Skyline Happenings

This Yom Kippur, I am running out of prayers, out of feelings, out of words, the author writes. Pictured are strips of fabric bearing the names of Palestinians who have been killed during a rally on the eve of Yom Kippur at the Seattle Federal Building last year. (Karen Ducey / The Seattle Times)

By Hollis Cooper

In the fall of 2023, I spent Yom Kippur in a synagogue, as I often do. I am not, on balance, observant, but for 25 hours I abstained from food and water. I thought about where I’d fallen short in the past year, and set out to improve in the coming one.

Two weeks later, I woke to news of unfathomable violence in Israel. In the days that followed, the Israeli government imposed a complete siege of the Gaza Strip, blocking food and water from entering.  Soon, I began to experience a strange and striking sensation. I started to notice a phantom thirst that would come on and off. Sometimes it was brought on by turning on the tap, sometimes from seeing rain outside the window and sometimes it would arise spontaneously. I would feel that parched, cotton sensation in my own mouth — the feeling of the afternoon of Yom Kippur.

I read that 2 million people lived in Gaza. I checked the weather forecast for Gaza: temperatures in the 70s, 80s. One day it rained. Could they collect rain? There was so much chaos in what I was reading that it was hard to guess.

I called my lawmakers. I voted. And then I stopped reading articles from Gaza or Israel or the West Bank. I simply was not able to continue to feel at that intensity without falling out of my own world. I looked away. The phantom thirst stopped, my projects moved along and the following summer I ate ripe blueberries in the sun.

In the fall of 2024, I returned to synagogue for Yom Kippur. I fasted. I didn’t have it in me to contemplate the people around me I have wronged. My thoughts were in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon. Hungry, I imagined being so because the only bakery in my neighborhood had closed. Restless, I counted the number of hours until I would break the fast in the atrium, then walk out into the evening.

I thought about the remaining Israeli hostages, day after day not knowing the number of hours until they would next eat, not knowing the number of days until they could walk out into the evening, or if they would. 

Without food, I noticed how tired I felt. For a year I had viewed images of this war while well-fed and well-rested — mothers carrying children, children carrying backpacks, crowds running from gunfire, boys digging through rubble. Now hungry and sleepy, I wondered how they could carry, run, dig? I was so tired after having missed only a couple of meals.

In a world that is changing so quickly, it is more important than ever that each of us take care to protect our humanity and the humanity of others. Will we do so this year? And will we be in time? 

This fall, I will fast again on Yom Kippur. For the third Yom Kippur swallowed by this war, I will read in the prayer book for Yom Kippur these words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel on learning the story of Isaac as a child in Poland. At the climax of the story, as Abraham lifts his knife to kill his only son, Heschel recounts: “I broke into tears and wept aloud. ‘Why are you crying?’ asked my rabbi. ‘You know that Isaac was not killed.’ I said to him, still weeping, ‘But Rabbi, supposing the angel had come a second too late?’ The rabbi comforted me and calmed me, saying that an angel cannot come late. An angel cannot be late, but man, made of flesh and blood, may be.”

That’s another thing about being human — we can be too late.

The third year of this war is starting. Many lie dead, in Gaza, in Israel, in the West Bank. Can this Yom Kippur help us recover our human capacity for empathy? I am running out of prayers, out of feelings, out of words.   

What is left is the single question — will we be too late?

Hollis Cooper: grew up in congregations across the Seattle area, including conservative Herzel Ner Tamid, reconstructionist Kadima and reform Temple Bnai Torah.