For a Jewish world in despair, we need High Holiday prayers that meet the moment

(JTA) — I’ve spent the last year traveling the world — two trips each to Israel and Ukraine, along with time in Bulgaria, Ghana, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Georgia and beyond — and I have new eyes for the situation we Jews find ourselves in.

We face skyrocketing antisemitism, an agonizing war with Hamas and its allies, and the grim Whac-A-Mole of so many other pressing concerns. And in early October, we’re somehow meant to endure a Jewish New Year that will force us to confront the chasm between our prayers and our reality.

Attempting to wrestle meaning from the daily pain so many of us have carried since Oct. 7, we’ll recite the Unetaneh Tokef, a medieval liturgical poem best known for the phrase “who will live and who will die” that also sneaks in an ancient formula for living through a spiritual hurricane.

“Prayer, charity and repentance can lessen the severity of the decree,” we belt out, but today, that age-old paradigm for how to handle hard times feels insufficient. With Jewish communities worldwide grappling with a discourse so black-and-white you could choke on it, we need more.

The father of two small children, I feel that imperative acutely. One year into this mess, my Jewishness, while lived proudly every day, feels smaller, sadder, more subdued. How can I raise my kids to be boldly and joyfully Jewish when we feel alone and unsafe in so many once-familiar spaces?

I began to find the answer in an unexpected place — the third floor of a lonely Khrushchev-era apartment building on the outskirts of Chișinău, Europe’s poorest capital.

I was in Moldova to meet 78-year-old Emilia Grosu, a widowed retired cook who ekes out a life on a meager fixed income with the assistance of my organization, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC. She is among tens of thousands of poor and elderly Jews across the former Soviet Union we care for — people without anyone else to aid them.

As I cackled at her jokes and marveled at the exuberant hospitality of someone with so little, our powwow turned to prophecy when we spoke of her struggles.

“The most frightening thing is when you’re sick. It’s not like I can ask for help from my neighbors — there are seven bedridden people in my building alone,” Emilia told me, jabbing a finger into the air for emphasis. “My only hope is our Jewish community. We stick together here.”

Her words echoed later during my months in Israel — where I visited the besieged Southern towns of Sderot and Ofakim, large cities like Be’er Sheva and Jerusalem, and communities in the North anxiously preparing for an escalation or full-scale war.

In Tiberias, the erstwhile tourist hotspot that’s absorbed more than 10,000 evacuees, I attended a JDC prenatal class for women living through the unimaginable — wrenched from their homes for nearly a year, some with husbands in the military, with no idea when they’d return.

It’s one of scores of emergency initiatives we’ve launched in the months after Oct. 7 to meet the spiking humanitarian needs of the hardest-hit Israelis. We’ve directly aided more than 450,000 people to date, but millions more who never needed social assistance before are now relying on it to survive.

There, in the basement of a community center overlooking the Sea of Galilee, I listened in awe as a roomful of brave young women described their clear-eyed choice to create new life in displacement. I was inspired by their rejection of the temptation to let today’s despair engulf them.

“I feel focused and calmer, like I know what I’m heading into,” said Hadar Elmakayes, a 33-year-old evacuee from Kiryat Shmona, less than two miles from the Lebanon border. “When each one of us shares what she’s going through, it unites us and lifts our spirits.”

As Emilia and Hadar reminded me, crisis demands community. We Jews require a minyan — a quorum of 10 people — for our holiest and most tender moments. By ourselves, we can neither properly mourn nor read from the Torah, our most sacred text.

How much more so now, with our hearts aching under the shadow of existential questions we’d hoped were long behind us: What will be the fate of the Jewish people? Of Israel? And how can we return to a world — to social circles, friends, and others — who either can’t fully feel our pain or reject it outright?

It was with all this on my mind that I met Oleksandr Kyrychenko, a young Ukrainian who only learned he was Jewish after Feb. 24, 2022, when his country was plunged into a brutal conflict with no end in sight.

Already 30, he recited his first Shabbat prayers during a 15-hour blackout. His inaugural Purim was celebrated in a bomb shelter with internally displaced Jews from battered Chernihiv. That first Hanukkah, he lit the menorah as the air raid siren sounded.

Now he serves as a counselor at our Superhero Camp in the Carpathian Mountains, an opportunity for Jewish families to get some respite, recharge their batteries, and rediscover their optimism and resilience. Along with the activities Oleksandr connected with as he rediscovered his Judaism, the camp is one facet of my organization’s sweeping response to the Ukraine crisis — just like the tens of thousands of Jews on our aid rolls and the more than 800 tons of humanitarian assistance delivered to meet their needs.

I asked Oleksandr what his trial by fire taught him about community. What do you learn about being Jewish when your only context is catastrophe?

“It’s a very difficult time to be a Jew, and tomorrow will be even harder,” he said. “But it’s also a privilege not to be alone. We can only overcome the darkness with the light and warmth we give each other.”

In that moment, I realized I couldn’t decipher a way forward alone. I’d need my global Jewish community — the people I met at a Ukrainian island of peace amidst ongoing devastation, in a wounded Israel facing a cruel anniversary on Oct. 7, and in the home of a poor Jewish woman with nowhere else to turn.

That is the vital fourth element of the Unetaneh Tokef formula for today, the one we Jews must harness at this impossible moment: We are our own way out.

Yes, we must pray and continue to beseech the heavens for an end to all this suffering.

Yes, we must give and continue to donate our money and marshal our passion for worthy causes so Jewish communities and Israelis, under threat all over the world, not only survive but thrive once more.

And yes, we must repent, and grapple with how we got here.

But this new year requires more than just our individual actions. It demands that we never forget that mutual responsibility — the idea that all Jews everywhere belong to each other — isn’t a burden but a blessing.

This year, alongside the Unetaneh Tokef’s classic formula of tefillah, tzedakah and teshuvah (prayer, charity and repentance), we must add arevut — showing up for one another. Only then can we reckon with an unrelenting world so agonizingly transformed for our people, but still holding the promise for a better future we can only build together.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.