Yom Kippur as Active Peace-Pursuing Day For the Jewish People This Year

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Dear companions in the pursuit of peace and justice,

I woke up this morning at 3:07 with two ideas for Yom Kippur blazing in my head and heart. I want to share them and ask for your suggestions. They are not brand-new, but connecting both of them with Yom Kippur is.

The bare ideas first, highlighted in green:

1. That we make the reading from the Torah Scroll of Genesis 25: 7-11 in Hebrew and English the central reading of Yom Kippur morning, to make its importance rise up.

That passage starts with Abraham’s death. Isaac and Ishmael, Abraham’s two sons, come together to bury their dangerous father, who has imperiled both their lives.

The passage then says Isaac goes to live at the well of Hagar and Ishmael, the Well of the Living One Who Sees Me. This confirms the reconciliation of the two peoples whom today we would call Israeli Jews and widely scattered Palestinians.

This passage is the Torah’s clearest call for reconciliation between the two great Abrahamic families. We need to hear it with our hearts and follow it now, as Israelis and Jews of all backgrounds and Palestinians of all living-spaces.

To emulate the Jewish tradition of “targum,” instant translation of the Torah's Hebrew in the Aramaic better known by some generations of Jews, I suggest interspersing Gen. 25: 7-11 with English translation, perhaps if possible using the chant used in Torah reading.

2. My second heart-flash from the night was that immediately after the last shofar-blast of Yom Kippur returns us from our interior self-healings to our work in the world, we write, sign, and prepare to mail letters to our Senators of all political parties.

The letters would urge each Senator to insist on applying the well-established Leahy Act to units of the Israeli armed forces as the Leahy Act has been to the forces of other states for the past decade. The law requires suspending US arms aid to any unit of a foreign armed force that has used US arms to violate human rights.

Congress passed the law in 1997, and it has been applied to many states — including US allies — but not to Israel.

Given the publicly known massacres of noncombatant Palestinian women and children in Gaza, it is time to apply universally this universal law.

This idea for making Yom Kippur an ‘actifest’ draws on a proposal by Peter Beinart that he applied to a presidential candidate.

This approach is rooted in a Jewish tradition to follow Yom Kippur with an action in the world to embody the spiritual commitments of the day. The traditional symbolic action was to nail together two branches toward the “sukkat shlomekha, sukkah of Your peace,” that traditionally we were about to build. The letters to Senators would be more “real” than symbolic.

These two actions call for others — songs, chants, meditations, invitations to Muslims and Palestinians as well as Israelis to speak, during the day of Yom Kippur. We invite you to send us your suggestions for what these might be. Please write me directly at awaskow@theshalomcenter.org.

Blessings of shalom, salaam, peace, in your own lives to all who pursue peace in the world

— Arthur

Isaac and Ishmael bury Abraham in the cave of Machpelah next to his wife Sarah. Engraved by Matthaeus Merian (1593-1650).