Erev Yom Kippur Message Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton 10 Tishrey 5786 // October 1, 2025 OrH – Or Haneshamah: Ottawa’s Reconstructionist Community
Let’s begin this time of listening with a time of looking.
In a moment I’ll invite you, if you are willing, to bring to your gaze to a neighbour in the pew, and silently offer and receive:
– Love
– Respect
– Appreciation
– Compassion
If you prefer not to receive or offer a direct gaze from others, or are joining on Zoom, the invitation is to scan the room and offer and receive those intentions at large. Just look around, breathe and send: Love, Respect, Appreciation, Compassion.
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We all belong here.
Especially this Yom Kippur, we are struggling with how to be with each other, especially as we approach the 2nd anniversary of October 7th – and I refer to that more in my message. So, as you lovingly, respectfully, appreciatively, and compassionately hold who we are at this moment, this beautiful array of all we hold in common along with the ways we differ, I bring some reminders from the liturgy we’ll chant and sing, tonight and tomorrow.
In the confessional litanies, many of the actions are direct references to speech in relation to our treatment of others. In Psalm 34 we’ll sing, mi ha-ish: “Who is the one who delights in life [he-chafetz chayim], and desires days of seeing good? Keep your tongue from speaking evil, and your lips from pronouncing deceit.” In the text framing our confessions, we note that while sometimes our acts are intentional, and sometimes unintentional, we repent for both. The very first aleph of the Al Het, invites atonement for the closing of our hearts.
These texts, and this whole set of services, are offered to open our hearts, unclench our fists, and release judgment.
So one more time, direct your gaze out, perhaps this time to someone across the sanctuary and silently offer and receive:
– Love
– Respect
– Appreciation
– Compassion
Its first name was the Young Israel of Saint-Martin. It was established in 1959, and the construction of a synagogue on Elizabeth Boulevard began in 1961.(i) We had recently moved to what still felt like “the country” in nearby L’Abord-à-Plouffe. In 1961 those two villages, along with Renaud, became Chomedey and the shul became the Young Israel of Chomedey. It was there that I started kindergarten in the basement library, with a piano just to the right of the doorway, and a long row of books on the facing wall.
Along with my bubbe and zayde’s place on Saint-Viateur Street, 20 kilometres away in Montreal, Young Israel was the spiritual home of my childhood. It was led by Rabbi Solomon J. Spiro, black-hatted but clean-shaven, and to me, remote yet revered.
Until one high holidays. I was fairly young, on my own in the ezrat nashim. It was time for the sermon, and I sat quietly, surrounded by the mostly older women. And while I can’t tell you much about the message, I clearly and viscerally recall being yelled at. He wanted to know why we weren’t there the rest of year, why we weren’t observing the laws of kashrut, and why we rode on shabbat. He didn’t speak, he thundered, he pointed, he accused.
I was confused. We were there. I went on shabbat, and so did many of the older women and men on the other side of the mechitza. I didn’t know very many of them, but they peopled this space in my childhood that was overwhelmingly for the good. Now the rabbi was yelling at them, at us, at me, for not being there, among other things, and that memory clouds – but does not obliterate – the joy of my key childhood Jewish communal space.
We were there, and the rabbi was mad at those who were not. It didn’t make sense. In that moment I didn’t understand that for Rabbi Spiro what was core, what was essential, to his rabbinate was to uphold strict halakhic Jewish practices, and with his biggest kahal of the year, the most community members gathered, he may have felt inexorably compelled to shout, and pound, and – in my case – create a strangely indelible memory.
Public chastisement causing embarrassment, I learned in rabbinical school, is never acceptable, and neither is onaat devarim, or verbal abuse. Yet right up there in torah, nestled close to the beloved phrase love your neighbour as yourself in Leviticus 19:18, is you shall surely rebuke your neighbour in Leviticus 19:17.
The Talmud(ii) does not mince words – shaming another in public is akin to shedding blood. Yet Torah seems to obligate us to scold! As you can imagine, layers and generations of conversation ensue, contradictory opinions and disagreements are recorded, and rabbis – and communities – are left to set their boundaries and expectations.
What better moment than for Rabbi Spiro, and rabbis before and since, to admonish and preach than from the bimah during the High Holidays? We gather at a time we say is most open to inner transformation, to spiritual examination, to chart a path of improvement in our behaviour and especially in our speech. For some, there is still an irresistible compulsion to yell and pound in front of our largest crowd of the year.
As you can well imagine, rabbis everyone have been agonizing about what they will say from the pulpit these High Holidays. Chas veshalom – God forbid I etch in you anything like the stunned incomprehension of my childhood experience.
So allow me to peel back the curtain a little, to reveal some of the wrestling that my Reconstructionist rabbinic colleagues and I have been engaged with leading up to Tishrey 5786. Perhaps just the title of a pair of Zoom sessions will tell you all you need to know: Holding Our Integrity While Leading Big Tent Spaces.(iii) As I absorbed many gems of insight from our wise teachers, I registered that their teachings apply to much more than just the current moment, as we are witness to the annihilation of Gaza, and as we approach the 2nd anniversary of the devastating attacks in Israel on Simchat Torah 5784.
In guiding us to speak out truths in ways that could be heard on the most tender day of the year, my teachers – Rabbis Mordechai Liebling,(iv) David Teutsch,(v) and Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer(vi) – invited us first and foremost to ground ourselves in compassion. Leading with integrity, we were reminded, means leading with love. It was also helpful to hear aloud that right now, everyone is feeling pain, many are upset, and some regard this moment as an existential crisis in Judaism.
Indeed, as my beloved teacher and friend Rabbi Liebling noted, the beginning of compassion, of empathy, is naming and then feeling the pain that is in here and out in the world. The session recalled for me a short animation(vii) narrated by Brené Brown, in which she brilliantly demonstrates the meaning of empathy. The merely sympathetic talking animal looks down to the critter in the pit of despair and says, “Ooh, it’s bad. Wanna sandwich?” The empathetic critter recognizes the need to connect to something within themself, climbs down, and says, “Oof. I don’t even know what to say right not but I’m so glad you told me.” Brown as narrator adds, “rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.”
Empathy requires perspective taking, that is, recognizing others’ truth; staying out of judgment; discerning others’ emotions; and naming that. Most of us, myself very much included, are trapped in judgment. First and foremost, I judge myself – for what I said, or did not say, for the paucity of my actions. I swear – privately yet profusely at myself, at the radio, at others. It does not serve me well. Acknowledging the impulse, naming it and what’s behind it, now that would be showing compassion for self, enabling me to better call it up for others.
We are assaulted, we are barraged, we are challenged, we are despairing … and we all must be willing to take the leap over to we are empathic. For those paying attention to intra-communal Jewish conversations these past months, you may have noted a trickle-turned avalanche of assaulting, barraging and challenging voices targeting those who have taken a leap towards empathy.
Jewish communal leaders who were actively hostile to any suggestion that what was taking place in Gaza following October 7th might amount to war crimes or genocide, or that what was unfolding in the West Bank might bring annexation, are now declaring that their minds have changed, their hearts have opened, and they have begun to see things differently.
Among those voices, one that struck me as commanding attention is the former chancellor of Conservative Judaism’s Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch.(viii) I had long struggled with the contrast between the experience of gleaning great insights from his parsha commentaries, and the knowledge that he had presided over the Seminary during the period of judgment, refusals, and awful halakhic rulings around homosexuality – and I use that archaic term deliberately. He retired in 2006; in 2007 the rabbinical and cantorial schools began accepting queer candidates.
In late August, I learned that earlier in the month Rabbi Schorsch had written a dramatic post(ix) that began as follows: “Despite the comforting fact that fasting gets easier with age, this year’s Tisha be-Av was the hardest of my life. From beginning to end, I found the gap between words and deeds insurmountable. The day commemorates graphically what others did to us, including on October seventh, with almost no attention to what we have done and are doing to others.”
It is worthwhile quoting segments conveying the heart of his commentary:
“Our immediate challenge as Jews is … to make sure that Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state. The unremitting violence against helpless Palestinians in Gaza and their wholly innocent coreligionists on the West Bank will saddle Jews with a repulsive religion riddled with hypocrisy and contradictions. The messianism driving the current government of Israel is sadly out of kilter with traditional Judaism — and an utter moral abomination.”
I only learned of his dramatic break with the rigid perspectives held by so many major Jewish institutions because of an interview(x) he granted to fellow Jewish historian Peter Beinart. In their conversation, Schorsch asked, perhaps rhetorically, “How can I live with Judaism after what is taking place now in Israel for the last year and a half to two years?”
He went on, expanding his “I” to “we:”
“I think in some ways Judaism is at that critical moment. Are we going to be able to defend Judaism, which has the burden of the hillul hashem (the desecration of the name) that is taking place on the West Bank and on Gaza? Will we be able to live that Judaism, and if we don’t speak out now, it may be too late. This may be our final moment in raising the ethical constraints that need to be imposed on the Israeli government; we are defending Judaism, and Judaism is going to have to survive that catastrophe. How are we going to be able to live with ourselves if we are going to be silent?”
Schorsch may present a voice from an unexpected corner, but colleagues’ voices across the political, religious, and Zionist spectrum seem to be converging in one chorus of concern: will Judaism and the soul of the Jewish people survive the path being forged by the Jewish state?
There was another angle to his Tisha B’Av essay that reached me. Schorsch explicitly invited rabbis to pay more attention to the prophetic strand of our tradition in order to reassert Judaism’s ethical legacy. I took up the assignment and re-read passages from the books of Samuel and Kings, and in Isaiah. He quotes Amos, prophet of the Northern Kingdom, from whom we often pull his stirring calls to justice, offered here in a tone of fury: “I loathe, I spurn your festivals, I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies. If you offer Me burnt offerings – or your meal offerings – I will not accept them; I will pay no heed to your gifts of fatlings.” (xi)
Isaiah, in the haftarah passage traditionally chanted on Yom Kippur morning, echoes Amos: “Behold, you fast in strife and quarrelling, and with a meanly clenched fist you strike. Today, you do not fast in such a way as to make your voice heard on high. Is this kind of fast I delight in? A fast merely to deprive one’s body?”(xii)
What is it we are called to do? Whose voices will pierce our resistance, change our hearts, support us with love and compassion, guide us with wisdom and insight, without shaming or yelling?
On this long day that has begun this evening, this day devoted to holding ourselves and each other accountable for our transgressions, and wrestling with transgressions perpetrated in our name, let us allow the prophets of yore, and of this moment, to speak to us. Let us receive their wisdom and pair it with our empathy – for all those being subjected to inhumane and unfathomable suffering, for ourselves, for each other, and for the world.
May our hearts be soothed by our chants even as we cry out for the sanctity of all human life, and may b’tzelem elohim, that we are all created in the Divine image, be the central, sustaining pole of our beautiful, sacred little Big Tent. Gmar chatima tova.
Source List
i https://www.bnaibrith.ca/young_israel_of_chomedey_adjusts_to_life_in_a_new_home/ ii Babylonian Talmud Bava Metzia 58b-59a
iii Facilitated by Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman, https://www.shamayim.org/ourrabbi
iv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Liebling
v https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/author/rabbi-david-a-teutsch/
vi https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/author/rabbi-nancy-fuchs-kreimer/
vii https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZBTYViDPlQ
viii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismar_Schorsch
ix https://www.jassberlin.org/post/a-hard-tisha-b-av-rabbi-dr-ismar-schorschchancellor-emeritusjewish theological-seminary-7-6-2025
x https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/a-stain-on-judaism-itself?triedRedirect=true xi Amos 5: 21-22
xii Isaiah 58:4-5a
