High Holidays 2025/5786

Almost Every Religious Jew Writes One of These. Here's Mine.

It’s 20 minutes to candle lighting and Yom Kippur begins. As Jews, we ask G-d to forgive our sins. This has followed 10 days where we seriously think about our sins and apologizing to those that we hurt (if we can). We forgive those who hurt us, even if we don’t want them back in our lives.

I write this after spending all morning in housing court because my landlord filed eviction papers and even got an eviction without telling me. I didn’t know about it until the marshal sent a letter telling me to pay up or get out. It’s been a rough few weeks. I was waiting for the landlord’s lawyer who sent me to intake to get a referral for the legal aid attorney. Next court date on December 17 so maybe I’ll get a one shot deal or help from one of the housing groups by then.

Either way, not quite like eviction proceedings to get you in the Yom Kippur mood. I don’t recommend it. If you’ve been reading this Substack for any length of time, you know the issue. For new readers, ChatGPT killed my best income stream. Not only has it stolen my clients, but it has trained from my work. That’s my best explanation for clients telling me that they aren’t going to pay because the AI detector said that I didn’t write an original paper.

I’ve been alternatively trying to get those clients back and find new ways to make money. I sent my resume to hundreds of potential employers. I really have no faith in the Indeed site. Maybe next year, I’ll get some great editing jobs. My bg acting gigs will pick up (bye bye purple hair). Maybe Door Dash will be lucrative enough to pay over the principle.

On the way home, a guy came on the subway with a speaker and started loudly “rapping” into a microphone. He was loud. I couldn’t shove my fingers in my ears enough to tune out his pedestrian obvious rhymes. A stranger gave me ear plug. He didn’t have to do that. Yet, when he saw me suffering he was kind.

On Yom Kippur we pray as a group. When we confess our sins, we say that we have sinned. We have blasphemed. We have murdered. We have stolen. We are together in this. We might not like every Jew we know. In fact, I can name at least three Jews that I can’t stand. But on Yom Kippur, we are praying for each other. We are praying for the ones who aren’t in shul and the most holy people we know. We are praying for the Jews that tell Holocaust jokes to make their antisemitic friends feel comfortable. We are praying for the Jews that confront Nazis whenever they can.

On Yom Kippur, we read Yonah and while most people know about the whole “getting swallowed by a fish” part, the real kicker is WHY he was running away from his mission. He didn’t want to preach to Ninevah because these people are monsters. They were the Assyrians who piled up skulls and destroyed entire civilizations. Yonah is seriously angry at G-d for letting them repent.

This hits differently now that we’ve had almost two years of Leftists celebrating October 7 while accusing Israel of Genocide. As I’m writing this, the IDF is stopping the flotilla of idiots who are spouting their propaganda. The irony is that if Israel was as bad as they claim, they’d all be dead by now. You don’t see these people going into Afghanistan or Sudan with aid obviously. Greta Thunberg is not going to go up against that Iranian Revolutionary Guard. That role is for Iranian women who have the courage to resist theocratic fascism, not egotists with mean pinched up faces.

Yet, even these people have the ability to grow and change and stop with their bullshit. They know that they can change because else, they’d watch the October 7 documentaries that Israel showed them and not care. Instead they resist all evidence that contradicts their “Heroic Hamas vs. Evil Israel” narrative because seriously considering that Hamas is evil enough to rape children would break them.

May G-d break them and put them back together as decent human beings.

May G-d break everyone who stubbornly hates without thinking. May G-d rebuild them into tzaddiks.

May we all find the opportunities to get off our bullshit.

May we all find opportunities to be kind.

Have an easy fast if you are fasting and a pleasant Thursday if you aren’t.

If you like me, please donate to my gofundme, get a paid subscription or hire me to edit your manuscript, write your personal statement, etc. You can email me at omanlieder@yahoo.com or

Ok. Yom Kippur Stuff. Let’s see. Buy Rashi by Maurice Liber.

Want to read Rabbi Sacks writing about this in a much eloquent way? Here you go.

YOu can still donate to the Indiegogo Campaign for Nothing in the Basement. Great gifts.