Bob Schwartz

The upcoming Jewish New Year 5787, which begins with Rosh Hashanah on the evening of September 11, 2026, is declared the Jewish Year of Compassion.

This obviously has no formal or official effect. I have no position and very limited influence. It is just urging the Jewish communities to focus more on compassion this coming year.

I’ve posted regularly about the High Holidays. Here is a post from 2024:

Confession for the Jewish High Holidays 5785/2024

I have been reticent to publicly and widely express my views about the positions of Israel and Jewish communities on the current Israeli war on Gaza. Not that expressing divergent views is discouraged. But it is frequently the source of dispute with little movement. So my views have been expressed in small circles. I have posted about Gaza, urging support for extraordinary work of the International Rescue Committee, which seems to me humanely neutral.

By 2024, a year after the Gaza war began, I had a growing sense that more focus on compassion—great and unconditional compassion—might be beneficial. The 2024 post above was about a central part of the High Holidays liturgy: confession. Was I suggesting, obliquely, that among the matters that we confess on the holidays—we all have lots to confess—maybe the treatment of the Gazan people was one of them?

The point of the Declaration is to increase the Jewish focus on compassion. This is not in any way to suggest that compassion is not a significant element of the tradition or that the Jewish communities and their members are uncompassionate. The only point of the Declaration is to promote investigation this New Year, as communities and as people, into whether compassion has been conditioned and qualified in ways that subvert or contradict the most basic—the most central—principles of the tradition. Whether human compassion, not just God’s compassion, should play a greater role in the High Holidays and in Jewish policies and positions.

5787: The Jewish Year of Compassion