Baruch she’amar v’hayah ha’olam, “Blessed is the One who spoke, and the world came into being.” The prayer reminds observant Jews each morning that God spoke the world into being. It also reminds us that, alone among His creations, human beings have been given the power to shape the world through speech.
Our words give permission or impose restraint. They can uplift or humiliate. They can reinforce the truth or spread a lie.
We create the world daily with our words.
Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of creation. It begins the Ten Days of Repentance leading to Yom Kippur. Jewish tradition tells us: We will be judged for the edges of the world we have distorted or left misshapen with our words.
And those who have platforms and followings have an even greater responsibility. Because fanatical rhetoric inflames the mob.
The terrorists who flew planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11—and the Hamas-led butchers who raped, pillaged and murdered Israelis on 10/7—were all set in motion by lies. Yet words can also change the world for good. Can any American listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and not share in that dream?
At singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran’s recent MetLife Stadium concerts, rapper Macklemore tried to play it both ways. He hid a Hamas-level weaponization of Holocaust language behind dignified-sounding words, invoking the charge of genocide against Israel—“Free Palestine”—while stressing that his message was one of peace, dignity, respect and equality. But words don’t become harmless merely because their speaker announces benign intentions.
Whatever his intention, the poisonous accusation went beyond criticism of Israeli government policy.
What kind of world is created when a stadium of concert-goers are told that the Jewish state is the world’s villain—while omitting the Oct. 7 massacre, the hostages murdered in captivity and the vulnerability of a small country surrounded by enemies who have repeatedly declared their wish to destroy it?
What kind of world is created when a man with tens of millions of followers shouts “Free Palestine” without reckoning with the Palestinian choices made with said freedom after Israel withdrew every soldier and settlement from Gaza in 2005?
How large is the lie of omission when the salient reminder is not shared that Hamas won an election with its charter of hatred, seized Gaza after killing their political opponents, rejected the Quartet’s terms for peace and engagement, and built rockets and terror tunnels rather than a future for the people it ruled?
Words don’t become harmless merely because their speaker announces benign intentions.
Our challenge is how to respond to this battlefield we live in, where ignorant words fly past us like bullets, where the steady mortar shelling of images meant to stir hatred against Israel leaves our nervous systems on fire—or worse, unable to summon a response.
How do we deal with a world in which many of our friends, both non-Jewish and Jewish, believe the lie that Israel is guilty for having fought a war to defend itself?
This year, I lost a friend—not to death, but to the kind of political disagreement that changes the air between people. He says he wants to remain friends. Yet every email intended to renew the connection finds its way back to a collective indictment of Israelis for the conflict around them.
I know I am a flawed person. I regret the sharpness of my own words. I re-examine my choices and whether anger led me to say more than was useful. I know I have cut someone out of my life who had enriched it. But I cannot pretend that his ignorance is harmless or that I must accept it as the price of friendship. Ignorance, repeated and moralized, is fuel for the fire that burns against us.
If I’m not going to feel anger when somebody tells me that the Jewish residents of Israel “had it coming” for the violence unendingly unleashed against them for over a hundred years, what, then, should I feel anger about?
This holiday season, we should repent for every word that has hurt another person. We should mourn the innocent dead and contemplate how to save broken relationships. We should keep asking difficult questions of ourselves, our leaders and our community. And in this modern era of information warfare, we should pray to find a way to use our words with the caution and respect with which we would handle a weapon.
But, God forbid, we should accept false charges to make our accusers comfortable or apologize for refusing to disappear. Repentance requires us to examine our own language. It does not require us to accept someone else’s lies.
We may offend some people by insisting that Jewish lives matter; that Oct. 7 matters; that facts and history matter; that the Jewish people are entitled to safety, dignity, and self-determination; and that our existence as equals is not a sin for which we must apologize.
Those words, too, make a world. And for those words, and the world they bring into being—let us remain unrepentant.
