The Older and Most Painful Human Question there is: Why? - Kol Nidre 2026/5787

On this holy night of Kol Nidre, as we stand before our Creator in self-reflection and prayer, we are reminded of the profound fragility of our lives. There is perhaps no story in our tradition that captures this human vulnerability more deeply than the ancient Book of Job. 

Job was a man who seemingly had everything - a large, loving family, wealth, and a reputation for righteousness. Yet, in a flash, his whole world was turned upside down. His livestock were stolen, his servants were killed, and weeping sores covered his body from head to toe. A mighty wind blew and collapsed his home with his children inside; not one of them survived. Sitting in the ruins, scraping his skin with a broken piece of pottery, Job was left with nothing but his grief, his physical pain, and a devastating silence from above. 

Job’s friends came and tried to offer what they considered to be words of comfort, but in reality, were words of harsh theology. They told Job that God is just, so Job must have done something wrong to deserve this punishment. Job, however, refused to accept this answer. He screamed into the ether, demanding an explanation for his suffering. Eventually, out of a whirlwind came God’s voice. But God did not give Job a neat explanation for why these terrible tragedies occurred. Instead, God reminded Job that the universe is infinitely larger, more complex, and more mysterious than the human mind can possibly fathom.

 

I bring up Job today because Yom Kippur is our whirlwind. We stand here, fasting and wearing white, confronting our mortality and the ultimate unpredictability of this life. Like Job, we look back over our past and acknowledge our losses, our hardships, and the unanswerable questions we carry into this sanctuary. Like Job, we, too, have probably had our own moments when we screamed into the ether asking the oldest and most painful human question there is: Why?

 

We want to know why we suffer, why bad things happen when we are trying so hard to do all the right things. In our desperate human search for order, we, like Job’s friends, almost always stumble into the trap of blame. We blame ourselves: “What did I do wrong?” We blame others: “Whose fault is this?” Or we blame God: “Why are You, God, doing this to me?”

 

Just a few moments ago, we stood together as a community and shared the vidui. We beat our chests and read aloud a long list of our moral missteps. And yes, there are mistakes we’ve made in our lives we need to make up for. We need to take that seriously. We have spoken harshly. We have broken trust. We have caused harm. Yom Kippur demands that we own those choices and do the hard work of repair. But let us not push this prayer beyond its purpose. If we leave thevidui believing that the brokenness in our lives - the medical diagnoses, the financial losses, the grief – is somehow God’s retaliation for the sins we’ve just confessed, then we have confused our moral accountability with the universe's unpredictability. We must never turn our liturgy into a weapon against ourselves.

 

I remember a moment from over twenty years ago when I was living in Jerusalem during my first year of rabbinical school. Back here in the States, my mother was dealing with serious health problems. She was spending more and more time in a wheelchair due to mobility challenges. After years of complications from diabetes and related illnesses, she was facing her first amputation. “It’s just my big toe,” she said to me over the phone half a world away. She said it almost dismissively, but I could hear the fear in her voice. She and I both knew that it would likely be the beginning of more amputations up that foot and leg. But one night, very close to the surgery date, she dropped the pseudo-bravery and really let go with me on the phone, crying, asking what she could have possibly done in this lifetime to deserve what was happening to her. She started naming incidents from her life even back to her teenage and childhood years in a rambling rant as if confessing her mistakes might help her avert the decree of the upcoming amputation. She then paused and asked me: what did Judaism say? Was she to blame? Why, she wondered, was God punishing her?

 

At the time, I didn’t know what to say. Not only did I not have a good grasp on what Judaism had to say on the subject, I didn’t have a good grasp on how to handle my mother’s pain.

 

Looking back, I wish I could wrap my arms around the student I was then, the daughter I was then, and more than anything, I wish I could have wrapped my arms around my mother. Because what I needed to tell her, what our tradition desperately wanted me to tell her, was that her pain was in no way a cosmic receipt for past mistakes. I sensed it then, but I know it now: That is not how God works. That is not who God is.

 

I wish I could have told her that we are a people taught to wrestle with the divine, not to cower before a cruel theology of self-inflicted guilt. To look upon our own broken bodies or the broken bodies of those we love and declare that we must have somehow earned this brokenness is a profound misunderstanding of the world that God created. 

 

Like the unfeeling progression of disease, our world operates based on the laws of nature that affect the righteous and wicked alike. Genes mutate, volcanoes erupt, accidents happen - none of it personal. The physical universe does not cast its moral judgement upon us. 

 

And our world operates on free will. God gave us the autonomy to heal or to harm, to choose good or to choose evil. The Shoah was not a punishment from above; it was unchecked evil in human hearts and unchecked apathy and fear in a human population. God is not a puppet master pulling the strings of our fate. War, crime, cruelty – those are human choices. That is on us, not God.

 

From the Book of Job, we see the idea of punitive, divine bookkeeping challenged and completely dismantled. To his friends who think otherwise, Job fiercely maintains that he did nothing to deserve his pain, and God confirms this truth from the whirlwind. Modern Jewish theology overwhelmingly rejects that our suffering is a punishment from God.

 

Claiming to understand the exact calculus of why a specific tragedy strikes a specific soul is not an act of faith; it is an act of arrogance. When that quiet voice of self-condemnation whispers that our pain is a punishment for our past, Jewish tradition tells us to stop, to look away from that imagined ledger for it is a spiritual dead end. My mother did not need to audit her teenage errors; she needed to know that she was loved, and she needed to know that God was crying with her, not punishing her.

 

In what is perhaps the most misunderstood, yet most profoundly liberating book in our entire Tanakh, the Book of Ecclesiastes, known in Hebrew as Kohelet, we read: “I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong… nor wealth to the intelligent… but time and chance happen to them all.”[1]

 

Time and chance happen to us all. What Kohelet is uncovering here is the profound truth that the universe is filled with randomness. Everything does not happen for a reason.

 

The swiftest runner sometimes trips and comes in last. The strongest soldier sometimes falls in battle because of unpredictable conditions on the field. The smartest entrepreneur sometimes watches their life’s work evaporate because the economy tanks. Not because they did something wrong, but simply because time and chance happen to us all. We can be perfectly righteous and still get sick. We can play by all the rules and still watch our hearts break. 

 

The worst sometimes happens – even to the best.

 

We want a universe that makes sense. We fight against randomness because what it implies is terrifying: that there is no order, no one setting the scales in our favor if we just behave. 

 

Part of our psyche craves a punitive God because a punitive God is still a manageable God. If God is a judge handing out direct punishments for specific sins, then we have a chance at least of understanding how this all works. We can make a plan: If I can just pray a little harder, fast a little longer, or be a little more “good”, I can control the outcome. I can keep the disease and the natural disaster and the terrible tragedy away from my door.

 

It seems we would rather choose self-inflicted guilt over our powerlessness.

 

But both Job and Kohelet shatter that illusion. We do make mistakes that have consequences, yes, but we must also brave the truth that not everything that happens to us - for good or for bad - is because of us. 

 

When we view God as the author of our tragedies, we cut ourselves off from the greatest source of healing in the universe. But when we internalize the wisdom of Kohelet - when we accept that randomness is woven into the fabric of creation - everything shifts. We are finally freed from the burden of blaming God and can turn to the Source for the strength to survive whatever the storm has brought our way.

 

God is not the source of the storm; God is our shelter from it. God does cause the house to collapse; God is the one weeping with us in the ruins, whispering, “I am here. Let me help you carry this.” 

 

Tomorrow, we will confront this reality directly when we recite Unetaneh Tokef, considered by some to be the most unsettling prayer in our high holy day liturgy. We will say the words that have made generations of Jews tremble: Who shall live and who shall die? Who by fire and who by water? Who by famine and who by plague?

 

For centuries, this prayer has been deeply misunderstood. One could read Unetaneh Tokef as God sitting up there somewhere with a divine ledger, tracking us, actively deciding our fates and our executions. But Job and Kohelet force us to read Unetaneh Tokef through a completely different lens. This prayer is not a list of divine punishments; it is a catalog of human vulnerability. It is an honest, unflinching acknowledgment that we live in a fragile world governed by time and chance, by the blind laws of nature, and by the free will choices of humanity.

 

The prayer doesn’t say God causes the fire, the famine, or the plague. Rather, it names the terrifying truth that these forces exist under the sun, and any one of us could face them at any moment, regardless of how righteous we are. Unetaneh Tokef reminds us that we cannot control everything that happens to us, but that is not the end of the story. Our prayer doesn’t leave us there. It rescues us from despair. It concludes with a powerful, definitive roadmap for what we can control, and that is: our teshuvah – our power to transform, our tefillah – our power to connect, and our tzedakah – our power to pursue justice. These holy acts won’t change the random universe, but they do change us. They change us!Teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah won’t stop the storm from coming, but they will ensure that when the storm hits, we will have the strength we need to stand back up and face tomorrow.

 

The Jewish response to catastrophe is found in the pivot from the unanswerable question of “Why did this happen?” to the urgent, sacred imperative of “Now that this has happened, where will I find the strength I need, and how will I respond?” We are called to channel our grief away from self-blame and blame of God into holy action.

 

That is how our people have survived for generations and that is how our people will survive for generations to come. And that is how each of us – me and you – will survive as well after our own personal worst of days.

 

We cannot stop the unpredictability of life, but we can control the sanctuary we build right here, right now. Look around this room tonight. Really look at the people sitting to your left and to your right. Every single person in this sanctuary is carrying an unanswerable question. Someone two rows ahead of you is nursing a broken heart. Someone across the aisle is grieving a heavy loss. Someone in your row is silently auditing their past, wondering where they went wrong, drowning in guilt they do not deserve to carry.

 

Let us promise each other tonight that we will not be like Job’s friends. We will not offer each other, or ourselves, harsh theology or empty declarations that good reasons always exist for our unexplainable suffering. Instead, let us be the ones to wrap our arms around each other’s grief. If God is not the author of our suffering, then God is found in the love that helps us survive it. God is the hand that holds yours in the waiting room. God is the community that brings you a meal when the world falls apart. When your own strength fails, God is the presence that sits with your restless soul and raises you up.

 

As the gates of this Yom Kippur whirlwind open wide, may we do the honest, necessary work of repairing the mistakes we did make while also extending gentle compassion to the wounds we did nothing to earn. And whatever the whirlwind brings, may we be secure in the knowledge that we will never face it alone. We will face it together for it is together that we will survive the storm, and we will face it held in the arms of our God who weeps with us, who loves us, and who calls us to love one another.

 

G’mar chatimah tovah. 

 

---

[1] Ecclesiastes 9:11

The Beachcomber and the Ocean - Rosh Hashanah 2026/5787

Shabbat shalom. Shanah tovah. 

 

So, my sister and I shared a bedroom growing up. Because she was so much older than me with an eleven-year age gap between us, everything she did seemed cool, but it was her summer beach trips with friends that felt legendary to me, filled with fun and an independence I could only imagine. 

 

On our dresser sat a clear jar, and every time she returned home from those epic trips to the ocean, she would deposit into it a few new fragments of seaglass. I watched the layers build summer after summer - smooth browns, vibrant greens, frosted whites, and the occasional, almost miraculous flash of blue or red.  

 

It's why I’ve always loved seaglass. But even more than the seaglass itself, I’ve always been drawn to the actions of the person committed to finding seaglass, the patient beachcomber who was able to discern beauty amid chaos. Looking back, I realize I wasn't just watching a jar fill up with discarded glass; I was bearing witness to something sacred.

 

The shoreline after a violent ocean storm can look chaotic; it is littered with debris, tangled seaweed, sharp shells, and driftwood. To the untrained eye, it can look like wreckage. But the beachcomber walks out into that wreckage with an entirely different intention. The beachcomber walks slowly. They bend down, looking past the mess because they know there is beauty in there just waiting to be noticed and claimed.

 

Sometimes when I look out at our broken world today, I feel like I am seeing that shoreline after a storm. Littered along the shore are the remnants of the storms we’ve faced: grief, conflict, confusion, and pain, and I ask myself: How did we get here? How do we live amidst this wreckage? How do we live with this broken world?

 

As I am prone to do, I turn to our tradition to help me wrestle with these questions. I feel the clues are like seaglass glinting up from the sand just waiting to be discovered. 

 

Maybe the mystics hold an answer for me, for us. So, I turn to the sixteenth-century mystic Rabbi Isaac Luria who answered these questions not with a historical critique or a story of human failure, but with a profoundly different understanding of creation than the orderly story we read this morning from Genesis.

 

Rabbi Luria taught that at the very beginning, God was everything and everywhere. To make room for something else, for us, God lovingly had to constrict God’s self in a process known as tzimtzum. It was like God took an enormous breath in. And then into that new, raw, empty space, God breathed out brilliant, blinding divine light. Luria taught that ten cosmic containers of creation were formed to hold the light. But the light was too intense, and the vessels began to crack, and they shattered. The shattering, however, did not cause holiness to vanish; instead, the holiness splintered. The sparks of divine light fell into a million jagged fragments and tumbled down into our material world, becoming trapped inside the debris of this beautiful catastrophe. Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism teaches that we are living in the aftermath of that explosion. Every day, we are walking on holy shards of shattered glass. 

 

Yet, this story need not be read as tragedy. It should be read as holy opportunity. 

 

The world we live in is like that shoreline after a storm. Our task as human beings is not to pretend the world isn’t full of brokenness and jagged edges. It is to stand amidst the wreckage, refuse to look away, and begin the work of tikkun, the work of repair by finding the broken pieces of the divine hidden among our world. The fragments are in everything, but they are most often disguised as the ordinary and as the frustrating and as the painful. 

 

When we look around and see the aftereffects of the violent storms on our world, our eyes and hearts can stay on the tangled kelp and the torn fishing nets, on our fractured society and our torn social fabric. But if we are willing to adopt the posture of the patient and curious beachcomber and see and squint, and stay committed to the seeking, we can find the broken fragments just waiting to be redeemed.

 

Three tools can help us find the sparks. Vulnerability, radical empathy, and small acts of repair.

 

Vulnerability.

We must begin by first changing how we look at ourselves. Instead of starting by looking out there for the light, we must look within. Too many of us spend so much of our time trying to present a pristine, unbroken facade to our social circles, our colleagues, and even our loved ones. We hide our grief, our doubts, and our failures because we have mistaken wholeness for perfection. But let us remember Luria’s lesson: the universe itself began with a break. If those first cosmic vessels could not hold God’s light without shattering, why would we expect our fragile human hearts to remain unbroken?

 

The gift of the Lurianic version of creation is its insistence that we accept the impossibility of perfection. The challenge of this new year is to stop treating our wounds as embarrassments and our struggles as secrets. To embrace vulnerability is to look at your own jagged edges and say I am still holy. It is the realization that we do not have to be flawless to be vessels for God’s light. You are worthy of God’s light, and you always have been, and you always will be. 

 

Soon, we will stand together in this sanctuary and sound the shofar. Amidst the piercing clarity of tekiah and the frantic alarm of truah, we will hear the sad notes of shevarim. The sequence of these three broken, rolling blasts can sound to the ear like a human chest heaving, like a person catching their breath after a heavy sob, or letting out a sigh so deep it rattles the ribs. Shevarim translates quite literally as breaks or fractures.

 

We force ourselves to sit with this sad, broken sound on one of the holiest days of the year for a reason: to remind us that we do not leave our fractures at the sanctuary door. You brought your brokenness into this room today, tucked under your Rosh HaShanah clothes. You brought the medical diagnosis you haven't told your friends about yet. You brought the quiet feeling of drowning depression, or the deep ache of a chair that sits empty at your table this year.

 

The shofar doesn't demand that we fix these pieces before we praise God. The notes of shevarim simply demand that we live in honesty – at the very least to ourselves. They cry out to us to say: Look at the wreckage. Admit you are hurting. The sounds of the shofar signal to us that this holy, joyous day is big enough to hold both your highest hopes and your deepest fractures simultaneously. You can be joyous and whole and also broken, too. Just like our world.

 

Radical empathy.

Once we can begin to accept this about ourselves, we are then challenged to look differently at the people around us. It is easy to love what is beautiful and intact. It is profoundly difficult to look at an estranged family member or a former friend who has deeply disappointed us and see anything worth saving. Our natural instinct is to sweep away the broken shards of our failed relationships, so we don’t get cut again. The question lingers: Who have you thrown away?

 

But the mystic in us, the mystic who remembers our world began with a break, can see the world with different eyes, with empathetic eyes. Empathy is not some soft, sentimental feeling; it is the radical refusal to see anyone as mere debris.

 

But looking for the nitzotzot, the divine sparks, inside someone who has actively harmed you is a brutal task. It takes courage and a resilient self. Radical empathy requires we look past the sharp, defensive edges of the person lashing out at us. It demands that we stop asking the defensive question, “What is wrong with them?” and start asking the curious questions like “What heavy storm broke them?” And “Where is the trapped divine light trying to get out?”

 

If we can do this kindness for ourselves, we can do this for others. 

 

This need not mean that we always have to forgive or even engage. But the truth is that we will never find the sparks in the wreckage if we don’t even try to look.

 

The same is true for how we encounter our fractured society. The fissures in our country and world are so vast that they threaten to paralyze us. The scale of the brokenness looms large. We ask: How do we even begin to mend a global landscape torn by hatred, or a culture splintered by apathy? Let us let Luria’s mythic creation story wash over us. Let it come as a breathtaking relief that we are not required to heal it all. 

 

Small acts of repair.

As we walk the shoreline of our daily existence, we are simply required to pick up the single piece of glass sitting directly in front of us. This is what mysticism teaches us is the true meaning of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Tikkun olam is picking up one fragment, one holy spark at a time – and then doing the same with the next step forward. Like Rabbi Torop taught us last night: yes, you are required to do something, but so are you and you and you – and me, too.

 

We are all capable of finding those holy sparks and doing those small acts of repair, those acts of tikkun. A small repair is the note of apology you draft three times, delete twice but finally find the courage to send anyway. A small repair is the deliberate choice to sit quietly next to a grieving friend, swallowing your urge to say “everything happens for a reason” because it doesn’t, and bravely just letting the silence sit between you. A small repair is the quiet, invisible integrity of not cutting corners even though no one would know. It’s making the right choice, especially when no one is watching simply because it is the right choice.

 

In this new year, don’t expect and look for a pristine, untouched, unbroken beginning. If you do, you will be disappointed. Stop cursing the brokenness in you and in the world and instead spend your sacred energy combing the sand to release the sparks. For it is through vulnerability, radical empathy, and small acts of repair that we gather together the scattered fragments of God to reshape this world.

 

The ultimate challenge of Rosh Hashanah is to stop waiting for a flawless life before we begin to live fully. The book of the world is written in fragments, but our task is to read it like a love letter.

 

I have my own jar of sea glass now. It reminds me of my role in this life as a beachcomber. But lately as I walk the shoreline of the world, I find I am drawn more and more to the ocean than the sand. I realize that there are times when we will be called upon to become the beachcomber and pick up the seaglass with its already ocean-softened edges and see it shimmer in the light. But there will also be times in this new year when we will be called upon to become the ocean itself.

 

When left alone, the broken edges of seaglass and holy vessels are dangerously sharp. But it is the ocean that takes that dangerous piece of glass into its depth, rolls it, tumbles it, and wraps it in a relentless embrace. The ocean doesn’t yell at the glass or punish it for being sharp. It doesn’t demand the broken glass change its shape overnight. The ocean softens it through the patient commitment of turning it over and over again, day after day, year after year. The sharp eventually becomes smooth. What was once dangerous can now be held in the palm of the hand without fear. 

 

There are seasons in our lives when we are too exhausted to be the ocean. There are days when we are the jagged glass, snapping at everyone who gets too close because we are too raw. In those moments, we need someone to hold us in our mess and patiently soften us.

 

I remember a night recently when I was the one who was completely jagged. I was exhausted, overwhelmed by a tough week, and walking around with my guard up. I snapped at my husband, Jeff over something small that didn’t really matter, my stress turning my words into something sharp. He could have snapped back. He could have met my jaggedness with a jaggedness of his own. Instead, he took a breath, and stayed steady. He didn't raise his voice, and he didn't walk out of the room. He just looked at me with knowing eyes, and said, "Hey, Jill, I know you're exhausted.” He didn't lecture me. He didn't demand I apologize right that second. He just chose to not strike back. In that moment, his calmness became a patient tide. Because he refused to be a rock for me to smash against, the anger went out of me. My shoulders dropped, the fight evaporated, and I was able to take a deep, cleansing breath. He was the ocean for me when I was too sharp to save myself.

 

There will times in this new year when we will need our family, our friends, our community, God to be our ocean and to soften our sharp edges. And there will be other times when we will be called upon to become the ocean for someone else.

 

We live in a culture that acts like a hammer. It just shatters people. People are smashed into further fragments of themselves the second they stumble. To become the ocean means to offer a steady, rolling grace that refuses to abandon any piece. We heal others, we heal ourselves by becoming the environment of love and time that allows the sharpest, most defensive edges among us to finally become soft.

 

I invite you to look back at the ledger of your year and ask yourself: Do your daily actions sharpen the fractures of this world? Do you shatter? Or are you the patient tide that helps smooth someone else's pain? 

 

I dream about what it would mean if we all lived our lives with hearts as wide as the ocean with a love that surrounds and softens. We have been so conditioned to believe that when our hearts are hurt, the only safe response is to shut them down because we are terrified that if we let the world’s pain in or our pain out, it will break us completely. But a closed heart does not protect you; it only keeps you isolated. Instead of shutting down, we need to believe in a different kind of biology - a spiritual anatomy. We need to trust that our hearts are fundamentally capacious and resilient enough to keep pumping even while they are breaking. I believe my heart is big enough to hold the wreckage of this world and to still find the light, and looking out at all of you, I believe that yours is, too.

 

And so, as we stand at the start of this new year, big, broken hearts in hand and broken glass beneath our feet, may this be our blessing:

 

May our eyes be blessed with the sight of the beachcomber, always able to look through the tangled debris of this life to find the hidden, shimmering holy sparks.

 

May our hearts be blessed with the capacity of the ocean, vast enough to hold the jagged edges of those around us, and patient enough to smooth them down with relentless, rolling grace.

 

And when we feel our own fractures, may we remember that the cosmic vessels themselves could not hold the light without shattering. May we be blessed to know that despite our cracks, we are still holy and still, always, full of light. 

 

And so is our world.

 

In the year to come, may we each write ourselves into the Book of Life for a year of healing, a year of softness, and a year of repair.  

 

Shabbat shalom. Shanah tovah.