I got nothing. After almost a year of commenting on the War on Gaza, I find that there is little left to say. The war has taken on an air of surreality for those of us who are not dying under Israeli bombs, a strange sense that this is just the way things are, like bad weather or an annoying electronic whine that you just have to live with. Ten months ago, I could imagine a ceasefire; this summer, I might have imagined that the State of Israel could be forced by international pressure to pull back.

But today, the day after Yom Kippur 5785, and the end of the Days if Awe, the ever-expanding horror in the Eastern Mediterranean just seems, like the Ukraine War, to be part of the scenery. Climate catastrophe, American totalitarianism, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East seem to grind on with the dolorous inevitability of old age and decrepitude. As a great philosopher once said, “time keeps on slipping into the future.” That’s just the way it is.

This sense of open-ended, yawning despair is sharply at odds with both the spirit and the doctrine of the Days of Awe, and as I ponder the convergence of this unhappy anniversary with the High Holy Days, I feel something very much like betrayal. Jewish time is cyclical, with each cycle of weeks, months, and years embodying creation. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan wrote that creation – an idea, and not an event – was never meant to be understood as a singular moment, but as an ongoing process that opens continually, like the petals of a flower.

Thus, when we celebrate the birthday of the universe every Shabbes, it is not some distant event of billions (or, traditionally, thousands) of years ago, but the inauguration of a continuing cycle, when we rest and create the universe anew. Our years, too, are cycles that begin, end, and begin again. Every year on Simchas Torah, we end the annual reading of the Torah with the last two chapters of Deuteronomy and begin the next cycle with the first two chapters of Genesis, Bereshit: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

And the cycle begins again for another year, speaking creation into being:

“Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. And God said: ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”

Rosh Hashana, the first day of the month of Tishrei, is the New Year of the Hebrew calendar that flips the date from 5784 last year to 5785 this year. Tradition tells that our names are “written in the book of life” on that day, but only sealed on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, ten days later. “We have, in fact, been living in the in-between,” Atalia Omer quotes activist Scout Bratt in the opening page of her book Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians, “a time when, according to our liturgy, we could actually change what was written for us on Rosh Hashanah.”

In those ten days, we are enjoined to do the true work of kippur, to repair what is broken, to make amends to those we have wronged, and to honestly atone for our transgressions. Just before the Yom Kippur fast, we say the Tefilah Zaka to meditate on our imperfections and prepare ourselves for the Day of Atonement. And the culmination of our atonement is the collective viduy (confession) that we say in the Al Cheyt prayer:

For the sin which we have committed before You under duress or willingly.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by hard-heartedness.
For the sin which we have committed before You inadvertently.
And for the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance of the lips.
For the sin which we have committed before You with immorality.
And for the sin which we have committed before You openly or secretly.
For the sin which we have committed before You with knowledge and with deceit.
And for the sin which we have committed before You through speech.
For the sin which we have committed before You by deceiving a fellowman.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by improper thoughts.
For the sin which we have committed before You by a gathering of lewdness.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by verbal [insincere] confession.
For the sin which we have committed before You by disrespect for parents and teachers.
And for the sin which we have committed before You intentionally or unintentionally.
For the sin which we have committed before You by using coercion.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by desecrating the Divine Name.
For the sin which we have committed before You by impurity of  speech.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by foolish talk.
For the sin which we have committed before You with the evil  inclination.
And for the sin which we have committed before You knowingly or unknowingly.
For all these, God of pardon, pardon us, forgive us, atone for us…

This – the work of sincere repentance and atonement – is meant to allow us to enter the new year purified and able to undertake a new cycle of creation. In the impoverished language of pop psychology, it offers us closure that allows us to move forward. The old business is done, and we can move on to new business.

Yet, it does not feel like that this year. The old business is far from done; it drags on and prevents the creation of a new, better world.

In her book, Omer writes that we must seize the opportunity of that liminal space – both temporal and spiritual – embodied in the Days of Awe. “In Bratt’s words, ‘the work of repentance and refection’ entails ‘rewriting’ our stories through a space of uncertainty rather the one of either-or certainty, the hallmark of binary thinking.” She details creative strategies to reconfigure Jewishness not only in solidarity, but in conversation and participation with Palestinians. It is a work of creation and reclamation and, like the weeks and years themselves, suffused with the hope of redemption.

But this year, at the conclusion of the Days of Awe of 5785, that hope appears no more real, solid, or attainable than the Fata Morgana dancing on the horizon. The horror goes on, and it gets worse, and no amount of working in solidarity and conversation with the Palestinian people, it seems, will bring it to an end.

Perhaps that is because our atonement remains incomplete. True kippur demands more than confession and contrition, but real, material amends. It is not for us to say when those amends are made and there is no obligation that the party we have wronged – God, a person, and entire people – accept our atonement. How could the tens of thousands, the hundred thousand, dead of Gaza, and those yet to come, and their families and loved ones even begin to accept it as the killing goes on with no end in sight?

One might object, and many of us do, that we have no part in this; that the slaughter is perpetrated by Benjamin Netanyahu, the State of Israel, its enablers, terrorists and the proverbial “bad actors.” The horrors of the war are being perpetrated by them, not us. This is clearly not a transgression that we can even atone for – it is not our own.

Indeed, it is an article of faith of the non- and anti-Zionist Diaspora Jewish left that the State of Israel is not all Jews and does not represent us. I have deployed this argument many times, and I do believe it. I would go so far as to say that the War on Gaza is the proof that the time has come for the Diaspora Jewish community to part ways with the State of Israel and to throw off the yoke of Israeli colonization.

Or we pontificate – as I admittedly do – as heroes of righteousness, taking positions on our phones and keyboards far from the shattering blast of bombs, shells, and rockets. We oppose evil and produce ourselves as agents of light. This is not our doing, and it is not our fault; we stand against the darkness unblemished in our moral perfection.

But the Days of Awe and the Al Cheyt demand that we acknowledge that we are not morally perfect and blameless. We transgress in hundreds and thousands of ways great and small, consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and inadvertently. It is the nature of humanity to be complicit in evil, and the evil in Gaza, and now Lebanon, is our responsibility, no matter who we are, where we live, and what we believe.

Whether we excuse the State of Israel or celebrate Hamas, whether we condemn the US government for its continued military support, whether we promote Islamophobic narratives that dehumanize Palestinians and Muslims here in North America or abroad, whether we parrot and amplify antisemitic libels that seem to justify the Zionist politics of fear, and whether we determine to just stay out of it and avoid discussing potentially divisive, emotionally raw issues, we are all complicit.

And that is the lesson that I take from Yom Kippur: I am not doing enough because there is not enough that I can do, as an individual, as a member of my community, and as a human being until the shooting stops and the dying ends. Until that time, the Days of Awe will go on, demanding atonement, and the Book of Life will remain unsealed.