Along with the preceding month of Ellul, the High Holy Days are a period of introspection for Jews. The aim is to change our attitudes and behaviour so that we might become our best selves.
It’s a high bar. This is an era, however, in which such a desire to change has widely gone out of fashion. More and more people can’t see the point of needing to change themselves at all. In place of that effort has come an adherence to dogma that can’t be challenged. This involves forcing others to see things your way and, when they don’t, blaming and shaming them.
In this deeply polarised culture, it’s impossible to get such people to change their approach because they’re in the grip of ideologies that are held to represent nothing less than the redemption of the world. The striking thing is that these are secular ideas which aim to supplant biblical precepts. Yet they mimic the Christian paradigm of sin, guilt, penance and redemption.
Many on the extreme right today often profess Christian belief, sincere or not. They hold the Jews guilty of the sin of creating the liberal universalism that has driven the West off the rails, which can only be redeemed by driving the Jews out. For their own part, liberals strikingly channel Christian sin, penance and redemption into their secular belief system.
Key liberal ideologies such as multiculturalism, anti-colonialism or environmentalism suggest that white people, the West and the human race can be redeemed only if they all do penance for their sins of racism, oppression and climate change. If they refuse, they’re subjected to a secular inquisition in which they’re burned at the reputational stake.
These religious echoes show that secular culture is inescapably influenced by the West’s foundational Christianity. Even secular people seek a replacement for religion to give a meaning to their lives.
Everyone seeks such meaning. Jews derive it from taking responsibility for their own actions. Secular ideologues turn that on its head. They trumpet their own guilt for the colonial oppression of people in the developing world, even though those people themselves often colonised and oppressed each other.
The West professes such exaggerated guilt because it thinks of itself as supremely powerful, while it assumes that people in the developing world are powerless and so have no agency over what they do.
That’s not just profoundly dehumanising – by loudly championing such people over whose fate they actually have no influence whatever, liberals can virtue-signal their own moral purity while taking no responsibility for the effect of what they either do or fail to do.
By contrast, Jews take personal responsibility to such excessive lengths that they often beat themselves up unduly for what they believe they do wrong, even by excusing and sanitising the terrible wrongs that such people have done to the Jews – as so many in the diaspora and even in Israel excused the Palestinian Arabs, at least until their atrocities on October 7 2023.
In many Jews who trash Israel, the cultural self-flagellation of the secular West combines disastrously with pathological Jewish guilt-tripping. This found particularly egregious expression recently in America. Michigan’s Jewish Attorney-General Dana Nessel, who appeared to agree that her own Democratic party posed a danger to Jews, argued nevertheless that Jews had “a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival”.
Invoking Queen Esther, she suggested that Jews might be called upon to “sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people” for the sake of humanity. Grossly misrepresenting both Judaism and Esther, who risked her life to save the Jewish people, Nessel was arguing that Jewish survival was an obstacle to the perfection of the world. This wasn’t so much suicidal empathy as suicidal imbecility.
Too many diaspora Jews agree that the world must be purged of Israel’s geographical integrity, its security or its military power, at the very least.
They are quite unable to see that, through such wildly irresponsible and distorted thinking, they are helping destroy the West’s moral compass and aiding the mortal enemies of Israel and the Jewish people.
Subscribing to secular ideologies, they view personal responsibility as a burden on their freedom to live as they want. But moral agency means taking power over your own life.
True powerlessness lies in being unable to make moral choices. To take responsibility is like gaining freedom from slavery: liberating and terrifying at the same time.
Some Jews, however, have always preferred enslavement. In the Torah, they chose to remain in Egypt during the Exodus; wandering in the desert, those who had departed complained bitterly about leaving behind the fleshpots of the Nile.
Today, too many diaspora Jews are enslaved to ideologies that represent harm to Israel, Judaism and the Jewish people. They have outsourced both reason and conscience to a culture of irresponsible conformism.
Freedom comes from the courage to take responsibility for the effects of your mindset on others. Shanah tovah.
Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist
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