In a commencement address, the author George Saunders shared a story from his youth.1 When he was in the seventh grade, there was a girl in his class named Ellen. Ellen didn’t quite fit in, and the other kids made sure she knew it. They rolled their eyes when she spoke. They whispered in the hallways. They watched her sit alone in the lunchroom. George wasn’t one of the cruel kids. He didn’t tease Ellen. But he didn’t sit with her either. He didn’t do anything to make it stop.
Decades later, standing at that podium, he said: “What I regret most in my life are my failures of kindness.” Not the big mistakes. Not the obvious wrongs. But the silences. The moments when he could have made someone’s life easier, lighter, less lonely… and didn’t.
I suspect many of us carry a story like that. The time we saw something wrong and looked away. The day we knew someone needed support and hesitated. These are not dramatic betrayals. They are quiet ones that still echo in our souls.
A Culture of Blame
And the truth is, we live in a culture that doesn’t really reward this kind of self-reflection. We live in a culture that rewards pointing outward, not in. We are fluent in blame.2 We blame a friend for pulling away, instead of asking what weight they might be carrying. We blame politicians for every fracture in our democracy, but refuse to face how our own cynicism and disengagement widens the divide. We blame the media for spreading lies, even as we read and share clickbait stories knowing that they are meant to rile us up. But Yom Kippur encourages us to ask ourselves: What part did I play? When did I, through my silence, normalize bad behavior by ignoring it?
Kol Nidrei and Silence
This evening, Kol Nidrei began not with the grand failures, but with these smaller, more personal ones that live close to us.3 The promises and vows we made… and did not keep. The tenderness we could have extended… but withheld. The courage we hoped to summon… but never did. That is why its melody haunts us.
When we fail to keep our promises, to speak when it matters, to act when kindness calls, the consequences ripple outward. Silence may begin as something small, personal, and private. But when multiplied across a community, silence creates the space where cruelty takes root. What begins as hesitation in one heart, repeated in many hearts, can grow into a culture. A culture where fear is amplified, suspicion spreads, and cruelty is tolerated as normal. That is why our tradition doesn’t just ask us to confess what we’ve done. It asks us to notice what kind of world is created when people stop showing up with courage. And that’s why we tell stories like the one about a king named Balak.
Balak and Balaam
Balak was a Moabite king.4 He looked out and saw our ancestors, the Israelites, recently freed slaves, camped near his border. They had not attacked. They had not made demands. But their very presence unsettled him. Balak saw the Israelites and questions began to spiral in his mind: Who are these people and what do they really want? Balak feared not only the Israelites’ strength. He feared being exposed as weak before his own people. And rather than learning more about them, he invented answers. He called the Israelites invaders. Not because of what they had done, but because framing them as a danger gave him power. If they were an enemy, “defensive action” was justified. If they were an enemy, his people would rally behind him. And once he declared them dangerous, he could do whatever he wanted.
It is a pattern as old as time: Leaders who call neighbors “invaders” or “threats.” They declare truth a lie and lies the truth. So he hired Balaam, a prophet-for-hire, to curse a people he had never met and knew nothing about. And Balaam was willing. Because fear always finds someone ready to profit.
But something interrupted Balaam as he traveled to curse the Israelites in the wilderness. Three times the donkey he was riding veered from the road. He beat the beast, repeatedly, so she would stay on task. But Balaam’s donkey saw more clearly than he did. An angel, sent from heaven, was in their way. The prophet was blind to it, while the creature he dismissed as irrational, saw the truth. Later, when Balaam stood before the Israelites ready to curse, God intervened again. Balaam’s words, which were meant to curse, emerged instead as a prayer of hope. “Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov, Mishkenotecha Yisrael…” “How good are your tents, O Jacob. Your dwelling places, O Israel.”
The lesson of Balak and Balaam is stark. His was a leadership of fear, paranoia, incitement and curse, a leadership fueled by a need to cling to his own power. History shows us that when societies normalize fear and contempt, trust erodes, and communities slowly unravel and corrode from within.5 That is the world Balak built. And it is a world we dare not accept today. We cannot counter a culture of fear by echoing its rage. We do not answer cruelty by becoming cruel ourselves.
Vidui and Responsibility
On this day, our tradition calls us to an ancient ritual that guides us inward and asks us to choose a new path. It’s the sound of vidui. The confession. We beat our chests and say an acrostic of sins… Ashamnu, Bagadnu, Gazalnu, Dibarnu Dofi.6 Not once, but again and again and again. Not alone, but aloud… together. The words are not meant to bury us in guilt. They are meant to lift us into responsibility. The prayer reminds us that responsibility is never abstract.
Ashamnu says: You have a sliver of influence, so you carry a sliver of responsibility. George Saunders carried his silence as regret for a long time. But he did not remain stuck there. By telling the story aloud, by naming what he wished he had done, he turned his regret into a lesson. It became a choice about how he wanted to live his life.
And this is precisely what our tradition asks of us. Ashamnu is not about burying ourselves in guilt. It is about speaking the alphabet of our shortcomings, knocking on our hearts with each word until the door to change begins to open.
The Twenty-Third Letter
The Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters. It is complete, from aleph to tav, from beginning to end. And still, Rabbi Michael Marmur imagines a twenty-third letter, a letter not on the page but in our hands, traced in the way we live.7 Not written with ink, but with the choices we make. A letter Rabbi Marmur felt was desperately needed to help hold, heal, and recreate a world that feels broken right now. Each act of courage, each refusal to stay silent, each tenderness that interrupts cruelty is a stroke of that unwritten letter.
But we live in a world that feels really fragile right now. Nearly everyone I speak with these days feels it. Trust feels as thin as a worn thread. Truth seems negotiable. Scapegoating has become a sport. Lies move faster than facts, and cruelty often wears the mask of strength.
Just in the last month it has seemed like every single day gave me material for a separate and timely High Holy Day sermon. Even when our own lives may feel relatively steady, there’s still that low key worry. The onslaught of news. The suspicion that swells louder than compassion. The sense that the norms of civil society are fading quickly. The rising pressure to pick a side, prove a point, win the fight.
We know that to live within that framework is exhausting. And in our exhaustion, it is all too easy to pick up the very same weapons: To meet contempt with contempt. But, if all we do is reflect or magnify the bitterness around us, we will become the very thing we lament.
On the flip side: It is also too easy to worship big, empty gestures, the outrage that trends for a day, the slacktivism of posting what we detest, the spectacle that earns “likes,” the polished protests staged more for the camera than for real change.
But just as empty gestures will not redeem us, neither will grand miracles. If you’re waiting for the plagues of Egypt, or for the sea to split, or for Sinai’s thunder to hand us the answers, you’ll be waiting a very long time. The pull of spectacle is strong. But Judaism has never measured strength in what dazzles. It measures strength in the small, steady choices that actually shape us.
Mitzvot as Daily Blessings
Our tradition says that God gave us mitzvot so revelation would not remain locked on the mountain. Instead, it would walk with us into the marketplace, into our homes, and into the ordinary encounters of our lives.8 The world does not turn on miracles. It turns on smaller acts, the daily choices we make. In Judaism, we call these mitzvot: sacred acts that transform ordinary life into holy life. The rabbis of the Talmud established mitzvot as the fabric of living, grounded in the bold and beautiful idea that what we do everyday matters.9 Our actions, repeated again and again, can shape the world around us.
I know that some hear “commandments” and think of restrictions, what we can or cannot do. But another way to see mitzvot is as daily acts of blessing. Each one a chance to bring a little more light, a little more justice, a little more compassion into the world. And together, those actions form the language of blessing, a language expansive enough to imagine a world still being written.
These daily acts rarely make the news. But they are the quiet commitments that hold the world together, the countercultural path our tradition places before us, to radiate blessings out.10
Choosing Blessing
We all know the Balaks of today, turning shadows into threats, neighbors into enemies, selling suspicion as spectacle. When we are at our worst, we echo them, repeating their tactics, amplifying suspicion, and letting contempt pass through our own voices.
And sometimes silence feels safer. We stay quiet not because we agree, but because we are tired, uncertain, afraid. Yet, even that silence has power. As Saunders taught, silence lets cruelty grow louder than kindness.
That is why the smallest step toward change can feel so weighty. Every local action matters, but against problems so vast it can feel impossibly small. It takes energy we may not have, courage we are not sure we possess. That is precisely why it’s so tempting to look away. It is easier, and even accurate, to say: “This is not my problem. I am not the one under threat. So I will pay attention to something else.”
But our tradition insists that silence is never neutral. We need to find the still small voice of conscience Saunders longed for. We need courage to act when the road is uncertain. What the world desperately needs right now are people willing to stop and bless.
Writing the Twenty-Third Letter
This year, someone in your life needs your courage. This year, someone in this city needs your blessing. This year, we can write with a twenty-third letter… to create a new alphabet of blessing, not with ink but with our lives. The world will not be saved by the next great leader. It will not be saved by the next election, or the next innovation, or the next technology. It will be saved (or lost) by the choices of ordinary people who dare to write blessings when no one is watching.
Letter by letter, act by act, an acrostic of blessing:
The apology we finally spoke… blessing in place of arrogance, breaking the silence that allowed cruelty to grow louder than kindness.
The bread and soup carried to a neighbor, a friend, or a stranger… blessing in place of selfishness, honoring the truth of another’s hunger and humanity.
The curiosity we chose over condemnation… blessing in place of caricature and vilification, refusing to reduce a life to a single story.
The door we kept open when anger pressed us to close it… blessing in place of exclusion, remembering that they bleed as we bleed, they love as we love.
The eyes we opened to those who had been mocked or demonized… blessing in place of contempt, discovering that their struggle is real and their lives, no matter how different from ours, are also a gift from God.
The forgiveness we risked before we knew how it would be received… blessing in place of resentment, choosing courage where fear might have ruled.
The grit to remain at the table, even when disagreement felt unbearable… blessing in place of division, daring to believe that connection is still possible.11
This is the heart of our people’s story. Blessing is not withdrawal from the struggle. It is the struggle. And it is a particularly Jewish form of stubbornness, a way of living, that insists that when the world grows dark, we kindle with the light of blessing. Because we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.12 We have control over our own lives. We are responsible. Now it is on us, in this new year, to write with the twenty-third letter, with a language that tells the story of who we dare to become: With courage. With love. With blessing.
Gamar Chatimah Tovah. May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a blessing.
Footnotes
1. George Saunders, “Commencement Address at Syracuse University” (2013). Published later as part of Congratulations, By the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness (Random House, 2014).
2. Brene Brown (Daring Greatly) or Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark) write on blame/agency.
3. Mishkan HaNefesh (Yom Kippur volume), pp. 18–19.
4. Numbers 22–24, the story of Balak, Balaam, and the talking donkey.
5. History shows this pattern again and again: fear and suspicion fueled McCarthyism in America, eroding trust and destroying lives. Contempt between neighbors in Rwanda was stoked into genocide. Hatred and fear of the “other” in Nazi Germany corroded the society until it normalized hate collapsed into horror. And our sages taught that it was baseless hatred — sinat chinam — that hollowed out Jerusalem from the inside, long before Rome’s armies arrived.
6. Vidui and Confession (Machzor and Talmud Bavli Yoma 86b — source of confession and repentance). This can be found in Mishkan HaNefesh: Machzor for the Days of Awe, CCAR Press, Yom Kippur volume, pp. 82–90. See especially the notes on p. 90. Notice that Ashamnu is an acrostic.
7. Michael Marmur, Living the Letters: An Alphabet of Emerging Jewish Thought, chapter “The Twenty-Third Letter,” pp. 339–348.
8. Talmud Bavli Ta’anit 7a.
9. This idea was taught to me originally by Rabbi David Stern. It is also rooted in classical rabbinic teachings, such as Pirkei Avot 2:1. The Talmud teaches that the commandments were given to Moses as a way of sanctifying ordinary life (Makkot 23b–24a). Maimonides explains in the Mishneh Torah that even physical health can be acts of divine service when done with the intention of mitzvot. Early Hasidic teachers, such as Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev and the Baal Shem Tov, explain that mitzvot elevate the hidden sparks of God into the world. The paradox of Sinai is that it is an unrepeatable event and also continuously unfolding through everyday life. Abraham Joshua Heschel called mitzvot “sacred deeds” through which we “make the world a sanctuary.” Eugene Borowitz emphasized that the covenant is renewed daily through mitzvah choices.
10. Pirkei Avot 4:1.
11. This is a play on Ashamnu’s acrostic.
12. Often attributed to June Jordan (poet/activist), echoed by Alice Walker.
