From Judgment to Joy: Recreating the World after the Rupture

From Judgment to Joy: Recreating the World after the Rupture

Rosh Hashanah is the Day of Judgment. It confronts us with our responsibility—to ourselves, to the Jewish people, to the world, and before the Holy One, blessed be He.

This year, judgment takes on a special meaning. The events of the past three years have shaken fundamental certainties: our sense of security, our trust in institutions, our perception of the unity of the Jewish people, and our hope that reason might prevent the return of hatred and violence.

Recently, I read Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. Zweig describes Vienna before the First World War—a world that believed in stability, progress, culture, and common sense. Then came the collapse: war, nationalism, racial hatred, and Nazism.

This does not mean that we should abandon reason, but rather that we must recognize its limits. A reason too confident in itself may remain blind to the deeper forces at work within society: fear, resentment, the need to belong, and the desire to find an enemy upon whom all evil can be blamed.

We, too, cannot simply return to “the world of yesterday.” We need new thinking and a form of repair capable of restoring our trust in life, solidarity, and the possibility of a shared future.

It is precisely here that we may return to the end of the Torah and to the death of Moses.

Moses dies, but before his death he writes down the Torah and entrusts it to the people. Israel loses his living voice, his presence, the person to whom one could turn in order to know which path to follow. In place of presence, a book remains; in place of the voice, a trace—a reshimu.

As Edmond Jabès suggests, the book is also born from absence. We write because the one who spoke is no longer present. Yet it is precisely this absence that opens a space for our responsibility. After the death of Moses, we are the ones who must read, listen, interpret, and decide.

The book may remain closed and become a monument to the past, but it may also be spoken anew and become song—a living voice. Moses wrote the Torah, but every generation bears the responsibility of restoring its voice within a world Moses did not know and in the face of questions that previous generations could not have foreseen.

This is the meaning of the words we recite in prayer:

“In His goodness, He renews each day, continually, the work of Creation.”

Creation is not merely an event that occurred in the past. The world needs to be renewed every day. The Torah, too, cannot merely be preserved; it must be brought forth anew in every generation. True fidelity is not a frozen repetition of the past, but the ability to gather the trace it has left behind and transform it once again into life.

Emmanuel Levinas also teaches us that freedom is never a guaranteed achievement. It is fragile and must therefore always be protected. In times of fear, we are tempted to surrender it to those who promise us absolute security, power, and unity.

Fear then conceals itself beneath violent ideologies: the legitimate need for sovereignty turns into sovereignism; vulnerability into the worship of power; identity into exclusion; and the desire for security into a relentless search for enemies.

At times, these ideologies also offer us a Torah severed from the universal morality of the prophets—a Torah reduced to power, possession, and an absolute distinction between “us” and “them”; a Torah in which there is no face of the Other, no widow, orphan, or stranger.

But the prophets never set Israel’s existence in opposition to justice. On the contrary:

“Zion shall be redeemed through justice, and those who return to her through righteousness.”

Prophetic universalism does not demand that we renounce our Jewish identity, our land, or our right to defend ourselves. It teaches that Jewish particularity carries within it a universal responsibility. Election is not a privilege but a deeper obligation toward God and toward every human being.

Here we return to the meaning of judgment. Judgment is necessary because it establishes a boundary. Without boundaries, there can be neither responsibility nor freedom. Rosh Hashanah reminds us that we are not the absolute masters of history, of the land, of the Torah, or of the lives of others. Not everything we have the power to do is permissible, and our own suffering does not release us from moral judgment.

Yet Kabbalah teaches that when judgment is separated from mercy and becomes absolute, it turns into harsh judgment. The boundary becomes enclosure, judgment becomes condemnation, protection becomes the worship of power, and identity becomes exclusion.

For this reason, the journey of the festivals of Tishrei does not end with Rosh Hashanah. It begins with judgment, passes through the repentance and forgiveness of Yom Kippur, and finally reaches Sukkot:

“You shall rejoice in your festival.”

Joy does not abolish judgment. It is born from its sweetening.

After recognizing our responsibility, we leave the stability of the house and enter the sukkah—a temporary and fragile dwelling, open to the heavens. The sukkah has walls and boundaries, but they do not turn it into a prison. They protect us without completely cutting us off from the world.

In this sense, the sukkah is the opposite of the ghetto. The ghetto is born from fear and seeks salvation through enclosure. The sukkah acknowledges vulnerability, but teaches us to live within it without transforming it into hatred.

The journey of the festivals of Tishrei may therefore be summarized in these words:

From judgment to mercy, from fear to responsibility, and from responsibility to joy.

Perhaps this is the true judgment of Rosh Hashanah. We are asked not only what we have done, but also what we have done with the traces and remnants entrusted to us:

Have we transformed memory into life or into nostalgia?

Have we transformed the Torah into a living voice or into stone?

Have we transformed fear into responsibility or into hatred?

Has pain deepened our sensitivity to the suffering of others, or has it become a justification for hard-heartedness?

Of Rosh Hashanah it is said:

“Today the world is conceived.”

We do not merely remember that the world was once created. We proclaim that today the world can be born anew.

We cannot restore the world of yesterday, just as Israel could not bring Moses back from death. But we can accept responsibility for what will be born from the traces left to us.

The question of this Rosh Hashanah is therefore not merely how we can restore the world we have lost, but:

What kind of world do we wish to bring forth after so many of our illusions have collapsed?

Perhaps it will be a less innocent world, but a more responsible one; a world less certain of its formulas, but more capable of listening; a world that recognizes the existence of evil, yet remains capable of placing its trust in life.

Moses left us the book. The responsibility rests upon us to decide what voice will be born from it today: a Torah born from fear, or a Torah capable of transforming fear into justice, responsibility, and hope.

Perhaps this is our task of repair: not to reconstruct the world that has been lost, but to participate each day in the renewal of Creation:

“In His goodness, He renews each day, continually, the work of Creation.”

And above all, to remember this one word: “in His goodness.”

Not every change is renewal, and not every form of power brings forth life. True renewal is measured by its ability to transform the darkness of harsh judgment into the light of responsibility, and to lead us, through repentance, toward the fragile yet genuine joy of the sukkah:

“You shall rejoice in your festival.”

Rav Roberto ARBIB