just the High Holidays. Heschel sees this as a prayer in which we are trying “to make God immanent,” to bring God’s presence into this world. He writes:

The true motivation for prayer is… the sense of not being at home in the universe. Is there a sensitive heart that could stand indifferent and feel at home in the sight of so much evil and suffering, in the face of countless failures to live up to the will of God? … That experience gains intensity in the amazing awareness that God Himself is not at home in the universe. He is not at home in a universe where His will is defied and where His kingship is denied. God is in exile; the world is corrupt. The universe itself is not at home. To pray means to bring God back into the world, to establish His kingship for a second at least.

Heschel sees the “��’v������ ten pahdekha” paragraph in the High Holiday liturgy as an emblematic expression of the ultimate aim of all prayer, at “the most important moment of the Jewish liturgy.” The payoff comes in the next paragraph, “��’v������ ten kavod.” After we have come together to bring God’s presence back into this world, we feel a sense of dignity (kavod) and good hope (tikvah tovah) for the future; there is “happiness in the land and joy in the city.”

Let this new year, 5785, be a year in which we all learn, once again, to take seriously the sacred value of words. We can learn this value by taking seriously and paying attention to the words we say in prayer, which reflect, in turn, the very essence of prayer. Let us turn to our Siddur and Mahzor and pay attention to the words and their meanings and pray them with seriousness.

When we turn from the High Holiday season back into daily life, let 5785 be a year in which we speak to one another with words that are carefully considered – words that we can truly own and stand behind. This involves engaging in deep and extended conversation – not the kind of conversation that happens in fits and spurts on social media – and with words that are our own, whose authorship has not been outsourced to technology. This involves listening carefully to the words of others, giving them the benefit of the doubt, asking questions for clarification, assuming good will, and when we disagree, expressing that disagreement with frankness and honesty, but also with thoughtfulness and respect, in a way that preserves relationships. When we do this, we can hope that others will do the same for us, and, over time, if we continue to take words seriously both in prayer and in daily relationships, we can become a unified community, even across difference. And perhaps we will experience again that good hope, dignity, and joy that we see in the “��’v������” prayers – for the Jewish people together with the broader community of humanity.

The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).