Hecher, Hecher: The Sins We Did Not Say Out Loud
a sermon by Rabbi Gary M. Bretton-Granatoor
Kol Nidre 5787
Congregation Shirat HaYam, Nantucket
Every year on this night, we do the same thing. We stand together, we beat our chests, we recite the Al Chet — the litany of sins — and we go down the alphabet like we’re taking attendance at our own moral failure. Aleph, we sinned. Bet, we sinned. We are thorough. We are, dare I say, professionals at this by now.
But here’s what’s worth noticing after so many years of doing this together: almost every sin on that list is a sin of commission. Something we did. We spoke unkindly. We were arrogant. We were duplicitous. We stole. We hardened our hearts. It’s a catalog of action — of things our hands and our mouths and our hearts actively did wrong.
Tonight, let’s talk about the sins that don’t make the list the same way. The sins of omission. The things we didn’t do. The words we didn’t say. Because this may be the year those matter most — and they are the hardest ones to confess, because how do you beat your chest for silence?
There’s a word for this in our tradition. Tochecha. Rebuke. The obligation — not the option, the obligation — to say something when we see something wrong.
Tochecha comes from Leviticus 26, a passage so unsettling that it has its own peculiar customs attached to it. It is a list of curses — what will befall the people if they abandon the covenant and chase after their own hearts and desires instead of God’s ways. A Tochecha for their time. What will the consequences be for their actions? Drought. Famine. Exile. Terror in the night. It is, frankly, terrifying material, and our tradition has always treated it that way.
Walk into a traditional shul when the Tochecha is chanted, and you’ll notice something odd: the ba’al koreh, the Torah reader, drops the voice to a mutter and races through it. Quietly. Quickly. As if reading it too loudly, too slowly, might somehow invite the curses in. And if the reader makes a mistake in the middle of it? Tradition says: don’t correct it. Just keep going. Get through it. Get it over with.
We whisper the rebuke. We rush past the warning. That’s the custom. And, uncomfortably, it’s also how most of us tend to live our lives.
There’s a story — some tell it about the Klausenberger Rebbe. He came to this country after the Shoah. He had lost his wife and all eleven of his children. Eleven. Sit with that number for a moment before we move on, because we’re not allowed to move past it too quickly.
His first Shabbat in America happened to fall on the week the Tochecha was read. And true to custom, the reader started to whisper it, to rush through it, the way it’s always done. And the Rebbe — this man who had buried his entire family — stood up in the middle of services and started shouting: “Hecher! Hecher! Louder! Louder!”
The reader, startled, raised his voice — but still raced through the words. The Rebbe shouted again: “Chap nit, chap nit! Slower! Slower!”
After services, the congregants surrounded him, bewildered. Why would he, of all people, want the curses read louder and slower? And he told them: “I want God to hear every single word. I want God to know that each one of these curses has already been fulfilled in my lifetime. Now, God, it is time to send Your blessings.”
That was the moment the Rebbe stopped drowning in his own grief and began to build. He gathered disciples. He moved to Israel. He founded a moshav. He built a hospital. His act of turning — his teshuvah — began not with silence, but with insisting that the rebuke be spoken plainly, fully, at full volume, so that no one, not even God, could pretend not to have heard it.
That’s Tochecha. Not whispering past the hard part. Shouting it, so it can be answered.
So here is a hard question for this holiest night of the year: where have we been whispering when we needed to shout? Where have we rushed past the mistake instead of stopping to correct it?
Consider the last three years, since October 7th. In the aftermath of that unspeakable massacre, when Israel began its military response in Gaza, many of us were slow, too slow, to raise our voices about the scope and conduct of that response. We were so consumed, understandably, by grief and by fury and by the need to defend Israel’s right to exist and to fight back, that we left a vacuum. And into that vacuum walked others who were not slow at all. They rushed in with a word — genocide — a word coined by Raphael Lemkin with a precise legal meaning, a word that does not, by any serious legal reading, describe what has occurred. But because that silence was not filled with an honest, searching, morally serious voice, others filled it instead. The narrative was written by people who had no interest in nuance, and by that silence, we handed them the pen.
And it isn’t only Gaza. What is happening in the West Bank right now is shameful, horrible, horrendous, criminal. Those words shouldn’t be used loosely. Just weeks ago, Israel Policy Forum — hardly a fringe organization, hardly anti-Israel — issued a statement about the siege in the village of Qusra, where extremist settlers trapped Palestinian families inside their own homes to terrorize them into fleeing so their land could be seized. Israeli soldiers reportedly stood by — some, by report, in solidarity with the settlers — for days, blocking journalists and preventing the siege from being broken. The IDF eventually condemned the episode as “illegal, reprehensible, and unacceptable.” But the Israeli government itself said almost nothing. Did almost nothing.
This is not the Zionism so many of us were raised to love — a dream of a Jewish homeland rooted in justice, in refuge, in dignity for a broken people after the Shoah. And because too many who love Israel have been too quiet, too willing to whisper concerns privately rather than voice them publicly, we have allowed others to recast the entire Zionist project — a movement born of persecuted people seeking survival — as nothing more than European colonialism. That is a lie. But lies fill the space that silence leaves behind.
And it is not only “over there.” Here, in this country, we watch ICE agents detain and mistreat the stranger in our midst, and too many of us say nothing, because it feels safer to look away. But we were the strangers in Egypt. Thirty-six times — more than any other commandment in the Torah — we are told not to oppress the stranger, because we know the heart of the stranger, we were strangers ourselves. Thirty-six times. And still, we whisper.
We watch as those in power treat the rule of law as an inconvenience rather than a foundation — as something to be undermined so that buildings can be erected without regard for whether ordinary people can afford food or shelter or the roof over their heads. We watch leaders, in this country and in Israel both, cling to power in no small part to avoid facing prosecution for their own conduct, surrounded by sycophants — in both capitals — who enable it because their own position depends on staying silent, or worse, cheering along. We watch retirement funds, Social Security — money that working people set aside from their own paychecks, money they earned, money they are owed… Wait! Money that we earned, money that we are owed — recast in political rhetoric as a “government benefit,” an “entitlement,” as though it were charity rather than a promise kept. And still, so many of us whisper. Even when it is our own money on the table.
Here is what should trouble us most: on Yom Kippur, we are extraordinarily good at confessing what we did. We are far less practiced at confessing what we failed to say. There is no line in the Al Chet that reads, “For the sin we committed against You by staying quiet when we should have spoken.” Maybe there should be. Maybe tonight, we write it in ourselves.
Because here is the terrible mathematics of Tochecha: if we miss the mark this year — if our rebuke falls short, if our courage fails us, if we choose the comfortable whisper over the costly shout — we are told there is always next Yom Kippur. More days of teshuvah, and then, God willing, a whole year to try again, and if we fail again, another Yom Kippur after that. Our tradition is endlessly, mercifully patient with our failures.
But the world is not so patient. A siege in Qusra does not wait for next Yom Kippur to resolve itself. A family separated by ICE does not get a “do-over” next year. A democracy whose institutions have been quietly, patiently hollowed out does not simply restore itself because we’ve decided to finally speak up once the damage is done. Some doors, once they close, do not reopen just because courage arrived a year too late.
So here is a charge for all of us tonight: let this community stop whispering the Tochecha of our own time. Let us stop rushing past the parts that are hardest to say. When we see the West Bank descending into lawlessness, say so — loudly, and to the people who can do something about it, not just to each other in comfortable rooms. When we see cruelty toward the stranger, say so — not only in our hearts but with our voices, our votes, our checkbooks, our feet in the street if that’s what it takes. When we see the foundations of justice — economic, legal, democratic — being dismantled brick by brick for the benefit of the few, say so, and don’t let anyone shame us into silence by calling it disloyalty. Loving something — a country, a people, a faith — does not mean staying quiet about what threatens to destroy it. It means precisely the opposite.
The Klausenberger Rebbe did not stay silent in his grief. He stood in a congregation of strangers, in a language and a country not his own, having lost more than most of us can imagine, and he shouted: louder, louder — let it be heard. And then he went and built something. A community. A hospital. A future.
That is the movement of teshuvah — not away from the hard truth, but through it, spoken fully, at full volume, and then toward the work of repair.
We have one more day ahead of us before the gates close. Let us not spend it whispering. Let us, together, find the courage to say the things we have left unsaid — and then, like the Rebbe, let us go and build.
G’mar chatimah tovah — may we all be sealed for a good year, and may we have the courage, this year, to raise our voices before it is too late to matter.