.png)
What Would Judah Do? Kol Nidre, 5787 — Community Synagogue of Rye
Rabbi Daniel Gropper
There is a teaching, tucked into The Zohar, that is so quiet you could miss it if you weren't listening for it: Yom Kippur, the sages say, is Yom k'Purim — a day like Purim.
Sit with that for a moment. The holiest day of the year, the day we stand before the Gates, stripped of food and pretense and everything that ordinarily insulates us from ourselves — this day is compared, not to Rosh Hashanah, not to Yom HaZikaron, not to some other solemn day in our calendar. It's compared to Purim. To Purim, of all things. To noise and costumes and Hamantaschen and a scroll read aloud in a room full of half-drunk people.
I used to think that teaching - Yom Kippur as like Purim - was clever wordplay and not much else. This year I understand it differently. This year I lived it.
Let me take you back to March. Purim eve. Tamara and I were in Tel Aviv, and Iran had just done what Iran does. The sirens that night were not there to drown out Haman’s name, they were wailing to let us know Haman was coming to wipe us out, literally. And here we were, trying to figure out how to celebrate the evening of frivolity and joy while running back and forth to the shelter. Our lives were in the balance in a way that Yom Kippur usually only asks us to imagine. This past Purim felt like Yom Kippur. Not the other way around.
And so the question that faced us wasn't theoretical, it was urgent: what do we do with this? When the day built for laughter is shadowed by something that wants to kill us, how do we respond? Do we ignore Purim for our physical safety? Do we forgo the holiday that coined the phrase, 'they tried to kill us, they didn’t, let’s eat?’ because it was no laughing matter.
At that moment I found myself summoning Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl spent three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and Theresienstadt discovering the one freedom the Nazis could never destroy: the freedom to choose his response. Everything else was taken from him — his clothes, his name, his family, his body. What remained, he wrote, was the space between what happens to you and what you choose to do about it. That space, he said, is where you become human.
So in that space, Tamara and I made a decision. We did not cancel Purim. We leaned into it.
We had brought the Megillah scroll with us; the one that had come from the same shul in Romania where my great-great-great grandmother may have worshipped. We bought a bottle of Arak from the corner store, because you cannot read Megillat Esther without a little fire in your throat, and we unrolled that scroll. Between trips to the shelter, we read it. Not from a printed booklet. From the scroll itself — the actual parchment, the same one, that had probably not been read from in eighty or ninety years.
I want you to understand what that choice was. It was not bravado. The sirens were real. So was the fear. But so too was the Megillah, and so was the booze, and so was the “choice” to read aloud a story about a Jewish community that nearly disappeared and did not. It felt like we were living that story in real time. We did not pretend the threat away. We simply refused to let it be the only thing that was true that night.
That is Frankl's freedom. That is also, I came to recently learn, exactly the freedom the entire Torah has been trying to teach all of us throughout these millennia. It’s been there all along, hiding in plain sight.
I was at the Hartman Institute this summer and our teacher, Tal Becker - probably one of the smartest people on the planet - (He is a Hartman Senior Fellow and, until recently, Legal Adviser to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs representing her at the ICC in the Hague) - stood in front of all of us and asked the question each person in that room was desperate to ask: “When will this anti-semitism and this period of anti-Zionism come to an end?” “When will be the ending of all this anxiety we all seem to feel?”
And Becker did something I did not expect. He didn't give an answer. He told us it was the wrong question.
Because here’s a difficult truth, he said. Nobody knows when this will end. Not this current round of warfare, not the antisemitism climbing through European capitals, American campuses, or the streets of our beloved New York City; not the low hum of dread that has settled into Jewish life since October 7th. Nobody can give you that date, and any question with no available answer only feeds the anxiety that's asking it. So Becker offered a different question, one that has stayed with me since; not, “when will this end,” but, “how do I choose to show up during it?”
It’s not a small reframe. It’s the entire difference between a life lived in reaction to and a life lived in responsibility towards. We live in an age of anxiety, as Auden called it. But Becker's insight is that Judaism was never built to numb anxiety. It was built to give you agency inside of it.
This is where Becker took us somewhere I did not expect a Hartman lecture to go: into the opening chapters of Genesis, tracing what he called the arc of responsibility.
After eating the forbidden fruit, God asks Adam, the simplest and deepest question in the Torah, “Ayekah - where are you?” How does Adam answer? He doesn’t. He deflects. “The woman you gave me, she gave me the fruit.” Eve, asked next, deflects again, “The serpent deceived me.” Cain, asked where his brother is, doesn't deflect so much as detonate the question itself, “Am I my brother's keeper?” a line so corrosive it has echoed for thousands of years precisely because so many of us, in our worst moments, have quietly uttered it. Noah, given the chance to argue for his generation, says nothing at all. Builds a boat, saves his family, lets the rest of the world drown in silence.
Genesis begins, in other words, as a catalogue of people declining to take responsibility. And then Judah shows up. Judah is the first person in Torah to take real responsibility.
Not at first. Judah’s first idea when it came to ridding him and his minyan of siblings of their brother Joseph was to sell Joseph rather than kill him. But watch what happens to him across the chapters that follow. He loses his own sons. He wrongs his daughter-in-law Tamar and then has the extraordinary honesty to say, when confronted with his own hypocrisy, “tzadka mimeni — she is more righteous than I.” And then, just as their youngest brother Benjamin is about to be taken as a slave in Egypt, Judah — the same man who once sold Joseph into slavery — steps forward and offers himself in Benjamin's place. Judah’s story is not just an odyssey, it is a transformation.
That is not a small arc. It is the entire distance between Cain and covenant; between, “Am I my brother's keeper?” to, “I am my brother’s keeper,” — from shifting blame to shouldering it, from being the man who sold one brother to the man who would enslave himself to save another.
This, Tal Becker suggested, only half-joking, is why we might do better to call ourselves Judahites rather than Jews, Not Judaism, but, “Judahism.” To be a Jew in an age of anxiety is not to wait for the anxiety to lift. It is to do what Judah did: to step into the breach and say, “I am my brother’s keeper.” “I will be responsible for this.” I think that as a reminder of Judah’s act we need necklace charms that say, “WWJD.” But instead of those charms asking, “What would Jesus do?” they can ask, “What would Judah do?”
Look through the rest of the Torah and you will find the same pattern again and again. We are never redeemed by the world becoming safe. We are redeemed when someone stops acting like a victim, stands up and takes responsibility. Nachshon walks into the sea before it splits. Moses returns to Pharaoh though he stammers and doubts. Esther, the heroine of this story (hold up Megillah) goes to the king when confronted with the question, “who knows, maybe you were put here for such a time as this.” The entire arc of our story bends not toward certainty but toward agency — toward people who decide, in the middle of not knowing how it will end, how they want to show up. Hillel put it succinctly in the Mishna, “וּבְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ: In a place where no one is human, strive to be one.” (Avot 2:5)
That is what Tamara and I did with a Megillah and a bottle of Arak while the sky over Tel Aviv held things we did not want to think about. That is what this whole nation of ours did this year, in ways large and small. When the missiles came, we did not stop being who we are. And that, I would suggest to you tonight, sitting here on the holiest night of the year, is what is being asked of every single one of us.
I think about our children in this and how we want to educate them about what it means to be Jewish and how we want them to show up as Jews. I think about the fact that a whole generation of young Jews now recognizes Jewish spaces - a synagogue, a JCC, a day school - by the security guard standing outside it. That guard makes us safe. I am grateful for every one of them, especially ours. But I want to name the sadness in that, because it deserves to be named: we have built an architecture of physical safety around our children. It is necessary and it should break our hearts, because a five-year-old should not have to learn what security bollards are before she learns what a mezuzah is. A Jewish pre-teen should not have to receive a Jewish version of “the talk,” the way Black families have to prepare their children for systemic racism, discrimination, and potentially fatal interactions with law enforcement. This should not have to be the way things have become, even though they are.
So here is the harder question, the one underneath Becker's. We can secure the building. Can we secure the soul?
How do we build a sense of safety that doesn't depend on an armed guard or a metal detector — a safety that lives where no army and no policy and no diplomatic breakthrough can ever reach, because it's ours?
The answer Judaism has always given is the same one Frankl stumbled onto in the camps and the same one Becker taught us this summer: you decide. You decide how you want to show up. You decide how you want to respond. Not because the danger isn't real — it is — but because the response is the one thing that was never ever in Tehran's hands, or Hamas's hands, or anyone's hands but yours. Who knows, maybe you were put here for such a time as this.
Let me bring you back to that airbnb. We finished the Megillah. We drank the Arak. We did not know, when we went to sleep, what the morning would bring — whether the sirens would return - as they did, multiple times. We did not know whether any of it would resolve in a way we could live with. We still don't fully know. That is the condition we are in, all of us, this Yom Kippur: leaning forward into genuine uncertainty.
But here is where the sages of the Zohar were not merely being clever when they punned the connection between Yom Kippur and Yom K’Purim. They were trying to teach us something profound. Purim is the day we tell a story of near-annihilation that ends in survival and dancing. Yom Kippur is the day we confront our own mortality and, if we do it honestly and fully, walk out the other side still standing, still breathing, still here… having a schnapps, banging together the pieces of your sukkah - to remind us that despite it all, despite all the anxiety, we are still here and we get to decide how to live. It is why I always make such a big deal of staying till neilah. We need to see how it ends, not to deny the anxiety, the sadness and the oys, but to know that it can coexist with hope, optimism and joy.
Look, here’s a truth. We are here. We are alive. Whatever else remains unresolved — and so much does, so much always will — we retain the one freedom that has outlasted every empire that has ever come for us: the freedom to choose what we do next. Not everything is in our control. Most of it never was and never will be. But at this moment, in a Jewish community that is, by any honest measure, the most educated, most resourced, most empowered Jewish community that has ever existed on the face of the earth, we have less excuse than any generation before us to answer Cain's question the way Cain answered it.
We are our brother's keeper. We are our sister's keeper. We are here for such a time as this. We are, each of us, capable of being a Judahite rather than merely a descendant of Adam — of stepping forward instead of stepping back, of saying, “take me,” instead of, “it’s not my problem.”
The psalmist promises us, “hazor'im b'dima b'rina yiktzoru — those who sow in tears shall reap in joy.” Not those who avoid the tears. Not those who wait for the tears to stop before they plant anything. Those who sow in the tears — who take the field as it actually is, uncertain and dangerous and real, and plant something in it anyway.
That is the whole of what I am asking of us tonight. Not certainty. Not safety, though God knows I want that for each and every one of us and for our children most of all. What I want is just this: decide, right now, in this room, on this night when the gates are said to be wide open — decide how you want to show up. Decide what you will take responsibility for. Decide to be a Judahite and at each choice point ask, WWJD, what would Judah do?
Gmar chatimah tovah.