"No Bad Jews" — R'Steven Yom Kippur Sermon

This sermon was delivered at our 5785 Yom Kippur service.

****

For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar, and see our Accessibility & Inclusion page for information about our venues. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook for more updates.

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

When I’m out and about and other members of the tribe find out what I do for work, nine times out of ten they’ll tell me that they are a “bad Jew.” It’s become a sort of ritual when I meet new people. “Oh, you’re a rabbi? Well, I’m Jewish… but, like a bad Jew.” And what they usually mean by that label is that they haven’t gone to services since they became b’mitzvah, or they love bacon, or they use their phone on Shabbat, or that the only reason they’re at synagogue on Yom Kippur is to make their mother happy – which is to say, they don’t measure up to the rubric of traditionally observant Judaism (they are, of course, assuming that I would do well by those standards – which I often don’t). The term finds its origins in 19th-century Germany, in the rift between early reformers and an emerging orthodoxy; each side accused the other of being “bad Jews,” either by betraying tradition for assimilation or by forgoing progress in favor of fundamentalism. This label implies there is some sort of litmus test for determining Jewishness – and whether you’re doing it right.

We begin this holiday with the recitation of Kol Nidrei, asking for permission to pray together even if we might be counted among the avaryanim: a word that means “people who have transgressed,” but could also be translated as “sinners” or “bad Jews.” And if we’re honest, that includes all of us. Each of us comes here flawed, in need of comfort and repair – perhaps this year more than most. And today, I want to talk about this idea of the “bad Jew” because it’s not just a phrase we apply to ourselves in moments of self-deprecating humor with a rabbi – it’s one I’m seeing Jews apply to each other to define who is and who is not welcome in our communities.

Reflecting on her book – aptly titled Bad Jews – Emily Tamkin notes that groups are held together by stories. Stories tell us about where we come from, point to where we are going, and explain who we are. This is one of the reasons we come back to the Torah over and over again; it’s the foundational narrative of the Jewish people. But what happens if you don’t fit comfortably into one of these stories? “We have this reality,” Tamkin explains, “Of stories that don’t quite work for people and people who don’t quite work for stories.” The “bad Jew” is someone who doesn’t see themselves reflected in the narrative that is being told about our people. The thing is, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the story is true or not. Here’s an example that might speak to some of you right now: If you think that most people in this room know how to read Hebrew, and you don’t know how to read Hebrew, then you might start to think that you’re a “bad Jew” – even though the truth is that you’re in very good company.

The “bad Jew” is also someone who has been told by others that the story of our community doesn’t include them. This is the problem with the way that the label is being used today. It’s more pointed. More intentionally painful. It conveys the idea that the way you’re doing this Jewish thing is wrong (maybe even morally wrong). Which is hard to hear because if you’re doing this Jewish thing at all, you clearly care about it. Our people are no longer locked in the ghetto. You have a choice, and you’re choosing to opt in. But then someone looks at you, at the way you’re claiming Judaism, and says you’re a “bad Jew.” Despite your best effort, you’ve been voted off the island. You’ve been kicked out. You’ve been canceled.

Although excommunication may not feel native to Judaism, it was once practiced as a form of punishment for sins that were particularly damaging but maybe not so egregious that they warranted the death penalty. Herem, which means to ban or banish someone, is only briefly mentioned in the Torah but expanded upon by the rabbis. They mention twenty-four transgressions that demand herem, mostly antisocial in nature, such as publicly shaming someone or possessing an object that might cause harm (the rabbis’ examples are a rabid dog or broken ladder). They also include intentionally leading others to sin, like sneaking pork on the plate of someone who keeps kosher. Once the subject of herem, a person was cut out of their community; other Jews could no longer associate with them.

We’ve mostly done away with this practice, although some Orthodox communities still use it to discourage heresy (famously, Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan – the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism – was subject to herem in 1945 for publishing a prayer book that altered the traditional liturgy). There are without question Jews who do bad things, but I’m grateful that our community has turned to other forms of seeking accountability and reparation for the harm we have done. At least until now. The label “bad Jew,” and others like it, seem to be a return to herem, a way of cutting down and cutting out people we don’t agree with. But what this kind of name-calling is actually doing is cutting us off from one another, at precisely the moment when we need each other most.

A few months ago, I mustered the courage to look at my DMs (for those who are not on social media – and honestly, good for you – DMs are private “direct messages” people can send you on Instagram and other platforms). I had been avoiding them for a while, given the political and social climate of the country since October 7. I use Instagram to share my sermons (@ravsteven if you’re not following), and I knew people had responded to them. Admittedly, I tend to speak from the heart about these things and have used this pulpit over the past year to preach a consistent message that we must never lose sight of the humanity of our fellow Jews, or of Palestinians, or of any other human being. That we continue to insist that peace between us is possible because the alternatives are too terrible to bear. This all seems intuitive to me, but I know this isn’t what some folks want to hear from their rabbi. So I poured myself a glass of wine, sat down on my couch, and unlocked my phone.

Here’s what I found. One person called me a kapo. Another told me I have blood on my hands. One person said I was a Zionist (and not in a nice way), while another said I was an anti-Zionist (also not in a nice way). I was called an antisemite. An apologist for the IDF. A Hamas sympathizer. A self-hating Jew. A fake Jew. A bad Jew.

Perhaps it was naive of me to think that Jews could resist the polarization that has cleaved so many other communities in two. Here at Mishkan, but also within American Jewry writ large, we (mostly) watched from the sidelines as opinions on climate change, or abortion access, or vaccines became irreconcilable differences. We certainly had our arguments – but we stuck together, conceiving of Judaism as a “Big Tent” that could hold us all. I think that we were able to buck the trend of polarization for so long because we are the inheritors of an interpretive tradition whose foundational text, the Talmud, is a record of the rabbis’ disagreements. We value multiple voices being placed side by side. We love to argue, yet we are committed to coexistence. The Talmud contains over 300 debates between the students of Hillel and Shammai, two of our greatest sages. They couldn’t agree on anything. Yet we are told that, even though they held different opinions on the laws of marriage itself, they still encouraged their children to wed. The rabbis hold this up as a living example of the prophet Zechariah’s exhortation: he’emet v’ha’shalom ehavu, love truth – but love peace, equally (Yevamot 14b).

But after October 7, something changed. I have sat with many of you as you’ve mourned broken friendships, relatives you no longer talk to, neighbors you avoid. We’ve lost our tolerance for debate, our ability to speak to each other across differences of identity and opinion. What I’ve heard over and over again is that, in this moment, the stakes are just too high. And I understand. I get it. If the State of Israel, and by extension the seven million Jews who live there, is under existential threat – the stakes are too high. If seven million Palestinians, and their hope for a state of their own, are in the crosshairs of violent messianic ambitions – the stakes are too high. If inaction means our destruction – the stakes are too high. If indifference abets genocide – the stakes are too high. If this is a battle for the soul of the Jewish people and the survival of our tradition – the stakes are too high.

On Rosh Ha’Shanah, Rabbi Lizzi spoke about grief; that rather than letting it isolate us from one another, we can allow it to bind and heal us – if we muster the courage to turn to each other and ask mah lach, “what’s troubling you?” and then actually listen to that person’s heartbreak. Today, I want to speak to you about anger: how it can be used as a tool to tear us apart and tear us down – or how it can be the force that moves us from apathy to action, together.

Regarding anger, the rabbis identify four temperaments (Pirkei Avot 5:11). A person who angers easily and is appeased easily. A person who is difficult to anger, and is also difficult to please. A person who is difficult to anger, but appeased easily. And a person who is easy to anger, but difficult to please. For the first person (easily angered, easily appeased) they teach that his loss is greater than his gain; although he is easily mollified, the fact that he is quick to anger makes him difficult to be around. Regarding the second person (difficult to anger, difficult to please) they teach that her gain is greater than her loss. While she may not be easy to placate, it’s also hard to upset her in the first place; her patience outweighs her tendency to hold a grudge. But I want us to focus on the latter two. The rabbis teach that the person who is difficult to anger but easy to please – this is a hasid, a pious individual; and the person who is easy to anger but difficult to please – this is a rasha, a wicked individual.

I think a lot of us are raised to fear anger. At least when I was a kid, the lesson was that anger is something we should avoid. And for too many of us, this warning was reinforced by watching its consequences at home. I know some in this room bear its scars, physical and emotional. As a result, what we fail to learn is that what makes anger “good” or “bad” is not in how it’s felt, but how it is acted upon.

The rabbis understand that feeling anger is an essential part of being human. This is why the hasid, the pious person, is still capable of being enraged; they may be difficult to anger, but it’s not impossible for them to reach their boiling point. The 13th-century moralist Rabbeinu Yonah teaches that sometimes a person of faith needs to be angry l’kinat HaShem, out of devotion to God. Anger helps us identify injustice. It points to a wrong that has been committed. This is the prophetic voice of our tradition. Psychologists call this justified anger, a sense of moral outrage at a world that is not as it should be.

During rabbinical school, I did a chaplaincy rotation at a care facility for chronically ill and disabled adults. My supervisor often said that anger is a lifeforce. It is our patients reminding us that they are people, not problems to be solved. It is a demand for dignity in a system that strips them of their privacy and their agency. And for some it was an indictment against the very fact that they were hospitalized, when they still had so much life left to live.

I was reminded of what my supervisor said in the months following October 7. There was an immense chasm of grief, widened each day by the news out of Israel and Palestine. But there was also so much anger. And for good reason. Hundreds had been taken hostage. Thousands were dead and tens-of-thousands more were dying. Jewish pain seemed to have become the exception for global sympathy. And yet despite countless prayers and platitudes, no one had the political will to temper the violence being inflicted on Palestinians either. And here, in Chicago, we had become embroiled in divisive resolutions about what was happening overseas, while the rise of anti-Jewish and anti-Arab hate at our doorstep and the psychic toll this tragedy had taken on our communities was not being addressed in any meaningful way by the people who sat in City Hall.

How could we not be angry? While grief reminded us of what we had lost, rage oriented us toward the wrongs that had caused those losses. It moved us from sitting shiva to marching in the streets. It reminded us that we are alive and that, while we are alive, we must use the time we’re given to fight for a reality different from the one we’re living in. I saw anger compel us to action in ways that felt meaningful and important. But I also watched anger take its toll on our wellbeing and the health of our communities.

I want to return to the hasid, the one who is difficult to anger and easy to appease, and the rasha, who is easy to anger and difficult to appease. I don’t think they’re different people. The rabbis meant them to be archetypes, in the Jungian sense of the word, models of identity and personality encoded within each of us. And so who we become when we feel anger, is who we choose to be.

I’m going to be honest. This past year, I saw a lot of us become the rasha. Easy to anger. Difficult to please. Otherwise reasonable people became quickly enraged – about everything; not just the heartbreaking headlines of death and destruction, but every post, every statement, every newsletter, op-ed, or sermon that they consumed. People became unyielding about what should and should not be said. Words like “self-defense” or “ceasefire” or “genocide” became a litmus test for who could be trusted. And as we turned toward the people and places that matched us word for word (and away from the people and places that said something we did not like), our opinions became more imperious. People started to draw increasingly smaller circles around themselves: on this side of the line, the right side of history; on that side, the wrong one. These lines divided communities. They separated friends and families. They put us at odds with our neighbors.

The anger of the rasha quickly turns difference into a reason for distrust. Justified by our grief and fueled by our pain, it crowds out our curiosity, our compassion, and our capacity to be collaborative. We find ourselves asking: How can people be willfully ignorant of the wrongs that I see so clearly? How can they be so unmoved? If only people thought like me, if only they saw it the way I do – then maybe we could fix it. And because they don’t think like me, because they refuse to see it the way I do – then they must be part of the problem. This is the seduction of the scapegoat: the idea that we can pin all that is wrong with the world on a person or a group of people. None of us are immune to this temptation. How many of us have thought: if only Netanyahu or Trump or AOC or AIPAC or JVP was out of the picture, then everything would be better. If only those people could shut up and stay home (and maybe educate themselves in the process), then we’d be safe and secure. Writing in the New York Times, the journalist Robert Cohen recently observed that “The tribal has triumphed over reason in a sea of mutual incomprehension and recrimination.” This is the danger of the rasha. The justified anger that first emerged in response to the wrongs of the world, easily becomes an indiscriminate, sanctimonious rage: unable to bend, unwilling to compromise, unselective in its pursuit of justice, ironically creating more harm along the way.

Our prophetic tradition warns against the trap of self-righteous indignation. On Yom Kippur we read the words of Isaiah, who sees his fellow Israelites fasting and offering sacrifices – but for their own gain, their own sense of moral superiority. Is this the fast I want? God admonishes. You starve your bodies, but in contention with your neighbor. You fight among yourselves and ignore the needy at your doorstep. And so I ask us, now: is this the fast God wants? To be so sure of our correctness. To be so scrupulous in our judgment of others. To cut down and cut out the “bad Jew?” No! God responds. The fast I desire is one that removes the shackles of your self-satisfaction. One that forces you to put down the yoke of ideological purity that constrains you. One that awakens you to the pain and loss of the people standing right in front of you.

Teshuvah, the process of reflection and repair that we engage in this season, requires us to be open to receiving new information and willing to change how we act. It challenges us to see how problems are rarely one sided and (regardless of who did what) understand that their resolution requires participation from all parties.

This posture is what separates the hasid from the rasha. Their justified anger is tempered by humility, an understanding that they don’t know everything and that they control even less. It doesn’t mean they lose sight of the wrongs that kindled their rage. But they pursue justice with a cooler mind. They learn and modify their behavior accordingly. They are willing to admit when a course of action is no longer useful. They are comfortable acknowledging that sometimes what they thought was true is, in fact, not (which is, in counter fact, an intensely uncomfortable thing to own up to – it requires letting go of that self-satisfying reassurance of being right).

Admitting we are wrong is hard. As a society, we’ve developed an unhealthy avoidance regarding confession. It’s why the public chest beating of this holiday challenges us so much. Somehow owning up to the fact that we’ve made a mistake or changed our minds is seen as a sign of spiritual weakness, a moral failing. This is the Jonah problem (another story we read on Yom Kippur). He is sent to preach repentance to the Assyrians. But when they change their behavior and are forgiven by God, Jonah throws a temper tantrum. He kind of wanted the Assyrians to be punished. How often do we see public figures lambasted for having reconsidered their position, as if their ability to take in novel information and choose a new course of action is a character flaw? How often do we hold ourselves and each other to this harmful standard? But teshuvah doesn’t make us “bad Jews.” The word literally means “return.” Teshuvah is not about becoming a less deficient version of ourselves, but turning back to that most earnest and generative part of who we are. Owning our mistakes and modifying our behavior is a form of repair predicated on the belief in the inherent good in ourselves.

So let’s talk about scapegoating for a minute. It’s a term that actually comes from the ancient rituals of Yom Kippur, when the Temple still stood in Jerusalem. The High Priest would take two goats: one would be offered as a sacrifice to God, one would be sent into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people. When the Torah was translated into Greek, the latter was called a tragos apopompaios – the goat that goes out; then in Latin, a caper emissarius – the emissary goat. And so when William Tyndale sat down in 1530 CE to render the Bible in English, he called it the (e)scape goat. And here’s the thing about the scapegoat, saddled with all of our sins and then sent away into the desert. It’s only doing half of the job. There’s a second goat still at the Temple, one that we are responsible for – and responsible for cleaning up after.

When we look at what is wrong with the world, some of our anger (if we’re being really honest about it) is also directed at ourselves: at the fact that we didn’t do more to prevent injustice or that we contributed to it in some small way. Sometimes we’re angry because we reached the limits of what’s actually in our power to change and that frustrates us. But we don’t like to admit it, especially when we’re mad. It’s much easier to point at the scapegoat and believe that banishing it will solve all our problems.

How different would this year have been if in the heat of anger we turned toward each other to share responsibility for finding a way forward, rather than turning away from each other in blame? To maintain our indignation, but directed at the injustices we see rather than one another? I don’t know if it could have prevented what is happening in Israel or Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, or Iran (although I think it could). I do know things would be very different here, in this country. Our communities would be less fractured – and imagine what could be accomplished if we mobilized for change together.

It’s not easy to stay in relationship when you’re angry, especially when we’ve been hurt. I carry the scars of what people have said to me. Some of those people are in this room right now. But I refuse to point my finger and pretend that you’re the problem, to act as if I have no part to play in repairing our relationships – or have the hubris to believe that I can build a better future by myself. If we’re actually going to get out of this mess, we cannot continue to nurse our wounds behind the shield of our self-righteous indignation – because eventually, it will constrain and consume us. It will make us inflexible and intolerant. It will narrow our vision, so that we doggedly pursue the path ahead of us – not realizing that there might be a better way to move forward, if only we look up from our own two feet.

First things first: we need to stop the name-calling (another version of this sermon was yelling “people, stop being mean to each other,” *mic drop*). But I’m serious, we should not punish each other over differences in identity and opinion. There is already enough pain in the world; we don’t need to create more of it. The legal scholar Noah Feldman, in his recent book To Be A Jew Today, argues that none of us – family, friend, or stranger; synagogue, organization, or institution – should be in the business of defining who is a “bad Jew.” He writes: “A ‘bad Jew’ is just a Jew expressing irony and self-skepticism and maybe a little guilt.” Yes, Jews can do bad things. But there are no bad Jews.

A Jew who is worried about the safety of their loved ones in Israel, and therefore prioritizes their protection, is not a bad Jew. A Jew who sees echoes of our people’s pain in the pain of Palestinians, and therefore prioritizes the alleviation of their suffering, is not a bad Jew. A Jew who refuses to “pick a side,” who rejects the maddening calculus of determining whose agony is more worthy of our compassion is not a bad Jew. A Jew who looks to Israel as their ancestral homeland is not a bad Jew. A Jew who sees where they stand right now, in the Diaspora, as their home is not a bad Jew. A Jew who continues to believe in the hope of Zionism is not a bad Jew. A Jew who is critical of the State of Israel is not a bad Jew. A Jew concerned about what happens if we don’t defend ourselves is not a bad Jew. A Jew calling for an immediate ceasefire is not a bad Jew. (And if you’re not a Jew, but see yourself in any of these statements, you’re not “bad” either).

None of these people are bad Jews. But they are all members of this community, and of other communities we belong to. And I know that none of our problems will be solved by cutting them out. All of you belong here.

I want to be very clear, I’m not arguing for moral relativism. There are standards that we hold sacred as Jews, values that form the ethical core of our tradition: the sanctity of life, empathy toward the stranger, protection of the most vulnerable, the inalienable dignity of all people – to name a few. Individuals who call for and condone violence against other human beings are not speaking from a place grounded in Judaism. Refusing to scapegoat each other doesn’t mean we no longer hold people accountable for harm they have perpetrated, intentionally or unintentionally. In our anger, we have hurt each other. And we are obligated to name it. But tochechah, rebuke, is an action that calls us into relationship with the person we are indicting – because it comes from a place of care. It comes from the belief in their inherent good and the desire to see them cultivate it through teshuvah. Tochechah is a fundamentally relational and reparative act.

None of our beliefs are unassailable, which is why we should be suspicious when the people we choose to be around simply parrot them back to us. We should be worried if we’re always right. Our hearts and minds stagnate when bogged down in the mire of self-confirming certainty. On the other hand they are tempered, made more durable and elastic, when we allow ourselves to be challenged by others. Our tradition actually elevates the relationship born out of disagreement. In the Talmud, there are several rabbinic pairs called bar plugta, which might be best translated as “scholarly opponents” (Hillel and Shammai, who I mentioned earlier, are an example). Through their arguments, they contribute the most to our tradition because they test the pliability of our ethical system across scenarios that threaten to bend or break it – ensuring that it can guide us, no matter what tomorrow brings. Judaism is built on debate, but debate grounded in courage, curiosity, and compassion, even when the stakes are high.

Here is the thing about the students of Hillel and Shammai. They disagreed about a lot of things, from the banal to the morally fraught. And they could have stopped there: using their (not insignificant) differences as a reason to disengage, to point their finger and blame the other for contributing to whatever problem they were trying to address. Instead, they insisted on finding a way forward together. And to get where the other was coming from, to try and see it from their perspective, the students of Hillel and Shammai would state the other’s argument before their own, at its most reasonable and persuasive. Imagine what you might learn if you asked the person who is least like you: Where do you see injustice? What is the better future you dream of – and how do you think we can get there?

The kind of anger that leads us to blame and banish one another keeps us from recognizing that our moral compasses share a true north: a future where nation shall not lift up sword against nation and we shall not teach our children war any longer (Isaiah 2:4). This is the inheritance of all Jews, one that gives us direction and purpose. It is an audacious hope our people have somehow maintained through a history of tragedy, and even now. I have yet to meet a Jew who does not share this vision. Honestly, I’ve yet to meet anyone who does not believe in this future. They may not see eye-to-eye on how we’ll make that journey, but our destination is the same.

And if you don’t believe me, ask each other (seriously, if there is one thing you take away from this sermon: find the person who you least understand, who you think is contributing to or part of the problem - and talk to them. Ask about what angers them, and what gives them hope).

We can’t afford to let our anger tear us apart. The social strain we have felt in our communities this year is a canary in the coal mine. If we don’t learn to work with each other, we have so much more to lose. There are people close to power who are deadly serious about the way they want to remake this country and the world, at the expense of the most vulnerable among us. We must stand together – in uncomfortable coalitions powered by shared purpose, shaped by our moral heritage, galvanized by our anger but guided by curiosity and compassion. In so many ways, this is the hardest path forward. But history has taught us, again and again, that it is the only one that leads to any kind of meaningful, lasting change. There is no scapegoat that will carry our sins into the wilderness. The responsibility is ours.

G’mar hatimah tovah, may each of us be a reason that we are all inscribed for a gentler, kinder, and more peaceful year to come.