In these Days of Awe, we search for strength, nurture hope, and work to shape a future for our people.
Hope itself feels almost out of place. We are living through days of profound pain, enduring the most difficult period in Jewish history since the Shoah (Holocaust).
Across Israel and the Diaspora, our people are united in grief, anger, and fear.
Still, as Jews, we are called to a deeper understanding of hope. It is not blind optimism, nor the naive belief that everything will simply be all right. Hope, in our tradition, is an act of deliberate choice.
As Psalm 130 declares: “Out of the depths I call to You, O God.” The most profound prayers do not rise from comfort but from despair. It is from those very depths that meaning can be discovered.
The wisdom of Viktor Frankl teaches us that even in humanity’s harshest conditions, life’s purpose can be revealed.
In 1935, Rabbi Leo Baeck, the very namesake of our center in Haifa, offered words of courage to a community facing devastation. In preparation for Yom Kippur, and amid rising hatred, he wrote:
“We stand before our God and with the same courage with which we have acknowledged our sins… shall we express our abhorrence of the lie directed against us and the slander of our faith. We believe in our faith and our future…
“Who brought the world respect for man made in the image of God? Who brought the world the commandment of justice? In all these, the spirit of the prophets of Israel, the revelation of God to the Jewish people had a part. It sprang from our Judaism and continues to grow in it. All the slander drops away when it is cast against these facts.”
Baeck’s words remind us that our values are an unshakeable foundation. We are called to meet hatred not only with condemnation, but with pride in the enduring truth of our tradition.
The Talmud contains a teaching of sorrow: “From the day the Temple was destroyed, the gates of prayer have been locked.” The very gates of heaven, sealed against us.
The gates of tears remain open
Yet, the sages add: “Even though the gates of prayer are locked, the gates of tears are never locked.”
This is the lesson we must carry. Heaven does not open for eloquence or ritual perfection. It opens to the tears of the weak, the oppressed, and the stranger. Prayer becomes more than words to God. It becomes the opening of our hearts so that we may feel the suffering of others.
Rabbi Leo Baeck embodied this truth in Terezín. When the camp was liberated, typhus patients begged to be released, crying, “We too are free!”
But Baeck walked into their barrack, closed the door, and spoke softly: “If you leave, if you walk among the others, the death that follows will be the Nazis’ final victory.”
One dying man whispered back, “And what will become of us?”
“I will stay with you,” Baeck replied.
He had earlier refused a transport to Switzerland, choosing instead to remain in the camp. He could not heal them, nor free them. But he gave them what was most precious – his presence and his love.
The gates of Terezín were locked. But the gates of tears, of spirit, and of love stood wide open.
Today, many gates feel locked once again. The actions of Israel’s government risk driving young Jews not only away from the State of Israel, but also away from their Jewish soul.
We must welcome their criticism, hold them close, and meet their anger with empathy. Anger cannot open any gates. Tears can. Through our embrace, we can remind them of Judaism’s two great revolutions, which lie at the heart of the Zionist dream:
Equality and freedom
First, the message of equality: Every human being is created in the image of God. Second, the message of freedom: God is the One who brings people out of Egypt. Every person has an Egypt. Every person deserves liberation.
These two truths – equality and freedom – are Judaism’s greatest gifts to humanity, as Baeck himself taught in 1935.
The entire project of Jewish prayer, and most profoundly Yom Kippur, is this: to open our hearts. To open ourselves to the world, to our fellow human beings, and to empathy. To stand with the brokenhearted and honor the tears that fall.
This effort, our tradition teaches, is itself an act of faith in God.
Through centuries, Judaism has transformed many times, across continents and generations. Yet one demand has never changed: to be human. To choose life. To turn away from evil and pursue good.
This is our gift of gratitude to God for the complex, beautiful gift of life.
Let us step through these gates together. Let us choose hope, not as naïve optimism, but as a living vision, a sacred responsibility, and an enduring act of faith.
In this new year, may we turn our people’s tears into a powerful force that reshapes the very soul of Judaism and Zionism.
The writer, a rabbi, is the managing director and headmaster of the Leo Baeck Education Center.