78 | SEPTEMBER 26 • 2024 
J
N

I

t’s hard to believe how different 
life was during the High Holidays 
last year. We were blissfully 
unaware that in just a matter of 
days Israel would find itself in the 
largest, longest and 
most serious war in 
its history. We always 
knew there were storm 
clouds brewing in Israel 
prior to Oct. 7, but little 
did we know just how 
ominous and imminent 
those clouds really were.
This year — 5785 — Israel finds 
itself in a full-blown war on multiple 
fronts against multiple enemies. Given 
its enemies’ stated goals, this war is 
indeed a fight for Israel’s survival. 
We can hope against hope for a good 
outcome, but we should not sugarcoat 
the fact that the situation there is 
indeed grave.
The High Holidays are a time to 
reflect on the past year and look 
ahead to the coming year with a 
focus on themes like repentance, 
forgiveness, charity and faith. It’s a 
beautiful time to renew and refresh 
our souls. But this year everything is 
different. This year it’s wartime.
So, how do we juxtapose the 
uplifting message of the High 

Holidays with the reality of an active 
war? How do we embrace forgiveness, 
repentance and charity when we know 
that Israel’s enemies are trying to wipe 
it off the map? And what emotional 
toll will the war take on us as we are 
tested in the coming year?
So far, I think I’m flunking that test. 
If I’m being honest, I must confess 
that this war has changed me, and not 
for the better. It has brought out an 
ugliness in me that I hardly recognize. 
Too often I live in a state of rage, 
whether it’s against Israel’s enemies, 
or Hamas apologists, or all the anti-
Israel news coverage that is wreaking 
havoc on my blood pressure. I feel 
myself becoming hateful, gloomy and 
callous, and I wonder if I’m losing my 
sympathy for truly innocent people. 
Worst of all, my hope for a good 
outcome has been shaken like never 
before. Needless to say, this is an 
awful way to live.
This year, once again, I’ll recite 
the ancient prayers at High Holiday 
services and wish people a Shanah 
Tovah — a good year. It’s a simple 
and beautiful sentiment, but a bit 
perplexing for me during wartime. 
Short of a real and lasting peace — 
purely a fantasy at this point — what 
exactly constitutes a “good year” for 

Israel for the next 12 months? More 
military victories? Fewer incoming 
rockets? A hollow ceasefire?
I’ll sit in services and my thoughts 
will drift to dark images that are 
breaking my heart these days, like 
weary hostages huddled in dark 
tunnels, or their grief-stricken 
families, or terrified children in bomb 
shelters clutching onto their parents, 
or the countless tears of pain and 
sadness that will surely be flowing 
down Israeli faces during their holiday 
observances.

ADJUSTING MY ATTITUDE
But as the holidays approach, I 
think time has come for an attitude 
adjustment. I don’t want to spend the 
next 12 months in a dark place filled 
with pessimism, rage, callousness 
and despair. Those emotions are 
very unhealthy and actually very 
un-Jewish. The Jewish spirit, I’ve 
always been taught, is to meet 
adversity with positivity, optimism 
and hopefulness. “Hope” is literally 
the name of the Israeli national 
anthem. As Golda Meir once put it, 
“Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can 
never allow himself.”
There is a powerful true story of 
a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz who 

smuggled a shofar — the ancient 
symbol of hope — into the camp. 
On Rosh Hashanah, he would faintly 
blow it, so enough people could hear 
it without him getting caught. 
We can only imagine what that 
sound must have meant to the other 
Jewish prisoners. I suspect it meant 
everything. At one point, the man 
was ordered into the gas chamber. As 
he was leaving, he handed the shofar 
to another prisoner and said, “Take 
it. Maybe you will make it. Take the 
shofar. Show them that we had a 
shofar in Auschwitz.”
This war will pass one day, and 
surely there will be some rough days 
ahead. But as I look ahead to the new 
year, I will take Golda’s words to heart 
and bury my pessimism. I will take 
a cue from our ancestors and clutch 
more tightly onto the uplifting values 
that have always sustained the Jewish 
people. I will do my small part to 
show future generations — and our 
enemies — that even during this dark 
hour, the Jewish people held onto 
the essence of our Jewish spirit. We 
need to show them that we, too, had a 
shofar at Auschwitz. 

Mark Jacobs is the co-founder of the 

Coalition for Black and Jewish Unity.

Mark Jacobs
Special to the 
 
Jewish News

ROSH HASHANAH
ESSAY

 A 
High Holidays 
 Confession

