A Vidui for the Children of Gaza

This Yom KippurThe holiest day of the Jewish year and the culmination of a season of self-reflection. Jews fast, abstain from other worldly pleasures, and gather in prayers that last throughout the day. Following Ne'ilah, the final prayers, during which Jews envision the Gates of Repentance closing, the shofar is sounded in one long blast to conclude the holy day. It is customary to begin building one's sukkah as soon as the day ends., I found that the standard viduiLit. Confession. A litany of one's sins that is traditionally recited on Yom Kippur, prior to one’s wedding, and on one's deathbed. was not enough. Something was missing. There was something else I felt compelled to say, a confession I needed to give voice to. I didn’t have the words then, but I do now.

In the first year of war between Hamas and IsraelLit. ''the one who struggles with God.'' Israel means many things. It is first used with reference to Jacob, whose name is changed to Israel (Genesis 32:29), the one who struggles with God. Jacob's children, the Jewish people, become B'nai Israel, the children of Israel. The name also refers to the land of Israel and the State of Israel., more than 10,000 children were killed in Gaza. There is no reason or rationale — not the origins of this war, not the nature of war — that we should allow ourselves to feel anything less than abject anguish at that figure. Sympathy is not a finite resource, nor is heartbreak.

Among the many innocent victims of the violence on both sides, it is the children who are the most pure, born into a conflict many decades older than they were permitted to live. The TalmudThe rabbinic compendium of lore and legend composed between 200 and 500 CE. Study of the Talmud is the focus of rabbinic scholarship. The Talmud has two versions, the main Babylonian version (Bavli) and the smaller Jerusalem version (Yerushalmi). It is written in Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic. Yerushalmi, the Talmud that developed in the Land of Israel, teaches that to destroy a life — any life, not just a Jewish life — is to destroy an entire world. We may not be personally guilty of the cataclysmic destruction of so many worlds, but as Rabbi AbrahamAbraham is the first patriarch and the father of the Jewish people. He is the husband of Sarah and the father of Isaac and Ishmael. God's covenant - that we will be a great people and inherit the land of Israel - begins with Abraham and is marked by his circumcision, the first in Jewish history. His Hebrew name is Avraham. Joshua Heschel said, “all are responsible.”

Today, on Yom Kippur, we can take responsibility by reciting this acrostic (a poetic means of hinting at a whole) according to the Arabic alphabet. As the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha reminds us, it is not enough to think of the victims as numbers. Each had a name, even if only for a day, even if only for a few hours.

Ibrahim Muhammad Hassan Al-Sabakhi, Badr al-Din Badr Muhammad al-Amrain, Tala Samir Salama Saad, Thaer Shadi Fawaz Tabji*, Jamil Nijm Jamil Nijm, Hazem Muhammed Ali Salem, Khaled Jabr, Dalia Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, Zikra Hamoudeh Muhrez Al-Nammam, Rama Ashraf Tayseer Al-Herbawi, Zeina Ziad Adel Nashbat, Siwar Almadhoun, Sham Muhammad Montaser Shaaban Halasa, Saba Muhammad Imad Shalaq, Dhiya Saeed Anan Tanbura, Talal Mohammed Ahmed Al Rashidi, Dhafer Ayoub Dhafer Al-Halou, Omar Almadhoun, Ghina Alkrunz, Fatima Ramzi Subhi Al-Ajl Qais Raed Rafiq Dweikat, Carmel Hamid Khaled Al-Bayaa, Layan al-Shaer, Momen Muhammed Ahmed al-Nairab, Nour Islam Khader Musa, Hala Rushdi Nasser Al-Ghazali, Waseem Ahmed Mohammed Al-Nabih, Yahya Awad Hamdan Farhat.

* Killed in Jenin, the West Bank