On Sunday, 20 September, at sunset, Israel will do something that almost runs against its national character: it will stop. The roads will empty, most commerce will close, routine broadcasting will largely fall silent, and synagogues will fill. For about twenty-five hours, one of the world’s most argumentative and vigilant societies will wrap itself in silence.
To a non-Jewish reader, Yom Kippur may appear to be one more fast in an ancient calendar. It begins the previous evening because the Jewish day starts at sunset. It is Judaism’s holiest day, the Sabbath of Sabbaths. There is no feast, procession, or fireworks. Instead, there is fasting, prayer, abstention from work, confession, and the difficult duty of seeking forgiveness. It is a day to stand without decoration before God, before those who have caused us pain and before those whom we have hurt.
During the ten Days of Awe, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, Jewish tradition depicts every person as standing in judgement. The verdict is written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur. Yet this is not blind fate. At its centre is teshuvah, usually translated as repentance but literally meaning return: to the path abandoned, the values neglected, and the responsibilities evaded. An apology without changed conduct is not teshuvah. It is a courteous description of the same mistake.
The most unsettling idea in Yom Kippur lies in the language of confession. The worshipper says, Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu: we have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed. The confession is collective even when the offence was personal. Judaism refuses to portray society as the righteous looking down upon other people’s sins. We all help create the climate that rewards arrogance, the silence that permits failure, and the habit of assigning every responsibility to someone seated in another chair.
Jewish teaching also places a hard limit on the power of ritual. Yom Kippur may atone for transgressions between a person and God. It does not erase a wrong committed against another human being until the offender has sought forgiveness from the person harmed. One cannot fast before heaven while ignoring the wound left on earth. Even on Judaism’s holiest day, there is no shortcut around responsibility.
This is where Yom Kippur meets 7 October. The Hamas massacre was a planned and savage crime. Moral responsibility for the murder, sexual violence, abduction, and abuse rests with the terrorists and those who sent and supported them. No Israeli error diminishes their guilt. Yet in a sovereign state, moral guilt and institutional responsibility are different questions. The enemy is guilty of the crime. Israel is responsible for protecting its citizens from that enemy.
The attack of 7 October 2023 came almost exactly fifty years after the Yom Kippur War, which began with the surprise assault on Israel on 6 October 1973. The enemy, the leadership, and the precise failure were different. The calendar nevertheless supplied a brutal footnote: a country can be powerful, armed, and experienced, yet still be caught unprepared when it falls in love with its own assumptions.
Arrogance does not always shout. Sometimes it wears a uniform, sits inside a classified paper, appears in a tidy presentation, and speaks in the calm language of probability. It begins when a professional assessment hardens into belief and contradictory information is treated as an inconvenience rather than a warning. An intelligence concept becomes dangerous when facts are forced to serve it instead of being allowed to overturn it.
Since 7 October, Israeli public debate has often become an exercise in confessing other people’s sins. Every political camp can name who failed, who ignored the warnings, and who must resign. That may offer political satisfaction, but it is the opposite of self-examination. The word “Ashamnu” removes the spectator’s chair. Responsibility is not equally shared, but every person and institution must identify its actual share.
A national reckoning does not end with a commission or a few new officeholders. It begins with precise questions. Which warnings were given too little weight? Which assumptions escaped serious challenge? Who feared contradicting a superior? What has changed to prevent a repetition? Accountability is not revenge. Its purpose is to protect the next potential victim.
Humility here does not mean self-abasement. A state that neglects its security simply abandons its citizens again. Yom Kippur does not require Israel to seek forgiveness from unrepentant murderers, blur the difference between aggressor and victim, or surrender its right to self-defence. It requires force without the loss of judgement and investigation without capitulation.
Humility also has strategic value. It requires commanders to assume that the enemy is learning, intelligence officers to listen to dissent, leaders to distinguish loyalty from flattery, and citizens to demand answers from their own political camp. Technology can widen the field of vision, but it cannot guarantee understanding. The more convinced a country becomes of its superiority, the more urgently it needs someone in the room to say that the picture is incomplete.
Indian readers need no lecture on strategic surprise. India, like Israel, is an ancient civilisation and a modern state living alongside real threats. The experiences of Kargil, the Mumbai attacks, and other acts of terrorism have shown that adversaries do not always search for the weakest point. They often search for the point that the defender has stopped imagining can be breached. The cases are not identical, but the principle is shared: confidence is necessary for a nation; certainty can endanger it.
Yom Kippur therefore offers a Jewish idea with universal force. A strong society is not one that never errs. It is one that does not need to lie to itself in order to continue functioning. Leadership is judged by the decisions taken before disaster and by the capacity to say afterwards, “We were wrong, this is our responsibility, and this is what we changed.” Without the third sentence, the first two are public relations.
Yom Kippur ends with the Ne’ilah prayer and a single blast of the shofar. The gates close, the fast ends, and ordinary life returns. In many Jewish homes, preparations for the festival of Sukkot begin almost at once. The sequence matters. Judaism does not sanctify guilt for its own sake. It devotes a full day to recognising failure so that people can rise the next morning and build differently.
When silence descends upon Israel on Sunday evening, the most important question will not be how many hours people fasted or how many times they struck their chests in prayer. It will be whether Israel has become more humble since 7 October: before the enemy, before the facts, before the families of the murdered and the hostages, and before the citizens whom the state promised to protect.
Be humble. This is no concession to Israel’s enemies. It is a duty to Israelis, who must never again pay for the excessive confidence of their leaders. In a country surrounded by enemies, humility is more than a moral virtue. At times, it is the most important layer of defence.