We Have Failed Gaza: Sermon for Erev Yom Kippur 5786

Rabbi Brant Rosen

photo: Amnesty International/Younis Tirawi

On Yom Kippur, we say the hard truths out loud. On Yom Kippur, we proclaim together as a community: chatanu, we have sinned. We have failed. We have not lived up to our promises of the past year. 

I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced these words more brutally than I do this year. In last year’s Rosh Hashanah sermon, I ended with these words: “A year from now, when we are back here, we will have to have an answer. We can’t find ourselves just asking the same question. We must be ready to answer: what did we do in the last year to bring this genocide to an end?”

We have failed. It is now one year later and Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza is continuing toward its second year mark. As I speak these words, the Israeli military is literally leveling the entire northern region of Gaza to the ground. Earlier today, Israel issued its final warning for Palestinians in Gaza City to evacuate, saying everyone who remains will be considered a “terrorist. Many are refusing to leave, many are unable to leave. 

It is horrifying to even say these words out loud: on this Yom Kippur, the day when we plead to be written into the Book of Life, Israel is systematically erasing Gaza from the map – and the people of Gaza along with it. 

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve struggled mightily over what I could possibly say tonight that would be worthy of Yom Kippur. I could discuss the geo-political causes that have been prolonging this genocide. I could discuss craven US politicians and corporate gangsters who are planning to carve up Gaza for their own profit. I could spend my time excoriating the Jewish establishment for supporting this genocide – and too many Jewish communal leaders for their silence. But frankly, none of it would be particularly new. None of it feels worthy of the grief pervading this sacred moment of Yom Kippur. 

I also don’t want to spend this sermon describing the specific litany of the atrocities being inflicted on the people of Gaza – to reduce them to trapped, powerless victims. We’re all too familiar with the horrors of the past two years. Like so many of you, I’ve been scrolling daily through unbearable pictures and videos live streaming Gazan’s agony, their erasure. There’s something obscene about the casual way we’ve been viewing these horrors on our mobile devices, right alongside memes and texts and emails as we go about our daily business. 

And yet at the same time, I know we must bear witness. We owe it in particular to the courageous young Gazans reporting on their own erasure from the ground even as Israel maintains a total media blackout. We cannot and must not look away. This has been our sacred responsibility to the people of Gaza. It is precisely through this bearing witness that we affirm their essential humanity. 

As I thought about what I could possibly say to you tonight, I kept returning the same basic truth: if these days are to have any meaning for us at all, it is Yom Kippur’s sacred challenge to publicly affirm our accountability to the Palestinian people – as Jews and as human beings of conscience. We cannot let ourselves become complicit in their erasure. If we are truly serious about Yom Kippur, we must vow that solidarity is our sacred obligation. 

When I think about Jewish accountability to the Palestinian people, I must mention our profound debt to Prof. Marc Ellis, of blessed memory, the great Jewish scholar, writer and theologian, who was an important teacher to me and a friend to our congregation from our earliest days. I quoted Marc in my very first sermon at Tzedek Chicago and many more times over the years. He was a prolific writer, but more importantly he was a courageous writer. Among other things, he wrote a great deal about what he called “revolutionary forgiveness” and the imperative for a collective Jewish confession to the Palestinian people. As he put it:

Revolutionary forgiveness in Israel-Palestine begins with a confession by the Jewish people. The confession is simple. What we as Jews have done to the Palestinian people is wrong. What we are doing to the Palestinian people today is wrong. With that confession, we agree to begin to walk the path with Palestinians towards justice and equality. As that path begins to be walked, the memories of each people, broken by history, remain. But as that path is walked, new memories begin to be created. As those memories of justice and equality are created, they begin to dominate the history of both peoples until in the end an injury against one is an injury against all.  Revolutionary forgiveness; confession, justice at the center.  

Marc died last year, far too young, as Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people was raging in full force. I yearn to talk to him now about this confession. I so want to ask him if he would still, in this terrible moment, be writing about mutual, revolutionary forgiveness? I want to ask: is forgiveness even possible any more? Or is what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people truly unforgivable? And if that is the case, is there really any future at all? Can there ever be any hope for real justice in Palestine/Israel?

For the past two years I’ve been in touch with my friend Rachel Betarie, an antizionist Israeli Jew and activist and former director of the organization Zochrot. Over the months, her words to me have become progressively more despairing as she’s described how it feels to live in Israel at this terrifying moment, in a country where the majority of its citizens support the genocide.

Recently, Rachel told that she was part of a new working group organized by Zochrot, as she put it, “of activists in Palestine, colonized and Anti-Zionist colonizers, who have been meeting since April to think, re-imagine, and suggest concrete processes through which the right of return for Palestinian refugees from Gaza could be realized after the genocide.” She went on to write:

It is not easy to imagine a better, more just future at a time when the ground is crumbling under our feet. Some of us have families in Gaza and most of us have deep ties there. All of us see our future here in Palestine, between the river and the sea. The question arose again and again in our meetings: Is it even relevant to talk about the future right now? Isn’t this just escapism? Still, we chose to trust each other – a work in progress – and our deeply held values, and extract some ideas from our process of learning and discussing. With every meeting it became clearer to what extent the Nakba, and the ongoing system of settler colonialism – not October 7, 2023 – was and still remains the root of the problems we face today, and that return is the core of every future solution that has a chance to bring any stability, justice and peace to our communities, and that entails dismantling of the Zionist colonial regime.

Through this work, we came to the conclusion that return from Gaza must begin – not at some distant point in the future. Our discussions did not only focus on the design of return but also raised questions of community, of collective and individual healing, and of how social processes of repair can accompany physical return. With our hearts shattered daily by the horrors of the genocide, and with fear and hopelessness engulfing us, envisioning this still possible future is in itself a remedy.

I’m so inspired by their effort, their determination to come together, Israelis and Palestinians – or as Rachel put it, colonized and colonizers – even in this unbearably tragic moment, to vision a future of reparation and return. They know full well that they are a tiny minority in Israeli society, a small island of hope amidst an ocean of trauma and fury. And yet they are determined to keep this vision alive despite it all.

As I think further about how we might envision the future this Yom Kippur, particularly here in the diaspora, I keep returning to one basic truth: Palestinian voices must be centered in our observance. Quite frankly, I don’t know how we can do the work of teshuvah, of repentance and return if we don’t hear their stories directly, open up fully to their voices and honor their experience. 

As I said earlier, as we gather tonight for Yom Kippur, Israel is erasing the entire northern region of Gaza City, the most populous, built-up region of the Gaza Strip. According to reports, the scale of these demolitions are unprecedented. Over the past few weeks, the Israeli military has been systematically destroying every high-rise building in Gaza City. Satellite pictures show that the most populous region of Gaza has been reduced to a lunar landscape. Israel has already done this to large swathes of the Gaza Strip, including the city of Rafah in the south and the town of Beit Hanoun in the north. 

These words, however, are mere reportage. I believe it’s critical that we hear the story of this erasure from those who are most directly impacted. And so I’d like to share with you two extended testimonies for this Yom Kippur, our day of reckoning. The first is the voice of Taher Herzallah, who comes from Gaza City and works as the Director of Organizing for American Muslims for Palestine. These are the words that Taher recently posted on this Facebook page: 

Gaza has fallen.

I’m not a sensationalist, nor am I someone who likes to shatter people’s hopes. But what we are witnessing today is the complete and utter annihilation of a people. It really feels like the end of Gaza City, and I don’t say this lightly, especially since I have family members and friends in Gaza who follow me on this page. This is the city where my father was born and where my family has lived for centuries.

Many of my relatives held out for two years under the worst conditions human beings can live under. But for more than 700 days, they’ve endured and found ways to survive in Gaza City.

No longer.

They’ve decided to leave Gaza City for the first time since this all started. It is just no longer possible to live there. With Israel’s systematic destruction of many of the major residential high rises in the city this week, the message is unequivocal: all of Gaza City will be leveled to the ground, the way Rafah and Jabalya and Khan Younis and Beit Hanoun were.

The images of displacement today broke something inside of me. People, looking back at Gaza with tears in their eyes, are moving south into another uncertain reality. Death and suffering are still a high likelihood as “safe zones” don’t truly exist. They know a return to Gaza is unlikely and they will be stuck in a cycle of displacement and suffering for years to come. But what choice do people have?

Some people refuse to leave Gaza. Not only out of stubbornness but also because they don’t have the means to leave. With the lack of aid organizations or large-scale efforts to facilitate the transfer of the population to another area, everyone in Gaza is left alone to figure out how to move their families to safer zones.

I have family members in Gaza who have gone back and forth from Gaza City to Deir El Balah 3 or 4 times to find a small plot of land to set up their tents. Finding an apartment or a built structure to live in is an absolutely hopeless endeavor. The best-case scenario now is to find a small plot of land large enough to erect a tent. With 2 million people squeezed into a small area on the Gaza coast, even that has become nearly impossible…

The stories we are hearing out of Gaza are heartbreaking and soul-crushing. A 10-year-old child in Gaza City was asked what his hopes are for ending this war. His response: “I only hope for one thing–to find my dad’s body and to bury him.” This is the extent of the boy’s hopes and dreams. To find consolation in burying the body of his father, who was killed at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site.

Other people have similar stories. They refuse to leave Gaza City, not because they don’t think it’s dangerous, but because they have loved ones buried under the rubble that they have not retrieved and can’t fathom moving on in life without burying them. The psychological and physical trauma of this genocide is so severe that people know that carrying that trauma will be the end of them anyway, and would rather die in Gaza City than endure years of more suffering…

To my family reading this: I am sorry. I have failed you. I don’t know what else to say. I hope you forgive me.

For the rest of us: whatever happens next will be very difficult. So prepare accordingly.

The next Palestinian voice I’d like to share with you is that of Asem Alnabih, an engineer and PhD student and spokesman for the Gaza municipality, who recently evacuated from the Shujayea region of Gaza City. Shujayea is one of the largest neighborhoods in Gaza and once had up to 100,000 residents. It is also a historically significant neighborhood, located in the southern quarter of Gaza’s Old City. Shujayea dates back to the 13th century and is named after Shuja’ al-Din Uthman al-Kurdi, a Muslim commander who died fighting the Crusaders. In the Ottoman period, it was the only mixed quarter in the Old City, where Muslims, Christians and Jews once lived together.

I remember Shujayea well when I visited Gaza in 2017 as a staff member for the American Friends Service Committee. It’s residents were clearly proud of their home, of its history, its deep sense of community and especially of its resilience. Although Shujayea was heavily bombed by Israel in its 2009 and 2014 assaults, residents rebuilt their homes each time. 

Here is Asem Alnabih’s testimony, which he wrote in an article for Al-Jazeera:

My neighbourhood in east Gaza, Shujayea, is gone! The streets that once echoed with the laughter of children, the calls of vendors, and the familiar rhythms of daily life now lie in silence, smothered by dust and destruction. What was once a vibrant community, full of stories and memories, has been erased in a matter of moments.

A few days ago, my brother Mohammed went back to Shujayea to check on our family home. When he came back he told my father that nothing remained except for a few broken walls and scattered columns. A few hours later, we were shocked to learn that my father himself had braved extreme danger to see it with his own eyes. In a place where every step can mean death, he chose to walk through the ruins of our past.

This was the house my grandfather and father had built with years of effort, the house that carried my dad’s dreams and bore the marks of his sweat and sacrifice. It was where he raised his children, where we celebrated weddings and birthdays, where countless family memories were made. And now, it is nothing but rubble.

But our family’s loss is not just this one house. My father’s destroyed home is now added to my own burned apartment, my sister Nour’s bombed apartment, my sister Heba’s demolished home, and my sister Somaia’s two apartments – one reduced to rubble and the other burned. To this list are added my uncle Hassan’s destroyed building, my uncle Ziad’s building, my uncle Zahir’s home, my aunt Umm Musab’s apartment, my aunt Faten’s apartment, and the completely destroyed homes of my aunts Sabah, Amal, and Mona. And these are only the losses within our immediate family. All around us, countless relatives, friends, and neighbours have seen their homes obliterated, their memories buried under the debris.

This is not simply about the staggering material value of what we have lost. Yes, the homes were filled with furniture, personal belongings, and cherished possessions, but the destruction goes far deeper than material things. What has been taken from us is irreplaceable. A house can be rebuilt, but the sense of belonging that comes from walking familiar streets, from living in the same neighbourhood where generations of your family have grown up – that cannot be reconstructed with bricks and cement.

Shujayea was more than just buildings. It was a community stitched together by relationships, shared histories, and the memories of ordinary lives. It held the neighbourhood bakery where we bought fresh bread at dawn, the small corner shop where neighbours gathered to chat, the ancient Ibn Othman mosque that echoed with prayers during Ramadan. These were the spaces where children played, where families celebrated, and where neighbours supported each other through good times and bad.

When a neighbourhood like Shujayea is erased, it is not only walls that fall; it is a whole way of life. The destruction severs ties between neighbours, scatters families across shelters and refugee camps, and leaves a deep wound that no reconstruction project can truly heal. A rebuilt house may have four walls and a roof, but it will not be the same home that once carried generations of stories.

The pain of this loss is not unique to my family. Across Gaza, entire neighbourhoods have been flattened. Each pile of rubble hides the history of a family, the laughter of children, the wisdom of elders, and the love of a community that once thrived there. Each destroyed home is a silent witness to the human cost of this war, costs that cannot be measured in money or damage assessment.

What we have lost is not just property, but identity. A home is where a person’s life unfolds, where milestones are celebrated, where griefs are shared, where bonds are formed. To see so many homes destroyed is to see an entire people uprooted from the places that defined them. It is a calculated erasure, not only of lives, but of memory, heritage, and belonging.

Rebuilding will not bring back what was taken. The new buildings, if they ever come, will stand on top of the graves of our memories. They will not bring back my father’s years of hard work, nor the sense of comfort and security that once came with having a home. They will not resurrect the neighbourhood we knew, the one full of warmth, familiarity, and life.

The destruction of Shujayea is a wound that will remain open for generations. It is not simply a matter of humanitarian aid or reconstruction funds. This is about the deliberate dismantling of a community’s heart and soul. No amount of concrete can rebuild trust, restore memories, or bring back the neighbours who have been killed.

Shujayea is gone. And with it, a part of us has been buried. Yet even as we grieve, we hold on to the stories, to the love that once filled our homes, to the hope that someday justice will prevail. Because while they can destroy our houses, they cannot destroy the bonds we carry in our hearts, nor the memories that no bulldozer or bomb can erase.

On Yom Kippur, we say the hard truths out loud. And this Yom Kippur we must vow to hear them directly from the voices of those who would otherwise be silenced. Those whose lives would otherwise be erased.  We cannot even imagine atonement if these voices are not with us during this most sacred observance. 

On this evening of Kol Nidre, we admit publicly that we will fail to live up to the vows we make in the coming year. Does that mean we should adjust our vows to be more realistic, more achievable? Does it mean we should not make them at all? I personally find that prospect unbearable. On Yom Kippur, we are obliged to strive for our highest selves, even as we know we will not fully succeed. 

So tonight, let us hold tight to these vows. Let us vow that our movement will end this genocide in the coming year. Let us vow that the armies will withdraw, that Gaza will be rebuilt, that the dead will be given dignified burials, that the dispossessed will find home and shelter. 

And further, let us vow that Israel will be held accountable for its crimes, that the refugees will return, that reparations will be paid. Let us vow that Palestine will be free, that all will be liberated from the river to the sea. 

Yom Kippur demands that we make such vows, as unreal as they may seem to us now. Because as Asem reminds us, “even as we grieve, we hold on to the stories, to the love that once filled our homes, to the hope that someday justice will prevail. Because while they can destroy our houses, they cannot destroy the bonds we carry in our hearts, nor the memories that no bulldozer or bomb can erase.”

On Yom Kippur we vow these vows because we know that as long as we hold on to these stories, to these memories, to this love, then nothing and no one can ever truly be erased. And the hope for justice will never die.

Ken Yehi Ratzon – May it be God’s will. V’chen Yehi Retzoneinu – And may it be our’s.

Amen.

Rabbi Brant Rosen