t’s the beginning of the annual season of repentance, and once again rabbis around the world are searching for ways to make the old themes new again — often to teach the Jewish holidays’ age-old message of atonement through current-day examples.
This Rosh Hashanah, those examples are hard to find.
“I looked and looked,” said Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt, of Northwest Washington’s Adas Israel. “In almost every one of my sermons, I’m actually using examples of, basically, ways public leaders have gone astray. I was trying to be more positive, to think of someone I feel really exemplifies what atonement really looks like.”
It’s a common dilemma.
“It’s really hard. It’s really difficult to come up with examples of public figures who have done what we would call full teshuva,” said Rabbi Shira Stutman, using the Hebrew word for the process of making good on atonement. “To have political leaders in this day and age, leaders of all sorts, who are so proud of being unrepentant in any way, shape or form only adds to the problem.”
