Ten Reflections for Shabbat Shuva

Preparing for Yom Kippur

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This Shabbat we read Vayelekh, the third-to-last portion in Deuteronomy, as Moses says goodbye to his beloved Jewish people.

We also read in the haftarah the powerful words of the prophet Joel, “Return (shuva), O Israel, to Hashem your God.” Because this Shabbat falls between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, during Aseret Yemei Teshuva—the Ten Days of Return—we call it Shabbat Shuva.

Here are ten reflections to help us enter the mindset for Yom Kippur, which this year falls from Wednesday evening to Thursday night.

1. Choosing to Transcend the World

These days feel like a transcendent reprieve from the noise around us - a sort of antidote to the news. On Rosh Hashana in the Sephardic minyan I attended, we cried out the famous piyut Ochila La’El Achaleh Panav, a love song of longing for the Divine.

Singing it this year, I felt the stark difference between the cacophony of our world—its politics, wars, pain, and disasters—and the simple act of singing of our longing for God’s presence.

These days remind us that, amid the chaos, our inner selves remain ours to shape.

2. Holding worlds that collide

Between meals and prayers I read Eli Sharabi’s breathtaking memoir of being a hostage in Gaza. It was both inspiring and crushing—especially thinking about those still underground, like Alon Ohel, 24, whose face Hamas showed in a recent video, and about whom Eli writes movingly about.

Eli Sharabi’s book, forthcoming in English

I wanted to stop the hazzan (prayer leader) and make him add words—to beg God to open the gates of redemption for captives, the gates of healing for soldiers, the gates of clarity so we know how to act and how to fight back.

All of this, of course, is already in the liturgy. The prayers are vast; they ask for everything. But this year, I longed for the words to bleed with the texture of this moment.

Sometimes this season feels like it transcends too much.

3. Remembering We are a People

But even as I feel the dissonance between the sanctity of these days and the noise around us, I keep reminding myself that the architecture of these days is very close to where we are now.

One often-overlooked dimension of Yom Kippur is its focus not only on individual return and repair but also on national redemption, return, and resilience—simply, on our people’s hope.

Its first formative moment came after the sin of the Golden Calf, when Moses ascended Sinai to plead for forgiveness until God declared salachti kidvarecha—“I forgive, as you have asked.”

Yom Kippur thus became the day of national reconciliation, when God forgave the people as a whole, reminding me that He is always ready to forgive us not just individually but collectively.

4. Holding Audacious Hope

In biblical and rabbinic sources, Yom Kippur centered on the High Priest’s intricate Temple service, which we still recount in the Avodah section of Musaf.

Yishai Ribo’s modern rendition helps us imagine the High Priest entering the Holy of Holies, sprinkling blood, and pronouncing God’s name as the nation bowed in awe.

After the Second Temple fell, Yom Kippur risked becoming a symbol of distance and despair. Would exile mean God had abandoned us, leaving us no ritual to atone for our sins?

With breathtaking chutzpah, the rabbis reimagined it. Rabbi Akiva proclaimed that just as a mikveh purifies the impure, so does the Holy One purify Israel.

The shift is radical: it is not the Temple, the High Priest, or even Yom Kippur itself that purifies us. It is God.

Even in exile we are not abandoned. Closeness, forgiveness, and renewal remain open.

Now more than ever, we must cling to that defiant insistence: Yom Kippur is not about despair but about resilience, strength, and the audacity of hope.

5. Embracing an Open Future

This makes this season nothing less than the Jewish season of hope. When I teach, I often meet students who see these days as guilt-ridden and fear they’ll be doomed to a bad year if they don’t “do” them right.

That misses the point. These days are serious, but at their core they’re happy and hopeful. Our rabbis even called Yom Kippur one of the happiest days in the calendar.

On our Wondering Jews podcast, Noam Weissman and I spoke with renowned Professor Moshe Halbertal about teshuva.

One line stopped me in my tracks.

Professor Halbertal said: “The basic idea of Teshuva is really that your future is not hostage to your past… that your past doesn’t determine your future. Teshuva is the open-endedness of the possibilities vis-à-vis your future.”

That, to me, is the very definition of hope—the belief in the possibility of change. Watch above or listen here.

6. Beginning in Failure

The hope of Teshuva is radical because it begins in failure. The prophet says: “Return, Israel, to Hashem your God, for you have stumbled in your sin”. Not if, but because.

Everyone fails and stumbles, but Judaism insists we can change. Teshuva can even transform sins into merits—it is supernatural, a gift.

This is why confession (viduy) on Yom Kippur is so powerful.

Unlike in the criminal justice system, where confession leads to sentencing, here it leads to repair, atonement, and forgiveness. (Halbertal even critiques the criminal justice system through the lens of teshuva.)

In Judaism, to confess is not to seal your fate but to begin your transformation.

7. Asking God to Help Carry our Burdens

We each walk into Yom Kippur carrying private burdens. One song that really moves me that touches on this is Bein Kodesh Le’chol (“Between the Sacred and the Profane”) by Amir Dadon and Shuli Rand, a ballad about striving for transcendence while weighed down by mundane failure.

This year a friend shared a video of the family of Shmuli Grinlik z”l, a young man killed in Gaza, singing it in Jerusalem.

Hearing Shmuli’s father cry out, “the journey feels too heavy for me,” gave the song unbearable resonance.

Yom Kippur is the day we can turn to God with the same plea: to help us carry what feels too heavy to bear alone.

8. Practicing leadership without ego

In Vayelekh, Moses begins his final farewell. The medieval commentator Ibn Ezra teaches that he went tribe by tribe, speaking to each personally.

After forty years of sacrifice, rebellion, and disappointment, Moses does something extraordinary: he steps back. He appoints Joshua, knowing the story will continue without him. He accepts that his grave will remain unknown, that the mission matters more than his name.

That’s leadership without ego. That’s leadership as service. On Yom Kippur, when the High Priest confessed publicly on behalf of the people, he too modeled this truth: leadership is about carrying others, not about yourself.

This year, when so many of our communities feel unmoored, let’s make this part of our prayers—that we may be blessed with leaders who serve with courage, humility, and devotion.

9. Returning to old truths

I remember preparing to give my first Yom Kippur sermon nearly a decade ago. I was so nervous, thinking I had to say something brilliant and new.

Now I know: Yom Kippur isn’t about novelty. It’s about old truths we keep forgetting. As Ramchal writes in Mesilat Yesharim, a classic work of mussar (self-improvement), nothing here is new—it’s the basics we most need to remember.

Photo by menachem weinreb on Unsplash

That’s not just true for people giving sermons; it’s true for all of us. Yom Kippur invites us to hold onto those basics until they reshape how we live.

10. Asking the essential questions

And so the essential questions echo: Ayeka—where are you? Lech Lecha—are you ready to walk forward? Hineni—can you say, I am here? These are the questions of Yom Kippur, as haunting as they are hopeful.

May we be sealed in the Book of Life.

May Hashem hear our prayers.

May we find the strength and resilience to stay hopeful and to build a better future, together.

Shabbat Shalom,

Mijal

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P.S. I’m looking for book and essay recommendations to add to our minyan’s Yom Kippur library. Please share in the comments or send me a note if you have suggestions!