The Shattered Vow of Never Again, The Enduring Promise of Never Forget©

Rabbi David Baum, Kol Nidre 2025/5785 

In 2005, I was serving as a rabbinic intern in Norwalk, Connecticut, a small New England town with many commuters to the city. It was a lovely town, and a lovely community. Growing up in South Florida, it felt like I was living in Pleasantville with all the white picket fences. But there was an incident that shook the community to its core. A person, who it turns out was going through a bout of mental illness, spray-painted a swastika on a little old lady’s door, who also happened to be the kiddush lady at the shul.

The community sprang into action. The Mayor of the town came to the shul with the press and proclaimed that day to be Holocaust Remembrance Day in Norwalk, Connecticut. The Mayor stood on the bimah with the rabbis and leaders, in between an Israeli and American Flag, and proudly proclaimed, “Hate has no place here!” 

As a grandson of four Holocaust survivors and a first-generation American, it was a remarkable moment. I was raised on stories of non-Jewish neighbors who were friends one day, and then enemies the next day, turning their Jewish neighbors in to the Nazis. 

In that moment, I felt that “Never Again,” the vow my grandparents carried in their bones and my parents whispered into my childhood, was actually being honored in America. Perhaps we no longer need to keep saying it?

Perhaps here, the Jewish people would find safety, and our story of survival would become an integral part of America’s story as well.

Fast-forward twenty years, three weeks ago, just after school drop-off, something happened right outside our doors at our shul in Boca Raton, Florida. A parent from a Jewish home school who rents our space during the day was standing with her special needs child’s aide, waiting to be let into the school. 

Out of nowhere, a car pulled out of the gas station. The driver rolled down his window, shouted “Baby killers, Free Palestine,” and sped off.

No one was physically harmed, but the words left their mark. A mother stood there, too afraid to look up and to see the vehicle or its license plate. 

And all of this happened outside our very synagogue, where Jewish children come each day to learn Torah.

This time, I am not waiting for a call from the Mayor.

It’s not that leaders don’t care; it’s that these incidents are happening every day, across South Florida and across America. But, before I paint a bleak picture, I want to share the following: the Jews of South Palm Beach County have been incredibly blessed since October 7th. We have been insulated from most of the worst of the antisemitism seen around the country. In our case, we are blessed to have a Sheriff’s department that supports us in incredible ways both in front and behind the scenes.

But what we experienced outside of our shul will become more and more common everywhere, because the new blood libel against the Jews, all Jews everywhere, is the lie of genocide.

In early September, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. It felt like another gut punch, but there was “consensus”. Fewer than 140 members, under 30%, even voted, but headlines claimed the world’s experts had spoken with one voice. The resolution relied on biased sources, including some with antisemitic records. Even within IAGS, the process was flawed; one of its members, Sara Brown, called it activism, not scholarship. It’s part of a larger pattern: repeat an accusation often enough, and it begins to sound like truth.

And eventually, words inspire action. When I was in Israel, on May 21, 2025, in Washington, D.C.: two Israeli Embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum after an AJC event. The shooter, Elias Rodriguez, arrested at the scene, shouted: “I did this for Gaza. Free Palestine.” Just days later, on June 1, 2025, in Boulder, Colorado, a peaceful march to raise awareness for the hostages was firebombed by an assailant yelling, “Free Palestine” and “End Zionists.” 

And these words turned to action in September in front of a humble storefront synagogue near a gas station in Boca Raton, traumatizing a family and a classroom.

When organizations falsely claim to speak with a single, unified voice while spreading distortion, we are reminded why Yom Kippur calls us to account for the power of words and the sins of speech.

For the sin committed against us through slanderous words and twisting lies into truth,

For the sin committed against us by repeating falsehood until it sounded like consensus.

For the sin committed against us by branding the victim as the criminal and turning the Star of David into a swastika.

As the grandson of four Holocaust survivors, I never thought that just eighty years after the most systematic genocide in history, the Jewish people would be accused of committing the very crime that nearly destroyed us.

And what do we do when words, meant to inform, to inspire, to move people to righteous action, are twisted into weapons? That is what tonight is about: a night to confront the power and burden of words. 

Tonight, we're canceling the vows, the sacred words, that we are planning to make this year. I know, it sounds confusing, planning to make. How can you cancel something you haven’t done yet? In short, this service, Kol Nidre, All our vows, is saying: we really don’t mean any of the vows that we know are going to make and likely break.

But here’s the danger: we can start to believe that words don’t really matter. Judaism insists otherwise. Words are not throwaway things; they are sacred, powerful, and binding. In the ancient world, when people made a vow or an oath, it wasn’t just spiritual poetry. It was currency.

Think about the dollar. It’s just paper or a digit on a screen. Its value comes from faith in the United States economy. That’s precisely how vows worked in ancient Israel: they carried weight only because people trusted that words, spoken before God, were as binding as gold.

But last year, a sacred vow was shattered. 

Since October 7th, we Jews have had to face the painful truth: the vow we repeated for eighty years, “Never Again,” has been broken.

After having been to Israel, having stood less than a mile from Gaza and seen into the embattled area, and after talking to soldiers and victims, and after having visited the killing fields of the Nova festival and the massacre at Kibbutz Nir Oz, I will say, I saw genocide, but not the genocide that the Jews are being accused of.

During my two trips to Israel since October 7th, I heard stories that never made the headlines. Stories that were unbearable to tell, but that Israelis felt compelled to share, and that we as Jews must listen to and bear witness.

One story will never leave me. It is the story of Erick Peretz and his 16-year-old daughter, Ruth. Erick took Ruth to the Nova music festival on October 7. At first, that may sound like an odd choice: taking a teenager to a rave. But Ruth was no ordinary teenager. She was born with cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy, and she used a wheelchair, but Ruth loved music. She loved the beat and the joy. Live music made her smile. Erick devoted his life to her happiness. He took her to concerts because it was their shared joy. His wife Hila said, “He devoted his life to her. He was a perfect father, a free spirit who loved everyone, always smiling.”

They were found at Nova, father and daughter, their bodies embracing in what became their final dance together, murdered. 

Never Again is a broken oath. But Never Forget is in our hands. 

And here, Yom Kippur itself offers us a model. Our sages teach that the second tablets were given on Yom Kippur. The covenant had been shattered when Moses broke the first set in rage, and yet, on this very day, Yom Kippur, God and Israel began again. Moses and God had to forget just enough of the betrayal to carve out space for renewal. The covenant was repaired, not as perfect as before, but it was stronger and more enduring, because it was written in partnership, with human hands as well as divine words.

So too with us. “Never Again” has shattered. But Yom Kippur calls us not to paralysis, but to renewal: to take up “Never Forget” as our new tablets, etched with both memory and responsibility.

This is the second oath we take every year. Never Forget appears in two places: in Exodus, when our ancestors left Egypt, and in Deuteronomy, when the children of our ancestors were about to go into the Promised Land 40 years later.

We are commanded: Remember Amalek. Amalek attacked from behind, striking the weak, the weary, the stragglers. Hamas, too, struck the most vulnerable: the sick, the disabled, the children, the mothers who could not run fast enough.

But the Torah adds a troubling line: “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget.” If taken literally, that means the destruction of men, women, and children — genocide in response to genocide. That cannot be our path.

Our tradition wrestled with this unbearable command. The rabbis imagined King Saul pleading for Amalek’s lives, just as Abraham pleaded for Sodom. Others taught that we don’t bless the reading of this passage, because we cannot bless destruction. And the Talmud reminds us: when the Egyptians drowned in the sea, God silenced the angels’ song — “My handiwork is drowning, and you sing?!”

Across history, Jews saw Amalek in many enemies: Rome, Christianity, the Nazis, the Soviets, and sometimes even in one another. But when Jews had no army, the commandment remained theoretical. Since 1948, with the rebirth of Israel, the Jewish response to outside threats is no longer just metaphorical. Power changes the moral stakes.

But many Sages, including modern-day Sages, believed that we must also turn Amalek inward. Amalek became a symbol of the yetzer hara, the evil inclination that tempts us to exploit the weak. The 20th-century Israeli biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz went further: Amalek lacked yirat Elohim, the fear and awe of God, as demonstrated in how we treat the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. To “remember Amalek,” then, is not only to fight our enemies, but also to guard our own souls — to build a society that defends the defenseless and keeps its moral compass intact.

And this message feels urgent today. It is no secret that Hamas attacked Israel when it did, in October 2023, because the nation was divided due to the judicial reform protests. Israeli society was seemingly split, and Hamas saw its opportunity to attack, not just from Gaza, but from the North through Hizbollah, with missiles from the Houthis and Iran. The plan was to flood Israel and destroy her. The plan failed, but the war continues. Over two years later, Israel is in her longest war. 

Accusations of genocide grow louder every day, as we saw last week through the U.N., this time. The irony of Jews being accused of genocide is almost unbearable. And yet, thousands of civilians in Gaza have died. Even if, like me, you reject the accusation, we cannot ignore the tragedy.

I do not blame American Jews who wrestle with this tension, supporting Israel’s right to exist while struggling with how this war is being fought. Many Jewish-Americans feel powerless as they see the videos coming from Gaza. But as one teacher in Israel, Rabbi Mordechai Silverstein, told me recently: “The difference between being Israeli and living outside Israel can be summarized as:  moralizing versus agonizing. Written with the grandkids while filling in for our son-in-law, who was called up to the IDF this morning.”

We can moralize. Israelis live in agony.

And yet, every time I hear the word genocide hurled at us, I see Erick and Ruth—locked in their final dance. To remember Amalek in their honor is to speak the hard truth: if Hamas remains in power, October 7 will come again. The command to destroy this enemy is not a slogan. It is a terrible burden carried by young Israeli soldiers who did not choose this war but must fight it.

And yet, with that burden comes a parallel hope: that Israel’s leaders will face the facts with courage and compassion, ending this war, ending needless suffering for Gaza’s civilians, and bringing every hostage home. Because blotting out Amalek is not only about what we end. It is also about what we build.

We must build a society where Erick and Ruth could dance again. A society where the straggler is escorted, not abandoned. A society where the fear of God is measured by our care for the vulnerable.

And here, in our own community, we too can take steps to live out that vow. 

This year, we will travel to Israel—to see, to hear, to bear witness beyond the headlines. And here at home, our new Spicy Torah course will wrestle with Israel, Judaism, God, Torah, identity, and justice. All voices are welcome.

On this day of remembrance, we will remember names, not just numbers. We will recall loved ones during Yizkor, and Jewish martyrs throughout time during Musaf tomorrow. For one day, the whole Jewish world says kaddish for them. 

And each time we rise to say Kaddish, we take a vow; not one that Kol Nidre releases us from, but one that binds us: to memory, to dignity, to life.

Kol Nidre begins with vows we know we cannot keep. Neilah ends with vows we know we must keep: to remember, to protect, to choose holiness over cruelty.

So when the shofar sounds tomorrow night, let it be a summons to both courage and compassion: to defeat those who choose cruelty, and to bind ourselves with unbreakable vows: to the best of who we have been, and to the future where our children can dance in safety and joy.

Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha v’nashuvah, chadesh yameinu k’kedem.Return us, God, to the best of who we have been.

Return us, God, to the strength of our memory and the power of our hope. 

Renew our days so that “Never Again” is not broken this year, and “Never Forget” is forever kept.