Rabbi Dr. David Harbater, Efrat (2026)

02/10/2026

For those who didn't see my Simchat Torah article that is currently featured in the Times of Israel:

After Death, Creation: Simchat Torah in the Shadow of October 7

One of the most familiar customs of Simchat Torah is also one of the strangest. The moment we finish reading the Torah, we begin it again. We read the final verses of Deuteronomy, describing the death of Moses, and almost immediately afterwards we read the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

The standard explanation is straightforward and beautiful. We begin the Torah again immediately after completing it in order to demonstrate that Torah study never ends. We do not “finish” the Torah and put it aside; the moment we reach its conclusion, we return to its beginning, expressing our lifelong commitment to Torah and our recognition that there is always more to learn.

That explanation certainly captures something essential about Simchat Torah. But perhaps there is another way to understand this remarkable transition, one that has acquired profound significance in the years since October 7.

To see it, we need only pay attention to what we actually read at the end of Deuteronomy and what we read immediately afterward at the beginning of Genesis.

The Torah ends with death. Moses, the greatest leader the Jewish people has ever known, dies. The people are devastated, and the Torah tells us that “the Israelites bewailed Moses in the steppes of Moab for thirty days” (Deuteronomy 34:8).

This is not merely the grief of Moses’ family or of a small circle of disciples. It is national mourning. An entire people stops to grieve the loss of the leader who brought them out of Egypt, stood with them at Sinai, and guided them through the wilderness.

The Torah then pays Moses the highest possible tribute: “Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses” (Deuteronomy 34:10). And with that, the Torah comes to an end. It ends not in celebration, but with death, absence and a nation confronting an enormous loss.

And then, within minutes, we hear the words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The movement could hardly be more striking. Death is followed by creation; mourning is followed by life; an ending is followed immediately by a beginning.
Judaism does not deny death, rush past mourning or pretend that loss is insignificant. The Torah gives Moses’ death the space it deserves, records the grief of the people and acknowledges the magnitude of what has been lost.

But it refuses to allow death to be the final word.

And that is a profound message for us this Simchat Torah, three years after the massacre of October 7.

For generations, Simchat Torah was associated almost exclusively with joy: dancing with the Torah, singing, children waving flags, synagogues filled with celebration. Then, on Simchat Torah 5784, the day itself became inseparable from horror, massacre, hostage-taking, destruction and national grief.

Three years later, we cannot celebrate Simchat Torah as though that day never happened. Nor should we. The death of Moses and the national mourning that follows now speak to us in a way they did not before, because we too know what it means for an entire people to feel that its world has suddenly been torn apart.

But Simchat Torah does not end there. After the account of Moses’ death, after the mourning, after the recognition that something irreplaceable has been lost, we open another scroll and begin with Bereish*t. We move from death to creation.

That movement offers a powerful model for Israel after October 7.

In the midst of tragedy and loss, Israelis began to create anew: devastated communities began rebuilding, displaced families returned home, wounded soldiers fought to reconstruct their lives, and bereaved families somehow found ways to continue living while carrying unbearable grief. Volunteers built extraordinary networks of support, schools reopened, businesses resumed, weddings were celebrated, babies were born and homes were rebuilt.

None of this erases what happened. A new life does not replace a life that was taken, and rebuilding does not undo destruction. But creation is the refusal to allow destruction to determine the future.
That may be the message of Simchat Torah we need to hear this year. The Jewish response to tragedy is not to pretend that the tragedy did not occur, nor is it to leave the dead behind. We remember them, mourn them and carry them with us, while refusing to let death become the conclusion of the story.

The sequence of the Torah readings says it all. We read: “And Moses died there.” We mourn the loss, we acknowledge the absence, and then we turn immediately to the words: “In the beginning God created.”

Three years after October 7, those two verses belong together in our national consciousness. We know death, and we know mourning. But we also know rebuilding, renewal and the stubborn Jewish determination to create life in the aftermath of destruction.

Thus, perhaps we begin the Torah again not only because Torah study never ends, but because Jewish life itself must always begin again. The movement from Deuteronomy to Genesis teaches us that even after profound loss, the Jewish response is to remember, to mourn—and then, in the spirit of Bereish*t, to create anew.

For more insights on the Jewish holidays and current events, visit
https://davidharbater.com/holidays-others/

01/10/2026

My Simchat Torah reflection for this year—three years after October 7—is currently the featured article on the Times of Israel blogs page.

We usually explain that we begin Bereish*t immediately after completing the Torah because Torah study never ends. But this year, another meaning struck me: we move directly from the death of Moses and a nation in mourning to the creation of the world.

Perhaps that transition has something important to teach us three years after October 7.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/rethinking-simchat-torah-three-years-after-the-october-7-massacre/

29/09/2026

We ask God to “spread over us the sukkah of Your peace.”

Why a sukkah? Because peace is fragile—and must constantly be rebuilt.

24/09/2026

What Are We Really Celebrating on Sukkot?

The strangest thing about Sukkot is that we do not really know what we are celebrating.

The Torah tells us: “You shall live in huts seven days… in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in huts when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 23:42–43). Yet nowhere in the Exodus narrative does it say that God made the Israelites live in huts. Why, then, does the Torah institute a seven-day festival commemorating something that does not appear in the actual story of the Exodus?

The Rabbis offer two very different answers. According to Rabbi Eliezer, the sukkot were the clouds of glory; according to Rabbi Akiva, they were actual booths (Sukkah 11b). Their disagreement may represent two fundamentally different ways of understanding what Sukkot celebrates.

According to Rabbi Eliezer, sukkot is not to be understood literally. It refers to the divine cloud that accompanied Israel through the wilderness, guiding and protecting the people on their journey toward the Promised Land. Sukkot therefore complements Pesach: on Pesach we thank God for taking us out of Egypt; on Sukkot we thank Him for protecting us afterward.

Rabbi Akiva's interpretation raises a different question. If the sukkot were ordinary huts that the Israelites themselves built, why does the Torah say that God “made the Israelite people live in huts”? They built the huts. What exactly did God do?

Perhaps Rabbi Akiva is teaching a profound religious idea. God's gift was not only miraculous intervention from above. God liberated a nation of slaves and gave them the freedom, ability, and responsibility to begin caring for themselves.

The Israelites who had depended upon Egyptian masters now had to construct shelter, organize a camp, defend themselves, and eventually build a society. Their dependence upon God did not disappear, but God's providence increasingly operated through human agency. The ability to build the sukkah was itself a divine gift.

This interpretation points toward the future life of the Jewish people in their Land. Once they crossed the Jordan, there would be no manna falling from heaven and no miraculous cloud directing every step. They would have to plant crops, build cities, establish courts, fight wars, care for the vulnerable, and assume responsibility for their own national life.

The two interpretations therefore offer complementary models of faith. Rabbi Eliezer reminds us to be grateful for what God does for us. Rabbi Akiva reminds us to be grateful that God enables us to do things for ourselves.

The events of the past three years have made both ideas extraordinarily real.

On Simchat Torah 2023, Israel experienced a day of horrifying helplessness. Terrorists poured across the border while civilians in southern communities desperately called for help. For hours, many Israelis experienced something Jewish sovereignty was supposed to have ended: Jews facing murderous enemies with no one there to protect them.

But the story did not end on October 7.

Israel possessed something Jews in so many earlier periods of persecution did not possess: the ability to mobilize an army, defend its cities, strike those attacking it, and make decisions about how to secure its own future. The years since then have exacted a terrible price in lives, injuries, displacement, reserve duty, and national strain, while Israel has confronted threats from several directions.

Jewish sovereignty has not created the miraculous cloud of Rabbi Eliezer that shields us from every danger. No army, however powerful, can guarantee complete security. Israel remains vulnerable, as every sovereign nation ultimately is.

But that is precisely why Rabbi Akiva's interpretation matters.

The great achievement of Jewish sovereignty is not that Jews no longer face enemies. Jewish history never promised that. The achievement is that we are no longer condemned to wait helplessly for others to decide whether or not to defend us.

We have soldiers, intelligence services, doctors, scientists, emergency workers, and citizens capable of organizing themselves when disaster strikes. We possess the means to defend ourselves, rebuild what has been destroyed, and shape our national future.
And with that power comes responsibility.

If we control our own army, then the way that army uses force becomes our responsibility. If we govern ourselves, then the character of our government becomes our responsibility. If we possess political and economic power, then the kind of society we create becomes our responsibility.

Sovereignty means that we can no longer attribute our fate entirely to Pharaohs, kings, czars, or foreign governments.

We build the sukkah ourselves.

And yet every year we sit beneath its fragile roof and thank God.

That is the beautiful tension at the heart of Sukkot. Rabbi Eliezer teaches us never to forget the divine cloud above us. Rabbi Akiva teaches us never to forget the human hands building beneath it.

Perhaps Sukkot 2026 gives us special reason to appreciate both. We pray for God's protection because we know how vulnerable we remain, but we also thank God for giving the Jewish people something our ancestors dreamed of for nearly two thousand years: the ability to assume responsibility for our own fate.

Chag Sameach.

For more insights on the Jewish holidays and current events, visit
https://davidharbater.com/holidays-others/

19/09/2026

Yom Kippur: The Scapegoat We Have Misunderstood

We all know what it means to scapegoat someone. Something has gone wrong, but instead of confronting the complicated causes—or acknowledging our own responsibility—we find someone else to blame. The scapegoat becomes the convenient target upon whom we place our anger, fear, and frustration.

Few peoples know this phenomenon better than the Jews. For centuries, Jews have been blamed for problems they did not cause: plagues, economic crises, political instability, military defeat, even natural disasters. Disturbingly, the phenomenon has not disappeared.

Today, Jews are still scapegoated in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways. In some places, they are blamed for the policies of the State of Israel, even when they had no role in shaping them. In other circles, Jews are portrayed as beneficiaries of systems of racism and oppression; in yet others, antisemitic conspiracy theories depict Jews as secretly controlling governments, universities, the media, or global institutions.

The accusations may come from very different ideological directions, but the mechanism is the same: complex social problems are reduced to a single convenient target. The Jew becomes that target.

But we in Israel are not immune from the same tendency.

We too often look for a group to blame for what is wrong with the country: the settlers, the left, the right, the courts, the protesters, the media, the Kaplanists, the Arabs. Each group can easily become the explanation for everything that frustrates us about Israeli society.

But perhaps scapegoating is legitimate? After all, the very term “scapegoat” come from the Yom Kippur ritual described in the Torah. On Yom Kippur, the High Priest took two goats: one was sacrificed to God, while the other—the se'ir la'azazel—was sent into the wilderness.

The Torah describes the ritual as follows:
“Aaron shall place both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the Israelites, all their transgressions and all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat; and he shall send it into the wilderness” (Leviticus 16:21).

At first glance, this sounds remarkably similar to what we now call scapegoating. Israel sins, its sins are placed upon an innocent animal, and the animal carries them away. Read this way, the Torah seems to provide precisely what modern scapegoating seeks to provide: a way to place our failures upon someone—or something—else and thereby absolve ourselves of responsibility.

If so, perhaps scapegoating is not merely a human weakness. Perhaps the Torah itself institutionalizes it.

But that is actually a misreading of the ritual.

The crucial word in the verse is והתודה — “and he shall confess.” Before the sins are placed upon the goat, they must first be acknowledged. The High Priest does not accuse the goat, blame an outsider, or claim that another group caused Israel's failures; he confesses Israel's own sins over the goat.

The ritual therefore begins not with blame but with ownership: these are our sins. Only after the sins have been identified and confessed as our own can they symbolically be placed upon the goat and carried into the wilderness. That changes the meaning of the entire ritual.

The biblical scapegoat is not a mechanism for avoiding responsibility; it is a mechanism for moving beyond failure after responsibility has been accepted.

Modern scapegoating says, “The problem is theirs.” The Torah's ritual says, “The sins are ours.”

This is also the logic of Yom Kippur itself. Again and again we confess: Ashamnu. Bagadnu. Gazalnu. We have sinned, we have betrayed, we have stolen—not they, but we.

That is why there can be no justification for scapegoating in the contemporary sense based upon the Yom Kippur ritual. If anything, the ritual teaches the opposite lesson: before we blame anyone else, we must first ask what belongs to us. Before we condemn another community, we must first examine our own.

That is an especially important message for Israel today. Before the right lists the failures of the left, it should examine its own; before the left lists the failures of the right, it should do the same. Before religious Israelis explain what secular Israelis have done wrong, they should ask whether they have always represented Judaism in ways that inspire rather than alienate, while secular Israelis might ask whether religious communities have always felt that their deepest commitments were treated with respect.

Sometimes others really are responsible, and justice requires us to identify wrongdoing where it exists. But the first question cannot always be, “Who is to blame?” Yom Kippur insists that we first ask, “What have we done?”

That is the great irony of the Yom Kippur scapegoat. For centuries, we have borrowed its name to describe the act of placing our guilt upon someone else, yet the Torah allows the goat to carry away Israel's sins only after Israel has first had the courage to confess: They are ours.

Perhaps that is exactly the lesson we need this Yom Kippur. We will not repair Israeli society by finding the perfect group upon whom to place our failures. We begin repairing it when we learn to ask, before blaming anyone else: What is ours to confess?

Gmar Chatima Tova.

For more insights on the Jewish holidays and current events, visit
https://davidharbater.com/holidays-others/

15/09/2026

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Viktor Frankl

10/09/2026

An abridged video version of my thoughts on the shofar's deepest message

09/09/2026

The Sounds of the Shofar: From Wholeness to Brokenness — and Back Again

For an abridged video version
https://youtube.com/shorts/pdWCsHm6hgE?feature=share

The shofar does not speak in words. It speaks in sounds, and those sounds are remarkably different from one another. There is the tekiah — one long, whole, unbroken blast; the shevarim — three broken notes; and the teruah — a rapid succession of short, trembling cries.

Why does Rosh Hashanah require all three? Perhaps because no single sound can capture the experience of a person standing before God, and no single sound can capture the experience of a nation confronting its past, its pain, and its future.

There are moments when we feel whole, moments when pain is carried quietly within us, and moments when that pain erupts into a cry. The shofar gives voice to them all.

The tekiah is whole, clear, steady, and strong. It is a fitting sound for Israel. The Jewish people returned to the land from which we had been exiled for centuries, rebuilt sovereignty, revived Hebrew, gathered Jews from across the world, and created cities, universities, hospitals, farms, industries, culture, Torah scholarship, science, and extraordinary technological innovation. We built an army capable of defending a people who for centuries were largely powerless to defend themselves, and in moments of crisis ordinary Israelis have repeatedly demonstrated remarkable courage, solidarity, sacrifice, and resilience. The tekiah reminds us that there is much in the Jewish return to history about which we should stand tall.

But the shofar does not permit us to hear only the tekiah. The whole sound is followed by broken ones. The Talmud in Rosh Hashanah 34a asks what the Torah means by teruah. Is it גנוחי גנח — the groaning of a person in distress — or ילולי יליל — the wailing of someone overcome by grief?

Our practice incorporates both possibilities.

The shevarim represents the groan. It is not yet a scream, but a deep sigh that comes from somewhere within. Much suffering is like that. It does not announce itself loudly; people carry it. A bereaved parent returns to work. A wounded soldier enters rehabilitation. A reservist comes home after months of fighting and tries to return to ordinary family life. A spouse who has carried a household alone simply continues. A family displaced from its home begins again somewhere else. From the outside, life resumes, but every so often there is a sigh. That is shevarim.

Israel today is filled with shevarim: people continuing to work, parent, teach, serve, and build while carrying burdens that those around them may barely see. A society that celebrates resilience must be careful not to mistake resilience for the absence of pain. Sometimes the deepest wounds are the least visible, and sometimes strength itself sounds like a groan.

Then comes the teruah. If shevarim is a groan, teruah is a wail. Short cries, one after another. If shevarim is suffering held within, teruah is suffering that can no longer remain contained. There are moments when a person can no longer merely sigh, and there are moments when a nation can no longer do so either. October 7 was such a moment. The murder of families in their homes, the destruction of communities, the kidnapping of men, women, children, and elderly people, the bereavement of so many families, and the enormous sacrifices demanded of soldiers and reservists produced a level of anguish that could not be absorbed quietly into the normal rhythm of life. There are times when grief must simply be allowed to cry out. The teruah gives sound to that anguish.

The Gemara makes a further observation that is especially powerful. When both sounds are sounded together, shevarim comes before teruah. Why? Because, the Gemara says, when something terrible happens to a person, first he groans and afterward he wails.

That progression is psychologically profound. Pain often begins quietly. We absorb it, adjust to it, and try to continue. The sigh comes first. But sometimes the pain grows too great to remain contained, and the groan becomes a cry. The movement from shevarim to teruah therefore traces the deepening of human suffering: from inner fracture to open anguish.

And then comes the most important part. The shofar sequence does not end with either sound of brokenness. It returns to tekiah: tekiah — shevarim — teruah — tekiah. Wholeness, the groan, the cry, and then wholeness again.

Perhaps that structure contains one of the deepest messages of Rosh Hashanah.

The first tekiah reminds us of what we have built and of the strength we possess. The shevarim asks us to hear the quieter wounds carried within our society. The teruah gives voice to grief too deep to remain silent. And the final tekiah is the return to wholeness.

But the second tekiah cannot simply return us to where we began. After shevarim and teruah, we have heard too much. The final tekiah must represent a deeper wholeness: a society that has listened to its pain, cared for those carrying wounds, learned from what has happened, and resolved to rebuild with greater wisdom, compassion, responsibility, and solidarity. The first tekiah is the strength of what we were. The second must be the strength of what we choose to become.

Perhaps that is the call of the shofar to Israel this Rosh Hashanah: to remember the extraordinary strength of what we have built, to hear both the quiet groans and the anguished cries among us, and then to sound the tekiah once more — not because the pain has disappeared, but because we are determined that pain will not have the final word.

Shana Tova — may the coming year bring healing, strength, unity, and better days for Israel and the Jewish people.

For more insights on the Jewish holidays and current events, visit
https://davidharbater.com/holidays-others/

08/09/2026

Dear Friends,

As a new school year begins and we prepare to welcome a new Jewish year, I’m very happy to share my website:

https://davidharbater.com

The site now includes hundreds of articles and educational resources on:

Parasha and current events
Jewish holidays
Israel and Aliyah
Educational materials on parasha and Israel for teens and adults

My goal is to connect Torah and Jewish thought with the questions, challenges, and issues facing Israel and the Jewish world today.

I hope you’ll take a look, find something meaningful, and share the site with others who may find it useful.

Shana tova — may the coming year bring learning, growth, strength, and better days for Israel and the Jewish people.

02/09/2026

Nitzavim–Vayelech: No Violence in the Name of Torah or the Land

Parashat Nitzavim includes the following enigmatic statement:
“The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever, to fulfill all the words of this Torah” (Deuteronomy 29:28).

There are things we cannot know. Human beings cannot see into other people's hearts. We do not always know people's motives. We cannot predict every consequence of our actions. Some things remain hidden. Those belong to God.

But Moses immediately introduces another category: the things that are revealed. Those belong to us.

That distinction imposes an enormous moral responsibility. We cannot be held accountable for what we genuinely could not know. But we cannot hide behind uncertainty when something is happening directly in front of our eyes.

That lesson has become painfully relevant in Israel today.

There has been a troubling and well-documented rise in violence by extremist Jewish settlers against innocent Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.

In the Palestinian village of Qusra, families have reported repeated attacks on their homes and property. In August, dozens of masked Jewish attackers reportedly threw stones at a home while seven Palestinians were trapped inside. Earlier incidents in the village included attacks on homes, smashed windows, physical assaults, and threatening graffiti.

These acts cannot be excused as legitimate responses to Palestinian terrorism.

There is indeed Palestinian terrorism. Israelis living in Judea and Samaria have faced shootings, stabbings, car-rammings, and other horrific attacks. A Jewish state has both the right and the obligation to protect them.

But precisely because we insist upon the moral distinction between terrorism and legitimate self-defense, we must insist upon that distinction when Jews are the perpetrators as well.

Attacking an innocent Palestinian because another Palestinian committed terrorism is not self-defense. Burning property is not self-defense. Throwing stones at a family inside its home is not self-defense. Terrorizing innocent people because of their ethnicity is not the Torah's vision of Jewish sovereignty.

And here I believe there is another uncomfortable issue that we, particularly within the Religious Zionist community, must confront: the response of our religious leadership has too often been far too quiet.

To be clear, there have been important exceptions. Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein has called the violence morally and ethically wrong and argued that it must be confronted explicitly from the pulpit. A group of settler rabbis has publicly declared that violence must not be used even in situations of confrontation. Other rabbis and settlement leaders have spoken as well.

But given the seriousness and persistence of the phenomenon, where is the sustained religious outcry? Where are the sermons? Where are the public letters signed by hundreds of rabbis? Where is the educational campaign in our yeshivot and schools teaching young people that love of Eretz Yisrael can never justify cruelty toward innocent human beings?

Religious Zionism has produced extraordinary passion for the sanctity of the Land of Israel but it must speak with equal passion about the sanctity of the human being.

Indeed, the two cannot be separated. If we believe that returning to this Land is part of the fulfillment of Torah, then the way we behave in that Land must itself reflect Torah.

Our claim to Eretz Yisrael cannot merely be about where Jews are entitled to live. It must also be about the kind of people we become when we live there.

There will always be questions about which reports are accurate. There will always be disagreements about politics, territory, security, and responsibility. There will always be facts we do not know.

Those are the hidden things.

But there comes a point at which invoking complexity becomes a way of avoiding moral responsibility.

When people are beaten, when homes are attacked, when property is destroyed, when innocent families live in fear—and when perpetrators repeatedly act in the name of Jewish settlement—these are no longer hidden things. They are “revealed” and they belong to us.

This should be a wake-up call for Religious Zionism. A movement that taught generations of Jews that sovereignty creates religious responsibility must be the first to demand moral accountability when Jewish power is abused.

We should not need the international community to tell us this. We should not need foreign governments to tell us this. We should not even need the police or the army to tell us this.

Because the Torah tells us this. “The hidden things belong to the Lord our God.” But what is happening before our eyes belongs to us—and so does the responsibility to stop it.

Shabbat Shalom.

For more insights on the parasha and current events in Israel, visit
https://davidharbater.com/parasha-current-events/

Rabbi Dr. David Harbater

02/10/2026

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