Kol Nidre 5787 – “We the People” by Rabbi Andrew Oberstein
“We the People”
Rabbi Andrew Oberstein | Kol Nidre 5787 | September 20, 2026
Temple Israel of Boston | Riverway Project
View the video recording of this sermon
Every now and then I find myself explaining Jewish tradition to someone who has never encountered it before.
And I’ve come to realize that some of our holidays are easier to explain than others,
especially this time of year:
Rosh Hashanah?
Oh that’s our new year!
We look back at our past year and set intentions for the year to come.
Oh! And we dip apples in honey to symbolize the sweetness we hope this year will bring to our families,
our communities,
and this whole world!
Not bad,
right?
//
But Yom Kippur?
Oh! That’s our day of atonement when we confess our sins to God!
We don’t eat or drink for an entire day and our sages called it a rehearsal for our own deaths!
//
From my experience,
it just doesn’t land the same way.
To be fair,
those are obviously not the words I use to explain Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur is our annual opportunity to name,
out loud,
the ways that we,
both as individuals and also as a community,
have missed the mark this past year.
It’s our chance to start fresh,
to put any resentment and regret behind us,
and to take the first steps toward becoming better versions of ourselves.
I love Yom Kippur for the gift that it is –
the annual counter-cultural reckoning with our mortality,
our humanity,
our vulnerability,
to wrestle with our tendency to act in ways that we know are destructive and damaging,
and then to commit ourselves to the sacred work of growth and self-improvement.
But the metaphorical language of sin and punishment and God as a King on a throne judging us is so woven throughout the liturgy that it can be deeply challenging for modern liberal Jews to understand and embrace.
For so many Jews,
the idea that our tradition thinks we’re ‘doing it wrong’ is already so pervasive.
So many people tell me,
with a tone tinged with apology and resignation,
that they know they’re “bad Jews.”
Every time I hear that phrase,
my heart sinks a little bit.
Because when someone says that,
they’re really saying they’ve measured themselves using a very particular kind of scorecard:
did I keep kosher enough?
Did I show up to services enough?
Did I believe the right things in the right order with the right conviction?
And they feel like they came up short.
I know that this room is not monolithic.
Most of us here tonight may be Jewish,
but I also know there are people here tonight who are not Jewish but love someone Jewish!
And there are folks here tonight who are either on a conversion journey or considering one.
I’m so grateful for all of your presence.
I want to be clear to everyone in this room,
regardless of how you identify.
No one here tonight is a “bad Jew.”
No one streaming us on YouTube anywhere in the world is a “bad Jew.”
The scorecard that you’re using is the problem,
not any of you.
The idea that Judaism is,
first and foremost,
a religion,
a set of beliefs you either hold correctly or don’t,
is newer than most of us assume.
It’s a bargain we made when emancipation—
civic equality—
was on the table for the first time.
In 1806,
Napoleon convened an assembly of Jewish leaders and asked them to profess their loyalty to France.
They answered by calling themselves “Frenchmen professing the religion of Moses.”
Not a people,
but a religion—
a faith,
defined by a set of beliefs and practices.
Eighty years later,
American Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh made the same trade.
In 1885,
they declared:
“We consider ourselves no longer a nation,
but a religious community.”
No longer a nation.
But here’s the thing:
you don’t say
“no longer”
about something you never were.
The question hasn’t gone away.
Are Jews a religion, or something more?
My home state,
California,
is wrestling with it right now,
as a bill on Governor Newsom’s desk tries to give Jews a box to check under ethnicity;
a way to define ourselves that isn’t only ‘religion.’
The categories keep failing us,
then and now,
because the categories were never built to hold what we actually are.
Author Dara Horn writes in her new,
provocatively titled book,
“The Final Solution to the Jewish Question:
A Love Story for the Living”
that “Judaism,
of course,
has never been a ‘religion’ in the sense that most Christians and Muslims think of the term,
as a set of doctrines and practices that transcend national or tribal ties,
and one that professes as a condition of being part of a ‘faith.’”
Instead,
she explains that “Jews are a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but uncommon in the modern West:
a joinable tribal group with a shared history,
homeland,
and culture.”
“That description,”
she writes,
“is a sentence in English,
but in Hebrew,
it is one word that’s two letters long:
am,
a word best translated as ‘a people.’”
I think about my own family.
I think about my dad –
born to two Jewish parents who were themselves first-generation Americans.
I believe the last time my father attended a religious service was probably my Bar Mitzvah 26 years ago.
My dad will tell you he doesn’t believe in God at all.
Tonight on Kol Nidre,
my dad is probably at home watching tv and eating a sandwich.
And I say this not to denigrate him in any way.
I say this because this man is undoubtedly Jewish according to Jewish law.
He identifies as proudly as anyone I’ve ever met as a Jew.
And nobody in this room or in any other room could tell my dad he’s not Jewish.
We don’t have a doctrine test at the door and we never have.
What makes someone Jewish isn’t what they believe,
it’s whose story they belong to.
We call this “peoplehood.”
I’m a rabbi so,
yes,
of course,
I do believe that the religious and spiritual aspects of Judaism can bring incredible meaning to our lives.
Our 3000 year old story is full of deep wisdom and profound practices that have shaped and connected Jews across time and space.
But it’s not just creed that binds us, and you don’t have to take my word, or my dad’s for it.
Even antisemites have never once asked their victims what they believe before deciding they are Jewish enough to hate or hurt.
No Jew-hater cares whether you have separate dishes for milk and meat.
Haters have always understood us as a people,
even in the moments we tried hardest to convince ourselves and everyone else that we were simply a faith tradition,
just like everyone else.
Ask the conversos of 15th century Spain,
Jews who converted to Christianity,
sometimes generations before,
who prayed as Catholics,
raised their children as Catholics,
and were still hunted by the Inquisition as Jews.
Belief never protected them because belief was never the thing that made them Jewish in the eyes of the people trying to destroy them.
And this is the reason why our tradition has never actually treated conversion as simply signing on to a philosophy.
Ruth was a Moabite widow. She had no remaining obligation to her husband’s Jewish family.
And yet she refused to leave her mother-in-law,
Naomi.
Here’s what she said instead, and notice the order: “your people shall be my people,” and only then, “your God shall be my God.”
Peoplehood comes before theology in that biblical verse and that’s still the model.
When someone converts today,
we don’t ask you to pass a test of belief.
We welcome you into a people,
permanently,
the same way you’d welcome someone into a family by marriage.
No one can ever revoke it afterward based on how observant you turn out to be.
Once you’re in,
you’re in.
As we learn from the sages at Olive Garden,
when you’re here,
you’re family.
That’s why “bad Jew” is never the right description for anyone in this room.
You could be a struggling Jew,
a searching Jew,
an angry-at-God Jew,
a skeptical Jew.
You’d be in great company.
But peoplehood was never a status you earned through practice.
If you’re born into it,
there’s nothing you can do or not do that could change that.
And if you choose Judaism through conversion,
that’s a choice you make once and it’s never conditional again.
We are not,
first and foremost,
a religion that happens to share a history.
We are a people that happens to have produced a religion.
//
The truth is that peoplehood isn’t only a gift.
Sometimes,
it’s actually a burden.
Peoplehood means the ultra-Orthodox worshippers who’ve spat at and shoved women praying aloud at the Western Wall, tearing prayer books from their hands, are still my people.
It means the Jewish public figure who feeds every antisemitic stereotype the internet already wants to believe is still my people too.
I don’t get to keep the parts I’m proud of and hand back the rest.
That’s uncomfortable but it’s also the point.
You don’t feel implicated by a stranger,
you feel implicated by family.
//
So if none of it,
not belief,
not practice,
not observance,
is what makes you Jewish,
you might very reasonably ask why we’re here tonight at all.
Why fast?
Why confess?
Why spend a whole day reckoning with and rehearsing our own mortality?
Peoplehood tells you that you already belong,
no matter what.
There is no such thing as a “bad Jew.”
But it doesn’t claim that what you do with your life doesn’t matter.
Peoplehood settles the first question:
do I belong.
It doesn’t answer the second:
am I living like it.
That’s the question Yom Kippur has always actually been asking.
//
You’re not here tonight to earn your place in this story.
You already have one.
And nothing you do or fail to do this year could take it from you.
You’re here because this 3000 year long story deserves to be lived well.
And belonging like that deserves better than the way most of us have been living.
So tonight,
let go of that old scorecard.
Let go of “Bad Jew.”
And instead,
ask a different question:
not “did I earn my place this year?” but rather “did I live up to what belonging to this people asks of me?”
Did I treat this sacred inheritance,
the one that outlasted Pharaoh,
outlasted Rome,
outlasted the Inquisition,
outlasted every power that tried to end it,
did I treat this inheritance like something worth continuing on purpose,
or like something I happened to inherit,
by birth or by choice,
and never thought much more about?
Did I show up for my people?
Did I carry the story forward instead of letting it slip through my fingers?
Tomorrow morning’s haftarah gives us the prophet Isaiah answering a version of that question.
His people were fasting,
exactly like many of us are doing tonight and tomorrow,
and they were certain that fasting itself should count for something.
God’s answer is actually no, that it doesn’t count,
at least not on its own.
The fast that God actually wants looks like loosening the chains of injustice, sharing our bread with the hungry,
bringing the homeless poor into our home,
clothing the person who has nothing to wear.
And then,
in the same breath,
almost as an afterthought,
not hiding ourselves from our own kin.
Isaiah put those side by side on purpose.
The justice he’s demanding,
toward the hungry,
the poor,
the stranger,
isn’t separate from peoplehood.
It’s all connected.
We,
as a people,
know what it is to be enslaved,
to be exiled,
to be hunted for who we are,
because it happened to us,
over and over,
for thousands of years.
That memory is supposed to produce something inside of us.
It’s supposed to foster a sense of obligation,
a refusal to look away from suffering,
from anyone’s suffering,
because we know precisely what it looks like from the inside.
And Isaiah won’t let us stop at strangers.
Sometimes,
it’s actually easier to care about injustice somewhere out in the world than to notice the person closest to us who’s struggling.
Yes,
we’re supposed to loosen the chains of injustice out there.
But also,
don’t hide from your own kin,
the cousin you haven’t spoken to since that fight about Israel,
the friend who went quiet about being Jewish this year and you never asked why.
That’s the teshuvah I want for us this year.
We are not simply a religious group and we were never a scorecard.
We are a people,
Am Yisrael,
carrying a memory for three thousand years,
one that’s old enough to demand something of us,
on our best days and our hardest ones.
There’s no such thing as a bad Jew.
There’s only all of us, forgetting sometimes that we already belong, and that belonging asks something of us.
This year, let’s not forget either one.
G’mar Chatimah Tovah.