The themes of the season are intricately connected to the problems plaguing liberal democracy in America and worldwide. The liturgy, Torah Portions, symbolism and rituals of both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur lend themselves to address the underlying forces that support rising authoritarianism. Consider this an opportunity not only to preach to the individual Jew in the pew, elevating democracy as a personal issue, but a chance to set the congregational agenda.

After all, we all work in little democracies, and we all face the ways that America’s corroding political culture seeps into our board meetings, committee work, and our local systems of deliberation. Cleric burnout is a major problem for every faith tradition right now, and the Holy Day sermons are a chance to limit the toxicity that shortens our careers (and dries up the pipeline of new clergy).

So here’s a list of High Holy Day themes that can help strengthen your local political culture, nourish the civic space around your community, and slowly turn back the forces of authoritarianism rising in the country as a whole.

Rosh Hashanah

Creation: The idea that "hayom harat olam” offers a chance for us to consider what we are creating in our society today. This ties back to David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech, about the world we live in without seeing.

Knowledge of Good and Evil: Especially for those that read Bereishit, and for everyone who address the topic of tshuvah, awareness of sin requires knowledge of truth. This is a chance to address the relativism and misinformation plaguing our culture, and reinforce the Jewish notion that we seek truth communally, even if God’s Truth will always be just out of reach.

Being Created in the Image of God: a chance to reflect on the principles of the Declaration of Independence in this 250th year. Btw, human dignity extends to our political opponents as well despite what you see online.

Akedah: My take on this enormously difficult story is that Abraham was stuck in an echo chamber where idolatry and child sacrifice weres the norm. So he went along with the most horrific command. Are our congregations becoming echo chambers?

Akedah (option 2): Abraham needed an angel to break his information bubble. This is a chance to wonder who our angels will be. Can our congregations be places that break our informaiotn bubbles?

Malchuyot: This is what I’m preaching on this year. As moderns we like to think of ourselves as little sovereigns, but the liturgy, especially the Great Aleinu, insist that God is Sovereign of Sovereign of Sovereigns. Shai Held, in Judaism is About Love (160-163), describes how this creates a covenantal relationship for each individual with God, one that demands certain godly behavior. Not a bad way to describe civic norms and the healthy citizen behavior upon which liberal democracy depends.

Shofarot: We clergy like the call to justice. One of our colleagues once told me that we all secretly “want to take a selfie with Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Right now, the most just things we can preach are not specific policy issues, but rather the underpinnings of democracy: free and fair elections, rule of law, respect for institutions, freedom of speech and so forth.

Yom Kippur

Kol Nidre: This is the sermon that started my democracy work in 2018, that we are not living up to the promises we make as Americans. I used the Pledge of Allegiance as the oath we broke, but there are so many options to describe our failures as citizens to protect liberal democracy.

Kol Nidre (option 2): Just as Kol Nidre evolved in a world where Jews were not free to keep their promises (or so the mythology tells us), or alternatively just as Kol Nidre was used as an excuse by anti-Jewish-citizenship advocates in the eighteenth century, we can celebrate how America has been different, a place built upon the principle of absolute religious diversity and inclusion. This is the anti-Christian Nationalism sermon!

Unetane Tokef: We are living through a period of disorientation. The events of the world feel completely overwhelming like the list of potential blessings and curses written in the Book of Life. How can teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedekah help us ground us and help us regain a sense of truth and morality amidst the flood of toxicity, disinformation, and conflict we experience every day?

Vidui: Cancel culture and High Conflict are based upon the assumption that every action is potential cause for defriending and cutting ties. Vidui is a public establishment of the opposite assumption, that in our Jewish communities we accept that people will err and work to prevent repetition of the mistake.

Jonah: This is the story of the ultimate cynic, the one who would rather see his enemies die than change. The story allows us to teach the concept of meta-perception, and share the ways we misunderstand our political opponents, a problem within our congregations, and in the surrounding community and world.

I am sure there are more themes available to help us preach democracy. The season of the Yamim Nora’im are here to remind us all that we can improve our character and create a better world. No authoritarian is above the Melech Malchei Ham’lachim, and none of us are blameless. Not a bad place to start when refounding our sense of citizenship and civic responsibility.

I hate despair. It’s so unproductive. And as a Jew, I know I’m obligated to hope, not to be pollyannish, but always to work for something better. So as the 250th year of our country approached I began to think, what can we do to make this a year of hope?

I decided to post this to one of my Facebook groups: “I want to propose an idea for synagogues about Shabbat, July 4, 2026. I think we could catalyze multi-faith clusters of congregations to celebrate America250 together. Is that nuts? The goal is to ‘flood the zone’ with hope in dozens (or hundreds?) of communities as an alternative to whatever the politicans produce. Is this nuts?”

Over the next month I spoke with about a dozen colleagues and we began to dream. Then, working with the team here at American Scripture Project, and iterating with a slightly larger group of colleagues (including a few wonderful Presbyterian friends, Revs. Becca Messman and MaryAnn McKibben), we designed something. Finally, on July 1, we held a zoom with about 25 clergy from around the country to launch faith250.

The basic idea is that next summer’s celebration is an opportunity to solve a problem we did not even realize we had. That is, when July 4, 2026 rolls around, we will be surrounded by lovely, flashy, joyous, but superficial celebrations of our country. Parades and picnics are really not the time or place for the hard conversations. However, if we let the country’s important moral questions go unaddressed, something will be missing. Enter American religion.

So we created a way to talk with neighbors, to listen, to probe our collective tensions, anxieties, hopes, and sources of pride. We have a format for (1) small groups of clergy to talk about our big texts, and then (2) to gather their congregations for meaningful conversations, and finally, next summer, around the time of the big weekend, (3) to host dozens (or hundreds) of local ritual celebrations of America. Civic rituals, if well designed, can do something that parades and picnics cannot. This is because (as I described here):

[Rituals] provide legitimacy, express deeper values, and remind the community of what binds us together. They elevate us beyond the immediate policy or political conflicts of the day to remember the transcendent values undergirding the American endeavor. They make the losses of a single election bearable because our “true creed,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, remains intact. They help us maintain hope that even our worst national mistakes can be overcome and we can, in the words of Langston Hughes, “Let America be America again.”

Rituals can do this because they are vast and complicated. They communicate overlapping and even contradicting layers of meaning. Often, through art, architecture, music, garb, choreography, tradition, poetry, and, in the case of religion, theology, the combined aesthetics are more powerful than any speech or public statement. Because of their artistic complexity, they mirror the messiness of our humanity, and thus rituals address our individual and collective identities. In their ambiguities, they invite multiple interpretations and broad arrays of meanings. Thus they can unify, uplift, and even heal us, which is why after national tragedies, sanctuaries everywhere are full.

So think about joining the effort. Think about clergy colleagues you want to know better and talk with. Think about congregations in your area who could join you for a deep exploration of our country’s meaning in our lives. More info can be found here, and if you are interested, please sign up here. Stay tuned for more to come . . .

Each year Shavuot offers an opportunity and a challenge. We have an opportunity to remind our communities about the transformative power of studying Torah, and we face the challenge of overbooked calendars, distracted congregants, and exhaustion at the end of the school year. Against this reality, the need for Shavuot’s message becomes more urgent with each year. Our media-saturated, algorithmically manipulated, technologically exhausted minds are bombarded with messages, each shouting its claim on truth. But Shavuot says that Torah, and particularly the Jewish way of reading Torah, what we call parshanut, can be the antidote.

Well, in our time, the competing claims of truth have become a crisis of democracy. Abetted by sophisticated messaging and tech operations, political operatives have become what’s known as “conflict entrepreneurs,” emphasizing our divisions and toxifying our civic spaces. What can mere rabbis do? Our hypothesis is that parshanut can help.

Here’s the basic methodology: we take American texts, some famous, some more obscure, but all speaking to core ideas about our country, and we apply our Jewish way of reading and talking to them. That’s it. Then we watch how people learn that what really drives our politics are questions about our identities, our narratives, the stories and ideas that hold us together as a nation. Despite what the conflict entrepreneurs want us to believe, none of these issues are binary, none are simple, and all are amenable to conversation between neighbors, community members, and citizens.

In over seven years of practice, with a pilot cohort of 10 congregations, and with over 200 subscribers in the past six months, American Scripture Project has shown that our methodology strengthens communities, reignites patriotism, complexifies conversation, and cultivates healthy civic norms (some of which can directly help your congregation’s meeting culture).

First, consider grabbing one of our DafAmerica posts to use for this Shavuot. DafAmerica is an abbreviated version of American Scripture Project that pairs an American text with the weekly parasha. It uses shorter texts or excerpts and requires less preparation. All Dapim are free. Parashat Yitro, dedicated to the Declaration of Independence, might be a good place to start. Vayehi may also provide a nice foundation, as it introduces the importance of narrative to your learners. But any of the posts can start a conversation in your community, and if you advertise in advance, you may even bring in a few people who have no idea what Shavuot is.

Then, consider signing up for the full nine-session American Scripture Project program. This program can be used at any time, but starting this fall, we will begin a second cohort of congregations, who will progress through it together. We will supplement each session (designed to be 90 minutes) with dedicated monthly coaching sessions, open comments on the website with ideas from peers, and collaboration across the group. Registration for this program is now open.

Interested? Click here!

If you’re ready to sign up, as part of registration, we ask each new congregation to subscribe as a Founding Member and make a $500 donation. If that poses a challenge for you, please reach out.

Our first Info Session will be on July 24 at 2:30 p.m. EDT on Zoom.