Rosh Hashanah 2026: Peel Back the Layers of Prejudice

Rosh haShanah is a celebration of the sixth day of Creation—the culmination of the world in the placing of humanity as the cornerstone upon which all rests. God created the entirety of the ecosystem as we know it through the first five days, and then on the sixth completed it through the creation of humans, the glue that holds it together, or allows it to fall apart. 

A Rabbinic midrash on Leviticus teaches (Vayikra Rabba 29:1): 
“On the day of Rosh haShana, in the first hour, humanity entered God’s thoughts…in the seventh God breathed a soul into it, in the eighth God brought it into the Garden, in the ninth Adam was commanded, in the tenth Adam transgressed, in the eleventh Adam was sentenced, in the twelfth Adam emerged with a pardon.”

Rosh haShanah teaches us that we make or break the world in our actions. In that one day, the nature of humanity was revealed: Formed from the earth, infused with God’s breath, then given the role of the Garden’s guardian, only to err, be corrected, and then pardoned. Our behaviors, our choices, and our responses to the world around us are what makes humans human.

As the great Jewish thinker Baruch Spinoza understood, humans are apt to be overtaken by “prejudices about good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness." (Ethics, Appendix to Part I) These prejudices misalign us from our relationship with each other, with the world, and with the Divine. They lead us to misinterpret our world. We then act on a misinterpretation, rather than the world as it is, causing us to transgress. Whether that is misunderstanding another’s behaviors and responding inappropriately, or misunderstanding our responsibilities for the world we exist within—these prejudices lead to mistakes that create the need for t’shuvah, atonement. 

Rosh haShanah begins this process of re-attuning ourselves to the world of things as they are, and our relationship with all parts of it. We seek to peel back the layers of prejudice; to align our mind and our world so that we can perceive existence as clearly as possible. The goal is to understand the effects of our behaviors, and to align them with the world as accurately as we can. When we fail to do this, we fall into a feedback loop of confusion. We misunderstand the world around us, then respond to it in a way that reflects that misunderstanding. This then reinforces our misunderstanding. To do true t’shuvah, we have to address the first misunderstanding the rest have been built upon. We must seek where our prejudices, not some problem in the external world, led us to err, and to work for forgiveness in a way that allows us to fully perceive the mistakes we have made. 

In Judith Butler’s tour de force of Jewish critique of Zionism we can see a shadow of this thinking as carrying over from their similar critique of gender. Gender, to Butler, has no underlying, essential source. It is simply the acts we perform and the way we perform them. When we peel back the layers of those acts, of those performances, we find that underneath “it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.” (Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in The Judith Butler Reader, p.127) There is no hidden self underneath the performance; only the behaviors in relationship to the world.

This becomes true for Butler’s conception of Judaism, too. “To ‘be’ a Jew is to be departing from oneself, cast out into a world of the non-Jew, bound to make one’s way ethically and politically precisely there within a world of irreversible heterogeneity.” (Butler, Parting Ways, p. 15) There is no pure, essential Judaism that exists without relationship to non-Jews. Judaism is expressed as a series of performances that are deeply colored by their interaction with the non-Jew. 

Who we are is made up of our performances; our actions, the reactions they produce, and the further actions we take based on those reactions. When we concretize and collect misapprehensions, they accrete into the world we engage with; we can only clarify by stepping into relation to another who reflects us back to ourselves more clearly. This Rosh haShanah, remember that the beginning of t'shuvah, or atonement, is return. Return to the moment we first misunderstood; a shedding of accretions; an attempt to understand ourselves through that which we relate to on its own terms.

May each of us begin this new year with deep engagement with the world around us, re-aligning through a new phase of action that accepts the world on its terms, clear of our prejudices.