From The Bimah: Jewish Lessons For Life

On Yom Kippur, October 9, 1943, in the middle of the Holocaust, Rabbi Walter Wurzburger gave a sermon at Congregation Chai Odom in Brighton, Massachusetts entitled “The Individual in the Crisis.” He argued that Jews in Greater Boston own moral responsibility for the Holocaust. On the basis of the High Priest’s avodah service, Rabbi Wurzburger offered this stark challenge:We behold a world of agony, misery, cruelty, injustice, brutality, and tyranny. We are responsible for it. It is our world. No complaints! No excuses! No defense mechanisms! No passing of the buck. (quoting the High Priest) “I and my family, we sinned, we failed, we are guilty, we are responsible.”If this be our lens, we cannot just lament and decry the pain of our world. We own the pain. We own the moral responsibility for doing something to fix it.That feels like a tall order. What can we do, here or in Israel? Maybe we should just focus on our dalet amot, the four cubits of our own existence. We cannot control what goes on in Washington or