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Rosh Hashana arrives this year with the world looking less like a civilization governed by wisdom and more like a civilization conducting an experiment in collective insanity. Nations threaten one another while pretending to seek peace. Leaders confuse self-interest with statesmanship. Millions of people consume information designed not to enlighten them but to inflame them. Religious leaders who once understood that their sacred responsibility was to challenge power increasingly appear more interested in proximity to it. And everywhere one looks, truth has become negotiable. We have entered an age in which people no longer ask, “Is it true?” They ask, “Does it serve my side?” That may be the defining moral failure of our generation.
Rosh Hashana, however, is not merely the Jewish New Year. It is the day on which the Jew is supposed to confront a terrifying proposition: that the universe is not governed by political fashion, public relations, polling numbers, or the latest outrage on social media. It is governed by judgment. “Hayom harat olam,” today the world is conceived. The liturgy does not invite us to congratulate ourselves on surviving another year. It places the individual, the community, and ultimately humanity itself before a Judge. The great question is not whether we have won the argument. It is whether we have lived truthfully.
And this is precisely where the modern world is failing.
We have become extraordinarily sophisticated technologically and remarkably primitive morally. We can communicate across continents instantaneously, manipulate genetic material, send machines into space, and construct artificial intelligence capable of astonishing feats. Yet we remain incapable of mastering the oldest human impulses: greed, vanity, tribalism, hatred, dishonesty, and the lust for power. We have built a civilization capable of extraordinary achievements without building human beings capable of responsibly using them.
The Jewish tradition should make us particularly uncomfortable with this spectacle. Torah never promised that Jews would be the most powerful people in the world. It demanded that we be among the people most committed to truth. “Midvar sheker tirchak,” distance yourself from falsehood. Not merely, “Do not lie.” Distance yourself from it. Do not build a society in which falsehood becomes so common that everyone eventually becomes comfortable living inside it.
Yet look around.
Political leaders lie with astonishing confidence. Their supporters defend them with astonishing creativity. Facts become partisan. Institutions become tribal. The powerful demand accountability for their opponents while demanding understanding for themselves. The language of morality has become a weapon rather than a standard. And the most frightening development is not that politicians behave this way. Politicians have always been politicians. The frightening development is that ordinary citizens increasingly expect nothing better from them.
We have lowered the moral standard and then congratulated ourselves for clearing it.
America, Israel, Europe, Russia, China, Iran, and the rest of the world are all confronting different versions of the same crisis: power without wisdom. Military strength without political vision. Wealth without responsibility. Religion without introspection. Education without intellectual courage. And leadership without the humility to admit, “I may be wrong.”
That last sentence may be the most endangered sentence in public life.
The rabbis, of all people, should understand this. Judaism does not worship certainty. The Talmud is filled with arguments, contradictions, questions, qualifications, and competing interpretations. Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai disagree repeatedly, yet the tradition preserves the arguments of both. The Torah scholar is not the person who has eliminated every question. He is the person who has learned how to ask the right questions.
And yet, increasingly, some of our religious leadership seems terrified of questions.
We have created a culture in which challenging a rabbinic pronouncement can be treated as challenging Torah itself. We have elevated personalities into institutions and institutions into unquestionable authorities. We have sometimes confused kavod haTorah with protecting rabbis from criticism. But genuine respect for Torah cannot require intellectual surrender. A rabbi who fears an honest question is not demonstrating the strength of Torah. He is demonstrating the weakness of his own confidence.
Rosh Hashana should therefore be uncomfortable for the rabbinate as well as for the rest of us.
The shofar is not a musical instrument designed to make us feel religious. It is a summons. Wake up. Stop pretending. Stop hiding behind titles, institutions, political alliances, and communal etiquette. The shofar does not ask whether we belong to the right camp. It asks whether we are awake.
And perhaps nowhere is that question more urgent than in the relationship between religion and political power.
A president can support Israel and still be morally wrong. A prime minister can advance Jewish interests and still behave disgracefully. A billionaire can donate millions to Jewish causes and still deserve criticism. A rabbi can be enormously respected and still make a terrible mistake. These propositions should not be controversial among Jews. They are the essence of Jewish moral thought.
The greatest danger to religion is not always hostility from the outside. Sometimes it is the seduction of power from within.
When rabbis become too comfortable around politicians, billionaires, and communal power brokers, the question becomes whether they are still capable of speaking truth to power. The Jewish leader who can only speak courageously to the powerless is not a prophet.
Meanwhile, antisemitism continues to mutate and spread, sometimes from the political extremes and sometimes from supposedly respectable institutions. Jews are once again discovering an ancient lesson: civilization can become civilized very quickly until it isn’t. The Jew who assumes that yesterday’s tolerance guarantees tomorrow’s safety has forgotten Jewish history.
But there is another danger, and it comes from within.
We cannot respond to antisemitism by abandoning the moral standards that Judaism itself taught us. We cannot demand justice for religious Jews while becoming indifferent to justice for everyone else. We cannot demand that the world distinguish between secular Jews and the actions of Haredi Jews, while simultaneously treating every political and existential disagreement as a referendum on someone’s Jewishness.
Jewish survival requires strength. It also requires moral credibility.
Israel, too, stands at a historic crossroads. The Jewish state faces enemies who genuinely seek its destruction. Anyone who denies that reality is living in fantasy. Israel must defend itself. It must maintain overwhelming military strength. It must never again permit its enemies to believe that Jewish life can be destroyed without catastrophic consequences. It needs religious leaders who can speak honestly to the Israeli public without calculating every sentence according to which political faction will applaud.
The same is true of the Jewish diaspora.
We have built extraordinary institutions, enormous communities, magnificent schools, synagogues, charities, and Torah centers. Yet institutions can survive long after the ideas that created them have weakened. A community can be wealthy and still spiritually impoverished. It can be observant and still intellectually dishonest. It can produce thousands of graduates and still fail to teach them how to think.
That is the uncomfortable question of this Rosh Hashana: Are we producing Jews who know how to obey, or Jews who know how to think?
Judaism requires both.
The Torah does not ask us to become human computers programmed to repeat yesterday’s answers. It asks us to wrestle, to inquire, to remember, to judge, to distinguish between good and evil, and ultimately to choose. “U’vacharta bachaim,” choose life. Choice requires judgment. Judgment requires thought. Thought requires intellectual freedom.
The world desperately needs that Jewish tradition now.
We are living through an age of information without wisdom, outrage without reflection, leadership without restraint, religion without sufficient self-criticism, and political power without enough fear of consequences. The antidote is not another slogan. It is character.
Perhaps that is what I hear when the shofar sounds.
I hear a warning that civilization itself can become spiritually bankrupt while continuing to function. I hear a warning that institutions can remain standing while their moral foundations crumble. I hear a warning that religious communities can become obsessed with appearances while neglecting substance. I hear a warning that Jews can become so concerned with defending their leaders that they forget that Judaism never taught us to worship leaders.
And I hear something else. I hear hope.
Because Rosh Hashana assumes that human beings can change. Otherwise there would be no point in judgment. Teshuva would be meaningless. The shofar would be nothing more than noise.
The world does not need perfect leaders this Rosh Hashana. It needs leaders capable of admitting imperfection. It does not need rabbis who know everything. It needs rabbis humble enough to say, “I don’t know.” It does not need politicians who promise salvation. It needs citizens courageous enough to reject political idolatry. It does not need Jews who merely defend Judaism. It needs Jews who embody it.
On the eve of Rosh Hashana, I look at the world and I do not see a civilization at peace. I see a civilization at war with itself, with truth, with history, and often with its own conscience.
But I also see the possibility of something better.
The Jewish answer has never been to wait for the world to become sane. It has been to become sane ourselves.
So before we ask God to judge the world, perhaps we should ask Him to judge us. Before we demand that politicians behave better, perhaps we should examine the compromises we make with truth. Before we criticize the rabbis, perhaps we should ask whether we have made them too powerful by surrendering our own judgment. Before we complain about the darkness outside, perhaps we should ask whether we have allowed darkness inside.
Rosh Hashana is not fundamentally about turning the page on the calendar. It is about turning the mirror toward ourselves.
And if the shofar has any message for this extraordinary moment in Jewish and human history, it is brutally simple: Wake up. Think. Remember who you are. Tell the truth. Fear God more than you fear politicians. Fear moral failure more than you fear criticism. And never confuse power with righteousness.
The world may be losing its way. The Jew cannot afford to lose his.
May we merit a year of blessings.
Paul Mendlowitz
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| REPUBLISHED |
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-state-of-the-world-as-i-see-it-on-the-eve-of-rosh-hashana/
