Is It Possible to Atone for Genocide?

Avigayil Halpern: Audrey, what’s bringing you here today?

Audrey Sasson: We’re two years into the genocide in Gaza. We think we’ve seen the worst, and then a new worst finds its way to our screens. Recently, it seems we have reached some sort of tipping point, with various liberal Jewish leaders and organizations newly reckoning with what has been done in our name, with our tax dollars, with our support.

As we approach Yom Kippur, I am left wondering: What does repentance look like as we try to move forward, both as a Jewish community, and also as part of the human community? How do we understand our own complicity and the specific ways we each need to be held accountable? For those of us who have opposed the genocide since its beginning: How do we relate to people who had been more reticent to speak out against Israel but are doing so now? We know that for hundreds of thousands of people, this reckoning is far too little, far too late. And still, this is not an intellectual exercise. For me, this question matters insofar as it can help hasten an end to the genocide, which needs to be our primary focus right now.

Avigayil: It’s such a hard question. So many people I know who have been opposing the war for so long have been navigating feelings of frustration. I know you’ve been out there, Audrey, with JFREJ, naming what’s happening, attempting to stop it. On the one hand, it’s such a relief to see so many people in the Jewish mainstream finally agree that this is bad. And on the other, it’s painful, because it feels like such a small intervention so late into the genocide. Moreover, those of us who have long opposed the war faced incredibly harsh opposition within the Jewish community and beyond, and it’s frustrating that people with more social capital are only speaking out now when it’s less risky.

And also, in my frustration at others in my community, I’m trying to ask myself: In what ways am I actually feeling frustration at myself? When I’m craving someone else’s teshuvah, in what ways am I mad at myself for not doing better? And how can I both communicate that frustration and also let it spur me to examine my own deeds toward taking more action against the genocide?

To give us more language to think through these questions, I have brought some traditional Jewish sources. This first piece is from Maimonides, from his great code of Jewish law, the Mishnah Torah, in which he codifies the “Laws of Repentance” and lays out the steps for doing teshuvah.

Audrey reads.

Avigayil: I’m curious how this lands for you as a comprehensive picture of repentance.

Audrey: Maimonides helpfully lays out several concrete steps that must be taken: You have to abandon your past ways, regret what you have done, commit to not doing those actions again, and, lastly, verbally confess your wrongdoing. I think it’s telling that confession comes at the end of this process, after one has “resolved in their heart” not to sin any longer. And I think this raises the question of at what point one must be public about their teshuvah for it to be meaningful. I am thinking about this line: “We will no longer say to the work of our hands, ‘You are our gods.’” This seems to refer to worshipping our previous actions and deeds. We are committing to not being in service of these gods that led us astray any longer. We are committing to the possibility that our hands can be in service of something else. In this case, the thought of corrective action is the precursor to the change in behavior.

Some of us—and I’m including myself here—may be craving a public reckoning from Jewish leaders, but perhaps it’s the private work that’s more important at the moment, to make sure the public work is actually meaningful. Perhaps right now the confession is less important than what might move people to action.

Avigayil: The sin here is idolatry, the paradigmatic sin in rabbinic thought—worshipping what we ourselves have created. And importantly, the problem with idolatry isn’t just carving a statue and bowing down to it. It’s believing that there is something other than God that you ought to worship. And if idolatry is commitment to human-created systems, then our job is to shatter those man-made systems that underlie and enable “idolatrous” actions. Idolatry, interpreted as a misplaced attribution of power, can be a really useful framework for grappling with the various ideas—Jewish safety, nationalism, “self-determination”—that are right now discursively being worshipped and put in opposition to the foundational value of the sanctity of human life.

Let’s continue with Maimonides. He’s got a really evocative image here.

Audrey reads.

Avigayil: What is this metaphor?

Audrey: The mikvah is the place that purifies. I imagine this image is trying to say that if one hasn’t done the real work of changing one’s beliefs and actions, the process of repentance is in vain.

Avigayil: Right. Scholars debate whether purity and impurity are morally loaded in the Bible or simply ritual categories, and whether those things overlap, but for Maimonides, for our purposes, impurity is analogous to sin, and teshuvah is the process by which a person is purified. And the “sheretz,” or lizard, is a low-level, impurity-generating object. It’s not as impurity-generating as, say, a dead body would be, but in the case Maimonides describes, you’re going into the purifying bath while clutching something impure, compromising not the mikvah’s ability to purify, but only your own ability to become pure. How do we map this metaphor onto our own moment? What is our sheretz? What is our mikvah?

Audrey: I think perhaps our sheretz is what we refuse to see. We think we are acting admirably, “going to the mikveh,” as it were, speaking righteously about Israel’s present misdeeds while still holding the sheretz of historical denial. Many leaders are now speaking out, for example, against starvation in Gaza, but fail to mention how starvation has been used as a weapon of war since day one of this genocide, nor do they acknowledge the siege that predates October 7th.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Nakba denial, and how our community holds on so tightly to a narrative that has allowed for the dispossession of the Palestinian people since before 1948, as well as for the ongoing forces of apartheid and occupation. I know so many people who do know the history but still paper it over with myths and distortions—anything to justify unjustifiable, unspeakable actions. I’ll never forget early on, in October 2023, speaking with a fellow Jewish leader, trying to get her to join the call for a ceasefire, and her telling me: “Israel is waging a just war, even if it’s not being waged justly.” I’ve been haunted by that comment ever since; I’ve heard variations of it over and over again these past two years from people who refuse to see what’s plainly in front of them because of the stories we’ve told ourselves about how we got here. It’s important to dispose of this denial not just as part of a moral reckoning, but to transform our behavior and help us take braver, truer action together.

Avigayil: That feels so clear as a diagnosis of the problem and of the spiritual and political work we need to be doing. I have felt really despairing lately about the possibility of that conversation happening within the broader Jewish community. And I’ve also been wondering if I even desire that any more. What does it mean to strive to be part of a community when so many of the community’s institutions are engaged in genocide denial, or otherwise supporting genocide and wanting more of it?

There’s another text from Maimonides that I’ve been using to think through some of these questions about relationships and community membership, and to try and imagine a future after such horror. This one is from his “Laws of the Murderer and the Preservation of Life.” Some necessary context is that according to the Torah, the relatives of a person who was accidentally killed have a right to avenge their relative, and therefore can come and kill the accidental murderer. And the killer likewise has a right to flee to what’s called “a city of refuge,” where they cannot be touched by the person who the Torah terms “the blood redeemer.” The only way an accidental murderer can leave a city of refuge is if the High Priest dies. Then all of the accidental murderers get set free from the cities of refuge. They are no longer on the hook for this killing, and it is forbidden for the relatives of the victim to pursue this person any longer. In this passage, Maimonides discusses what happens when such a person returns to their home city.

Audrey reads.

Audrey: I’m struck by the very measured accountability system that is described here, so that even in the case of accidental killing a) the perpetrator needs to be separated from society and b) when the perpetrator returns, they lose some of their stature. It’s understood that this person has caused great harm, and yet this is all premised on accidental death. I don’t know how to map that onto potentially hundreds of thousands of killings. Some in the Jewish community may claim ignorance, but we’ve already talked about that denial as the “sheretz.” Meanwhile, genocide is about intent: the intention to eliminate Palestinian life in Gaza—past, present, and future. And so this gives us a model for thinking about teshuvah in the case of accidents. But is there such a thing as teshuvah for genocide?

Avigayil: I think you’re right that in some ways, this text does not map onto the current moment. But I was so moved and saddened by these final words—“because of this great calamity that they caused.” Part of what’s striking in this description is that the actor in question is not malicious and had not actively chosen to do something harmful. But because this tragedy happened by their hands, they can now never go back to how they were before.

This text hits deeply for me when I read it as being about ourselves—not a description of the government officials, soldiers, and lobbyists who shape the flow of weapons and power, for they are by no means “accidental murderers”—but rather a reflection on each of us who is complicit, whether as a taxpayer in the United States or perhaps even as a member of the Jewish community who has failed to stop our shuls and schools and community organizations from supporting this genocide. In the view of this text, a person need not be a deliberate murderer to be on the hook for the calamity they have caused, even if such tragedy was not their intent. This then might even include those of us on the left, who have been voicing our dissent; who have been in the streets; who have been taking personal, professional, and relational risks. The calamity is still happening. What does it mean for us to still be on the hook for that?

Audrey: Look, on the one hand, we’re all on the hook. Israel is committing genocide, in the name of Jewish safety, with our tax dollars and with the full backing of the United States government. On Yom Kippur we beat our chests and atone for what we have done, collectively—in the case of the genocide in Gaza, there will be truth to that collective understanding of responsibility. Personally, I need to atone for the fact that at a certain point about a year ago, I gave up on trying to move certain people and certain segments of our community. It was too hard; the polarization felt cemented in place and I just couldn’t bring myself to keep trying to dislodge it. It was painful and exhausting and I was grief-stricken by it and I just gave up. I believe I need to atone for that as a leader in this community.

But not everyone has the same power in this equation, and not everyone is complicit in the same ways. There’s another level of accountability held by some of the most powerful leaders in our community—namely, those who refused to see the humanity of Palestinians. That dehumanization is what fuels Nakba denial and it’s what has allowed the genocide to go on these 24 months. The text suggests that the accidental killer should lose their authority in the community even as we welcome them back. I’m not the arbiter in these discussions of Jewish communal leadership; we don’t know what will be for those leaders, what the appropriate consequence is, and whether the community will be able to impose it. But the wisdom of this text is that we need to have consequences even for unintentional harm, and there’s no question that we’ve had a failure of leadership in our community, at the very least, when it come to speaking out forcefully against the genocide. This says to me that the leaders who got us here will likely not be the leaders who get us out. Through this process of teshuvah, we have an opportunity to make different choices moving forward. We can welcome the people who are coming along now without welcoming their myths, their distortions, their lies.

Avigayil: In thinking about the interactions between leadership and accountability, I want to bring in a text from the Mishnah in the tractate of Horayot, which focuses on what happens when the central court makes a mistaken halachic ruling. The Mishnah is particularly interested in who is responsible: Is the court liable, because it told the community to do something wrong, or are the individuals who erred responsible for their own actions, because they ought to have recognized that the court was wrong? In other words, when can we exonerate individuals because of their leadership, and when do we expect them to know better?

Audrey reads.

Avigayil: The text is saying that for the court to be on the hook, the court has to have perfect integrity, according to the rabbinic imagination. There are a lot of problems with these categories and the suspicion they induce for the rabbis, but that’s not our focus here. The point is that the group that is making this ruling needs to be a genuine, unsullied representation of the community as a whole. And so if the court has any kind of internal dispute, it is therefore off the hook because it can’t be considered legitimate; it wasn’t a “real” court in such a case.

This text is pushing me to think about who and what make up our “courts.” According to this text, if there is a single voice among the judicial leadership that announces the mistake, the court is exempt from any wrongdoing that arises from its incorrect ruling, which means all of the people are on the hook, since they can’t say, “Oh, the leadership told me it was okay.” The existence of a single voice in the leadership saying that something was wrong means that the people had the knowledge to have acted better.

Through my work as a rabbi and in various communities I am a part of, I see a deep desire among Jews on the left to talk about the complicity of Jewish leaders and institutions. There is a sense that “we”—the less powerful left, analogous to the laity in Horayot—can put significant responsibility onto the leadership, which parallels the court. But in Horayot, the court, the community leadership, only bears responsibility for wrongdoing when it is a perfect, unsullied representation of the community. In other words, we might say that the communal leadership has to actually be our leadership, if we, the laity, want to assign them responsibility rather than ourselves. If we on the Jewish left have long had a more fraught relationship with Jewish institutions, we cannot lay the blame at their feet because their leadership is definitionally illegitimate.

And, simultaneously, there is another way to read this text. Mainstream Jewish institutional leadership seems right as an analogue to the court, but simultaneously, it misses the larger genocidal entity we’re engaged with: the US government. Again, using the Mishnah’s logic, our government is also not a legitimate court, as there are dissenting members of Congress, like Rashida Tlaib, but I do think it’s worth expanding our view beyond Jewish institutions when we’re thinking about the scale of the harm. Perhaps we are living in a time without a court, and none of us can displace blame. That doesn’t mean our leaders aren’t responsible for the harm they do; it only means they aren’t responsible for each of us, and we can’t lay responsibility at their feet in a way that exculpates ourselves.

Audrey: I appreciate you broadening the frame. I’m thinking about the role of this one member of the court who called out the mistake as a parallel to those who accurately diagnosed this assault for what it was early on. On October 10th, 2023, for example, Palestinian American political analyst Yousef Munayyer wrote a piece in Slate entitled “Israel’s Militarized Approach to Gaza Brought Us Here. It’s Bound to Keep Failing.” He analyzes the political moment, discusses how Israel’s goal is to commit another Nakba, and calls on the international community to immediately sound the alarm to prevent atrocities and war crimes. Reading the article today, it’s hard not to be struck by how everything happened exactly as he laid out. Palestinians told us this from the very beginning. Our collective mistake—and I don’t just mean in the Jewish community—was in not listening to the Palestinian scholars and analysts and activists who were rightly sounding the alarm. Their voices were there; no one can deny it.

If we consider the analogy to the court and the dissenting voice, we must then reflect on which voices those were and why they were pushed away and silenced. It’s not about settling scores; there’s no value in the moment of “I told you so.” And yet, there is some value to stating explicitly that people should have known better. And examining the reasons these voices were sidelined in the first place seems like a major part of the necessary teshuvah.

Avigayil: I agree. Then, part of the question is, once the dissenter is proven right, how do we build a leadership that listens to them the next time, or even one in which the dissenters themselves become the majority of the leadership? In thinking about my own teshuvah ahead of Yom Kippur this year, I’m thinking about who the people were in my life who were saying things I knew were right but who I didn’t listen to early enough. For example, I didn’t join Rabbis for Ceasefire right away. I was scared about how people who I really care about—like those in Israel, for example—would view that decision. And I was really scared about how it would affect my career as a young rabbi. I’ve since joined, and I regret not joining sooner. Some of the work I’m doing is figuring out how I might listen more clearly next time.

I want to bring in one more text to think with. This is from On Repentance and Repair by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. It’s been helping me think about the question of whether teshuvah is even possible in cases beyond the directly interpersonal kinds of teshuvah that Maimonides and other Jewish thinkers tend to focus on in their work.

Audrey reads.