Fernando de Beer
Yom Kippur does not commemorate the giving of the Torah. What it asks is that we come back to Torah from a different place: Yom Kippur is the day we ask ourselves, and are asked, what we have done with that revealed word since the moment God spoke. It is, before anything else, a day of fasting and self-examination, of confession and prayer, of judgment and teshuvah, the famous “return.”
At Mount Sinai, the Torah tells us, there was lightning and thunder, and the blast of a shofar, while God proclaimed His commandments to a People of Yisrael terrified out of their minds (Ex 20:15-16). But that noise has receded over time. So much so that today it is perceived as silence. For a long time now, it seems that God has gone quiet.[1] So what do we do with that silence? Because if God is silent, revelation does not resolve the moral problem for us. Worse still, the name of God can be invoked for justice and for barbarism by those who try to recreate that reverential awe through terror.
I want to propose something that is simple to state and hard to hold: faith does not suspend ethics. This holds whether God speaks or is silent. But God’s silence adds something else: it creates a void. And every void tends to be filled. Because God is so often silent, what falls on human beings is a greater responsibility. If we, for some reason, fail to fill the void created by God’s silence with an ethical theology, that void will be filled by those who use the name of God for evil purposes. Thus, before the apparent divine silence, it is we, human beings, who bear the enormous responsibility of carrying on the spirit of that word so that it is not twisted into something terrorist. I am aware that I am not the only one to state this proposition, i.e., that ethics precedes theology. The last century brought several philosophers and Jewish theologians who arrived at similar propositions using their own systems of thought. Nevertheless, my approach comes from a direct reading of biblical and liturgical texts.
In that sense, my statement that human ethics precedes its religious codification is supported by the Torah’s first account of murder (Gen 4:8). In that verse, Cain slays Abel. In the next verse, Cain, who seems to know that killing his brother was wrong, answers a simple, “Where is your brother?” with an evasive question that suggests he knows he is accountable for what he has done. There was no need for an explicit commandment or law to say so. He showed a capacity to recognize the harm he had caused and the responsibility for his own acts before murder had been explicitly prohibited by divine command. Perhaps we humans acquired that notion as we were created in God’s “image” and “likeness” (Gen 1:26).
The argument goes further than religious codification. Across societies shaped by radically different theological traditions, human beings have developed prohibitions against murder and theft, along with rules limiting violence. Similar moral judgments are also made by people who hold no theological commitments at all. This suggests that ethical judgment does not need to wait for theology: human beings can recognize harm, assign responsibility, and formulate norms before settling what, if anything, they believe about God.
For the purposes of this argument, the central question here isn’t really whether God exists. You may believe in God every day; you may feel His presence every single day of the year. Nothing I am about to say depends on your beliefs. The stronger our faith in God, the more pressing this message becomes. For the great danger that stalks every religious belief is precisely when conviction replaces doubt, and the convinced come to see themselves as the owners of certainty. At that point, faith ceases to be a private matter and becomes a historical one.
As a clear and recent example, absolute certainty is what can produce the jubilant cries of Allahu Akbar (“God is great”) on October 7th. One of the details, and I stress the word “details,” that struck me most from footage of that day, and that still sickens me, was hearing those jubilant cries, hundreds or thousands of times, while the most atrocious crimes were being committed. Did those acts make God great? Does terror make God great?
In any case, those cries are a painful reminder of how far we human beings can go when we are certain we are the custodians of truth. None of us is immune to that. Not me, not you. None of us. For sacred texts contain verses that glorify and promote violence and verses that condemn it and extol peace and mercy. Through a partial reading, anyone can justify anything.
As a moral imperative, of course, we are obligated to defend ourselves against those murderers blinded by their apparent certainty. This is a visceral, human response, but one that must resist the temptation of being cloaked in an order from the explicit will of God. Because no such order ever existed. Beyond the eternal Jewish mandate to preserve life, there was no explicit order from God to do or not do anything. God kept silent that day. As He did the day before and the day after. As much as it hurts to say it, silence prevails.
That silence is so conspicuous that it confronts me, and I, grounded in my beliefs and in the midst of that silence, build from this starting point: life, in itself, does not come with an obvious meaning, a meaning given in advance. We are born, we die, and in between, things happen to us. If we think about it, nothing seems to follow any preordained plan or order. And yet, we human beings refuse to accept the evidence and have the impulse to search for meaning so as not to accept that everything is chance, contingency, and absurdity. Religion is one of the oldest and most profound ways of responding to that absurdity, and it gives us tools to grant life a purpose. That is a huge contribution.
Judaism, in its religious form, responds to this predicament in a very particular way: not only by speaking of God, but by sanctifying the chain of transmission. MiDor leDor. From generation to generation. The promise to Abraham does not end with Abraham. The people themselves are called Bnei Yisrael, the Children of Israel. The tribes are the descendants of Jacob. David was the great-grandson of Ruth. The Messiah, in turn, is “the son of David.” Again and again, the biblical text turns the continuity between generations into a carrier of promise, identity, and future. It is no accident that the Passover Haggadah is written in the present tense. “Ure’e Banim Levanecha Shalom al Yisrael.” Children, the bond between generations, and peace constitute the blessing.
We, the Jewish nation, accept the inheritance of memory, belonging, and promise. But this inheritance is not free. It comes with an inherent responsibility over the use of those words. MiDor leDor also means deciding what we do, in our generation, with a word that no longer descends accompanied by thunder and shofar, and it means how we pass it on.
So, faced with a life that guarantees no meaning, Judaism sanctifies the bond between one generation and the next, and gives life meaning by committing us to the word when divine silence leaves a void. Because, faced with this void, we human beings fill it with interpretation.
If there is interpretation, the first question that arises is this: what kind of God do we want to exist? Because every person, deep down, ends up wanting some particular conception of God to be true: a God of justice, or of comfort; a God who guarantees meaning, who accompanies us; a God who punishes, a God of vengeance, a God who absolves. Even our desire for God to exist is already shaped by a human image of God!
Some interpretations of the Divine draw on peace and solidarity, demand justice and seek mercy. But others do the opposite: they turn God into the perfect alibi for crime. We have seen it too many times. Those cries of “God is great” remind us of it.
I do not know about you, but when that phrase comes back to me, the images of atrocity return with it, automatically. There we cross from the abstract to the concrete. In that crossing, theology is no longer an intellectual luxury and is forced into being a moral necessity. Because if God is silent, someone is going to speak in His name. And not only those who cry “God is great”. Some of our own dare to invoke God in a similar way when attacking their neighbors in Judea and Samaria.
Silence creates an empty space. And every empty space tends to be filled. If there is no ethical theology, the void will be occupied, far too often, by those who bless atrocity. That is the price we pay for not making ourselves heard.
Seen this way, Yom Kippur does not only focus on the individual process of introspection; it expands it into the concept of “return.” Yom Kippur demands that we involve ourselves in the problem of how God’s name is used, and that we be part of the solution to that problem.
On Yom Kippur, we stand before God, or before the idea of God, to examine ourselves, ask forgiveness, confess, fast, and return. The point is not only whether we observed the ritual, which is the easy part. The point is what we do with the word we received, with the Torah, in the face of God’s subsequent silence. Ultimately, the point of Yom Kippur is what we do with the responsibility that remains in our hands.
The Haftarah assigned for Shacharit on Yom Kippur, from the book of Isaiah, speaks to this. The prophet upholds fasting and prayer. What he points out is that they do not replace justice. He has nothing against ritual, but he makes clear that a ritual indifferent to the suffering of others is not the will of God. Isaiah returns us to the moral demand of revelation, of the Torah. In his version, moral demand does not replace or nullify ritual. It stands above it.
Thus, the prophet is not secularizing Judaism or pushing God out of the picture. Quite the opposite. He seeks to ensure that God’s name is not used to, for example, absolve atrocity. Because if we read the Torah honestly — not with terror, with honesty — the text does not allow us to hide behind mute obedience.
Without going any further, the biblical text itself contains iconic scenes of protest: Abraham argues with God over Sodom in the name of justice. He does not question God’s existence. He questions God’s decisions. Moses, after the golden calf, stands against the possible annihilation of the people. In both cases, the anger is God’s; in both cases, it is the human being who seeks to contain it. In both cases, the conception of justice is inherent to the human being. The result of those interventions is a God who acts with more justice than He was about to exercise. In both cases, when humanity confronts God, it makes Him better. That is not heresy. It is in the text.
The greatness of God does not cancel debate. In fact, it makes debate more important. I would say it is foundational: protest is not something imported from outside the text; it sits inside it. These cases show that moral resistance born of doubt can be a stronger form of faithfulness than unreflective submission.
I can say this about doubt because it is the place I inhabit. There are days when I feel the divine presence and days when I do not. Belief, even when it appears, is not certainty. Some days I want Him to be there; a good number of days I do not even think about the question. That not-knowing does not, I think, make me a “bad Jew.” In fact, it strikes me as more honest than any certainty. That doubt keeps me inside the tradition without lying to it and without lying to myself. In any case, my argument does not rest on these beliefs nor weaken without them, but, having come this far, it would not be honest to omit them.
This doubt founds my position on the Akedat Yitzhak, the Binding of Isaac. When it is read solely as a test of faith, I find it insufficient. If a test of faith requires suspending moral judgment when a third party is harmed, the price is too high. Passing that test would come at an intolerable cost. A test that a human being can only pass by harming another is, to that extent, a test under suspicion.
The narrator of Genesis knows this, because he shows us Abraham’s heart everywhere else: When Sarah demands that Ishmael be cast out, the text is explicit: “the matter was very grievous in Abraham’s eyes, on account of his son” (Gen 21:11). The narrator is showing us Abraham’s feelings. When God resolves to destroy Sodom, this same Abraham argues and pleads for the lives of strangers he has never met (Gen 18:23–33). This same man walks to Moriah with the son he loves and says nothing, shows nothing, asks nothing.
That is the discontinuity. The Bible shows Abraham’s feelings on every side of his story and withholds them here. In this chapter (Gen 22) the register goes flat. We are not told how Abraham receives the command. We are not told how Isaac receives the news. Abraham comes down the mountain and the text does not return Isaac to him. Sarah, decisive until now, is simply absent from the scene. Her next recorded act is to die.
The greatness of Abraham, if there is greatness here, is that something in him refused. I call its return, and I call it the angel. In any case, the text’s refusal to grant him a single visible tremor until that moment is exactly what I find insufficient. So I try to convince myself that doubt does rise in him, however, only after the binding, with the knife already lifted. Doubt comes too late to spare Isaac the binding. It comes in time only to stop the blade.
For all of this, Abraham is granted a blessing the tradition treats as the cornerstone of the covenant: his descendants as numerous as the stars and the sand, a blessing to all the nations of the earth (Gen 22:17–18). We are taught to read this as the founding moment of the People of Yisrael.
Nevertheless, it had all been promised before. God had told Abraham that he would father a nation on numerous occasions and long before Moriah: when he first left Haran (Gen 12:2), and again at the parting from Lot (Gen 13:15–16), and in the covenant between the pieces (Gen 15:13), and in the covenant of circumcision (Gen 17:4–8), and once more in the assurance that Isaac, not Ishmael, would carry the line (Gen 21:12). Five times, by my count, the promise of a dynasty had already been freely given, attached to no condition and earned by no act.
However, to call the Akedat Yitzhak our founding is to lay the cornerstone of the covenant on attempted filicide. Obedience does not always ennoble, and not every act of submission is a virtue.
My overall point becomes even clearer when we internalize that every human word about God is mediated by human language. We have no direct access to God as God is in Himself. We have texts, traditions, representations, metaphors, anthropomorphisms, human names with which we try to reach what exceeds us. Not because there is nothing beyond our words, but because, if there is, our tools are not enough to apprehend it. We never speak of God as He is in Himself, but only of God as a human mind can think and say Him. Even now, saying this, I keep resorting to words like “He,” “His,” and “Himself”, words soaked in human meaning. Replace the masculine with the feminine in everything I have just said and a different God appears… or Goddess. Because what God truly is lies beyond our cognitive reach.
So, if every formulation about God passes through human mediation, it can also be examined — and it must be! It is the only way to prevent faith from becoming moral idolatry, or from being hijacked by certainty.
Our Yom Kippur liturgy is not foreign to this tension. In Avinu Malkeinu we ask for compassion, forgiveness, life, sustenance. But there are also harsher requests, born of pain, of fear, and of our history as a people: requests for judgment, for the defeat of enemies, even for retribution for the spilled blood of the faithful.
This shouldn’t scandalize us in any easy, surface way. It should make us think. The liturgy does not speak from outside the wound; it speaks from within the wound: from persecution, from the memory of blood spilled. So where do we stand? What do we do with those words? How do we read them? How do we prevent a legitimate pain from hardening until it becomes a theology of vengeance? It is not the same to say out loud that the crimes of our enemies should not go unpunished as it is to make them pay for those crimes in the name of God.
Something similar happens with Unetaneh Tokef. It is, in my view, one of the most moving and powerful texts in all of the liturgy. It names the extreme fragility of human existence and puts it in religious language. And the same question returns: what do we do with that language? Do we read it as the literal account of a God who hands out tragedies one by one? Or as the extreme form through which the tradition tries to put into words our radical vulnerability?
On this matter I do hold a conviction: neither Avinu Malkeinu nor Unetaneh Tokef should be read in a way that ends with religion absolving bloodshed or romanticizing destruction, which is what the legend of the origin of Unetaneh Tokef ends up doing when it is taught as if it were a historical account. Precisely, this is what one of the most important Hasidic movements today proposes in its official web site in Spanish, under the title “The History of the Unetaneh Tokef Prayer.”[2],[3] I will simply summarize it.
Eight hundred years ago, in the city of Mainz, there lived Rabbi Amnon, a great and pious sage, beloved and respected by Jews and non-Jews alike. For this reason, the local duke sought his counsel. This aroused the envy of the duke’s other advisors to the point that the duke’s secretary convinced him to demand that the rabbi convert to Christianity. The duke put it to Amnon plainly: convert, or face the consequences.
Rabbi Amnon asked for three days to think it over. But the moment he stepped out of the palace, he understood the terrible sin he had committed: “Did I ask for three days because I lack faith and courage? My beloved God, ‘du lieber Gott,’ forgive me.” And he spent the next three days praying and pleading, begging God to forgive him.
On the third day, when Amnon failed to appear, the duke had him brought by force. There, Rabbi Amnon refused to convert. The duke condemned him in this way: “For having sinned against your God,” the duke said, “let Him avenge Himself. I will punish you for having disobeyed my orders. Your legs sinned against me, for they refused to come here; therefore, your legs shall be amputated.” And so it was done.
It was the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Rabbi Amnon asked to be carried to the synagogue and placed before the Aron HaKodesh. A note from me: picture the scene — a mutilated body, blood on the stumps, a face pale from blood loss, sitting small before the Aron HaKodesh. I continue with the story: When the cantor began the Musaf prayer, Amnon interrupted him and recited Unetaneh Tokef. Then all recited Kedushah, and then Aleinu HaGadol. When he reached the words “He is our God, and there is no other,” Rabbi Amnon cried them out with his last remaining strength, and died.
Well, it seems God did not forgive him.
The account, as told by this movement, ends with an editorial comment: “Thus, the unbreakable courage of Rabbi Amnon, author of this prayer, serves as an inspiration to us all.”
I think it is necessary to dismantle this myth.
First, the Hasidic version already calls it “the history of Unetaneh Tokef.” Not a legend. Not a devotional tale. It has made the leap from myth to history, from legend to fact, even though researchers have established that the piyyut is considerably older and its real origin is still unknown (fragments tied to the Yannai tradition place it centuries earlier).
Second, in the legend Amnon never doubts his faith, his God, or his Judaism. His only doubt is whether to submit to punishment or save himself by being forced, publicly and under coercion, to convert.
Third, that doubt lasts barely a few minutes.
Fourth, God punishes the doubt without mercy. He lets Amnon die in a horrible and painful way. Note that the text uses a very harsh word: “avenge.”
Fifth, when the version closes with “the unbreakable courage of Rabbi Amnon, (…) serves as an inspiration to us all,” what it is actually saying is: do not even think about doubting, because God will punish you.
What pains me most about this myth is that, even now, it is still taught as a true story. If the liturgy says something true, it cannot do so at the cost of making us less thoughtful and less sensitive. If the fear of divine judgment leaves us morally blind, then we have misread even our own prayers. For terror and reverential awe are not the same thing.
It is worth recalling here something well known from the rabbinic tradition, something that makes the spiritual pedagogy of that legend even poorer.
Hillel — not just anyone, Hillel — summarized the Torah this way: do not do unto your neighbor what you would not want done to you. Rabbi Akiva, the Rabbi Akiva, named ve’ahavta lere’akha kamokha, “love your neighbor as yourself,” as one of the great principles of the Torah.[4]
Neither Hillel nor Akiva were secularizing the Torah. Quite the opposite. They believed in God to the marrow; they lived and breathed Torah. But even so, when they had to reduce its livable core to a single phrase, they framed it in terms of how a person stands before their neighbor. Intense Jewish religiosity, with God and Torah obviously at its center, places ethics between one person and another in a central place.
So, what do we do on Yom Kippur?
This is my answer: we return to the Torah as a weight of responsibility, never as a shield against doubt. Because faith does not suspend ethics. The ethical obligation does not depend on God. Hillel and Akiva did not need to mention God to formulate the core of the Torah, because the ethical demand precedes the theological question. Let me be clear: it does not replace it. It precedes it.
Fasting does not replace our moral discernment, and the liturgy obliges us to raise our voice when the name of God is placed at the service of evil. We are obligated to fill the void with an ethical theology and to understand that doubt is not a failure of faith. On the contrary, it is part of faith. Sometimes it is the only honest way to remain within a tradition without lying about it.
For that reason, on Yom Kippur, I would not put the whole weight on whether God judges us. I would also remember that God spoke, that afterward He so often fell silent, and that the silence left us with the task of responding: responding to how we treat the other, to what we do with the text, to which image of God we let occupy the void, and, in the end, to whether religion will be a force of responsibility or an alibi for violence.
[1] Our sages addressed a related principle when they faced the “Oven of Akhnai” issue (Bava Metzia 59b). There it is written that “Rabbi Yehoshua stood on his feet and said: It is written: ‘It is not in heaven’ (Deut 30:12). The Gemara asks: What is the relevance of the phrase ‘It is not in heaven’ in this context? Rabbi Yirmeya says: Since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai, we do not regard a Divine Voice, as You already wrote at Mount Sinai, in the Torah: ‘After a majority to incline’ (Ex 23:2)”.
[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20130907074427/https://es.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1973088/jewish/La-historia-de-la-plegaria-Unetan-Tokef.htm
[3] The cited article is published in Spanish, where the word ‘historia’ means both ‘history’ and ‘story.’ In this context, the usage is unambiguous: the article presents the account as historical fact, not as legend or devotional tale. See https://dle.rae.es/historia
[4] The citation of R. Akiva on Leviticus 19:18 is stated in Sifra, Kedoshim 4:12
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