We have sinned: After four years of Netanyahu, the 10 Commandments have a path to teshuva - opinion

Every Yom Kippur, we confess even to sins we may never have personally committed because Judaism understands moral responsibility as larger than the individual. We bear responsibility for our community, for what is done in its name. And that idea feels urgent in Israel at this time.

We have created other gods: nation, power, ideology, and political leaders. Parts of the Israeli Right have turned nationalism from love of country into an object of faith. Loyalty to Israel has too often been confused with loyalty to a government, a political camp, or even a particular man.

Ultranationalism has acquired its own articles of faith, while territory has assumed an almost religious sanctity. The Land of Israel may be holy; it is not God.

We have attached God’s name to political ambitions and treated them as though they came from beyond politics. Biblical promises are invoked to sanctify policies devised by human beings, transforming disagreements over settlements and sovereignty into questions of faith.

Once a political objective becomes a divine command, compromise becomes apostasy. Taking God’s name in vain surely includes claiming divine endorsement for choices entirely our own.

Shabbat is one of Judaism’s most beautiful ideas, a sanctuary in time that interrupts work and commerce. Israeli religious politics has transformed that gift into arguments about buses, shops, and what citizens may do between Friday evening and Saturday night, which for many is their only time off.

Rabbinic interpretation deserves respect, but in its zeal to protect the Sabbath, the religious establishment has obscured its simplest instruction: keep it holy. There is nothing in the commandment about electrons or forcing people to walk up stairs or suffer without transport to the beach.

A society honors its parents through the dignity it affords them in old age. Israel is home to a dwindling generation of Holocaust survivors and the men and women who built the state, yet many spend their final years struggling with poverty, loneliness, and inadequate care.

We are adept at memorializing the Jewish past while proving outrageously ungenerous toward elderly Jews still among us. Honor requires food, housing, companionship, medical care, and dignity. Words are cheap, and we have been cheapening this commandment.

The commandment also reaches the West Bank, where Jewish extremists have attacked Palestinian civilians. Our deepest sin may be the numbness that allows another death to become a statistic.

Adultery is a betrayal of covenant, and Israel has been unfaithful to the covenant made at its birth. The Declaration of Independence envisioned a Jewish state founded upon freedom, justice, and peace, guaranteeing equality irrespective of religion, race, or sex.

Attacks on institutions, efforts to weaken checks on governmental power, and the treatment of Arab citizens as conditional members of the national community have strained that compact. Israel’s civic covenant, like any covenant, requires fidelity.

Across the West Bank, Palestinian land has been appropriated through unauthorized outposts, intimidation, and settlement expansion, while ideological settlers have behaved as though biblical attachment confers ownership. The territorial dispute is complicated; the moral principle is simpler. Another person’s property remains his.

Theft also includes public money distributed according to coalition leverage rather than public need. Sinai required only three words: do not steal. In Israel, it seems we will need many words to convince citizens to fix this on October 27.

Israeli politics has become saturated with false witness against fellow Israelis. Leftists become traitors, rightists become fascists, protesters become enemies of the state, government supporters become enemies of democracy, and hostage families are assigned sinister motives.

We increasingly choose facts according to political allegiance and treat disagreement as disloyalty. Democracy requires fierce argument while society requires us to recognize those with whom we argue as neighbors. We have allowed the language of treason to consume the language of disagreement.

Israeli politics has increasingly entertained fantasies of a Gaza emptied of Palestinians, of mass “voluntary” emigration, and of a territorial problem solved through their disappearance.

Palestinians possess homes, fields, memories, attachments, aspirations, and a sense of peoplehood. Their attachment to this land can coexist with ours. Our tragedy has been the growing conviction on both sides that one people’s attachment invalidates the other’s.

Israel needs such a return: to a Judaism capable of cherishing the Land of Israel without worshiping it, observing Shabbat, each in their way, without coercion, defending Jewish life while grieving innocent non-Jewish life, and arguing passionately without turning fellow citizens into enemies.

A few verses later it goes further: “The stranger who resides with you shall be as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” Recognizing humanity beyond tribe is neither weakness nor a foreign ideal. It comes from the heart of the tradition whose name we invoke.

There is a Jewish state strong enough to defend itself and humane enough to grieve innocent life, a Jewish tradition secure enough to inspire without coercing, and a democracy mature enough to contain profound disagreement. The country we have become need not determine the country we choose to be.

So what will we do differently?

At the Neila service, as the long day draws toward its end, religious Jews imagine the gates beginning to close. This year Israel should hear both a warning and an invitation. The gates are still open.