With the self-examination and repentance of the High Holy Days coming up fast, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin wrote a column for Religion News Service that touched me deeply. Using a Yiddish expression that’s too nuanced to translate easily, he suggests the hard-right settlers in Israel’s government bring shame on the Jewish people.
In Yiddish the expression is a shanda fur die goyim, and it’s commonly translated as “a disgrace before the nations,” or gentiles. This goy, who has read enough of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish authors like Saul Bellow and Chaim Potok to sympathaze, couldn’t agree more.
Salkin says, at least in his family, it was partly a reaction to antisemitism. He explains:
[…] For generations, the idea and living reality of “shanda” served as fuel in our personal and communal Jewish engines. If something was a “shanda fur die goyim,” it meant whatever it was would bring shame, disrepute or embarrassment to the Jews, and it was something we should not let the gentiles see.
But there’s more to it than that. An explainer on the Chabad.org website recalls the covenant between God and the Jewish people:
Jews have long recognized that they are constantly scrutinized by those around them, often being held to a higher standard, as would be appropriate for the people chosen by G‑d to be a “light for the nations,” representing Him and His will in the world. Transgressing the Torah or acting shamefully is bad enough, but to do so in public is a double shanda.
Salkin brings in a related Yiddish term — es past nisht, meaning “it is not fitting,” He’s really unhappy with Israel’s current government, especially Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and he thinks shanda is too mild a term for what they’re doing, He explains:
Smotrich has called for the erasure of Palestinian villages. Ben-Gvir has openly encouraged settler violence in the West Bank and the creation of settler militias. Promoting Jewish ethnic hegemony, fanning the flames of violence in the West Bank, seeking to dismantle judicial checks and balances, and openly disparaging the Palestinians as a people, all of this is a collective shanda. Their actions damage the reputation not only of Israel, and not only of Jews, but of Judaism itself.
For that reason, perhaps the word shanda is not strong enough. Perhaps it is better to say “past nischt” — “that is not fitting” or “it is not becoming.” Our grandparents used the phrase to describe behavior unworthy of Jews, conduct beneath the dignity of a people in covenant with God. [Link in the original.]
Salkin’s explanation deserves quotation at length:
The policies and rhetoric of today’s Israeli right-wing leaders, most notably Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, strike so many of us as profoundly past nischt because Judaism teaches that all humans are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the divine image. And, because the Torah tells us — supposedly 36 times — not to oppress the stranger, as we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Our own history of exile and oppression should have engraved upon us an eternal empathy for the vulnerable.
Their actions are past nischt because every act of cruelty done in the name of Jewish destiny diminishes not only Israel’s reputation, but the credibility of Judaism itself. Their fantasies and policies darken the covenantal vision of Israel as “a light unto the nations.” To tolerate such leadership without protest is to forget who we are meant to be.
The Hebrew moral equivalent of past nischt? We say Hillul ha-shem — a desecration of God’s name. It is telling that the only power that we have over God is over God’s reputation in the world. We must use that power wisely.
So what is a symathetic, but somewhat clueless, goyishe observer to make of this?
In a word, I’m conflicted. It’s complicated.
First of all, I don’t pretend to be an expert on Middle Eastern geopolitics, but I’ve visited Israel and the occupied territories. I liked what I saw of Israel as we toured the Christian shrines in Galilee and Jerusalem — it reminded me of Arizona — but I got disturbing whiffs of Jim Crow in Bethlehem and the occupied West Bank.
Our tour group was Lutheran (from Rock Island, Illinois), so we were hosted for the most part by Arabic-speaking Palestinian Christians. But we also visited the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, and someone from the Quad-City Jewish Federation got us a briefing from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has the portfolio for minority religions. We also met Jewish peace activists in Jerusalem and visited a settlement on land confiscated from Palestinian villages near Bethlehem. It reminded me of a gated community in Phoenix.
All things considered, I felt like we were getting a balanced viewpoint. Or viewpoints. I came away from it with an intense sympathy for the people I met, on all sides of the conflict, who were formed by parallel tragedies of the Shoah, or Holocaust, and the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing experienced by so many Palestinian Arabs.
I came away from it feeling something else, too. While we were in Israel, a flareup known to history as the 2012 Gaza War broke out. Dahlia Lithwick, a US Supreme Court watcher whose work I follow, was in Jerusalem that year to work on a book. In a column for Slate. She said:
One good lesson I am learning this week is to shut up and listen. Because the only way to cut through the mutual agony here is to find people who have solutions and to hear what they have to say. Bombing the other side into oblivion is no more a solution than counting your dead children in public. The best thing about shutting up and listening? You eventually lose the impulse to speak.
Please don’t judge. Work toward solutions. Because everyone on every side of this is desperate. This isn’t a way to live and we all know it. [Link iun the original.]
We flew out of Tel Aviv the same night a Hamas rocket exploded (harmlessly) near Ben Gurion airport. Lithwick’s column, which came out a few days later, has stayed with me over the years. Shut up and listen. Look for people who have solutions, and listen to them. But there’s more it than that. It goes still deeper.
I’m not Jewish, but Salkin’s explanation of shanda fur die goyim hits me where I live. I’m a member of a Christian church, descended from three generations of Norwegian pastors and church musicians, but I shy away from using the word “Christian” about myself; I prefer to call myself a spiritual mutt. If I may borrow another faith tradition’s language, the intolerance and bigotry of some prominent self-proclaimed Christians is a shanda.
Not to mention 2,000 years of antisemitism, aided and abetted by the guy who founded my own Lutheran denomination 500 years ago. I can accept Luther as a mixed bag, both saint and sinner, and I try to work it out by doing what I can to atone for Luther’s sins.
But I do not want to be associated with the white Christian nationalists in today’s headlines. So I call myself a spiritual mutt.
There’s one more thing, too. When I went off to college, I left the church. My own formation (growing up in an Episcopal parish) was OK, if somewhat distant from my daily life. But I was in full-scale adolescent rebellion against the popular bible-thumping, intolerant popular religion of the day.
Then in grad school in the 1960s and 70s, I majored in English lit and discovered the Jewish novelists of the day. And in writers like Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, I rediscovered the ethical foundations of my faith tradition without the miracle stories and what struck me as Byzantine hair-splitting about the nature of Christ I’d recited on Sunday mornings. Yes, I rebelled against that stuff too.
As a tweed-jacketed English major, I was especially drawn to My Name is Asher Lev and other coming-of-age novels by Chaim Potok, whose young characters wrestled with their Hasidic heritage. (It didn’t hurt that Asher Lev is set in Brooklyn and my grandfather preached the Norwegian-language services at a church in Brooklyn.) I wish I could say these literary influences nudged me back to my own spiritual heritage, but that took another 30 or 40 years. In the meantime, I’ve read through all of Potok’s backlist
So I’ll be the first to admit there’s something superficial and English major-y about my understanding of Judaism. But I know enough to recognize where Jeffrey Salkin is coming from when he cites the Hebrew Bible, speaking of God’s commandment to welcome the stranger and to realize everyone — every last one of us — is created in the image of God. That’s good Christian theology, too.
I’ve always liked something Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, says in another book, a mass market introduction to Judaism simply titled To Life! He suggested “the religion of Jesus (love your neighbor, turn the other cheek, prepare for the End of Days)” rather quickly became a “religion about Jesus (he was the Son of God who died to absolve us of our sins).” Kushner explains:
The key figure in this shift was a Jew named Paul, known in Christian tradition as Saint Paul, author of many of the books of the New Testament. […] He brilliantly combined the strenuous moral teachings of the Jewish tradition with familiar elements of pagan religion that had not been part of Jesus’ original message — the leader, forn of a divine father and human mother, who dies and comes back to life.
The combination, adds Kushner, has taken the moral rigor of Judaism worldwide. I’m only an armchair theologian, and an English major-y one at that, but that’s about the way I see it too.
Salkin and I probably wouldm’t agree on all points. The people with solutions that most appeal to me tend to be Palestinian Christians and Jewish peace activists, and Salkin is a committed Zionist. (He offered an eloquent defense of liberal Zionism in March.) But when he grounds his criticism of Israel’s current administration in the law and the prophets, he’s preaching to my choir too.
I think maybe we can all agree the world is in an unholy mess at the moment. But maybe our faith traditions can point a way out. At least a better way of thinking about it all.
In another recent column, Salkin reviews a book by Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for Barak and Michelle Obama, titled As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us. I don’t want to claim any kind of false equivalence. My people, Norwegians, have been the butt of countless Ole and Lena jokes, but nothing as evil and malignant as the Shoah. Never, throughout history. That said, Hurwitz’ title, and Salkin’s discussion of her book, ring a bell with me. I can identify because I don’t like to talk about religion either, except in carefully curated, or selective, terms and settings. Salkin says Hurwitz’ life story suggests that may be a mistake:
“As a Jew” is her attempt to strip away those layers and reclaim Jewish life on Jewish terms. And it’s not merely Sarah’s journey — it’s ours as well. We often truncate and attempt to validate our Jewish identity with “ahems,” like saying, “I’m a cultural Jew.” That usually means, “I don’t do anything Jewish, but I like the food and I laugh at ‘Seinfeld.’”
But a real cultural Judaism is rich and deep and involves Jewish books, theater, magazines, music, movies, art and, yes, food. If we reduce 2,000 years of Jewish wisdom to sitcom humor and universal platitudes, we disrespect our own tradition. And we do that in ways that we would never do to another people.
So, what’s the answer? For Sarah, Judaism’s strength lies precisely in the fact that it is a counterculture. At a time when modern life prizes hyperindividualism and disposability, Jewish ethics insists on exquisite sensitivity to every human being.
Does any of this sound familiar? It does to me.
I never watched Seinfeld. I was in the middle of a career change, and I was teaching night classes during most of the time it was on the air. But I’m certainly alive to the idea we’re all created in the image of God, and we ought to act like it! And to the idea that religion works best when it’s countercultural.
In the 1960s and 70s when I was reading Chaim Potok and wrestling with my own religious heritage, I was loosely a part of an ecumenical ministry in an inner-city neighborhood just off the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville. It was nothing if not countercultural, but it also got down to basics. Love thy neighbor. Don’t pollute his water with the runoff from strip mines. Stop the war. It all fit together, and it was a far cry from the big churches downtown.
Today we’re faced with different challenges. (Well, some if them are different.) Israel is at war again in Gaza, in what is beginning to look like an existential war of extermination, and the current government faces credible charges of war crimes and genocide in international tribunals. In America, antisemitism — both real and wild, politically motivated accusations — is on the upswing, while an authoritarian presidential administration is raising legitimate fears of autocracy and fascism.
If ever there was a time for reflection and self-examination, now is surely that time. For Salkin’s Jewish readers, the High Holy Days, or “Days of Awe,” present an opportunity. Beginning with Rosh Hashana (Sept. 22 this year), observant Jews repent and ask forgiveness from those they have wronged; the holy days culminate in Yom Kippur (Oct. 1 and 2), the Day of Atonement. Says Salkin, “As the Days of Awe approach, read this book. Internalize it.” But it’s not just about Hurwitz’ book.
And it’s not just for Jews, but for anyone who has had to put their identity on the back burner — who has had to hide, dissemble, deny, edit or curate the essential pieces of themselves. Don’t do that anymore. It is time to come home.
In the Christian traditions, we have something like the Days of Awe with the sacraments of confession and reconciliation, as well as the seasons of Advent and Lent. But I like it that the Jewish new year begins with this cycle of repentance, forgiveness and atonement; and that it begins with each of us. I can’t stop the war in Gaza, and there’s not much I can do to stop Trump. But I can take a look at myself, remember that we’re all of us made in the image of God, and try to act accordingly.
ILinks and Citations
Harold Kushner, To Life!: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking (Boston: Little Brown, 1993): 286.
Dahlia Lithwick, “I Didn’t Come Back to Jerusalem To Be in a War,” Slate.com, Nov. 18, 2012 https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/11/israel-gaza-fighting-whats-its-like-to-be-in-jerusalem-as-the-conflict-escalates.html
Jeffrey Salkin, “‘Are you a Zionist?’: P;ease Do Not Curate Our Jewish Identity for Us,” Religion News Service, March 13, 2025 https://religionnews.com/2025/03/13/zionism-zionist-israel/.
__________, “The book every Jew should read before the High Holy Days,” Religion News Service, Sept. 10, 2025 https://religionnews.com/2025/09/10/the-book-every-jew-should-read-before-the-high-holy-days/
__________, “Yiddish offers a moral vocabulary for our times,” Religion News Service, Sept. 16, 2025 https://religionnews.com/2025/09/16/high-holy-days-smotrich-ben-gvir-israel-yiddish/
“What Does ‘Shanda’ Mean” Chabad.org https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4045341/jewish/What-Does-Shanda-Mean.htm
[Uplinked Sept. 20, 2025]
Ordinary Time 