Yizkor Yom Kippur 2025

A Tale of Two Communities, Writing a Story to be Read

Yom Kippur is not only a day of fasting and prayer—it is a day of memory. It’s a day to look deeply into the mirror of our souls and into the mirror of our people’s story. This is the sacred gift of Yizkor: to bring into our hearts the names and faces of those who shaped us. Our parents, our grandparents, our loved ones—they live again through the stories we tell. Their struggles, their triumphs, their values——these are not dusty relics. They are the living roots of our own Jewish identity.

For my parents, their Jewishness was not an abstract idea. They lived through the shadow of Eastern European discrimination where their parents came from before immigrating to Canada. The Holocaust was part of their friends’ family stories. They witnessed the birth of Israel and the wars that tested its survival, from the Six-Day War to the Yom Kippur War. These sweeping events gave shape to their Jewish journey. But just as powerful were the smaller, more personal stories.

My father grew up in a little pulp and paper mill town in Northern Ontario—a place you’d never imagine having a synagogue, yet it did. A tiny Jewish community, a visiting rabbi, a one-room schoolhouse. My father, his siblings, his nieces and nephews all sat together in that room.

Then came the announcement. A few days before Yom Kippur, the school principal declared there would be a high-stakes exam on Yom Kippur morning—no exceptions. Half the grade rested on it. Panic rippled through the Jewish families, who were recent immigrants, still finding their footing in Canada. And yet, they stood firm: their children would be in synagogue, not school, on the holiest day of the year.

My father always remembered what my Uncle Sammy said to the principal. He swore it was, “Over my dead body.” I always remembered it as, “Over your dead body.” Either way, the point was clear: there would be no test that day.

And then, as if the heavens themselves intervened, tragedy struck. A boat overturned, and the principal’s body was found in the water. School was canceled. On Yom Kippur morning, the Jewish children filled the synagogue while the rest of the town attended the principal’s wake.

That is the Judaism my parents carried: unwavering, committed, unshakable. And perhaps, yours carried the same.

So, when we gather on these Days of Awe, the questions before us are never only about me. They are about us. What does it mean to be a Jew today—in America, in Israel, in a world stretched across continents, languages, and wildly different realities? What is your Jewish story?

In his book, Tablets Shattered, Joshua Leifer suggests that American Jewish identity once rested on three sturdy pillars: Americanism, Zionism, and Liberalism. Our grandparents and parents embraced American life, often through Conservative Judaism, which helped immigrants bridge the old world and the new. With the founding of Israel, Zionism gave American Jews pride and purpose. Liberalism—pluralism, individualism, volunteerism—allowed Jews to fit Judaism into suburban, middle-class lives.

But today, Leifer argues, those pillars are wobbling. Many of the structures that once held us together are cracked, even broken. October 7th only deepened that fracture. The dream of America as an always-safe haven for Jewish life feels less certain.

And so, we return to Yizkor, and to this haunting question: What will hold us now?

Leifer reminds us of the broken tablets that Moses carried down from Sinai. Do you remember? The shattered pieces were not discarded. They were placed tenderly in the Ark, right beside the whole tablets. Our tradition insists that the broken is also holy. Both wholeness and brokenness belong to us.

Today, we live with two “tablets” of Jewish life—Israel and America. The Hartman Institute speaks of them as two centers of gravity. For the first time in Jewish history, we do not have just one Jewish home, but two vibrant, complex, and sometimes conflicting ones.

Israeli Judaism is about sovereignty, security, and peoplehood. American Judaism is about freedom, pluralism, and faith in democracy. Each is beautiful. Each is incomplete. Israel risks being swallowed by political conflict and a world that disapproves of Israel and its leadership’s response to the October 7th massacre by Hamas. The optics and the backlash have affected us as Jews living in America. And for American Jewish life, America risks reducing Judaism to a lifestyle choice. Neither can survive alone. But together—they just might.

Rabbi Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Hartman Institute, shared a powerful idea rooted in the words of Maimonides. In his section on the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides writes about a person who separates themselves from the community. Such a person, he says, "does not have a portion in the world to come."

Maimonides wasn't just raging against someone who strayed; he was conveying a deep sense of pathos. A person who stands apart is already in self-imposed exile. The threat is not punishment, but oblivion. They will be forgotten by history, like the Sadducees or the Karaites. They will be on the "wrong side" of the long arc of Jewish history.

We all want to identify ourselves in a continuous line of tradition, tracing back to Abraham and all the way through the descendants we’ll never see. We smooth over the ruptures because we see them as necessary steps in the evolution of our people. And we worry about whether we're making the right moves today, moves that will align with that single timeline of history we hope our descendants will inherit.

This is the power of making memory. It’s not just about what happened; it’s about how we tell the story, how we curate the past to align with the present, and how we shape what future generations remember. This is why the stakes feel so high right now. We worry that our grandkids are susceptible to wrong narratives about our people and about Israel.

In his podcast, Rabbi Kurtzer said that parents and grandparents are coming to him anxiously, worried that their children will "jump ship" because the narratives they learn about Israel and Palestine are so vastly different from what they grew up with.

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, senior rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City, urges us not to fall into indifference. We cannot, as American Jews, look away from Israel because it feels complicated. Israelis cannot dismiss American Jews as irrelevant. We need one another. We are family. We are covenant partners.

As Cosgrove explains, Israel is now in crisis. The question is: Are you going to exit and stand on the sidelines? Or are you going to use your voice, leverage your moral compass and the piercing clarity of your conscience to effect change? Why would you cede the discussion of what Zionism is and what it should be to those who would corrupt it, making it into something it is not?

Sarah Hurwitz, a former White House writer for Michelle Obama, notes that people are trying to rewrite what Zionism is. And in my opinion, that rewrite is not good for Israel, nor is it good for young Jews in America whose opinions are being formed in schools, universities, and yes, even in rabbinical school.

My colleague’s son, Gabi Mitchell, who lives in Israel, recently wrote a moving blog post about the psychological paradox in his community. It took place on the first day of school, just before Rosh Hashanah. He describes the neighborhood gathering in a park to celebrate, with bouncy houses and music.

But as his wife cooked, she turned on the radio. The news began with a funeral announcement for Idan Shtivi, murdered on October 7th at the Nova music festival, whose body had just been recovered from Gaza.

Mitchell writes about the paradox that has become a cliche in Israel: "we celebrate life as we bury our dead… and that’s what makes us stronger!" As a parent, he wonders how his daughters will make sense of these two soundtracks: the celebratory noise of the party and the sorrow of a grieving family. He asks, "How will they learn to balance between the extremes of the human emotional spectrum? Who will teach them to navigate this minefield of emotions?"

So, what do we do? How do we survive together?

1. A Shared Responsibility – Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. All Israel is responsible for one another—not just in crisis, but in learning, prayer, and building. The broken tablets remind us: holiness lies in carrying each other’s fragments.
2. A Deep Curiosity – American Jews must hear Israeli voices not only through headlines of war but through the melodies of culture, Torah, and everyday life. Israelis must see American Jews not just as donors or critics, but as partners in a shared covenant.
3. A Covenant of Dialogue – Distance must give way to conversation. Two centers of Jewish life need not compete; they can create balance, tension, creativity, and dynamism—if we let them.

The author of Tablets Shattered suggests that American Judaism is in decline. But we can choose a different story. Take Congregation Beth El as an example. As a congregation it may seem that we are in the twilight of our history. But we too have possibilities. We can actually sense the strength of synagogue community when we join together at so many different events, be they religious, social, educational, home hospitality or simply working in partnership and preparation for these events. It’s the joining together as lifelong friends, even when we are not at shul. Being there for each other in moments of joy and in moments of challenge. It’s being a Jewish community.

So, when we pray today that God inscribe us in the Book of Life, perhaps we should also ask: In what story of Jewish life will we be written? Will it be a story of estrangement, or a story of partnership?

Let us choose partnership. Let us carry both the broken and the whole. Let us carry Israel and America in our Ark, in our hearts.

Let us pray that in this new year, our people not only survive—but flourish. Together.

Our stories connect us back, remembering our loved ones. Some bring a smile on our face, some conjure up  sadness and a tear.  But they are the stories that connect us and hopefully inspire us and connect us to what we hold dear as a Jew in America and a Jew with a connection to both the land and the State of Israel.

As we stand together—broken and whole, let us be worthy of the story we inherit, and courageous in the story we create.

G’mar chatimah tova.