Yizkor in the Streets

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Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I'll be your host for today. Today, we're going to be talking about the Rabbis for Ceasefire Yizkor service that took place at the beginning of October on Yom Kippur. Instead of being in a synagogue for this service, 1,500 people came out on the streets of New York City as an expression of grief and an act of protest against Israel's genocide. This was the second year that Rabbis for Ceasefire did this, but this year, it ended with an act of civil disobedience that culminated in arrests. I have two amazing guests with me who are both planners and leaders in the action that we're going to talk about. First, I have Rabbi Alissa Wise, founding director of Rabbis for Ceasefire and co-author of Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing. Hello, Alissa.

Thanks for having me.

And Rabbi Elliot Kukla works at the intersection of justice and spiritual care to those who are dying and bereaved. His book on the power of mourning, Hidden Grief: The Heart Lives by Breaking, is forthcoming in fall 2027. Hi, Elliot.

Hi. Good to be with you.

So today, we're going to be talking about the Yizkor service that happened at the beginning of the month. I was there. It was a really, really moving service. From the service itself, there was a kind of Ne’ilah portion, where the smaller group took to the streets and blocked traffic on the Manhattan Bridge.

It was actually the Brooklyn Bridge, and there were almost 60 people in total arrested, and 10 of them were rabbis.

Amazing. Alyssa, you reached out to me initially because the debrief about this action revealed a real enthusiasm among the rabbis who put it together—I think there was more than a dozen rabbis who put it together—and you wanted to talk a little bit about what this means for our emerging project of building Judaism beyond Zionism. So that's what we're going to talk about today. What does this action/service mean to this ongoing project? So first, I was hoping that you both could tell us a little bit about the action itself. It kind of exists in this space between ritual and protest, is sort of both at once, and I was wondering if you could both describe it, and describe how you planned it in that regard, and how it felt to participate in something that was in both at once. And actually, before we start with that, I just want to recognize that we are recording this the day after the death of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, of blessed memory, who is really one of the pioneers of this form with the Freedom Seder during the civil rights movement, which was very much a Seder and very much also a protest and action. And so, we are remembering him today as we do this podcast.

Yeah, we very much are in his lineage, and it feels today like we're in a new day of taking on the mantle, and the baton has officially been passed. A few months ago, actually, he summoned me to his house and asked: What can I do? How can I be involved? How can I take action? And I told him: Arthur, you have done plenty. We've got it. We are on your shoulders. So I'm grateful I had the chance to say that to him and now to live into that commitment I made to him. So, as far as the Yizkor, last year, we organized a similar Yizkor event that took place at Grand Army Plaza. Part of how we got to deciding to do a Yizkor service is the same way we got to decide to do the action we did in Pesach 2024 at the Gaza border, and how we decided to do any of the actions that we've taken as Rabbis for Ceasefire during this time of genocide, which is to go actually straight to our liturgy and to our traditions as a people and allow them to speak to us and to be part of how we move in this time. This is how Jews have engaged with Jewish tradition for generations, is connecting to the liturgy and allowing it to be relevant to the political and social conditions of our time.

Yizkor is this tradition in particular that actually began in the Middle Ages, when there were actually a lot of deaths in the Jewish community for a variety of reasons, and it became a practice, then, that on Yom Kippur, there would be this Yizkor ritual where you would remember everyone who had died in the year past. So we really were just continuing that thread and that chain. For us, it felt really important that in this time when we're trying to figure out: What does it mean to be Jewish? How do we distinguish Judaism from Zionism and from the actions of the State of Israel? How do we contradict what is happening, as we know, in most Jewish communities, where the memories of all the Palestinian lives and Israeli lives that have been lost in the past two years will not be spoken or remembered? And so, it felt important for us to stake ground in the public sphere for the liberatory Judaism we are building, and that it had to be on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, when thousands of Jews will be gathering in synagogues. I want to emphasize: It doesn't need to be religious. I think there's ways that Jewish secularists do the same work. That's not my work, but I just want to affirm that I see that. My kid goes to Camp Kinderland, so I get to really, intimately see that there. We understand that liberatory Judaism doesn't just mean bringing politics inside the synagogue. It means bringing our Judaism out into public to renew and enliven it with the legacy of our ancestors, and with the political commitments of our present, and the possibility of what the future can hold.

Yeah, I mean, I would just add to that that Yom Kippur has such an enormous weight to it. Even for Jews who don't have much connection to Judaism, there tends to be a connection to Yom Kippur. So it already has a gravity to it that we don't have to create. You don't have to work to create some of these themes, as Alissa was pointing to, that are part of what we're talking about in terms of remembering the dead and bringing death closer. And also, the core theme of remorse, for grappling with how we can live with the role that Jewishness and Judaism is playing in this moment. That is one of the core themes of Yom Kippur—not just personal error but collective error. I think for a lot of Jews, myself included—I'm a Reform rabbi. I've mostly served modern liberal congregations and communities who tend to struggle with that very core and most surface theme of Yom Kippur, of atonement and of collective responsibility, of: How do we take responsibility for our sins or errors or mistakes? All of a sudden, that has a lot of new meaning in this moment when we're thinking about the question of: How do we deal with being responsible for a genocide being committed in our name as Jewish people, and with our dollars as Americans?

Yeah, I mean, I want to talk a little bit about that in a bit, but first, I just want to really understand what felt different. I mean, as you've said, this is in a tradition of ritual protest. What felt different about this event? Why did it kind of light up your rabbinic group so much? What was it about this event that felt like you had hit something or were starting to develop something that maybe hasn't really come into focus before now?

Yeah, I mean, there's a saying that rabbis give the sermons that they need to hear. And I think this Yizkor and Avodah service and Ne’ilah service that we did in the streets this Yom Kippur was a real manifestation of that. A lot of the rabbis who participated, in particular those of us who got arrested for blocking the Brooklyn Bridge and had the opportunity to daven Ne’ilah, the closing prayers of Yom Kippur, locked together inside PVC pipes blocking the street, a lot of them said it was the peak spiritual experience of their life. Last night, I was speaking to a rabbi who is in his seventies, and he said he never understood Ne’ilah until this Ne’ilah, and that it felt it was finally taking the form that put the pieces together, to understand that when we are begging, asking God to forgive us, to hear our prayers, to cry out as we do in the final verses of Ne’ilah, is the Shema: a bold declaration of the oneness of life. It all kind of came together in this moment, where you have us prostrating ourselves on the streets of New York City, disrupting, in a practical way, the cars that we're trying to go over the Brooklyn Bridge, but really, we were disrupting our own conventional wisdom of how Jewish practice has to be done. That's what it felt like, and I think this is kind of the highest that both protest and prayer can be—when we are both disrupting it and living it to its fullest at the same time. That's how we get the sanctity of what both prayer and protest can be.

Yom Kippur is supposed to feel dangerous, and we have generally lost that risk element when we're inside the synagogue. I clearly remember, after my first year of being a chaplain, the first time doing Yom Kippur and coming to Ne’ilah and coming to that end of the service, which is the same as we do at a deathbed. And it was completely different after having been with dozens of people as they drew their last breath, and they said those words, and then doing that liturgy of saying the Shema over and over again, and realizing: Oh, we're rehearsing our death on Yom Kippur and are we ready for it collectively? And it had much more power, realizing: Oh, this is how our ancestors did it because people died at home, and they were used to really feeling that Yom Kippur was rehearsing our death. We have lost touch with that risky element of Yom Kippur, of feeling the presence of grief and death in an embodied way. And bringing it back into the streets and feeling that element of risk—of literally putting our bodies on the line and having the presence of the police there, and also bringing the presence of Palestinian death into the center and humanizing that—brought the element of risk back into Yom Kippur. It also brought the urgency of what is happening to our humanity as well, in terms of the fact that here we are on Yom Kippur, and have we allowed the gravity of this situation to enter into our souls as well, and realizing the element of urgency of the moment.

Yeah, thanks for that. This segues into one of the core questions that I have. You both are talking about solidarity with Palestinians. I want to prod you a little because I showed up for myself—to go to a Yizkor service on that day, to be able to practice that as a Jewish person in a way that felt okay, in a way that felt like: I could manage this, I can stomach this, I can feel okay with this. And I guess what I'm saying is I really had no illusions that I was there for any other reason than for myself. And maybe that's okay, maybe it's not okay. I'm not sure Palestinians are asking us to make of our tradition a home for them. Or, on the list of things that Palestinians are asking of us, they're asking us for boycott, and they're asking us to push our communities to divest and to stop supporting organizations that support the genocide, to stop lobbying the American government for a blank check for weapons. So, I'm not sure that this is at the top of the list. I don't know. I guess I just want to deal with the discomfort, or maybe just the reality of that. And at the same time, just to be clear: I really believe that this work is something that will help the cause of Palestinian liberation. I think being able to move Jews in this way is a step in the process toward destroying support for Zionism within the Jewish community. And still, I think there's a discomfort in terms of how we think about who this is for. So, I was hoping you could talk about that and also about who it's for, in terms of who sees it. How you think about the work that it does in the world for people who are neither Palestinian nor Jewish.

I think, absolutely, this is not Palestinian solidarity work, in my opinion. This is the work that we need to do to strengthen ourselves, to be able to be fully present in Palestinian solidarity work. To me, it's like keeping our side of the street clean. I feel like we have seen in vibrant, living color the full impacts of not taking full responsibility for attending Jewish generational trauma, and not tending to Jewish generational grief, and not healing our traditions, and how that spills over on a grand scale in terms of the corruption and nationalism throughout Judaism, but also, even in some of our anti-Zionist spaces, in terms of Jewish feelings being so pent up and big that we don't have room for Palestinian solidarity work. So again, as a chaplain, I would never tell someone to leave their grief out of the room. For example, in accompanying someone who is dying. That doesn't mean to make your grief central when you're accompanying someone who is dying; you always have to center the person who is bleeding, which in this case is Palestinians. But in order to be able to tend to someone who is actively bleeding and dying right now, you need to know your own trauma, and if you don't know your own trauma, I'm not ready to send you in to do hospice work. Right now, we've really learned that culturally, as a people, we're not there yet. To me, as a rabbi, that is part of the generational healing work that we need to do is getting to know our own trauma that often not only gets in the way of us being present in solidarity, but actually gets in the way of core humanization of Palestinians that happens over and over and over again, and that we really need to make use of our own traditions, our rituals and our symbols to heal so that we can be fully present when we do show up, and so that we're not doing that healing work in the time when we really should be doing the solidarity work.

I think it's really important to emphasize that I understand the project of building Judaism beyond Zionism, as we often refer to it, or building liberatory Judaism as distinct from Palestine solidarity organizing. There is a Venn diagram, and there's an overlap, and there's times when the two come together, but I want to emphasize that I see those as two different projects. I think it's important that we all do, and we understand that, and be able to be clear when we're in one space or the other. At Rabbis for Ceasefire, the way we talk about that is that our role as rabbis in the Palestinian freedom movement is to, on the one hand, bring our moral power as rabbis to the fight for political goals, and on the other hand, safeguard a Judaism for the future that's worth preserving. I think one of the reasons that's really important is: It's not just to preserve Judaism because Judaism is uniquely important as a religion. Obviously, I feel connected to Judaism, and I want it to endure for my children, and my children's children, and my friends’ children's children, because it's been a source of meaning for me and my family for generations. But I don't want to make the case that there's something inherently valuable about Judaism.

But what I think is valuable, especially in this moment where we understand religious nationalisms of various stripes—Christian nationalism here in the US; Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, in India—there's other religious nationalist projects that we all need to practice our skills of: How do we ensure that our religious and cultural traditions remain ours and aren't able to be used as justification for oppression, genocide, apartheid, as is happening all over the world? So there's actually a skill that we're building for liberation movements throughout the world, of practicing: How do we insist that we get to have our cultural and religious traditions be a source of building solidarity, of practicing solidarity, of being able to be more human in feeling our grief, pushing us to take courageous action? Those are skills that I think will be transferable to other forms of organizing against religious nationalism.

The thing with grief is it puts you in touch with humanity. It puts you in touch with the fact that we all die, and there is something so deep in Jewish culture that wants to set us apart from these forms of universal human suffering as a defense.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot in what you guys just said that I want to pull out, but I want to go back to the question both of grief and of trauma. We have been talking, in the Jewish community, about trauma for a million years, and I think also, on the Jewish left, we have kind of our own flavor of that. Elliot, I know you and I are both descendants of Holocaust survivors. I am, I guess, somewhat ambivalent at this point to a continued focus on trauma, and I want to talk to you about it because I want to work it through with you. In America, I think the amount of people who are actually Holocaust survivor descendants is actually not that many, and the Sephardi and Mizrahi communities who have in-memory experiences of exile is also a small group. A lot of the trauma that we talk about in the American Jewish community is essentially a secondhand trauma or a learned trauma. That doesn't make it maybe any less real in terms of what we have to undo, but it is, on some level, a different thing than the way that we've been talking about it, or at least I've felt that in terms of the differences in the way that I see what's happening in my family, in terms of the intergenerational aspect of Holocaust trauma, and what is happening in the families of American friends that I grew up with.

And then, on the other hand, the grief element as well, on some level, puts us in a slightly different orientation than some of our Palestinian comrades, who really feel like they're too in the process. I mean, Hal Alyan talked about it at the Yizkor service, that they're too in the process of experiencing the thing to be in a place of grief. Abdeljawad Omar has also talked about this really beautifully, that actually, the process of grief is delayed by necessity because the grief is a way of signaling that something is over. Obviously, I'm painting with a very broad brush here. I think that particularly, the question of grief has put Jewish communities on the left a little bit at odds, from the beginning, since October 8th, with the movement as a whole and the feeling of the movement as a whole. Maybe less so now, but still something to think about. So I wanted to just dig in on these questions of trauma and of grief. Because I'm in agreement with you that it's so important for us to start to deal with this shit and deal with it on our own, on some level, and also that they represent ways in which our positionality is a little bit uncomfortable in all of this.

I mean, I think one of the big issues is the way that grief and trauma are exceptionalized in Jewish community without any basis. So, using myself as an example, my father was a hidden child in the Holocaust, and my grandparents were camp survivors, and one of the ways that trauma manifested in my family was my parents kind of replicated a refugee experience, sort of by choice. We lived in tents growing up around the world; I had a refugee experience, even though I grew up in a very peaceful era, and I felt extremely alone in that experience. I felt very isolated by it. I did not really know any Jews growing up because of the places that I lived, and I thought I was the only one having this experience of this life that was completely set by this experience of intergenerational trauma. However, two of the main places I grew up were Hawaii and Toronto. And now, I realize that there were actually active genocides in both those places at the time. There's lots of ways to define genocide, but there was active ethnic cleansing going on, in terms of the legacy of the US annexing The Big Island, where I lived, and all of the families that I grew up around in the village I grew up in in Hawaii. Then, I moved to Toronto and did a lot of schooling there. The Canadian residential school system still existed in the 1970s and ’80s when I was growing up. We are still digging up bodies from the Indigenous school system there. I had no idea as a child that these stories were much more present than the genocide story that I was growing up with. I had absolutely no idea.

When I learned this, it was incredibly healing and comforting for me, and I only started to learn and understand this because I became a chaplain, and I started being with people at their deathbeds, and by being with people at the end of life, I started to unwind my own generational trauma and understand that almost everyone has these stories of national horror, and the way that nationalism impacts all of our families in their stories, and that Jewish stories are in no way exceptional. I was able to unwind Jewish exceptionalism through being in people's stories, and that helped me make sense of my own story. But it wasn't through letting go of my own story. It was through finding companionship in my own story. That's something that I hope for all of us in this, is to find companionship in our story so that there's less isolation around it. It's also realizing that there are other stories that are happening today. There are people being kidnapped on my corner right now by ICE. So how do we hold the fact that there are more urgent stories, and this story still needs to be healed?

I mean, look, it's very challenging for me because I have been hearing this discourse in the Palestinian world and feeling challenged by it myself. Like, the stopping to grieve is the moment of surrender or capitulation in some schemas.

I would really strongly disagree with that. I appreciate that a lot of Palestinians are not ready to grieve as quickly as we have been ready to grieve, but I think that grief happens in so many different ways and often not at an ending, in any way. Like, for example, the grief for chronic illness is something that you're constantly having because there is no closure and no ending. We need to find a way to grieve it all along the way. Something that I've been deep in reading lately has been accounts from disabled Palestinian people. There was a really beautiful writing by a disabled Palestinian kid talking about grieving for her disability aids that had been lost in this genocide, thinking: Oh, I've lost my crutches. I've lost all of this. How will I ever recover? And it was a very clear expression of capacity to grieve in the midst of it, and it was a child. There is grief that is able to happen all the time and in every moment, and I just want to challenge the idea that grief is in any way a luxury, or grief is in any way self-indulgent, or you need spaciousness, or you need an endpoint to grief. I really strongly believe that grief is ongoing, and grief, like love, exists at all times and places. And like love, it might be harder to feel or access when everything is coming at you, but like love, it's an essential part of being alive, and it will find its space when it has its space. I hear that in times of war and trauma, there might be so much numbness and overwhelm, it's hard to feel like all human emotions, but I don't set it apart from other human emotions for a later date.

Yeah. I do feel like Jewish activists have reached for a grief register more often than Palestinian activists, who are reaching, often, for an anger register. And again, I also don't think that those two things have to be diametrically opposed at all. I've been grieving also for my father and my grandmother, who I lost in the past two years, and I feel angry and in my grief all the time, you know. But I don't mean to flatten it. I'm just trying to pull out the threads, I guess.

But we live in a grief-phobic world, where grief is equated with being self-indulgent and, in some ways, contrary to anger in action. The idea that grief is not activism is an idea that's out there, and I'd like to really strongly challenge that and say that, in fact, a lot of the most powerful Palestinian activism is fueled by grief, even if it's not named as such. I actually think that the heart of what Palestinians have been putting into the world is grief, and that has been what has moved the world right now. Watching Palestinians grieve, mixed with anger and resistance—that moves people. That is activism, and that is not unique to Palestine. Many, many of the world's greatest social movements, like people grieving for George Floyd in the streets, like people grieving for people with AIDS in the streets in the ’80s. Grief is activism. And this idea that it is self-indulgent in some way to take the time for grief—honestly, that's capitalism. We're supposed to think that grief is self-indulgent so that we just keep moving, and buying things, and don't take time to feel that push toward numbness and that grief-phobia and emotion-phobia. But in fact, grief has always been at the core of many, many social movements, and I just want to name the unbelievable bravery of Palestinians sharing their grief in this moment and how much that has changed the world.

I think that's totally, totally right and needed. I wanted to switch tracks. There's actually two questions I want to ask. Maybe I'll start with the personal question since we're on the topic of grief. I want to ask what we lose in introducing these kinds of protest elements into our rituals. So, for me, I lost my father semi-recently. Normally, one would go to a Yizkor service to perform that service for a family member, which is an experience that I knew I wasn't going to have when I came to this Yizkor, and obviously, a lot of us are making the supposition that it's worth it, but is there something that we lose? We often have on the show Raphael Magarik, who is orthodox, leftist, anti-Zionist, who goes to a kind of traditional synagogue and says: These two worlds for me don't mix, and that's okay with me, basically. And usually, he's the kind of minority voice saying that on this podcast. But I just want to channel him a little bit in this moment. Like, do we lose anything?

I think that the question of what we lose is hard for me to answer because I already feel like we've lost so much. So for me, this is really about reclamation and about having to try. One of the things I've been feeling over these past couple years, where all the conventional wisdom about how power shifts has been thrown out the window, is we just have to try new things. We're throwing spaghetti at the wall. Like, what is possibly going to work to force Israel to end this genocide, to force world powers to bring power to bear? We just don't know what's going to work, and I find that same spirit with: What are we going to do with how we relate to Jewish tradition? We've already lost so much trust. So much of our legacy has been broken. And so, to me, it is a real earnest effort of trying to figure out: How do we stay connected? How does this tradition endure? Should this tradition even endure? Can it? These are the hard questions that we're trying to answer, and we have more to lose in not trying to do things in this uncomfortable, unpredictable, unconventional way than we do from staying the course.

I would agree with that and compare this moment to the moment after the Second Temple collapsed, of needing to create something incredibly new, in that our structures are so corrupted and so not working for this moment that we really need to have a leap of radical imagination for this moment that is as big as the leap from worshipping in the temple to studying the Talmud.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I wanted to talk about, just to close, about the practicalities of that. So, first of all, something that I heard back after I wrote my piece about new Jewish institutions was the need for new liturgy, and trying to counter the liturgy of chosenness and being sanctified among the nations. And I did hear in this Yizkor service, new liturgies, things that I had heard rarely before, but I had heard— instead of “mi-kol ha’amim,” “im kol ha’amim,”—so, as opposed to “we are chosen from all the nations,” “we are with all the nations.” That was one change that I heard, and I heard that also in the Kaddish, “v’al kol Yisrael,” that God should make peace for all of Israel and “kol yoshvei tevel,” and all of the inhabitants of the Earth. And I was just wondering about these liturgical changes and where they came from, and also how you are thinking about changed conceptions of peoplehood in this moment. I mean, of course, we are gathering in a Yizkor service, in a Yom Kippur service, to take collective responsibility—that is a part of our liturgical legacy, that we do this as a community. We do this, in a sense, in some ways as a group, maybe as a people, some would say. How are we shifting that both in this service and more broadly?

Well, as a Reconstructionist, I can say that some of these liturgical changes are older. These are some of the innovations that Mordecai Kaplan, who is the founder of Reconstructionism, and my Reconstructionist colleagues have innovated out of the belief that what we say in prayer needs to match our values.

And how old is that?

Probably like 50 to 60 years old at this point. I think a lot of that movement for integrity and liturgy was also deeply informed by the feminist and queer liberation movements of the ’70s and ’80s, and once women and queer people started to be ordained as rabbis, and helping to ensure that we were not written out of Jewish liturgy and prayer. So, I think a lot of what we are doing on the Jewish left in this moment is just what we've inherited from previous generations. I think there's very little that we're doing that is a total new direction right there. It is in its content, but it's not in its form. We continue to do what other Jews have done throughout time: Insist that our liturgy, our prayers, our rituals make sense to us with our values and the world that we live in. Even for ultra-Orthodox communities that pretend a static Jewish tradition—Judaism is dynamic and always has been, and our liturgies have continued to evolve, as have our practices. When I look back over Jewish history, I don't see a people; I see various Jewish communities across the globe in relationship to the communities where they're a part of, being dominated by them, living harmoniously with them, trying to find camaraderie inside of them, and that's the project that we're still doing. We're in a moment of rupture, we're in a moment of schism, and I think that actually is a time old Jewish tradition, as well. There's many ways for Jewish people to live and make Jewish lives, and we are taking up our responsibility as Jews to create a Jewish future that makes sense to us and feels aligned for us. I recently got to welcome my child into the Jewish people as a B’Mitzvah, and I said to them in their blessing: I can't wait to find out what we're doing wrong and what you need to figure out of what we need to do next. I think that's kind of the deepest blessing we can offer—that we all should, in every generation, continue to struggle, continue to innovate, continue to change how we pray, where we pray in service of liberation.

Well, thank you both so much for this conversation, and for leading this service, and for all of the work that you're putting into building a Judaism beyond Zionism. This has been another episode of On the Nose. If you like it, share it, leave us a review, and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. See you next time. Thanks, everyone.