On Yom Kippur, October 9, 1943, in the middle of the Holocaust, Rabbi Walter Wurzburger gave a sermon at Congregation Chai Odom in Brighton, Massachusetts entitled “The Individual in the Crisis.” He argued that Jews in Greater Boston own moral responsibility for the Holocaust. On the basis of the High Priest’s avodah service, Rabbi Wurzburger offered this stark challenge:

We behold a world of agony, misery, cruelty, injustice, brutality, and tyranny. We are responsible for it. It is our world. No complaints! No excuses! No defense mechanisms! No passing of the buck. (quoting the High Priest) “I and my family, we sinned, we failed, we are guilty, we are responsible.”

If this be our lens, we cannot just lament and decry the pain of our world. We own the pain. We own the moral responsibility for doing something to fix it.

That feels like a tall order. What can we do, here or in Israel? Maybe we should just focus on our dalet amot, the four cubits of our own existence. We cannot control what goes on in Washington or in Israel or in Gaza. We can have more control over what goes on in our homes, workplaces and communities.

So consider this lens. When Moses announces the decisive tenth plague, he says it will happen at about midnight. The Talmud jumps on the word about. Why wasn’t Moses more precise? The Talmud’s answer: The Torah says about midnight to teach us to say: “I don’t know.”

Is “I don’t know” a valid Jewish response to the pain of the world? I did not cause it. I cannot fix it. I don’t know.

The first lens came from a class this past summer at Hartman taught by Elana Stein Hain. The second lens came from a class taught by Yehuda Kurtzer. Are we living the second lens? If so, is that okay?