During the Jewish High Holy Days, clergy take the pulpit before community members who yearn for a narrative to explain these complicated times.
This year, we will hear and see one theme at the fore: peoplehood. It’s a mouthful of a word, but, as Rabbi Yehiel Poupko defines it, means that Jews are a “family that became a faith that stayed a family.”
While Judaism brought monotheism, the rule of law, and many universal values to the wider world, it did so in a unique way: through a small group of people bound together in an experiment of shared norms and practices intended to help them become better people.
The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, reiterate the root of these ties, as Jews around the world join in reflection, introspection, and self-improvement.
This year, more than most, peoplehood will be front-and-center of High Holy Day observances (or rituals). The modern state of Israel is still at war against Hamas, raising spiritual questions for a people which prays for peace multiple times per day but also understands that its survival depends on self-defense. Diaspora communities are facing a painful rise in antisemitism and hate crimes, and the largest Jewish Diaspora, in North America, seeks animating purposes for its communities beyond merely survival.
At the core of these High Holy Days is a key question: what does it mean to belong to the Jewish people?
We do not pray with the same melodies or define eating practices the same way. We do not share norms for Shabbat, our sacred day of rest. Our internal diversity is itself a wonder to behold. But there is something often unspoken which binds us together.
As Jews, we experience life as a shared tapestry of joys and sorrows — taking pride when Nobel laureates rise from our community, and feeling a collective sting when one of our own falters.
In this season of renewal, our task is to tell a story of belonging that unites Jews across every language, culture, and background. This story needs to include Mizrahi Jews who trace their families back generations in Damascus and Persian Jews who do the same in Tehran; African Jews from Ethiopia and Uganda and Ashkenazi Jews who fled Europe to Latin America; Eastern European Jews who populated much of the great American Diasporas and those from around the world who returned to our spiritual homeland in Israel.
Explaining Jewish peoplehood is also crucial for relationships with our non-Jewish friends and neighbors — among the many with whom we live side by side in the United States. For too long, well-meaning friends have projected onto Jews notions of belonging — to a “faith” or a “cultural community.”
We are both — and also much else. We weave threads of belonging from relationship, belief, open debate, history, language, values, behavioral norms, holidays, and spiritual practices into a greater whole.
As we have learned from the friendships that have frayed since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks against Israel, and the subsequent surge in hate against Jews in the Diaspora, we cannot afford to have these misunderstandings of our identity take root.
Rather than letting others speak for us, Jewish communities would do well to define themselves in their own terms — and to take time during these High Holy Days to find articulations which are authentic, nuanced, and comprehensible to those who might not understand the visceral sense of connections which Jews feel towards each other.
This process of articulation will be a salve to Jewish communities who have for too long felt isolated amid the onslaught of antisemitism. It will also help them engage in the reflective work which is core to this sacred season. When we know the spectrum of belonging that our tradition affirms, we can discern how and where we are living up to those norms and where we have fallen short; how we have built enduring bridges of friendship and where they have fallen apart.
Jewish leaders across the continent have been hard at work building and strengthening friendships with Catholic, Evangelical, Hindu, Latter-Day Saint, Black, East Asian, and Latino communities — among many others. May this be the year when Jewish communities summon the courage to say out loud that which binds us all, and our friends from other communities come to better understand us as we understand ourselves.
Stanton, a rabbi, is associate vice president for interfaith and intergroup initiatives at the Jewish Federations of North America.
