Atoning for the world we ignore - The Jewish Standard

There is still time to finish that cheshbon hanefesh, that accounting of our souls before Yom Kippur begins on Sunday night. That accounting, however, not only includes our everyday behavior and our interactions with others; there also is our public persona, which must be considered because of who we are. We’re God’s mamlechet kohanim v’goy kadosh — God’s kingdom of priests and holy nation — and so we have a public role to play in the world at large.

That means we have to take stock of how we’re helping to repair our broken world. We’re supposed to do that by living up to God’s code of morality and ethics in a way that demonstrates to the people around us how living by that code can help create a better world than what we have now.

In order to judge what needs repairing in our world, we need a standard that we can use, and we have the perfect one. It’s the standard Isaiah provides for us in the haftarah we’ll hear read on Monday morning.

In it, God, through Isaiah, sets out what’s expected of us. It’s “to undo the chains of wickedness, to remove the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke….[It’s also] to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring the poor, who are cast out, into your home. That when you see the naked, you cover him; and that you do not hide yourself from your own flesh.”

Using the Talmud’s principle of “acharon acharon chaviv” — the last-mentioned is the first considered — we’ll begin by examining how well our world does in caring for all its poor and disadvantaged, the people society tends not to see.

There are more than eight billion people in this world of ours — a world of extraordinary agricultural knowledge, extraordinary technology, extraordinary wealth, and extraordinary productive capacity.

Yet in the last secular year, meaning in 2025, more than two billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, approximately 2.7 billion people couldn’t afford a healthy diet, and approximately 645 million people suffered from chronic hunger.

Along with hunger comes malnutrition — denying the body of what it needs to grow, to resist disease, and to develop properly.

More than 150 million children under the age of five suffered from stunted growth caused by malnutrition. Their bodies may never develop fully. Their brains may never reach their full potential.

And yet, while so many people go to bed hungry every day, households around the world throw away more than one billion meals every day.

It’s even worse than that, though. In 2024, the last year we have for this statistic, nearly five million children died before reaching their fifth birthdays—that’s about 13,300 children every single day. Most of those deaths were caused by malnutrition, augmented by the absence of proper health care, basic medicines, and vaccinations.

How do we justify standing silently while 13,300 children die every single day of the year before they’re even five years old?

Another factor in most cases is giving those children and the adults they live among a glass of clean water to drink. Water covers most of the earth’s surface — yet more than two billion people have no access to water that’s safe to drink. For those people, finding water requires walking for miles, and all too often the water they find carries disease.

Some 3.4 billion people lack safely managed sanitation, and 1.7 billion lack even basic hygiene services. We can carry phones in our pockets, but we can’t seem to find ways to improve the basic living conditions of people who desperately need it.

Forget about caring for the homeless poor. The world just keeps adding to their number. In 2025, nearly 118 million people were driven from their homes by war, persecution, violence, and human-rights abuses; 45 million of them were children. That’s one forcibly displaced human being for roughly every 70 people alive today.

“Don’t hide yourself from your own flesh,” Isaiah quotes God as saying, but that’s what the world does. If all people are descended from the original First Couple through their son Seth, as the Torah says, then we’re hiding ourselves from our own flesh when we ignore the poor and the disadvantaged.

Now let’s consider the first part of God’s statement quoted by Isaiah:

“To undo the chains of wickedness, to remove the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.”

Education, we’re often told, is the key to freedom, which is one reason why the Torah commands us to educate the children.

And yet approximately 273 million children and young people around the world can’t go to school. They’ll never learn to read a medicine bottle, or understand a legal document, or calculate how much change they’re owed at a checkout counter, and so much more. They’re trapped in the poverty into which they were born.

Nearly 138 million children remain trapped in child labor, and some 54 million of them do hazardous work in mines, fields, factories, workshops, among other places.

Let’s talk slavery. According to the International Labor Organization, nearly 50 million people in 2025 were enslaved. Slavery survives because slavery is profitable, and because its victims are invisible to the people who benefit from it — governments, businesses, marketers, and consumers, meaning us. In the private economy, it generates an estimated $236 billion in illegal profits each year.

“To undo the chains of wickedness,” God says. That’s not the way it is in our world today.

Sometimes those chains are made of iron. Too often, though, they’re made of hunger, debt, ignorance, fear, forged documents, confiscated passports, political corruption, or religious intimidation.

Sometimes the chains are forged by tyrants.

Sometimes they’re forged by respectable businesses.

And sometimes they’re strengthened by ordinary people who prefer not to know that injustice exists, who don’t want to know where their food, clothing, technology, jewelry, or household goods come from.

Slavery is a form of human rights abuse. We condemn such abuses when our enemies commit them, but we make excuses for our allies who commit them, and we ignore them when it profits us.

Our own government boasts about a new “golden era” in the U.S.-Saudi partnership, built partly upon hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and weapons sales. We choose to ignore the human-rights abuses in Saudi Arabia that our own State Department says include arbitrary killings and severe restrictions on basic freedoms.

Compromising principles for advantage is wrong, but people in this world lack either the will or the moral courage to demand that such compromises must end. It’s almost never discussed on the campaign trail by either side.

When we choose ignorance, we’re part of the problem.

When we remain complacent, we’re part of the problem.

When we condemn injustice only when it’s politically convenient, we’re part of the problem.

And that’s the real challenge for us, because we Jews are not permitted to be disinterested observers. We’re God’s kingdom of priests and holy nation. If we don’t believe that we are, then what we do on the High Holy Days is just a waste of time. Keeping kosher, observing Shabbat and festivals, fasting on Yom Kippur (the point Isaiah was making), and everything else we do as Jews is a waste of time unless we recognize suffering wherever it exists, unless we hear the cries no one else wants to hear, unless we’re willing to stand up and challenge injustice even when doing so is inconvenient, unpopular, or costly.

We’re supposed to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

On Sunday, we’ll stand before God and ask to be forgiven.

“Sh’ma koleinu, Adonai Eloheinu.” “Hear our voice, Lord our God. Have compassion upon us and accept our prayer with mercy and favor.”

Before God answers our prayers, we need to answer God’s question of us:

“Did you do what I asked? Did you examine all your sins, your private sins and your public ones? Did you not only consider the harm you’ve personally caused, but also the suffering this world finds it convenient to ignore? On Yom Kippur, you say 10 times “Ahl chet shechatanu l’fanecha b’imutz halev — for the sin we have committed through hardening our hearts.” When you say that, will you keep in mind the sin of looking away, of keeping silent in the face of injustice, of ignoring the sufferings of others because what can one person do about it, of enjoying the benefits of products produced under unjust working conditions, of demanding compassion for yourselves but not for others?”

If we can answer that rather involved and essential question — to God’s satisfaction, not ours — then God makes this promise to us in that same Yom Kippur haftarah: “Then shall your light break forth like the morning…. And you shall be called ‘Repairer of the breach, restorer of paths for people to dwell in.’”

True repentance means more than repairing ourselves. It means taking the lead to rebuild what’s been broken in society and to restore the paths by which all members of the human family can live together.

May we all be inscribed for a better 5787 than we already hope for, and God willing we will, if we all take seriously how we act in our narrow worlds and in the greater one.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

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