I will never forget my first Yom Kippur in that sanctuary. It was a daunting task at times: Serving the thousands of post-Soviet Jews coming to shul, most of whom had no knowledge of Hebrew and therefore could not follow the prayers and couldn’t pray. As a result, people came in for a short time to meditate quietly, independent of the communal prayer, and then strike up a conversation with a neighbor or just read a book or newspaper. I would pause the prayers at certain intervals to explain the liturgy, and then read the prayer word by word. As the years passed, the congregation changed, with more and more community members able to participate and lead.
It is painful to imagine reciting the closing climactic prayers far from my community. Even in my early years there, even when few knew the prayers, we used to shout the final words of the service in unison. It was the sound of a community of survivors — survivors of Communism, antisemitism, the obsessive machine that sought to destroy their identities. And yet, there we were.
This year, I will divide my time between a few Jerusalem synagogues. Here, and across other cities of Israel, I meet new Jewish émigrés from Russia, the tens of thousands of fellow Jews who have fled since the start of the war. We reminisce about our pasts, and look ahead to our future.
It is strange to feel in exile in Jerusalem, in the Jewish ancestral land — but home is strange like that. Over the centuries, rabbis used to sign their names on documents, not as a “rabbi of” a certain city, but rather “as a temporary dweller” of that city. The role of a religious leader is not only to be a pastoral guide, not only to answer questions and lead services and give sermons, the beautiful and glorious moments that fill one with meaning, a sense of purpose and awe. Those are, so to speak, the easy parts of the rabbinate.
The hardest task of religious leadership is to take moral stances in difficult times, no matter the cost.
And this is perhaps what the shofar, the ram’s horn that Jews blow on the High Holy Days, represents. According to the Bible, the shofar blow is the sound of freedom. It was historically blown at the beginning of the jubilee year — the year that freed all slaves and returned all sold ancestral property. The sound of the shofar blow is meant to remind us of both freedom and equality.
When we blow that shofar this year, let us remember how a peaceful world must rely on the fundamentals of liberty and life, not only for individuals but also among nations. For so long, we had assumed these qualities were a given in Western society — until they no longer were.