GO DEEP: Kol Nidrei 5786

In March of 1933, with the nation mired in the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood before the American people to deliver his first inaugural address. Banks had collapsed, factories had shuttered, families had been ruined, and breadlines snaked for blocks through city streets. A quarter of the workforce was unemployed, millions had lost their homes and their savings, and what confidence remained in the nation’s institutions and in its future hung by a thread.

It was against this stark backdrop that Roosevelt delivered a line that would become one of the most famous in presidential history: “The only thing we have to fear,” he said, “is fear itself.” 

He did not deny the reality of the economic calamity – the hunger, the poverty, the despair. He knew those dangers were real. But he also named the deeper truth: that fear of those dangers, when untethered and unexamined, can prove even more destructive than the dangers themselves. Fear has the power to paralyze, to magnify every danger, to corrode solidarity and blind judgment. Fear itself can undo us more thoroughly than the storms we are facing.

If that was true in 1933, it is surely true today. For we, too, live in an era of upheaval. We, too, are battered by crises that seem to multiply faster than we can recover from the last: war abroad, instability at home, polarization that frays our communities, antisemitism and bigotry resurgent; even the ordinary patterns of our lives feel more fragile than before. 

To live with fear right now is natural and understandable. This is a scary time to be alive. But I want to suggest tonight that the greater danger we face might well be fear itself. Fear, left unchecked, has a way of corroding everything it touches. It magnifies every danger, so that even the smallest threat looms like catastrophe. It clouds our vision, narrows our imaginations, makes us reactive and brittle. It impels us to jump at shadows, to see enemies where none exist, to close in on ourselves rather than open up to each other. As Master Yoda famously observed, “Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

We see it in our public life. Fear turns political opponents into mortal enemies, neighbors into strangers, difference into danger. It makes us question whether the institutions that once anchored us can be trusted at all. It causes us to confuse vigilance with paranoia, prudence with panic. It makes us small, keeps us from seeing clearly, paralyzes us from acting boldly, and turns us into people we don’t want to be.

The Torah itself knew this truth long before FDR named it. In the book of Leviticus, in the litany of curses that describe what will happen if Israel abandons God’s covenant, it says: “The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, even when no one pursues them.”

The upheaval resulting from Israel’s faithlessness will be so devastating, so disregulating, that they’ll no longer be able to tell the difference between real and imagined threats. The mere sound of a leaf rattling in the wind will be enough to cause people to flee in terror, as though enemies were chasing them or death itself was upon them. 

This ancient image is not hard to recognize in our own lives, in our own community, in our own moment. We, too, live with the sound of driven leaves rattling in our ears, and all too often we scatter at the slightest noise, not knowing what is real and what is imagined, not knowing what to defend against, or what the true threat even is.

We know the very real dangers we face. But the deeper danger, the Torah warns, is how we respond. When fear rules us, we lose our bearings. We imagine pursuers where there are none. We lash out blindly. We confuse shadows with enemies. We knock down what we ought to hold up, and cling to what we should actually release.

Today’s reawakened antisemitism is a perfect case in point. The Jewish community confronts real danger: the massacre at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, the attacks in Poway and Colleyville; Jewish demonstrators assaulted in Boulder for waving Israeli flags; the governor of Pennsylvania’s home torched, and Israeli diplomats murdered, because they were Jews. 

It is, as we know, on our college campuses, where, as my teacher Rabbi Sharon Brous recently put it, Jewish students are threatened, marginalized, and expelled from clubs; dorms are plastered with images of jackboots stomping on Jewish stars and machine guns captioned, “The Enemy Will Be Eliminated”; students are met on their way out of Shabbat dinner with shouts of “Go back to Poland!”

But even when the threats are real, fear can distort our vision. It can turn every protest into a pogrom, every critic into a hater. Antisemitism imperils our bodies, but the fear of antisemitism can endanger our souls — clouding our capacity for discernment, blurring the difference between comfort and safety, and seducing us into confusing shadows for enemies and enemies for friends. It tempts us to imagine that those who wink at white nationalists, recycle antisemitic tropes, and dismantle civil-rights guardrails are somehow our protectors; that defunding universities, deporting student protesters, and blacklisting professors are somehow acts of solidarity with Jews.

Antisemitism is undeniably dangerous. But so too is the fear of antisemitism — which, like the Torah’s image of the driven leaf, can make us brittle and reactive, scattering wildly at the faintest sound.

The liturgy of Kol Nidrei takes the Torah’s warning and turns it into confession. Later this evening, we’ll arrive at a section of our service known as seliḥot, penitential prayers — the most urgent prayers of this night, raw pleas for forgiveness repeated again and again throughout the long hours of Yom Kippur. 

Just before we reach their climactic moment, when we invoke God’s thirteen attributes of mercy, we pray:

תַּעֲלֶה אֲרוּכָה לְעָלֶה נִדָּף, תִּנָּחֵם עַל עָפָר וָאֵפֶר…“

Grant healing to this driven leaf; take pity on dust and ashes.”

The Torah prophesies that our faithlessness will cause us to flee in fright at the sound of a driven leaf. The liturgy suggests that the truth is even more devastating: we are the driven leaves. We fail to uphold our promises, falter in our commitments, break faith with ourselves, with each other, with God. That faithlessness makes us unmoored, vulnerable to being blown away by every passing storm. And it makes us dangerous – to ourselves and others. A driven leaf can set off a stampede. A brittle spirit can lash out and wound. Fear does not only break us down; it can also break the world around us.

Tonight, and throughout this holy day, we acknowledge our terror and admit our trembling – and seek out a way to stand firm once again.

But how? 

Howard Thurman, the great 20th century Black liberation theologian whose disciples included Martin Luther King, Jr. and other legendary civil rights activists and leaders, used to teach: “All social issues are temporary and brief. Go deep.”

Thurman did not mean that issues don’t matter. On the contrary: he dedicated his life to putting his faith into action, pursuing justice in the realms of policy and the arenas of politics. And he insisted that the issues should also matter to the rest of us, demanding our attention, our energy, our passion. 

But he also knew that when we only focus on current events and policy debates, we can become hollow and hotheaded. We come to confuse issues with ideals and fight undiscerningly on every front, harming ourselves and others. 

In order to act with clarity, consistency, and courage, we must cultivate deep roots, grounding ourselves not in the crises of the moment, but in deeper truths, in eternal values that do not wither when the winds rise.

Thurman’s wisdom echoes a much older teaching from the prophet Jeremiah: “בָּר֣וּךְ הַגֶּ֔בֶר אֲשֶׁ֥ר יִבְטַ֖ח בַּיהֹוָ֑ה וְהָיָ֥ה יְהֹוָ֖ה מִבְטַחֽוֹ / Blessed is the one who trusts in the Infinite, for whom the Infinite is their security. וְהָיָ֞ה כְּעֵ֣ץ ׀ שָׁת֣וּל עַל־מַ֗יִם / They will be like a tree planted by water, sending out roots by a stream. It will not fear when heat comes, its leaves will always be fresh. It will not worry in a year of drought, it will not cease to yield fruit” (Jer. 17:7–8). 

The deeply rooted tree — steady, supple, fruitful, alive – is the opposite of the driven leaf. Storms pass. Droughts rage and subside. But the deeply rooted tree remains, standing firm. And the deeper the roots, the greater the tree’s resilience.

What are the roots that can hold us steady when the winds rise? According to Jeremiah, it is faith that keeps us healing and wholeness. But what does that really mean? What is the substance of that sustaining faith?

In his classic and influential book Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman tells how his grandmother, born into slavery, never forgot the words of a slave preacher who used to remind his congregation of fellow slaves: “You – you are not slaves. You are God’s children.” That single affirmation, Thurman observed, became “the ground of personal dignity,” providing “a profound sense of personal worth” that was strong enough to steady them against the lash, strong enough to absorb the fear that forever threatened to undo them. “The awareness of being a child of God,” explained Thurman, “tends to stabilize the ego” enabling one to know that they matter, that they belong. The person aware that they are a child of God “senses the confirmation of his roots, and even death becomes a little thing,” resulting in “a new courage, fearlessness, and power.” True, Thurman admits, this awareness “alone is not enough, but without it, nothing else is of value.”

A similar stabilizing belief is at the heart of our own tradition. From its very opening chapter, the Torah proclaims that humanity is created in God’s image. Rabbinic tradition explains that the point of this teaching is that no life is disposable; that each and every individual has infinite value: "Anyone who destroys one life,” they take Genesis to mean, is “considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world. And likewise, Scripture considers anyone who saves one life to have saved an entire world.” In God’s eyes, each and every one of us has ultimate worth, and so too – each of us should see ourselves as fundamentally worthy. 

Why does this matter when the fearsome winds howl? Because if I know that I bear the image of God, then my worth is not contingent on the verdict of others, or the outcome of events, or even my own success or failure. That conviction fortifies me against fear’s corrosive whisper that I am small, alone, disposable. It clarifies my vision when shadows confuse me, reminding me that even when the world tells me otherwise, I carry an irreducible dignity. And it gives me resilience when fear would scatter me like a leaf in the storm, because whatever else I lose, nothing can take from me the image of God in which I was created.

This truth by itself will not solve every crisis or help us survive every threat. But without it, nothing else can hold. 

According to tradition, this faith is what enabled our ancestors to survive centuries of enslavement in Egypt, holding fast to names and practices that kept them rooted in who they were and whose they were. It is what has carried us through exile after exile, persecution after persecution, reminding us not only how to endure but why endurance matters. As my old friend Bari Weiss has put it, the Jewish people “were not put on this earth to be anti-antisemites.” Our worth is not determined by our enemies. If I believe I am created in God’s image, then my value is not dictated by what others think of me, nor should the direction of my life be set merely in reaction to their hatred. 

Instead, our calling is to live out loud as Jews — not timidly or defensively, but boldly, joyfully, proudly. We can nurture our roots through prayer that reminds us who we are, Torah that teaches us how to live, mitzvot that bind us to God and to one another, in acts of kindness that bring our innate godliness into the world.

At the same time, it is not enough simply to know that I matter, that I am God’s child. The Torah insists that every other person also bears the same Divine image, that every life equally carries that same infinite worth. Not just those closest to us, not just those who agree with us, not just those who look or live like us — but all humanity. As the rabbis teach, “the [first] human was created alone…so a person will not say to another: My parent is greater than your parent.” 

Rabbi Art Green, in his book Judaism’s 10 Best Ideas, recalls a debate nearly two thousand years ago between Rabbi Akiva and his colleague Ben Azzai. Akiva said the greatest principle of Torah was “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But Ben Azzai disagreed. Love, he argued, is fragile. It can falter — especially when our neighbor is unlovable, or when we cannot even agree on who counts as neighbor. 

Instead, he pointed back to Genesis: “On the day God created human beings, God created them in the Divine image.” Not just some lives, but every life. Human decency, Ben Azzai taught, cannot depend on whether I can muster affection. It must rest on something deeper: the unshakable conviction that every person reflects the image of God.

If that is true, then my dignity is bound up with yours. If I am created in God’s image, so too is the one who is hungry, the one who is indebted, the one who has been pushed to the margins. Their dignity demands not only my recognition, but also my responsibility.

Indeed, the Torah does not stop at affirming human dignity. It commands us to structure society in a way that enshrines it. That’s why the image of the driven leaf appears in a passage warning Israel of the consequences of ignoring God’s vision for a just society. At the center of that vision as outlined in Leviticus are the sabbatical and jubilee years: times when debts must be forgiven, the enslaved must be set free, and private property must be relinquished – so that inequality can never calcify into a permanent underclass.

The Torah’s claim here is bold: if we forget that every human being is God’s child, if we fail to enshrine that truth in our communal life, then we will become like driven leaves — scattered, brittle, reactive, carried away by every gust of fear. But if we live by it — if we move beyond simple self-preservation to anchor ourselves in the dignity of all people — then even in an age of upheaval, we can remain steady.

Botanists tell us that aspen trees, which cover vast swaths of the Rockies, look like countless individuals, but are in fact shoots of a single root system. What looks like a forest is actually one living organism. When one tree suffers, the whole system responds. When one thrives, the nourishment ripples outward.

That, too, is what it means to “go deep”: to remember that our rootedness is shared, that beneath all our differences and divisions, we are connected by something larger — the image of God that we all share equally with one another. Fear makes us brittle; covenant makes us strong. Fear drives us apart; God’s image binds us together. 

The Torah’s insistence that every person is created in God’s image is not a policy but a principle — a foundational moral claim. As legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin explained, policies are provisional and pragmatic, our shifting attempts to put ideals into practice. Principles, by contrast, are absolute and abiding. Policies compete; principles unite.

Going deep is about rooting ourselves in principles that do not shift and scatter with the wind. When we focus on policies we allow ourselves to be tossed about by every gust. But if we ground ourselves in principles, we can stand strong no matter the storm. 

That is the work of this holy day. Tonight we begin by admitting how easily fear can scatter us, how often we live like driven leaves. And then we recommit to going deep — to tending the roots that hold us steady and help us flourish, no matter which way the winds blow.

To ground ourselves not in fear but in faith.

Not in policies that shift, but in principles that endure.

Not in self-preservation alone, but in the steadfast conviction that every human being is God’s child, every life infinitely precious, every person’s dignity bound up with our own.

Because the storms will come. The winds will rise. The crises will cascade and compound. But if our roots are deep enough — and if we tend them faithfully, watering them with prayer and study, nourishing them with acts of justice and compassion, strengthening them through solidarity with one another and with all God’s children — then no storm can sweep us away. We will bend without breaking, endure without hardening, and offer our strength to a world in need of healing.

So this Yom Kippur, may we be moved to go deep: deep enough to stand steady in any storm; deep enough to live by principle when policies falter; deep enough to remember that beneath all our divisions we are joined — like aspen trees bound by one hidden root system, drawing from the same living waters.

May the One who grants rest to driven leaves grant us clarity, conviction, and courage in the face of fear. 

May the One who pities dust and ashes strengthen us with commitment to covenant when our faith falters.

And may we, rooted in God and in each other, rise from this day ready to bring to our weary world healing and wholeness, compassion and caring, justice and peace.

So may it be God’s will. Amen.