Judaism believes we can change: Rabbi Angela Buchdahl on forgiveness, Zionism and Mamdani

The Jewish new year arrived with the word Zionist being used as an insult and a record that never forgets anything anyone has ever said. For the third year running, Yonit Levi and Jonathan Freedland opened the season of awe with Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York and author of Heart of a Stranger. Three weeks before the conversation, an intruder had rushed the bimah at Central during a packed Friday night service. She wanted to talk about forgiveness.

What a real apology requires

Buchdahl sets out what repentance demands: a sincere apology, a changed action when the same situation returns, and three attempts. If the person you have wronged will not forgive you, you go back a second time, and Maimonides has you going back a third. After a sincere third refusal the fault passes to the person refusing. The structure, she says, is built so the door never closes.

Asked what to do with the long list of sins recited collectively through the holidays, she said it is not there to convince anyone they are a terrible person.

"It's actually to remind us that every one of us always has an opportunity to do better. There's something actually very hopeful about the idea that Judaism deeply believes we can change."

The brain wants to forget. Social media will not

Jewish memory, Buchdahl argues, was built to be selective, and the brain agrees: its default is to forget, and remembering takes effort. Social media runs the other way, keeping every input and sorting none of it. A hard setting, she says, for a season built on repair. The muscles for apologising face to face have atrophied, and she puts part of the blame on seven hours a day of screens.

"We're no longer living our lives. We're watching other people live them. So there are many reasons to get off the screen, but maybe that could be one of our resolutions for the new year."

Why Abraham failed the test

Her reading of the binding of Isaac this year is that Abraham failed. Chapters earlier he had argued God down over Sodom, from fifty good people to ten. Faced with the order to kill his own son he says nothing, hitches up the animal and walks up the mountain. Buchdahl finds the silence shocking, and reads the story as a warning about unthinking obedience to what you take to be a divine instruction, in America and in Israel both.

Yonit pressed her on the implication: would protesting have meant passing the test. Buchdahl's answer went to the Israeli protest movement, which has had people on the streets week after week for years without fixing what it set out to fix.

"It's about what it does to our souls to be protesting."

The outcome, in other words, is not the only thing being measured, and the moment to worry is the one where people stop.

The word American Jews stopped using

Buchdahl's Rosh Hashanah sermon starts from a gap. By her reading of recent studies, roughly nine in ten American Jews back Israel's right to exist as a Jewish democratic state, and about a third will call themselves Zionists. She traces the split to 1885, when Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh wrote a platform declaring for the first time that Judaism was a religion and not a nation. Before that, she says, nobody had been able to separate the two.

Her argument runs through Martin Buber: history happens to a nation, religiousness happens to an individual, and Judaism gets both at once because its revelation came to an entire people rather than to one prophet. Her question for the new year is what American Jews handed over with the word, and what the inheritance was worth.

Mamdani, Netanyahu and the election

Buchdahl argues that Zohran Mamdani's language about Israel is doing Netanyahu's work for him, and that Netanyahu is running it in his campaign ads. She wrote to the mayor about it, and says he replied and called her after her synagogue was attacked. She calls the coming Israeli election existential for Jews everywhere.

The conversation ends, as her previous two have, in music: Ne'ilah, and a song for the gates. It is on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.