BY Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, Rabbi at New North London Synagogue, Senior Rabbi to Masorti Judaism UK, and CCJ President.

‘May the old year and its curses end, the New Year with its blessings commence:’ so runs the chorus of a mediaeval poem we sing just before Rosh Hashanah begins.

This has been the worst year in the lives of virtually everyone I know. Aside from all the other troubles and conflicts in the world, there have been three terrible wrongs: the horrors inflicted upon Israel on and since October 7; the wretched fate of desperate Palestinian civilians caught between the cruelty of Hamas and Israel’s strong response, and the wave of Jew hate, as well as anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant racism, which has spread across the world, including the UK.

For many Israelis the calendar has stood still. With the horror of October 7 time stopped; the country is still in the grip of that trauma. As David Grossman wrote in Falling Out Of Time, his searing meditation on losing a son, ‘How can I move / to September / while he remains / in August?’ For the hostages, their families, and those whose friends and relatives were murdered and killed, calendar time makes no sense. There is only the pain of the heart’s grief. Added to this now are Hezbollah’s repeated bombardment of Israel, and the attacks and counterattacks in the north which have made yet more thousands homeless. I have seen some of the shocking propaganda materials issued by Hezbollah, the Iran backed terror organisation, of precisely how it wants to destroy Israel. Since drafting this article tensions have risen to the threshold of full-scale war. I worry deeply for all my friends in Israel and their communities, and for the fate of innocent people everywhere exposed to the horrors of rockets and bombs.

Within days of October 7, a wave of antisemitic hatred broke over the Jewish world and has not receded since. School-goers have found themselves shunned by their closest friends, driven by crass and vicious social media and the desire to be ‘cool’. Students have had to face encampments. Jews across the professions have often found themselves quietly ostracised or condemned. It’d been a tough year to be a Jew.

At the same time, we are deeply pained by the misery of hundreds of thousands in Gaza, caught hopelessly between the nihilistic cruelty of Hamas and Israel’s response, and left grief-stricken and destitute. One dreads to think of the further fears, misery and hatred to which this war has given birth, the terror of the years to come. In a café in Haifa I met up with a woman volunteering for Road to Recovery, an Israeli NGO which takes Palestinians to their hospital appointments in Israel. She showed me pictures of her friend in Gaza: he’s stirring a huge vat of soup and children are coming running. ‘I try to keep in touch,’ she tells me, then adds, ‘I need a shoulder to weep on.’

On Yom Kippur, when we pour out before God our tears, frustrations, regrets, remorse and guilt, all these horrors will permeate our prayers. At the heart of the day, we will recall how the High Priest made atonement for the Jewish People in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple. With its destruction, and the devastation of Jewish life by the Romans, the rabbis added a martyrology, a deep lament for the teachers of Torah slaughtered in the subsequent persecutions, a bitter postscript to a ritual they could no longer practise:

All this has befallen us; we recount it with hearts brought low with grief. God on high, hear our supplications, God, God, merciful and gracious.

The closing words can be read as a challenge or a desperate plea: Where are You, God, - You who’re supposed to be full of mercy? I hear in my head fellow Jews, parents of hostages, families of loved ones killed at the Nova music festival, saying those words. I hear, too, Palestinian mothers calling out to God with the same tears, in similar terms.

I’m struggling with what to say to my community on Yom Kippur. I shall talk with a sore heart about what has been done to Israel and the Jewish People, the hatred, the brutal threats from Hezbollah and Iran. At the same time, I cannot ignore the helplessness and misery in which so many innocent people in Gaza have been left, however one apportions the blame. I cannot be deaf to incitements to racism, or blind to the violent wrongs perpetrated by many settlers against Palestinian villagers un the West Bank.

God, who knows all, will judge us all.

But there’s something more that I intend to say, which goes deeper than these terrible ills. I want to speak about life, its preciousness and opportunities. In invoking God’s presence, we call upon the one, single, sacred source of vitality that flows through us all, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druse, all humanity and all being. Over our High Holydays especially, we pray to God who delights in life, remembers all creation for life and commands us to honour all life. We belong to together; we are interconnected through ties of spiritual and material kinship and bound by our interdependence on each other and all life.

The recognition of this truth is the ultimate struggle we must win if we and all living beings are to survive.

In me are people without names,
Children, stay-at-homes, trees,
I am conquered by them all
And this is my only victory.

    Boris Pasternak: Daybreak