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This is a guest essay by David Gerber, the senior rabbi at Congregation Gates of Prayer in New Orleans.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
A lot of us are walking into this new year tired in a way that has nothing to do with how little we slept last night.
It’s been a year of a particular kind of tzuris — exhaustion, if you want the English for it — but tzuris is closer. Not the kind that comes from one unthinkable event; tragically, we know how to brace for one of those.
This is different. This is the exhaustion of a thousand small cuts. Another celebrity we used to like, discovering they think Israel shouldn’t exist. Another university where a swastika shows up on a dorm wall, and the response is a memo about “context.” Another influencer with 11 million followers casually implying that the one Jewish state on earth is the one state that doesn’t get to defend itself.
None of it, on its own, is the Inquisition. None of it, on its own, is Kristallnacht. And that’s exactly what makes it so exhausting: It never quite rises to the level of the thing you can point to and say, “There, that’s the crisis, now we respond.”
It just accumulates. A drip. A year of drips. Until we’re sitting here during the Ten Days of Repentance, feeling something a lot of us have trouble naming honestly out loud. Not fear, exactly. Fatigue. And underneath the fatigue, a worse question: What can I possibly do about any of this?
I’m one person. I don’t run a network. I don’t own a platform. I can’t un-radicalize a comedian or fact-check a musician mid-concert. What is our move, here, against a tide that big?
I don’t think we’re wrong to ask that question. I think it might be the most honest question in this room today. But I don’t think the answer is going to come from making ourselves smaller, quieter, or easier to overlook.
For the past three years, I’ve been part of a group called “Recharging Reform Judaism” — hundreds of Reform rabbis who share one concern: that our movement, representing roughly a million and a half Jews in the United States, isn’t sufficiently addressing the rise in antisemitism or the growing polarization around support for Israel.
I hear a version of this constantly from colleagues — rabbis, Zionists, lovers of Israel — who tell me they stay right down the middle in their own sanctuaries because they’re afraid half the congregation will walk out. Rabbi after rabbi, editing their love for the Jewish People in real-time so the room doesn’t split in half.
I don’t think staying down the middle is working. I don’t think it’s protecting anyone. I think it’s just a quieter way of losing. And in my 15th year as a rabbi, I’ve learned not to predict what a year is going to ask of us, but I believe we’ve reached an inflection point in American Jewish life. I believe Reform Judaism has a choice to make.
I want to speak for a minute in the language of this digital era, because I think it’s the clearest way to say what I mean. Every one of us runs on an operating system — some fundamental way of looking at the world that decides what we notice, what we prioritize, what feels obviously true, long before we ever consciously choose anything.
And somewhere over these last decades, as the distance grew between us and the Holocaust, between us and the Yom Kippur War, between us and the generation that built a state and a movement with their own hands, I worry that American Reform Judaism’s operating system quietly changed.
We became universalists.
Look at what our movement has chosen, again and again, to spend its voice on: voting rights, immigration, environmentalism. None of them are particularly Jewish things. We don’t need a synagogue for any of that. We don’t need Hebrew, or Torah, or 3,000 years of an argument with God. We need a good newsletter and a mailing list. If we as a synagogue offer people the same universal values they can get anywhere, what is the point of us?
And here’s what I know is causing emotional exhaustion for a lot of us: Sometimes the causes we care about so deeply ask us, quietly, to hide the parts of ourselves that complicate the coalition.
To not mention Israel too loudly in that meeting. To leave the kippah at home for that march. To let our Jewishness go a little soft around the edges so it doesn’t get in the way of belonging to something bigger. I don’t know about the rest of you, but every kids’ show I watched growing up in the 1980s taught me the same lesson: If we have to change who we are to fit in, they were never really our friends to begin with.
I think Judaism has to be the operating system again — not an app we open for a cause, or a holiday, or a wedding, and then close. And to be clear, making Judaism our operating system does not mean we give less to the world. It means we stop showing up to fix the world as a scattered collection of individuals, each of us quietly editing ourselves to fit into somebody else’s room. It means we show up as a people, rooted enough in who we are that we can actually be of use to everyone else, instead of just useful enough to be tolerated.
We have confused one of Judaism’s greatest gifts with Judaism itself.
Judaism has given extraordinary ideas to the world: that every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God; that we have obligations to the stranger; that justice and human dignity matter. Those are Jewish ideas. I believe them. I hope you do too. But Judaism does not begin with humanity in general. It begins with Abraham.
God calls one person, who becomes one family, one people, bound by one covenant, connected to one land. And God tells Abraham that through him, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Listen to the order of that. First Abraham, then blessing. First covenant, then responsibility. First particularism, then universalism.
Judaism’s ability to be a universal blessing grows out of Jewish particularism. It does not replace it.
Somewhere along the way, especially in American Judaism, I worry we reversed the equation. We became extraordinarily good at translating Judaism into universal values like justice, equality, compassion, human dignity. All beautiful. All important. But if that’s all Judaism is, our children will eventually ask the same question, just aimed at something closer to home: Why do I need Judaism to believe any of that?
Judaism was never meant to be a delivery system for values available everywhere else. Judaism is a covenant, a people, a way of life. We inherited a calendar, a language, a land, a history, and an argument with God that has been going on for 3,000 years. Particularism means that before I belong to humanity in the abstract, I also belong to a particular people, with obligations that are specifically Jewish. Not because other people matter less. Because our people matter too.
There’s an image sitting right in front of us every High Holiday season that explains this better than I can: the shofar.
The sound only comes through the narrow place — the tzar. It’s the language of the Psalms: Min hameitzar karati Yah; anani vamerchav Yah. “From the narrow place I called to God; God answered me from the wide expanse.”
We cannot improve a shofar by widening its mouthpiece. Sand it down, make it comfortable, remove the constriction, and we’ll have the most inclusive shofar in Jewish history.
It just won’t make a sound — because the narrowness isn’t a defect. The narrowness is what creates the voice.
And it’s not even a coincidence of language. Tzar, the narrow place, and tzuris, the word I used at the very start of this essay, share the same Hebrew root. Our word for trouble and our word for the narrow place have always been the same word, wearing different clothes. This means that, if we take our own tradition seriously, the very thing squeezing us this year is also, somehow, the place the sound comes from.
Without the tzur of the shofar, nothing downstream of it works — not the wide, beautiful, universal values we send out into the world, not any of it. It all has to run through the narrow place first.
And this is where I want to be careful about what I mean by narrowness. The narrowness is not the boundary of our compassion. It is the source of our identity. The mouthpiece is narrow; the sound is not. In fact, the whole purpose of that narrow place is to produce a sound capable of traveling far beyond it.
I think that’s where Reform Judaism finds itself right now. We’ve spent generations widening — removing barriers, opening doors, making Judaism more accessible. Much of that was good. I am a Reform Jew because I believe in much of what that widening accomplished.
But there’s a point at which widening stops being welcome and starts becoming erasure; a point at which we translate ourselves so thoroughly we can no longer remember the original language; a point at which Judaism becomes so universally agreeable there’s no particular reason left to be Jewish.
I don’t want that Judaism. I want the narrow end: God, Torah, Israel, Hebrew, Shabbat. Peoplehood. Obligation. Not because I want Judaism’s reach to be smaller, but because I want its voice to carry farther.
And we’ve done this before. When the wider world shut doors in our faces, Jews built our own institutions. Locked out of country clubs, Jews built our own. Hospitals wouldn’t hire our doctors, so Jews built hospitals. Shut out of industries, Jewish immigrants created new ones. Not because isolation was good for us, and certainly not because antisemitism was some kind of gift, but because Jews understood that when there was no room waiting for us, we had the ability to build one.
And then something remarkable happened. Once we built those rooms, we opened the doors to everyone. We built Jewish hospitals and treated everyone. We built Jewish charities and helped everyone. We built Jewish institutions and used them to make the world better.
We did not have to become less Jewish in order to care more about humanity. Our particularism gave us somewhere solid from which to care.
I don’t think that instinct died. I think it’s dormant. And maybe this is exactly the kind of year that wakes it back up.
Because Reform Judaism is not 11 people in a chat group wondering what to do about the news. It is roughly a million and a half Jews in the United States. Hundreds of congregations. Rabbis, cantors, educators, camps, schools, and families raising the next generation of Jewish children right now, in sanctuaries just like this one, all over the country.
Imagine, for a moment, if a movement that size actually pointed in one direction: that Jewish safety and Jewish dignity are not up for debate. That kind of unity doesn’t require a million and a half Jews to agree on everything. It asks us to agree on something much narrower and much more fundamental: We are a people. We have obligations to one another. Our safety matters. Our future matters.
That’s the mouthpiece. That is where the sound can travel from.
I think the answer is both smaller and harder than fixing the whole tide. We become more Jewish, not more conservative or more liberal, but more Jewish.
Because an operating system rooted in Judaism doesn’t ask us to be more conservative or more liberal. It asks us to be the kind of Jews who know that loving our own people doesn’t require hating anybody else’s; who can say Am Yisrael Chai without apology; who understand Israel as part of the story we were each born into; and how dark and unthinkable the world can be absent a Jewish state.
Judaism was never supposed to just affirm what we already believe. It is supposed to challenge us, shape us, root us, and sometimes tell us no.
We are living in a narrow place. October 7th changed us. Recent antisemitism has changed us. Israel is under extraordinary pressure. And there’s an enormous temptation, in a moment like this, to respond by widening ourselves. Say less, sand down the edges, don’t say anything that might make someone walk out, blow through the wide end.
But we already know what comes out — nothing.
This narrow place does not imprison us; it gives us a voice. Our roots don’t keep us from reaching outward; they’re what let us grow.
For many their Leftism Trumps their Judaism.
I am leaving my Reform temple and joining a Conservative temple in large part because of the leftist politics at the Reform temple. I know Conservative temples, at least in my area of the country may not be great politically either, but I am sure it will be less objectionable than the Reform temple.