Leap of faith: we must steady the world’s rage

Two years ago the world changed. On 7 October 2023, terror tore through Israel, and the shockwaves reached every Jewish home across the world. What followed has been a time of grief, fear and deep unease, a test of whether we can still live by the values we say define us when the world seems determined to tear them apart.

In those early weeks, as the newly appointed Co-Leads of Progressive Judaism, we worked with allies across communities to write Our Jewish Values, a statement signed by thousands who believed that even in that moment of anguish and rage, we had to hold fast to the moral foundations of Jewish life: compassion, justice, responsibility, and hope. We wrote then that our values must not depend on circumstance. Two years later, that conviction has been tested again – and still it stands.

But the world around us has shifted. Antisemitism, which many thought in retreat, has returned with new confidence. It seeps into public life, education and conversation. At the same time, fear has hardened hearts. Voices once on the extremes now dominate the centre, while those who speak of both justice and empathy are branded naïve or disloyal.

We have seen an Israeli minister invite Tommy Robinson to speak… and some Jews applaud him. We have seen those who challenge that descent into anger shouted down. And we have also seen a rise in anti-Muslim hatred; arson attempts and threats against mosques and imams. Faith buildings no longer feel like sanctuaries.

The Yom Kippur attack in Manchester brought that reality home. To have a synagogue targeted on the holiest day of the year was a wound that cut deeply. It echoed the trauma of October 7 – a festival day turned to tragedy – and was met, again, by too much silence. Children went back to school unasked if they were alright. Colleagues and neighbours, so quick to speak out on other injustices, said nothing. The absence of words became its own kind of injury.

And yet, there was also something else: reaching out. Messages, vigils, flowers left at synagogue gates, people of other faiths simply saying: “We see you.” That sound of solidarity broke through the silence. Proof that empathy, though fragile, still lives.

Since then, we have come to see silence and solidarity as the twin languages of our time. The same week that fear deepened among Jews, Muslim leaders reached out to check on our communities. The same week that mosques were threatened, rabbis wrote to their local imams. There is still reaching out, and it still matters.

We have tried to be consistent: to hold compassion when it would be easier to shut down, to speak for justice when the world demands rage, to remember that moral clarity and moral certainty are not the same thing. Judaism was born in argument and sustained by the belief that truth is found in relationship, not isolation.

Two years on, we still hold those same four words: responsibility, compassion, justice, hope. They feel heavier now, but also holier. The world has shifted, but they still hold true. Our task is not to mirror the world’s rage, but to steady it. To reach out, even when silence feels safer.

The cracks remain, but our sages taught that the Ark held not only the whole tablets, but the broken ones too, a reminder that holiness is not the absence of fracture, but the courage to carry it with care.

Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy are co-leads of Progressive Judaism