BELIEVE IN: Yom Kippur 5786

Perhaps the greatest of our contemporary sages, “Rabbi” Bruce Springsteen, once sang, “I believe in a promised land.” Just five words, but ones that express an unflinching faith — not in reaching a destination on a map, but in finding a future far from the broken here and now.

If you listen closely, that same conviction rises up in our own prayers on this very day. In the middle of the Kedushah of Musaf, unique to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we encounter the 1,500 year old piyyut, or liturgical poem, known as V’chol ma’aminim, a hymn that audaciously insists we all believe, among other things:

הַגּוֹאֵל מִמָּוֶת וּפוֹדֶה מִשַּׁחַת, וְכָל מַאֲמִינִים שֶׁהוּא גוֹאֵל חָזָק

“[that God is] the One who redeems from death and saves from destruction, and all believe that [God] is a powerful redeemer.”

We often sing these lines in a bouncy and infectious melody, as though it were a pleasant little interlude before the next prayer. But stop for a moment — what it’s actually saying is extraordinary: That we all believe the world can change, that God can be trusted to bring about ultimate redemption, that the very order of things — the way power and pain and privilege structure our lives — will one day be overturned, that even death itself will be destroyed.

Jews have long debated whether the Bible really teaches the resurrection of the dead — and if it does, whether that idea is meant literally or symbolically. But either way, the concept captures the radical vision at the heart of Scripture. The Bible portrays God, first and foremost, as a redeemer. 

That depiction finds concrete expression in the Exodus story, in which God liberates the Israelites from enslavement in Egypt. But redemption in the Bible is about more than mere freedom. Rather, it is about the building of a wholly new order, one founded on covenant and human dignity, where radical inclusion and complete justice will inevitably bring about pervasive and enduring peace. This is why the Exodus story does not end with the splitting of the sea but with the revelation at Sinai: to show that redemption is only complete when it yields a society of equity, compassion, and peace. And because all human beings are created equally in the divine image, this vision is not for Israel alone, but for all humanity.

Rabbinic tradition carried this faith forward, teaching that the redeemed world is an olam hafuch — an inverted world, where “what is exalted here will be made low, and what is low here will be exalted.” And they insisted that trusting in this transformation is a foundational Jewish belief. That’s why Maimonides, writing in the 12th century, named it among his thirteen principles of Jewish faith. Later generations wove those principles into our prayers, so they would live on our lips and in our hearts. In Yigdal, the creed became poetry. In Ani Ma’amin, it became song:

“Ani ma’amin b’emunah shleimah b’viat ha-Mashiaḥ.

I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah.

V’af al pi sh’yitmame’ah, 

And though he may tarry, 

Im kol zeh aḥakeh lo b’khol yom sh’yavo.

Still I will wait for his arrival every day.”

This belief — and particularly this formulation — carried Jews through exile and persecution, even through the heartbreak and horror of the Shoah. Tradition tells that the composer Azriel David Fastag of Modzitz set these words to music on a transport to Treblinka, turning the credo into an anthem of defiant hope, sung even on the way to the gas chambers. With this tune, our ancestors insisted: the world as it is is not the world as it will be.

Or, as The Boss put it: we believe in a promised land.

Or do we? V’chol ma’aminim insists that we all believe in ultimate redemption — that every one of us holds fast to the hope that the world will be overturned and remade. But despite the fact that we utter this assertion when we pray, despite the fact that our tradition regards redemption faith as mandatory, I sense that many, perhaps most, of us are at least skeptical of it, if we don’t reject it altogether. 

Perhaps we reject redemption faith because we think it irrational. To believe that a Messiah is coming, that the dead will rise, that history itself will be upended, is to believe in concepts that, to many modern ears, strain credulity — that sound fantastical, supernatural, superstitious. So we hedge. We hold redemption faith at arm’s length, lest we appear naïve or sound silly.

We also know how dangerous messianic fervor can be when abused. Throughout history, redemption faith has been exploited by would-be messiahs and their acolytes, whose false promises brought only division and destruction. Even today, we see supremacist apocalypticism joined with state power, as zealots and opportunists alike twist messianic language to justify oppression and tyranny.

And perhaps the deepest problem we have with redemption faith is not that it sounds irrational or that it has sometimes been weaponized, but rather that we have been waiting so long for this promised redemption, and it still hasn’t materialized. Generations upon generations of innocents have gone to their deaths with ani ma'amin on their lips, their faith unfulfilled. When waiting stretches across centuries, it begins to feel indistinguishable from never.

And so it is tempting to conclude that the way things are is the way they will always be. That poverty is permanent. That violence is inevitable. That injustice is ineradicable.

Our world — replete with war and violence, with deepening inequality and rampant oppression of the vulnerable, with ecological devastation that may already be irreversible — conspires to reinforce these conclusions. We are living through cascading crises: hostages still languishing in captivity; innocents suffering the ravages of relentless war; democracies straining under sustained siege.

Compounding this despair is the pervasive sense that our leaders do not care what we think, or even about truth itself; responsive only to the will of the extremely wealthy – or sometimes, simply, the most extreme.

This is a world that conspires to make us feel small, insignificant, powerless. It beckons us to retreat into our ideological silos and social media echo chambers, to revile those with whom we disagree, to mock, to disengage, to numb ourselves with endless consumption and distraction. And it is so tempting to give in to futility, to shrug our shoulders and say nothing will ever really change.

Those in power feed our weariness and cynicism by proclaiming that history has already spoken its final word, that nothing new can ever be born, that there is no alternative — that the world as it is is the world as it must always be. 

The ancient rabbis had a term for this mindset. They called it memshelet zadon — the rule of arrogance: the tendency of those in power to maintain a self-serving status quo by convincing everyone else to despair of the possibility of change. They first coined the term to refer to Rome, an empire built on brutality and expanded through exploitation. 

In rabbinic imagination, one figure embodied this arrogance: Turnus Rufus, the Roman governor of Judea in the reign of terror following the destruction of the Second Temple. He swaggered with the confidence of empire, certain that Rome’s power proved its inevitability, mocking the very possibility of a world redeemed.

According to tradition (Bavli Bava Batra 10a), he once approached Rabbi Akiva, the towering sage of his generation who would eventually be executed by Rome for refusing to reject redemption faith, with a question that was really a taunt: “If your God loves the poor – as your scriptures claim – then why doesn’t God provide for them?”

The implication was cruelly clear. Look around, Rabbi. The beggars on your streets, the widows without food, the children with swollen bellies — doesn’t their suffering prove that this is the way the world must be? Doesn’t their misery show that the order of things is fixed, unchangeable, even divinely ordained? If God wanted it to be different, God would do something about it. So why resist? Why struggle? 

This is memshelet zadon distilled into a single sneer: poverty is permanent, injustice inevitable, resistance blasphemy.

Rabbi Akiva, however, stands firm. He insists: No — poverty is not proof of God’s indifference, but rather a summons to responsibility. It is not a justification for resignation, but a call to action. The world as it is is not as it could or should be. The world as it is is broken – and God wants us to partner in its repair.

Now, whether God can’t, or simply won’t, perfect the world without our partnership, is an age-old theological debate in Jewish tradition, and one that continues to this day. For what it’s worth, I fall on the side that argues God doesn’t just want our help – God needs us. But in any case I think the underlying theology matters less than its practical implication: injustice demands our attention and action. If people are hungry, unclothed, or unhoused, it is because we have not yet done our part to build a just and inclusive world.

Indeed, even in the Torah’s great redemption story, God doesn’t do all the work. As the political theorist Michael Walzer points out in his classic Exodus and Revolution, the Israelites were not “magically transported” from Egypt to the Promised Land, carried on eagle’s wings while God did the work for them. No – they had to “join together” and march — through wilderness, through hardship, through crisis — because redemption requires human action. 

Yes, God is a redeemer. But always in partnership with us.

To emphasize his point, Rabbi Akiva quotes the prophet Isaiah, whose words we ourselves chanted in this morning’s haftarah: “This is the fast I desire — to set free the subjugated…to share your bread with the hungry, and to house the wretched poor. It is to clothe the naked when you see them, and not to ignore your own kin.”

Rome says: bow to the status quo. 

Judaism says: notice the needy, share with the less fortunate, break the chains of the bound. 

Rome insists that injustice is divinely ordained, that the world as it is is the world as it must always be. 

Judaism, however, insists that redemption is possible — but only if we act to bring it about.

That is the heart of redemption faith. To believe in redemption is not to sit and wait for God to fix the world. It is to enact redemption with our own hands — to prove our faith by living as though a different world is possible. 

Conversely, to reject redemption faith is to lower our expectations, narrow our horizons, and shrink our moral imagination until it fits inside the cramped confines of the status quo. When we make our peace with the way things are, we stop striving for things to be better, until ultimately the possibility of change slips further and further out of reach.

Which is precisely why our tradition has insisted for millennia that we must never give up on believing in a promised land. Not because it is easy or obvious, but because the stubborn belief that things can be different is what calls us to make them different. If we abandon the conviction that transformation is possible, we guarantee that transformation will not come. Faith in redemption does not assure us it will happen in our time; but without redemption faith, impossibility becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rome, of course, was neither the first nor the last regime that could be called a memshelet zadon. So long as we live in a world marked by widespread injustice and unending war, we remain subjects of the rule of arrogance. 

That is why, in the liturgy of these very days, we proclaim: ki ta’avir memshelet zadon min ha’aretz — the rule of arrogance remains with us – but one day it will be swept away from the earth. 

Yet after centuries of uttering these prayers, waiting seemingly in vain for the rule of arrogance to be overturned, it is tempting to make our peace with the world as it is, resigning ourselves to believing that our current cruel and unjust status quo is inevitable, reconciling ourselves to our present reality, however broken it may be. 

But accepting the world as it is means acquiescing to cruelty as the cost of doing business, poverty as a fact of life, violence as the background noise of history. Redemption is therefore only possible if first we believe. 

The mahzor underscores this point. V’chol ma’aminim comes immediately before our proclamation that God will one day “sweep away the rule of arrogance from the earth.” Believing in redemption is not the end of the prayer, but its beginning. Before redemption can take root, we must first affirm that it is possible: faith in redemption is the first step toward its fulfillment.

The influential Christian theologian Jürgen Moltmann called this the theology of hope. Redemption faith, he argued, is not escapism: 

It causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in us…Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present (Theology of Hope, p. 36).

Redemption faith is not meant to soothe us; it is meant to agitate us, to prod us, to make us restless until we align the present more fully with God’s promised future.

There is a story told about the great hasidic master known as the Seer of Lublin. When he died, his disciples divided his possessions — one received his books, another his tallit, a third his Kiddush cup. But one poor disciple was left with only the master’s clock. 

That disciple lived at a great distance from Lublin. So when he set out to return home from sitting shiva, he had to stop at an inn along the way. Not having enough money to pay for his lodging, he was forced to give the Seer’s clock to the innkeeper. 

Years passed, and the Seer’s clock was all but forgotten. Yet some time later, another of the Seer’s disciples happened to spend the night at that same inn. All night long, the innkeeper heard the restless footsteps of his guest pacing back and forth around the room. 

The next morning, he asked the guest what had kept him awake. The Hasid confessed: “It was the clock in the room that kept me up all night. Tell me – how did you come by this clock?” 

The innkeeper relayed the story. “I knew it!” exclaimed the Hasid. “This clock once belonged to the Seer of Lublin. It is no ordinary clock: Every other clock marks time from the past. With each tick we grow closer to the grave. But this clock ticks from the future, from the coming of the Messiah. It reminds us how much more there is to do before redemption is realized. Every time I laid down to rest, I heard the clock calling: Get up! How can you rest? Get to work now! The Messiah is so near! Redemption is waiting for you. It’s waiting for you to bring it about.”

That is what redemption faith looks like – the conviction that every moment brings us closer to God’s promised future. That belief is not meant to placate but to provoke. It is a refusal to accept the present order as permanent, a refusal to see injustice as inevitable, a refusal to let despair have the last word. Redemption faith means living as if the world could be remade today, partnering with God and one another to make it so, and refusing to rest until it is.

Yom Kippur, of course, is a day on which we declare that nothing is fixed or final – that, in the prophetic words that we echo today, even if our “sins are as scarlet they can yet be made white as snow,” that the way things are is not the way they always must be, that radical renewal is possible. 

But Yom Kippur is not about empty declarations of faith; it is about committing ourselves to enact our faith in the deeds of justice, compassion, and solidarity that can help make redemption a reality. As Isaiah prophesies: 

This is the fast I desire — to set free the subjugated…to share your bread with the hungry, and to house the wretched poor. It is to clothe the naked when you see them, and not to ignore your own kin…then your light will burst through like the dawn, and your healing will spring up quickly.

This is a day for nurturing a hope that refuses to be quieted, a faith that refuses to be tamed, a belief that the world as it is is not the world as it must be — and a summons to live, here and now, as if the promised land were within reach.

This is a day to renew our redemption faith – to refuse to accept our broken present reality as inevitable or incontrovertible, to believe in the possibility of a world turned upside down — an olam hafuch — where “every valley will be exalted, every hill and mountain will be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight”; where swords are beaten into plowshares, where every child of God can live in safety and peace.

It is a day to resist shrinking our moral imagination down to the cramped confines of the status quo, and instead, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” acting as if God’s promised future could break in at any moment, living as though it were already close at hand. 

This is a festival of transformation, a celebration of the potential for revolution – a day to restore our restlessness, to unsettle our comfort with the world as it is, and to embolden us to do our part to bring about the inclusive, just, and peaceful world as the God of Redemption insists it ought to be.

My dear friends, this charge has never been more urgent. For it is precisely in the places where the world feels most broken that our redemption faith must take root: 

In the cries of families still waiting for their loved ones to return home. 

In the shadow of devastating conflicts that seem endless. 

In the scourge of gun violence that continues to claim countless innocent lives.

In the destruction of the environment and in the erosion of our democracy. 

In the rise of antisemitism and in the spread of hatred that corrodes our communities. 

These are the arenas where despair whispers, “This is how it will always be.” But Yom Kippur summons us to answer back: No. The world as it is is not the world as it must be. We believe in a promised land – and we are called to join together and march toward it.”

And so, on this day, may God rouse us to wake up – to behold what is broken.

May God lift us to look up — to recall our responsibility to repair and redeem.

May God strengthen us to go deep — to meet fear with faith, resignation with resolve. 

May God bolster us to believe in a promised land – so that together we will bring near the fulfillment of “all the promises of God,” that great and glorious day when justice will roll down like waters, when righteousness will rush on like a mighty stream, when perfect peace will cover the earth as the waters fill the sea. 

May we anticipate the coming of that day, even if there is a delay. 

May we do our part to hasten its arrival and realize redemption. 

And may we merit – speedily, and in our time – to make it, together, to the promised land. 

So may it be God’s will. Amen.