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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

A More Perfect Union Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show creating better conversations about the major issues facing contemporary Jewish life from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Sunday, September 29th, 2024.

So death and life, but mostly death, permeates the High Holiday liturgy. And especially the drama, costuming, choreography, and prayers that characterize Yom Kippur. Many of us wear white kittels on Yom Kippur, which are like death shrouds. We speak about our lives hanging in the balance, our fates signed and sealed in these days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, as we seek penance for our actions and consider the myriad reasons why we might not be forgiven. The death of the animals sacrificed in the temple atone for us, and they replace us. Absent such a ceremony, like we have been for 2,000 years, we simply don’t know, every year as we face a coming year, whether we and our loved ones will live or die.

In college, I took a course with one of my religion professors, Alan Segal, blessed memory, who’s a professor at Barnard College. The course was entitled Life After Death, and several years later Professor Segal published the course, essentially, in a big book with the same name but with a better subtitle, A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion. Fun fact, that book is the first place where I ever saw my name in a footnote, as Professor Segal graciously cited my undergraduate paper on the Crusades in his discussion of the issue.

I don’t remember a lot from the class, but I do remember that in surveying the various ideas and beliefs from across many civilizations that semester, Western and non-Western. You could feel a kind of rage and resistance against the terror of the inevitability of death and our collective human powerlessness to confront its possible eternality.

What does it mean, after all, for human beings like all of us, with our curiosity to know everything and all of our scientific methods, to have no empirical evidence on what this essential feature of the human experience actually feels like? The confusion around death, the sadness of death, our inability to confront its permanence, all of that invites religion in.

We religious people then sanctify death. We render it as a moment of holy transition. We take violent death and make it a tool of purification. Either for the martyr who experiences it, or for all of us who witness the martyrdom. We attach purpose and meaning to death. The fear of death becomes a catalyst for us to live better, or sometimes we see the deaths of others as motivators for us to understand a deeper meaning in the world. We sometimes idealize death. We turn specific dead people into saints, or in some cases, into gods.

All of these moves feel anthropological and psychologically understandable. But none of them, I think, fully answers for any of us the terror of the encounter at the precipice at the end of life. What will this encounter with death and near death, which is so common in our liturgy, feel like this year, a year of so much proximity to death for so many of us Jews in Israel, especially, and in the diaspora, a year when so many lives still hang in the balance. I’m aware that this tension, this anxiety, is felt acutely by many people every year in this holiday season, people who have lost relatives in the previous year, who are facing terminal illness, and the many of us who use the cycle of the year to reflect on how each year of these rituals reminds us of the imminence of our own mortality drawing nearer every day, but after October 7th and in the same week as we will be memorializing October 7th the sanctity of death or maybe even just the mere reminder of it will hit differently now. I’m really worried about it.

I imagine most people associate the life and death narrative of the High Holidays with the “U’Netana Tokef” prayer when we chant the various dichotomies of the fates we might face. Who will be brought down, who will be raised up, who will live and who will die. Cue Leonard Cohen. But this year I’m thinking more about the piyut, the liturgical poem, Eleh Ezkerah, which is recited in many Ashkenazi shuls in the middle of Yom Kippur and Musaf. I haven’t done the research on whether it’s chanted across the denominational divide, but I know it features prominently in Orthodox and many conservative synagogues, and the violence and the tragedy it portrays, depicting the violent death of of several major rabbinic sages at the hands of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century, but plays a major role in elevating the drama of the day.

I’m thinking about it this year, because this has not just been a year of a cycle of life and death, but a year where violent death has been particularly prominent, the kinds of death in war that are ripe to be encoded with meaning in the way that martyrdom literature like this texts are wont to do.

In preparation for these high holidays, I invited my friend and colleague Yair Furstenberg to join me this week to consider the history and meaning of this poem and the themes that it evokes, but more to consider with me what it means to recite it especially this year as violent war drags on. And as all of this death, experienced by many of its victims as meaningless, but described by many of us survivors as meaningful, as all of this continues to swirl all around us.

Yair’s a scholar of early rabbinic literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He’s the co-author of a volume on Jewish martyrdom in antiquity, one of several books, but as a resident and activist in Jerusalem, it seems like he is living this conversation both in the past and in the present.

Yair, thanks for joining today. Let’s start in the present. I’m curious how you feel about this. Personally, maybe even professionally going into the Yamim Nora’im, the High Holidays this year with these themes that are so prominent in liturgy, but also so prominent in what I can imagine are your everyday conversations.

Yair: Thank you, Yehuda. I’m glad to be here. I think the challenge is immense. Because my immediate reaction to your question is actually the meaningless, I think that the major feeling that many of us share today is the meaningless of death. Or, let’s put it this way: There is no good organizing framework to give the death of so many young people, so many people we know, soldiers, citizens, to make sense of it.

And I think we’re at a stage, at least I feel, I mean, I can say it generally with my fear of tefillah these days, I mean, I’m going to go to shul, I’m going to daven, but I’m not sure how I can fill it with meaning. And there will be a significant framework for organizing my thoughts.

I usually, every year when I come to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I don’t think of my prayer as something that is going to change anything or act in this world or in another world. But more of a deep way to address our world, our experiences, and somehow to organize it. I think, in Rosh Hashanah, malchuyot, zichronot, veshofarot, thinking of history, thinking of destiny, thinking of Jewish experience, the question of the uniqueness of Jewish experience versus universality, daily issues that we usually don’t have the time to really think through.

And, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur is my time to do it. And I’m also usually, I lead the congregation many times on Yom Kippur Musaf. And I enjoy this tefillah because as a scholar of rabbinic law, I’m really into thinking of how they depict the high priest and what exactly, how they transform the ritual into a fantastic text. The liturgy is very good, insignificant, but again, it loses its, this year, I’m, I really fear that it completely loses its meaning.

And if we take like a one personal case that I think why you gave a podcast in memory of Hersh, which from our community and we both knew him. And when I think of, again, that’s my, the closest case for myself, and making sense, how would I see it as a martyrdom? What did he do for, did his death do anything to make our situation better? I mean, there is, there was like a moment when we thought, this may be a transformative moment, but actually I always find myself going back from the death of Hersh to his parents’ talk of hope in a sense that we’re somehow gonna bracket the situation and continue. And that power, that ability that I have no idea how they make sense of it. I really have no idea how they make sense of it, but that it’s a power of its own in a sense.

Yehuda: You know, I appreciate you’re talking about your own sensitivity also as a prayer leader around these things because what you’re describing is that from the standpoint of a prayer leader, you’re dealing with your own stuff, right? And when do you want the words that you’re saying to be in the category of sincerity, right, I say this because I believe it, and when in your own mind is it necessary for something to be metaphor?

But you’re also, as a prayer leader, you have to be sensitive to the fact that you’re praying in the same room with people who may be suffering through the loss of a relative. And by the way, you may not want to be talking about this from the perspective of sincerity, it might be it’s too much for you as the person who’s leading but they, the survivors, the relatives, may actually need the, they may operate with a different theology of death in a moment like that.

I always felt that, I too lead prayers, and I always feel this dance between what am I saying, when do I have to kind of believe what I’m saying, and when am I It was my job to merely create the vessel of this experience so that people can process their own learning or process their own mourning through the prayers themselves.

And I want to add a layer on that for you to help me work through, which is it seems to be, and I’m saying this from a little bit of afar, I’m saying it with respect, but there does seem to be a kind of regular refrain. I’ve noticed throughout this war that when family members lose relatives in the war, there is a kind of, recurring narrative about appreciating the sacrifice of their children, almost like it would be too much to bear to say, like, what the hell? This had no function. In fact, I’ve been told by friends, you can’t really criticize the war the same way when you’re in the presence of parents whose children are at war. Because you can’t, you don’t want to, you don’t want to shatter, for them, the illusion about the importance of the war that they are sacrificing for.

Can you give us a little window into how some of that is playing out in the streets of Jerusalem and how you think it’s going to play out in the context of the synagogues of Jerusalem?

Yair: I’ll separate between the two issues. In the streets of Jerusalem or in the streets of Israel, I really think it’s a personal issue and there are big differences between people and between different families.

The first division would be between families of soldiers and families of those who were kidnapped and died, because a soldier, you usually, you tend to automatically almost attribute significance on a national level. But the tragedy of those who were killed, whether they were hostage at the Hamas is such that the families themselves, that’s a significant element, which moves them to action, to political action, right? They will stand at the streets at the demonstrations and shout out, why, why was my child died? Why did he die? Or, we could have saved him. And this is a difference.

Now, this is very complicated because I mean, and again, not all families react the same. So you have this, like, an array of responses, and you have to be very, very sensitive, right? But I do think there are people that even those who lost their loved ones, you can really share a more critical view. I think we’re in a stage that people are not automatically, they don’t automatically justify it. They don’t automatically justify what the state is doing. This is this is part of the general, I think, sense of crisis we’re in, right? Because the basic assumption is that you send your child to die or when your child dies sent by the state, so it was for a just cause. Right?

So now it’s all so complicated. I mean, some of it obviously is justified and some of it in some specific elements, if you’re taking the woman soldiers, right. There’s the whole tatzpitaniyot case, right?

Yehuda: These were the women who were on the first line, essentially

Yair: Right, the first line, not combat, right, but they were there. And the feeling that they were sent to a place that they were not equipped to really deal with such a situation. And so people are very critical of the state and it differs from family to family. So I think that makes it, I mean, you have to be very sensitive on a personal level. So that’s when you’re on the streets or if you feel close enough to people to really share this kind of questioning the meaning or the value of the death.

Now, when standing in as leading the prayer. Right? I assume that the solution would be in sticking to the prayer as is. I mean, one of the, one of the qualities of prayer as I see it, it’s that it’s an open text. As much as we say so much, in fact, when you stand with a text and pray, each time you pray, you fill it with a different meaning. So as a leader of a prayer, you have to be very careful not to push towards a specific meaning by the way you, by your intonation or the way you think you stress or that you do slower or faster, right? You have to make sure that you’re providing this very comfortable framework.

For instance, I don’t like adding tunes that the community doesn’t really know or cannot immediately join because if they have to follow and listen to me, they’re not part of it, and they feel estranged. But once you do something that, I’m very familiar, I mean, I’m not sophisticated as a leader, but I think that’s some of the power, because you feel very comfortable, and now, once you feel comfortable, you’re in a place, you feel comfortable with the people, you know, the text. Now you can start with the personal action of filling it with your personal meaning.

Yehuda: Yeah. And that, so that means that extends not just to the experience of singing, but to the theological interpretations going on in every person’s head as they go, where if you do it correctly, you’ve created this vessel in which everybody can do their own work and make whatever meaning or not meaning they want out of their lives and their struggles.

Yair: And again, communities, there are communities where you’re committed to a specific theology, specific, they add interpretations or add personal notes, and I feel uncomfortable in such a community because that requires me to be, to adjust myself to something that I’m not sure I’m part of, and you don’t allow me to do that, to create my own space of, of thinking and theology and meaning.

Yehuda: That’s powerful. We can actually spend a lot more time on it, but let’s go to the past and to the text itself. And I, I’m really wondering why this, why a text like the martyrology text of Eleh Ezkerah shows up in Yom Kippur as just as background, I think in the regular Musaf service, the regular supplemental service, which is set in Shabbat and festivals, there’s a kind of clear theme of this is a service that is assigned to be a kind of commemoration of a particular type of temple sacrifice. And therefore you have to follow up reciting the temple sacrifice with some theological expression that says, well, but it’s too bad the temple is destroyed because of our own sins, but one day we’re going to get the temple back and then we’re going to be able to perform this rite again.

Now, Yom Kippur, everything is swollen. So the same rite, you don’t merely describe, they sacrificed X number of animals. On Yom Kippur, you describe this extended narrative about the sacrificing of animals. But it could be that you would then just say, but too bad, the temple was destroyed and bad things happen. And one day we’ll be able to bring back the high priest and this ritual. But instead, whoever crafted the version of the Siddur that many of us use, not only says, well, the temple was destroyed, it’s bad, but it stretches the consequences of the destruction of the temple into these violent deaths by a number of rabbis at the hands of the Romans.

So I’m curious, like, what’s your hypothesis about why put this in there? It’s really kind of a downer on Yom Kippur. It doesn’t strange.

Yair: I don’t connect it. I’ll just say upfront, I don’t view it as part of the commemoration of the loss of the temple. You’re right. You’re right that when we, at the stage that it’s in, we have the sequence of the worship of the high priest, and then a long list of these, I don’t think, and no one really reads it, a long list of it was so good when we had the temple, now it’s so bad, all these contrasts. So we have, again, after saying the sequence of the high priest worship, we have all these contrasts between how it was when the temple was built and now how, what we’re doing. And then we have this case of Eleh Ezkerah, telling the story of the 10 martyrs.

I think this is somewhat misleading and I would not interpret it within this context because I do think that the idea of the story is to talk about atonement and an alternative form of atonement. But, in a deep sense, it atones for something much deeper than the high priests worship on Yom Kippur. In other words, it would have been relevant even if there would have been a temple. We still need the ultimate blood of the martyrs. Because what are we atoning for? What does the Kohen Gadol atone for on Yom Kippur? He atones for standard daily actions, right? The small sins, let’s put it this way. It’s not a transformative action. On the contrary, the worship of the Kohen Gadol is something that is a ritual, that is a standard yearly ritual. It’s maintaining, it’s a maintenance work.

And actually we know from a Christian text, the letter to the Hebrews, where he’s very critical of this concept of saying, actually the priest enjoy the fact that there are sins, because if there were no sins, they would not have this daily work that we need something that is the ultimate, complete atonement. And that is according to the Christian view. That is Jesus.

Now, here comes another model, which is, I would say, a Christianized model of atonement, the ultimate atonement of the original Jewish sin through the death of the 10 martyrs. What are the 10 martyrs atoning for? Not our daily sins, small things that we do, but they atone for the sale of Joseph. The 10 brothers sold Joseph, and that is something that it’s, that is an awful sin. And only when they came to the 10 rabbis, right, during the second century, they were people that were so significant that they could atone for this awful sin through their death.

So what we’re doing here is actually adding a layer of atonement, which is completely it’s a different language of atonement and a different meaning for the death.

Yehuda: Well, now it’s worse, actually, because in theory, what you’re suggesting is that were there still to be a temple, you still need the blood sacrifice of the martyrs in order to exonerate the Jewish people out of these kind of primordial sins of the Jews, which feels to me that it runs pretty counter to the biblical narrative and to actually the Seder Ha’avodah, the temple rite service that we just recited, which actually describes something that we don’t have access to in quite the same way, which is once you have completed correctly, the pro forma temple ritual that the high priest has done what he is supposed to do inside the Holy of Holies, meanwhile, the scapegoat has been pushed off of a cliff out in the wilderness. Celebration ensues because it’s a, it’s almost a technical fulfillment of a process of atonement that exonerates our sins.

The whole notion of intentionality, I guess it’s important, but it’s not that visible, right? Except in the sense of being focused on your activity that you have to do. But to then come along and say, by the way, all of that is fine, but at the end of the day, you’re going to need the sacrifice of the holy people to exonerate the sin. Now it’s not just contradicting the previous text, but it’s undermining the entire biblical theology that precedes it. That’s bad. That seems like bad news, Yair.

Yair: I don’t know if it’s bad, but that’s the nature. of our history, adding additional layers, responding to new challenges and new competing ideologies. So there are two things that are, I think, are in the background here.

So one thing is the fact, as I mentioned before, critique of the priestly concept that you described very well. The priestly concept is, I would say, a bourgeois concept of maintaining our sins and feeling good about ourselves because we did everything okay, right. But that is immediately, I mean, you already have the prophets very critical of this kind of assumption and the Christians that express it in, I think, in a more, most extreme manner. So you say, no, you need something that would be transformative.

And I think that’s a real tension that we have on Yom Kippur. I mean, every year you’d have Yom Kippur and ask yourself, okay, but I’m doing this as a ritual, a technical ritual, but have I changed? Have I transformed? And not only on a personal level, can we say that something here in history is being changed, or that the Jews are, have gone through something that creates a new situation?

So this, in a sense, is the truth is there’s also this tension already within the story of the 10 martyrs, because on the one hand, we need something stronger and then we have this the story of the 10 martyrs but in parallel traditions regarding the need to exonerate the sale of Joseph, they say no because every generation and generation needs those 10 to be killed in his memory.

Because the problem is, and again, it’s a problem that also Christianity deals with, if you assume that there was an event, of historical salvation, we would say this, but we have annulled the previous sins. We’re in a new situation. Someone has paid the price and we’re now in a new world, but we’re not in a new world. We’re continuing to suffer.

And here’s a second element. So it’s not only a change of theology that we know through Christianity and other sources that goes against this priestly view, but it’s also Jewish experience that, of suffering, of continuous suffering, and again, here we return to the need to give meaning for Jewish suffering. The priestly world is a world of a normal world that cannot explain, it really cannot explain experience of suffering, of galut, of a situation of things that are breaking down and falling apart. It cannot explain it. Because it assumes that we have a way to organize it.

But when you’re in the general Jewish experience of living, right, in the diaspora and being persecuted by Christians, right? So you have to give meaning to this experience. So here they represent this almost eternal experience of martyrdom for the sake of exonerating this original sin.

Yehuda: But there has to be a difference between retrospectively justifying violent death and being programmatic to say, in every generation, we are going to need to sacrifice 10 holy people in order to continue to satisfy this bloodlust that the divine demands of us because of this sin committed by our ancestors.

I really understand the first. Okay, this terrible thing happened. I guess it is part of this cosmic rupture in the fabric that we need to fix. But why would we want or need a theology which would say in every generation we have to do something like this? That feels to me like,

Yair: I’m not sure maybe that I would say that you have to do it, but I think that if I remember the Midrash correctly, it’s a medieval Midrash, but it says we are continuing to pay for it in a sense that this is a represent reflects our experience someday. Someday this will end.

And I’ll just add another thing, because once you move out from the Temple to the political arena. Now, the sacrifice doesn’t happen within a sterile space. It happens within a political arena. And this is something we have to take into consideration. The sacrifice allows you also additional elements that you’re dealing with, and you have to find a solution for them, such as even the sense of vengeance, which is a very strong Ashkenazi concept, right, that will be persecuted, but this, someday, this will be solved and justice will come and somehow all this calculation would be solved and there will be vengeance. We cannot disregard this aspect of the tradition, which makes, which again, at the heart of the Yom Kippur ritual or davening, we have not a sterile situation, but a situation which requires, I would say, a meta-narrative, a grand solution, not only for our own sins, but also for our relations with others.

And now here’s a paradox, and I think there’s a tension when you read the piyut, because on the one hand, it’s our sins. But immediately it says, now we can revenge once we die by the hands of Edom, the representation of Rome and later Christianity. We have the legitimacy to hope for some kind of revenge. So, it’s bigger than us. But it allows us to just to absorb many, many, many levels of considerations.

Yehuda: Yeah, that’s what I was going to push on for a second. How can you simultaneously make the arguments that this suffering is justified for and necessary for our own benefit? purification, which then turns the Roman persecutors or the medieval Christian persecutors or the Nazis or whoever else, turns them into an agent of God’s will, which is pretty prominent in the prophetic literature, right? That’s what the Northern Kingdom is coming to do. They’re an engine. They’re God’s hammer. How do you have that? While at the same time talking about the comeuppance that they will get eventually, and I guess in contemporary parlance, when we use the language of that comeuppance or that vengeance, we don’t just mean God will do it. We kind of mean we’re going to do it too.

Yair: This is more complicated. As a historian of ideas that, I’ll put it this way, I don’t feel that I solve this kind of problem, but just tracing the development of motifs and accumulation of motifs that, they don’t make sense as a system. I really don’t think it makes sense of the system.

But I think we can see the roots. That’s why it’s interesting to trace the development of this tradition. Because if you start, if we look at the roots of Jewish, of the story of the 10 martyrs. So we’re not talking about this grand narratives of 10 martyrs that were punished for the sins of Joseph. No, we have a personal event. Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Shimon, Rabbi Yishmael, Rabbi Hananiah Ben Teradion, a few, a few rabbinic figures and many others that we don’t really know anything about. And in those stories, in almost all of them, the major motif is the issue of theodicy and how do we justify the fact that Rabbi Hananiah Ben Teradion was executed? God’s ways are just. He must have sinned, and therefore he is being punished. Very simple structure, biblical structure of crime and punishment.

And if Rabbi Hananiah ben Teradion could stand a minute before he’s being executed and being burnt with the Sefer Torah, and say that all of God’s ways are just, that is the ultimate tzaddik. That is the ultimate pious figure. And that this is an element we want to remember and to praise. So this element of God’s just ways, and if we’re being punished, it must have been because we sinned. I think that’s a very basic element that moves and it develops from a personal aspect to a more national, to a more national aspect.

But, and then there are other elements that are added. And you have to add them because you have to now respond to Christian models of martyrdom, which I think originally the rabbis were not concerned of at all, such as the death as a form of atonement. This is not, this is something that becomes very prominent in later Midrash, but does not appear at all in earlier descriptions of the rabbinic martyrs. They never atone for others. If they have sinned, they have to be punished.

Now, I think that this competition of martyrdom between Jews and Christians creates this additional element of atonement. So now you have atonement, you have sin and punishment, right? And now you have also the element, which is a general feature of Jewish and Roman relations. That’s the fact that we ultimately at the end of history, the Jews will be more powerful and will take vengeance, et cetera, or God.

And here we come to the last point. Actually the rabbis, I think, are very careful to say that only God is the one who will take vengeance of the Romans. He’s not, he’s does not, they stress it in order to make people feel secure that ultimately this will be solved, but this is not part of our authority or form of action.

Yehuda: Or responsibility, right? So I’ll kind of come back to that in a second, because I think it’s really important for bringing the conversation back to the present, but, and I guess like you’ve undermined the possibility of contradiction by admitting that there are theological contradictions, which you’ve said, well, they’re just layers of text.

So you have as, which is such a beautiful and straightforward idea as the Jewish people course through history. laden with the theologies from before us, we don’t actually throw them out. We just make these complicated mess of a liturgy where I’m dancing between these various theological commitments, even if I know when I look at it as a kind of composite prayers, set of prayers, they’re actually kind of competing in a war with one another.

I guess the bigger conceptual problem might not be on theodicy. It does feel that it runs, that this kind of idea of sanctifying suffering, runs deeply counter to what feels like an important rabbinic idea, which is that you only die in an act of martyrdom when you have no other choice, that you are actually obligated to live as a rabbinic dictum. You are obligated to in, in most cases of martyrdom, you are supposed to commit the sin as opposed to, which is by the way, quite different than the early Christian texts where there’s a kind of deep excitement about the possibility of being a martyr, a witness to the suffering of Christ by embodying it yourself.

So that instinct in the rabbinic tradition to repudiate that notion of holy violent death feels both very important internally to the rabbis as well as a means of repudiating Christianity. So this shows up now, and you said very much in a Christian model, can you talk a little bit about that weird dynamic of both projecting Christian theology, but also kind of embracing its models?

Yair: It’s a very good description, what you just offered, and I’ll just add to it, but maybe I’ll start from our own experience, because I’ll just throw in a word about that, because the fact that there’s so many contradictory elements is helpful for those different participants in the public prayer to find their own, to find their own place, to find their own sense of meaning.

And I think that’s in a deep sense, participating in Jewish tradition in the many voices of the Jewish tradition, and while we’re all doing the same thing, right, it’s a fair, we all, we’re all saying the same text, but we’re relating to a different layer within this text. And I think that anyone who would try to be too consistent and try to explain how this all works out, you would feel that it’s strange. It’s not, it’s not what we’re doing here. Right. Okay.

But returning to this kind of tension between adopting and rejecting Christian discourse, so let’s just start with a terminological distinction. Martyrdom, just to clarify, martyrdom is from the word martyr, martyrion in Greek, which means testimony, to testify. And there is no equivalent term in Hebrew. In Islam, we have a parallel term for martyr, which is shahid, which through his actions or through his extreme actions and his devotion testifies to the truth of his beliefs. So in Christianity, it would be to testify to the truth of Jesus and to the gospel as a whole. And in Islam, it would be to testify to God and Muhammad, et cetera.

Now Jewish, even in the same events of self-sacrifice, the terminology is different. And the source of the terminology is crucial because instead of talking about martyrdom, which again, as you stress would be something that I want to do, I’m happy to do, I’m waiting for the opportunity to testify to what I believe in, and many times I testify within a political situation, which requires me to fight for my beliefs against all odds, for the Jews, the term is Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying the name of God.

Now, it’s very important to remember, as you hinted, that this term comes not from the event of death, but actually from the form of life. So, the Jews are commanded to live a life where they sanctify the name of God and to be careful not to desecrate the name of God.

So the fear is not that we need to sanctify God, or the fear is that we’ll be in a situation where our action will entail a desecration of his name. And that’s why to some level, if it’s a idolatry or something like that, or murder, this is a desecration of the name of God, and I’m not willing to do it. And even if you passively, I’m willing to die and not to be in a situation of desecrating the name of God.

Now, these are completely two different forms of organizing this idea. So there will be occasions where you are, you have the choice. For the famous story of the mother and the seven children, you have the choice of either eating the pig or sacrificing for the idol, it depends on what version we’re talking about. And you decide not to do it because by doing that you would publicly desecrate the name of God.

But we have to remember that in none of the cases of martyrdom, again, in antiquity, I’m not talking about middle but in antiquity, Jews were not, we don’t have descriptions. Let’s put it this way. We don’t have descriptions of Jews having the choice. Are you gonna worship the idol? Or are you gonna, or are you going to die? This fear of desecrating the name of God by worshiping the idol is something that the Christians experienced, but the Jews never experienced because they were not required to do so because their religion was, in general, considered a legitimate religion and they were not persecuted to worship Roman idols or emperor worship.

So we have in all these stories is actually a situation of death for some reason that we don’t know. We don’t know why, actually, in the original versions, we don’t know why Rabbi Akiva was taken to be judged. Probably he was taken to be judged as a political, for a political reason, because he was together with a supporter of the revolt, and others also.

And Shimon and Yishmael, for instance, Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Yishmael, who later Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, Nasi Yisrael, and Rabbi Yishmael, the High Priest. Again, we don’t know why they were taken to be executed. And actually that simply does not interest them. They themselves don’t talk about, Whoa, why, what are the Romans doing now? Why are they killing us? They’re only interested the way they deal with the situation is by creating this, I would say, a separate realm of religious experience between themselves and God. If I am now being executed, this is a question of what does God want from me now? What should be my response in response to God’s decisions? Not in the Roman, I can’t care less about what the Romans are doing to me. Right?

So in that sense, this is a very different way of dealing with this experience. But I think, and here comes the point, once the persecution is not a Roman persecution, but a Christian persecution, I think the language, now this is a historical paradox, but I don’t have any other way to experience it, explain it. I think that the language that you use becomes the language of your persecutors because they’re the ones who developed a language of positive willingness to die for the name of God, to testify.

So suddenly you’re, and you feel it’s so, just think of a situation where Jews are persecuted by Christians who views themselves as the ultimate martyrs, right? And this is part of this historic competition between the two religions. And then the meaning just transforms into a, and I would say a positive, and this is very Ashkenazi, right? A positive willingness to, to sacrifice yourself as a Jew, to show the Christians that our death is more valuable than theirs.

Yehuda: Yeah. I mean, what you’re describing almost across the board, even at times when you embrace the language of your persecutor, is that all of these texts reflect a craving of agency and power. So agency can be expressed by a vulnerable minority when that minority gets to choose and define what they are doing in any particular moment and to choose and to define what are the theological terms of their relationship to God, which effectively disempower the persecutor, because I’m deciding what I want to do. You may be a vessel in this particular case. You may be a persecutor, but that’s actually, I’m not interested in you. I’m only interested in the autonomy and dignity of my own choice.

I’ll add one question on that. The thing that feels so different moving back to the present, before we wrap up, I’ll ask you this and then one more. When we move back to the present, the thing that feels so strange about encountering these texts today, is that when you hear that phrase, asarah harugei malchut, the 10 killed by empire, well, state of Israel’s empire, the fact that these continue to become texts that are recited in now in a Hebrew idiom by Hebrew speakers creates a whole other paradox of what it means to inherit these texts, which are described as the text of the victim of empire, when the deaths that are experienced by Israelis from October 7th to the present, they’re not persecution at the hands of empire anymore.

Yair: Of course. Now I’ll just say that I’m not sure to what degree Israelis are really appropriating this text. Of course, you say it, a text that is much more significant for Israelis is U’Netana Tokef and we know that. Because the most popular tune for this, for singing the U’Netana Tokef in many communities, and that’s what I do, is actually of Yair Rosenblum connected to the Yom Kippur War back in ’73. So you do see what elements Israelis, I think, are connecting to more broadly.

But I do think that if we are thinking of ways that Israelis formulate or understand this situation is returning to the terminology of Kiddush Hashem, to which a new formula was added, I think, and I didn’t do the research when exactly it happened, but Israelis would talk about Kiddush Hashem Ha’am Ve’Haaretz. In the sanctification they died, in the sanctification of God or the name of God, the people, the Jewish people, and the land, right? I think this is a way to take the rabbinic term. And again, somehow they don’t, you don’t take into consideration, this is a basic fundamental text and use the term of Kiddush Hashem and you make it a Zionist, a Zionist idea of sanctifying again, what is important for us is the sanctification here of the God, the land, and the people as the whole.

And now you can really feel, and here if you’re, even if you’re a secular Israeli, you hear there are events of sanctification. And this is very interesting to think of, what is sanctified in the modern states? And how Jews take their language of sanctification through death and attribute it to the soldiers. They died al kiddush haaretz.

But again, that would be a problem that would be very relevant. When you talk about soldiers that went to war in order to save the land, to save the people, and they not only saved them or defended them, but they all, they transformed them through this act of sanctification. But what happens to those who were killed, who were persecuted by Hamas or died in ways that are not as heroic?

Now, it’s very interesting because the idea of Kiddush Hashem, again, is not a heroic notion. I think that when the rabbis use it, even if they use it with respect to what we would call martyrs, it’s not a heroic notion. It’s a notion of devotion. Of complete devotion to the will of G d, like Rabbi Akiva says, Ve’ahavta et Hashem Elohecha b’chol levavcha b’chol nafshecha, afilhu hu notel et nafshecha. The love to God is, this is what I believe, and this is my commitment, even if He takes my soul and life.

Yehuda: Right, it goes back to that thing of agency. I don’t care. I’m gonna do what I want to do. And I guess the way you were describing the kind of Israeli, I don’t know, you tolerate that it’s in the prayer book, but it’s not the focus of our attention, is a way of also saying, I want to allow these layers to be there, I still want to have a sense of agency, but I don’t have to accept the terms of agency that were in the past which required a kind of vulnerability. To be a rebellion against that, I actually am just claiming it on my own terms based on the conditions in which I live today.

Yair: Yeah. I’ll just add that if we return to U’Netana Tokef, just the sense of awe that you have when reading the Talmud, the power of this text is not because you have God at the beginning of the text judging the world and deciding. That’s not the, I think that’s not the relevant aspect. But the feeling, this isn’t actually an open question.

God is there. He’s present, but He’s in the background. We’re addressing, we’re confronting our situation by opening these questions and make them, and we tremble in front of the fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen. So we can use this traditional text and at the same time, on some level, bracket the ultimate role of God as making sense and organizing this and continuing with teshuvah, with tzedakah, et cetera, as something, yet when you read the poem as a whole, it makes, there’s a sense, there’s something that has meaning, is meaningful, but I think that as we read it, that’s my feeling. The whole text is, it breaks apart and you have only a few statements that really are significant and powerful to our feeling right now.

Yehuda: My last question for you. In the High Holiday liturgy earlier, in the Temple Sacrifice, my favorite moment in the whole thing is that once the High Priest is finished, all of the responsibilities on the way kind of out, or maybe it’s in, around the Holy of Holies, there’s a brief moment when the high priest is shielded from everybody’s sight and gets to whisper a short prayer.

And the rabbis have great debates about what was the content of that prayer, but I don’t care about the actual content of the prayer. It’s more interesting to me that the person who’s leading a congregation or the Jewish people gets kind of a brief window to say what’s on their mind.

So, without giving too much away as a leader of High Holiday Services, what’s the internal silent prayer that you are going to be offering for your community, for the people when you’re leading High Holidays this year?

Yair: Regain trust, regain trust in our community, in our government, and the ability to make this world a better place. I’m searching for the idea of trust. This is one of my goals. I study, I read Mishnah, I read the prayer book. Where do we find a place that could point to the ability to regain such a trust?

Yehuda: Fantastic. Thank you, Yair. Hope you enjoyed that.

Yair:Thank you very much, Yehuda. Thank you.

Tessa: Thanks for listening to our show. And special thanks to our guest this week, Yair Furstenberg. Identity/Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sarina Shohet and edited by Ben Azevedo at Bear Cave Audio with music provided by Socalled.

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