The Courage to Remain Visible in this Season of Change

There is something about this time of year that makes change impossible to ignore. The light shifts, the air cools, leaves begin to turn, and the natural world seems remarkably unconcerned with holding onto what has been.

The Jewish calendar meets us in much the same place. We enter the High Holy Days examining what needs repair, what belongs to us and what we may finally need to surrender. But this year, I find myself sitting with a larger question: how do we remain open—to one another, to the wider world and to Gd—when we are also being reminded that we may not be safe?

That question became horrifyingly concrete in Belleville this Yom Kippur, only a couple of hours from my home. A man armed with a shotgun attacked outside Sons of Jacob Synagogue while the community gathered for services. Police have described it as a deliberate, hate-motivated attack against the Jewish community. An officer protecting the synagogue was critically wounded while helping prevent the attacker from entering.

Belleville feels uncomfortably familiar. It is a small Ontario community not so different from the one where I am raising my family. We are among only a handful of Jewish families here, and we have chosen to be visible. I teach Jewish education in our local school. There is a Shalom sign on our house.

When I was 15, I stood at Treblinka and made a promise to my family that I would never be invisible. It was the earnest promise of a teenager trying to make meaning of something almost impossible to comprehend. Decades later, that 15-year-old feels very far away. I understand the promise differently now because visibility no longer feels entirely symbolic. After Belleville, I notice the Shalom sign on my house differently.

I don't want antisemitism to teach me to become less Jewish. But I also cannot pretend that visibility carries no risk. Perhaps this is one of the central tensions of Jewish life right now: how do we protect ourselves without allowing fear to determine who we become?

Collective trauma naturally pulls us toward contraction. Jewish history gives us good reason for vigilance, but survival strategies can eventually shape identity. If antisemitism teaches us that we can trust only ourselves and we accept that lesson completely, then antisemitism has succeeded in shaping not only how others relate to Jews, but how Jews experience everyone else.

Perhaps tzimtzum has something to offer here. Contraction can protect sacred space, but contraction is not the end of creation. It creates the conditions for relationship.

Belleville reminds us of that too. The officers protecting the synagogue were not Jewish. They moved toward danger to protect Jews who were praying inside. The same event that gives us reason to fear the world around us also gives us reason not to reduce that world to those who hate us.

Yom Kippur asks us to surrender, but Jewish surrender has never meant passivity. We repair what human beings have broken in the human world. We protect our communities, confront hatred, build alliances and demand accountability. But we cannot personally eradicate a hatred that has travelled across centuries, nor can we continually explain our humanity until everyone agrees that we deserve safety.

At some point we reach the boundary between what belongs in our hands and what must be placed in Gd's.

And then Judaism sends us into the sukkah.

That sequence feels particularly powerful this year. We confront mortality, responsibility and uncertainty, and then enter a structure that makes no convincing promise of safety. Beneath its permeable roof, knowing perfectly well that we remain vulnerable, we are commanded to rejoice.

This is where culturally competent care matters. Healing cannot require Jewish people to convince themselves that the danger isn't real. But neither can healing mean organizing Jewish life entirely around danger. The work is learning to live between those poles: protecting ourselves without disappearing, maintaining relationships with the larger community without surrendering discernment, and refusing to allow those who hate us to determine the boundaries of Jewish life.

Perhaps this is something our traditions already understand. We repair what humans can repair. We remain awake without allowing fear to become our identity. We build relationships with those willing to stand beside us. And somewhere beyond what is ours to carry, we surrender.

The sukkah will not protect us from everything. Neither will our walls.

And still, we make room for joy.