One of the consequences of war is the hatred directed against the parties to it. Not only the military and the regimes but also the civilians and people who share the religion and culture of the participants, experience violence and abuse. Military wars spawn religious and cultural wars and personal enmity.
It is not surprising that the war in Gaza has led to hatred of Israel, to antisemitism and to islamophobia. Nor is it surprising that a distant war should divide Australians, too. This is what war does. Even those of us who regard war as the enemy, and believe that those who authorise and implement the massive and disproportionate killing in Gaza and Lebanon should be held to account for their actions, must resist imputing blame to the people of Israel or to Jews more generally. We need to be reminded of the diversity of the Jewish people and of the nobility of their religious tradition.
It can be helpful for those of us outside the religious tradition to enter the spirit of Yom Kippur (Oct 1-11), which was preceded by Rosh Hashanah, the festival of the New Year (Oct 2-4). It can lead us to focus on the wounded humanity and the desire for integrity and peace that we share with many Jewish people. The stories that underlie it and the prayers associated with it may not be ours, but the call to generosity is universal.
In the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur is a 24-hour fast and is dedicated to atonement, repentance, and asking forgiveness of God, of friends and of family for wrongs we have done. The observances both of Rosh Hashanah and of Yom Kippur are prescribed in Chapter 23 of the Book of Leviticus. In Jewish tradition they are conflated with the stories of Moses in the Book of Exodus. He twice went up Mount Sinai to receive the Law that confirmed both God’s promise to Isael and the people’s promise to observe the Law. The Feast of Rosh Hashanah recalls the first of these ascents, in which, according to later Jewish reflection, God placed the names of those saved in the Book of Life.
After Moses descended the mountain to find the people worshipping the golden calf, he broke the stone tablets of the law to signify the annulment of the Covenant – the contract God had made with the Jewish people. God then instructed Moses to climb the mountain again. There he received a second set of tablets of the law and announced to the people that God had forgiven their sins and had definitively renewed the Covenant with them. This second ascent of Moses and the sin of the people and the call for atonement are reflected in the observance of Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur is concerned with the large themes of God’s promise, the sin and repentance of the people, and God’s forgiveness and renewal of the Covenant. It focuses on atonement, which includes acknowledgment of breaking God’s Law, the call to atone for it and be cleansed of it, to be reconciled with enemies, and to celebrate God’s forgiveness. It is accompanied by prayer, fasting and other signs of grief and repentance.
Though anchored in different stories, the themes of Yom Kippur resemble those of the Christian season of Lent and the Muslim Ramadan. As has been the case with Christian feasts, too, Yom Kippur has been influenced by disasters that confronted the Jewish people and the responses made to them. Central among these were the exile to Babylon and the loss of the First Temple and the seemingly final and total destruction by the Roman army of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The loss was catastrophic because Jewish life, devotion and practices were so tightly bound to the Temple and to the sacrifices and ritual associated with it. The destruction of the Temple tested belief in the promises that God had made to the people.
For over three hundred years after the Roman demolition of the Temple, the Roman Emperors forbade the Jews to enter Jerusalem for all except one day of the year. They then gathered at the Western Wall, closest to the site of the destroyed Temple, to lament its loss.
'As we reflect on the same themes with people who have been faithful through so much suffering and disappointment, much of it caused by Christians, we are called to discern our own responses to the war in Gaza. The penitential emphasis invites us to see all human beings, including both the agents and victims of war, as persons and not as ciphers.'
In more recent years, the observance of Yom Kippur has inevitably also been coloured by the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish State, and the beginning of the war against Egypt and Syria in 1973 (the Yom Kippur War). These events and their implications for understanding the presence of God among the people are woven into the themes of loss and of hope, of sin and repentance, and of covenants broken and restored, which lie at the heart of Yom Kippur. It remains a central Jewish observance. It binds the people together.
This year, as so often in Jewish history, Yom Kippur will be commemorated at a time of crisis. It invites those who observe it to reflect on the directions of national as well as of personal life. That reflection does not focus on pride at what has been achieved, but on the acknowledgment of infidelity and moral failure, and on asking for forgiveness.
Christians, for whom the story of Moses and the making of the covenant are also foundational, can join Jews in prayer as fellow strugglers and sinner this Yom Kippur with its background of war and self-reflection. As we reflect on the same themes with people who have been faithful through so much suffering and disappointment, much of it caused by Christians, we are called to discern our own responses to the war in Gaza. The penitential emphasis invites us to see all human beings, including both the agents and victims of war, as persons and not as ciphers. It calls us also to grieve with the people of Israel, Gaza and Lebanon who have been killed and made homeless in the war, and to demand an end to the bombing of Gaza and Lebanon, and so an end to the war.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.