Fighting for Ourselves Without Losing Ourselves©

Yom Kippur 2026/5787

Rabbi David Baum - Congregation Shaarei Kodesh

Who are you remembering today? Today, I want to tell you who I am remembering along with my mother and grandparents: my great-Uncle Andrew and my great-grandmother, Rosalie Baum, whom I never knew.

My great-uncle grew up in a small city in Czechoslovakia called Komárno, in the 1930s. Jewish boys who wore a Star of David had a hard time in the street. Boys would jump him two or three at a time because of the antisemitic lessons they learned at home. He fought back every time for one reason: his mother taught him to. 

He’d come home with a bleeding nose or a black eye. His mother, Rosalie, never once told him to be careful, to keep his head down, or to blend in. She told him: "It doesn't matter what happens to you. You fight. You fight for yourself." None of her children ever backed down from antisemitism; they fought back with their fists, and when they couldn’t fight with their fists, they fought with their will to survive. 

On Rosh Hashanah, I taught Hillel’s lesson: “Im ein ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” My great-grandmother knew the answer in her kishkas: no one. You fight for yourself, because if you don't, no one else will.

I spoke about what it means for us today, as Jewish-Americans. How we must take responsibility for ourselves and for one another as Jews. And I stand by every word of it. 

Recently, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish, told a gathering of Jewish Democrats, “We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.” She invoked Queen Esther and suggested that Jews may need to sacrifice our own safety, security, and future to save the rest of humanity.

I believe she got Esther’s story exactly backward. Esther risked her own life to save the Jewish people. She did not ask the Jewish people to sacrifice themselves for everyone else.

Our tradition does not demand that we choose between Jewish survival and responsibility for the world. It demands that we hold both.

We are living through difficult times as Jews, and our history has taught us not to dismiss antisemitism or assume that it will simply disappear. We must fight back, but we cannot always fight with our fists; sometimes, we have to fight with our hearts. 

I want to tell you a story of an unbelievably strong woman you may never have heard of, but who is a heroine in Israel: Rachel Edri. 

On the sheets in front of you, you see another piece of graffiti from Tel Aviv. 

Look at how the artist chose to portray her. Rachel Edri, an Israeli grandmother from Ofakim, is depicted as Rosie the Riveter, one of the most iconic images in American history. On Rosh Hashanah, I showed you Superman, an American character created by Jews and later used on the streets of Tel Aviv as a symbol of Israeli strength.

Even with her own life in danger, she defended herself without needing to deny the humanity of the people in front of her. On the morning of October 7th, terrorists entered Rachel and David Edri's home in Ofakim and held them hostage for twenty hours. Rachel knew exactly who was standing in her living room. She had seen the weapons and knew these men had not come for a friendly visit.

And she wanted to live. She couldn’t fight with her fists, so she fought with her heart. 

So she told herself, “I have guests.” She made coffee, cooked for them, and served them cookies. She knew that if they got hungry, they'd get angry, and angry men with weapons were more dangerous than calm ones. One of the terrorists was hurt, so she bandaged him and sat with him. She even told one of them to rest because he looked tired. She also managed to signal to the Israeli security forces outside that there were five terrorists in the house.

Rachel was not naïve. She never mistook terrorists for friends. She did not choose hospitality instead of resistance. She turned hospitality into resistance. She fought with coffee, cookies, bandages, and conversation. Each gesture bought another minute of life, then another, until the security forces could storm the house, kill the terrorists, and rescue Rachel and David.

Rachel understood that they were human beings who could become hungry, tired, agitated, and calmer after eating, and she used that understanding to save herself and her husband. Recognizing their humanity did not mean excusing their evil. It meant refusing to let their evil rob her of her judgment, her courage, or her will to live.

My great-grandmother taught her son: you fight for yourself. Rachel Edri showed us, decades later, that there is more than one way to fight. She fought with patience until others could fight with weapons. She fought with courage, intelligence, extraordinary restraint, and heart.

Self-defense, self-respect, and refusing to hide who we are are not optional. They are the beginning of the whole story, but only the beginning.

Because Hillel goes on to teach: Uchshe'ani l'atzmi, mah ani? If I am only for myself, what am I?

I think about Hillel's teaching through a framework I call Circles of Obligation. Imagine yourself standing in the middle of a series of circles. The first circle is the self, followed by our family, our community, the Jewish people, and finally the larger world.

These circles are not all equal, and our tradition does not ask us to pretend we have the same obligation to every person in the world as we do to our own children, families, or our people, because we don't. We have particular obligations to those closest to us, but the problem comes when we decide that because one circle is closer, the other circles no longer matter. Maybe that is what Hillel is warning us about. 

The problem isn't that you stand at the center of your circles of obligation. You have to. The problem is when you begin to believe that the circle ends with you.

I want to share a story I’ve never shared before. In rabbinical school, one of my classmates asked me to join him on a trip to the state’s capitol in Albany to lobby for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. I got on the bus, and sitting next to me on that over three-hour drive was a woman from Haiti. I could see on her face that she didn’t really want to be sitting next to a kid in his 20’s who she thought she’d have nothing in common with. The beauty of that time was that none of us had smartphones, and I forgot a book, and it turned out she did, too.

After an hour, we started talking, and she shared her story. She came to this country because things were really bad back home. Her family depended on her to send money home. This woman, a mother, a wife, worked day and night to provide for a family she could not visit. 

When she told me her story, I shared my own. My grandmother, of blessed memory, came to this country with my father, who was just six years old at the time, in the early 1950’s. My grandfather could not join them because he wasn’t part of the visa they received, so it was just my grandmother and my father.

My grandmother was a proud woman; she hid as a Christian during the Holocaust and managed a hotel. After the war ended, they were stateless refugees with nowhere to go, and they dreamed of coming to America.

My grandmother spent two years working as a housemaid, living in a basement with my father. They slept together on the cold concrete floor on a down blanket, with no one to care for them but themselves. 

Suddenly, this woman’s story became familiar, because it was also our story. That’s why I helped her fight for her rights: because I would have wanted someone to fight for my grandmother and my father.

That is the tension Hillel asks us to inhabit. We begin with our own story, but we cannot end there. And there may be no better day to sit in that tension than Yom Kippur.

In the haftarah we read this morning, the prophet Isaiah describes people who are frustrated with God. They have fasted and afflicted themselves. They have done everything they thought they were supposed to do, and they ask God, why haven't You noticed us?

And God answers them with a question: Is this really the fast that I desire?

Isaiah doesn't hold back. Not this, God says: not bowed heads and sackcloth and an empty stomach. This is the fast I desire: to unlock the chains of injustice, to let the oppressed go free. To share your bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless into your home, to clothe the naked when you see them.

Isaiah is reminding us that not eating is not the ultimate purpose of Yom Kippur. If I spend this entire day focused on my hunger, my sins, my repentance, my life, and my death, and I never let this day change the way I see another person, then perhaps I have missed something essential about Yom Kippur.

Isaiah tells us what God wants from us: to see others suffering among us. 

Think about how radical that is on Yom Kippur. Today is probably the most inward-looking day of the Jewish year. We think about the mistakes we've made and the people we've hurt. We think about the loved ones we’ve lost. 

Isaiah says all of that matters, but then he forces us to look outward.

You are hungry today, but remember that people will be hungry tomorrow too.

You feel vulnerable today, but remember that some people live with vulnerability every day.

You want God to see you, so perhaps Yom Kippur also asks us: whom have I failed to see?

Our Rabbis teach: Mefarnesim aniyei goyim im aniyei Yisrael- מְפַרְנְסִים עֲנִיֵּי גוֹיִם עִם עֲנִיֵּי יִשְׂרָאֵל. We support the non-Jewish poor with the Jewish poor. The Talmud adds: We visit the non-Jewish sick along with the Jewish sick, and we bury the non-Jewish dead along with the Jewish dead, mipnei darkhei shalom, because of the ways of peace.

One word in that teaching stands out to me: im, with.

The Rabbis did not say that we stop taking care of the Jewish poor so we can take care of someone else. They did not say that caring for humanity means pretending that we don't have special obligations to our own people. But they also did not say that we can wait until every Jewish problem has been solved before we begin caring about anyone outside our community.

They said: with.

The Jewish poor with the non-Jewish poor. Our sick with their sick, and our dead with their dead. Perhaps that one little word, Im/with, contains both halves of Hillel's teaching.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? 

I have obligations to myself, to my family, to my community, and to the Jewish people. 

But if I am only for myself, what am I? If the boundaries of my compassion never extend beyond the boundaries of my own community, then what has Judaism actually taught me?

That is especially difficult for us right now because I understand the instinct to turn inward. After October 7, many of us discovered painful things about friends, institutions, and communities we thought would stand beside us. 

We learned that we have to protect ourselves and stand up for Israel in a world where too many people see the country as not only irredeemable, but as having no right to exist. We have to defend Jewish students, strengthen Jewish institutions, and make sure that our children know that they never have to apologize for who they are.

But if the only lesson we take from all of this is that no one will ever care about us, and therefore we should care only about ourselves, then I worry that we will have allowed antisemitism to define what kind of Jews we become.

And I don't want to give our enemies that kind of power.

Maybe that is what Hillel was trying to teach us all along: fighting for ourselves does not require us to lose sight of everyone else. For us as American Jews, that raises another question: Do we still believe in the American Dream that brought so many of our families here?

My grandmother did not come to America because America was perfect. She came because she believed that her son's life could become something different from hers. She could work as a housemaid, sleep beside him on a basement floor, and still believe that one generation later, everything could change; and it did. Our family is proof of the American dream. As my father likes to say whenever one of us accomplishes something, often with tears in his eyes: not bad for penniless immigrants. 

That is why the woman from Haiti mattered to me. Her story did not take me away from my own. My Jewish story taught me how to see hers.

I worry that after generations of fighting to become insiders in America, we might forget what it felt like to stand outside. We can disagree about immigration policy, borders, and laws. But before the political question comes a Jewish question: do I still see the person?

I think back to the many funerals I officiate at as a rabbi. I always ask families whom they want me to mention when I offer condolences and speak about their loved one. Of course they mention children, grandchildren, siblings, and friends, but very often they also ask me to mention the aide who cared for their loved one during the most vulnerable years of their life. These aides come from many different countries, often Haiti, Jamaica or the Dominican Republic, and over time many become almost part of the family.

We cannot repay the generations who came before us for what they endured. But perhaps we honor them by refusing to allow our suffering to make us indifferent to someone else's suffering.

And in a few moments, as we enter Yizkor and remember the people whose lives made ours possible, perhaps that is one of the questions their memories ask of us.

Im ein ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me? We have to fight for ourselves.

Uchshe'ani l'atzmi, mah ani? If I am only for myself, what am I?

Our ancestors fought so that we could have a future.

Yom Kippur asks us what kind of future we will create because of them.

V’im lo achshav, eimatai?

And if not now, when?