Monday evening is the beginning of the High Holy Days for Jews around the world, a 10-day period of repentance and celebration, fasting and feasting. The holidays begin with Rosh Hashana, the celebration of the Jewish New Year.
This year, the holidays arrive at a time of extraordinary tension for many American Jews. Fractures over the war in Gaza, the state of Israel more broadly and the Trump administration’s focus on antisemitism have divided many communities and families.
Is there a way for American Jews to find hope at the dawn of the year 5786? Rabbi Elan Babchuck, the executive vice president of Clal, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, said that one of his organization’s values was “grounded optimism.” His own work includes writing and consulting on polarization and on the role of religion in American life.
I interviewed Rabbi Babchuck on Monday morning as he was preparing to travel to the Midwest with his family. The family lives in Providence, R.I., but he is a visiting rabbi in residence at Aitz Hayim, a synagogue in suburban Chicago, and will lead services for the congregation over the holidays.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Clal was founded in 1974 by a group that included Elie Wiesel, born out of an awareness that Jews in America were in a new era of “unprecedented freedom, power and acceptance.” Just over 50 years later, how would you describe the position of Jews in America at the start of these High Holy Days?
On Oct. 6, 2023, I would say it was the best time in history to be Jewish, especially here in America. As my colleague Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, who’s the president of Clal, often says, “Jews, we need to learn to take yes for an answer.”
At the same time, there were cracks in the facade back in 1974, and there are cracks in the facade today. It is absolutely the experience of most, if not all, of the Jews that I speak to today, that they feel like they’re standing on shaky ground for the first time in a long time.
Did you have any sense in the early days after the attacks of Oct. 7 that this would lead to the kind of fractures you are feeling today, or did that feel like an occasion for potential unity in the moment?
I never would have imagined the splinters inside of the Jewish community, and the splinters between the Jewish community and others outside of the Jewish community, many of whom were partners and allies previously. I certainly would not have expected that it would lead to a further rise in antisemitism and the weaponization of antisemitism.
But in the same way, in hindsight we can look at Covid and say, well, actually it didn’t create more polarization. It didn’t create suspicion about vaccines. It didn’t create conspiracy theories about government power. But it exacerbated them and accelerated many of these trends.
Was there a particular moment over the last two years when those dynamics started to become clear?
Externally, I’m actually scared by the degree to which antisemitism has become so commonplace and is just now part of our everyday life experience. I just traveled to London for a work project last week. This is the first time in my life that I don’t wear a kipa when I’m traveling. If I’m in a place that I don’t know well and I don’t know who the players are, I no longer wear a kipa in those public settings.
Internally, I’m not surprised by divisions inside of the Jewish community, and I actually want to argue that divisions are what keep us so healthy.
In the Talmud, there’s about 5,000 recorded arguments, and only 50 of them get resolved. We can look at that and say, “We have a 1 percent success rate.” Or we can look at it and say, “No, we have a 99 percent success rate.” And it’s because at the end of the day, those rabbis knew what they were debating was going to determine the future of the Jewish people. Those rabbis still blessed one another after they learned for the day, after they argued, after they disagreed.
Doesn’t this feel like a different scale of disagreement, though? Not to say it’s the worst in more than 2,000 years, but in the American context, the divisions are emerging around what had felt like a core consensus around the centrality of the state of Israel.
I think the sense that there was universal agreement or near universal agreement is probably overstated. But yeah, the divisions feel really real and really raw, and they’re happening inside of families.
Israel isn’t just Israel. Each generation has a different relationship to it. For some, it was the saving grace; for others, it was the place where they could escape American antisemitism and go there and feel 100 percent safe wearing a kipa everywhere they went. For younger generations, maybe it was like a beautiful place to visit, a place their parents really, really cared about, and they could still feel something really transcendent when they touched the Western Wall. But you can see already the cascading effects of different relationships to the country and to the idea of it.
It’s completely natural for each generation to essentially rebel against what their parents stood for. It is not surprising that the younger generations are pushing back on what they might have perceived as a monolithic ideal about the state of Israel. And I also believe that this will oscillate, like many generational differences.
How do you think about navigating this moment as an institutional leader, given the tremendous pressure Jewish institutions are under right now, and the disappointment of a lot of younger Jews over the sense that many of the largest Jewish institutions have remained silent on some of these crucial questions around the war?
There hasn’t been a moment to pause. Find me a Jewish organization that’s done a strategic plan in the last two years. We’ve been in reactive mode every day for the last two years, whether we’re reacting to an incident of antisemitism, the murder of young Israelis in D.C. or the latest piece of news coming out of Israel or Gaza. We haven’t had that time to reflect.
You’ll be speaking from the pulpit over these next days, which is a different role. What do you plan to say to meet this moment?
I want to honor those in the congregation that feel like the sky is falling. I also want to invite them to consider that the sense of impending doom is ingrained in us as humans.
There’s a midrash about Adam on his first day. And he sees the sky falling. You can imagine whatever he did — he walked around the garden, maybe he ate a fig. Then he sees that the sun is setting and he says, “Oy li, woe is me. Something I must have done has caused the sky to fall and the world is going to end.” Then the sun sets, and in darkness, all night, he cries, and he prays to God that the sun might come up once again. But he’s taken responsibility for it.
Then, of course, the next morning, the sun rises. And he says, “Oh, I guess this is how the world works.” He still goes and makes a sacrifice.
That’s what I hope that people can walk away with: a tremendous sense of moral responsibility and human agency that we should be doing everything we can to bring about a kinder world in which more people are dignified than ever before, more people are safe than ever before and fed than ever before and reunited with their families. And also a faith that we have this partner in God, who also makes sure that the sun rises the next morning.
How are you going to spend these holidays?
My wife and I have three young kids, 13, 9 and 5, and the world has been spinning off its axis. All five of us are going to carve out some time to go offline obviously during the holidays and really reflect on what has the year been like. What were the highs, what were the lows and who do we want to be in the unfolding drama of the year to come?
Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.
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