During the High Holidays This Year, We Are Reaching Toward an Abolition Judaism

“Judeo Christian values” are having a real moment. Whether lionizing Charlie Kirk’s legacy or trying to stop Zohran Mamdani’s momentum, right-wing leaders across the United States, Israel, and beyond have been invoking the term to include Jews in the ongoing political project of expanding domination at home and abroad.

The undeniable drumbeat of American Jewish opposition to the genocide in Gaza grows louder. But “Judeo-Christian values” keep most Jewish-American institutions cemented to Israel. Carceral logics unite their Zionism with support for the prison-industrial complex as a “solution” to the capitalist production of sacrifice zones and surplus populations — and to antisemitic violence. It’s understandable that many Jews have fears about safety when reading reports about attacks on synagogues like the one that just occurred in the UK. But the solution to these fears is not increasing police presence at every synagogue during these Days of Awe. Doing so only reinforces the false notion that the police and prisons can keep us safe.

Laudable, powerful opposition to this norm include Jewish Voice for Peace’s effort to end the Deadly Exchange program, and a new Community Safety Campaign that offers an alternative to policing, designed to build “a Jewish future, and a future for all people, that relies on practices of solidarity.” Both grow out of years of work by leftist Jews — and in particular leftist Black Jews — naming “the ways our institutions’ competing policy objectives undermine Jewish anti-racist efforts,” as Rebecca Pierce wrote, and asserting Jews should “divest from structures of white supremacy.” These “competing policy objectives” (including but not limited to Zionism) are only some of the obstacles to Abolition Judaism. The structures of white (and/or Christian and/or patriarchal) supremacy are both physical and ideological — and thus, theological.

Most Jewish religious leaders are educated by legacy institutions to lead Jewish meaning-making through limited, nationalist definitions of Judaism, and thus trained to reinforce the world and its power structures as they are constructed now. Our tradition provides a clear, better alternative: an understanding of “The World to Come,” or olam habah, as this same world we inhabit, but transformed.

Jewish ideas are made unavailable to abolitionists — Jewish and not — when they remain locked inside Zionist, racist, and carceral understandings of Judaism.

Replacing olam habah with an ethnonationalist project (Israel) is a profound problem for us as Jews — and not only us. Our tradition holds many creative and provocative ideas about universal freedom and transforming the world — ideas that belong alongside other cultures’ radical traditions. The left needs them all. Jewish ideas are made unavailable to abolitionists — Jewish and not — when they remain locked inside Zionist, racist, and carceral understandings of Judaism. As that’s mostly what’s on offer from the bimah, Jews who look to their clergy or their tradition for insight on ethics and political imagination are stuck listening to a blast of nationalist theology — or if they resist that theology, many remain stuck in an argument with the right, a trap writer Jon Danforth-Appell has termed Zionist Realism. Others find themselves stuck in allyship when what is needed is solidarity.

The discipline and rigor of abolition offers a way out of this bind. “Abolition is a totality and it is ontological,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us. “It is the context and content of struggle, the site where culture recouples with the political.” From here, Gilmore goes on to discuss the importance of organizing to give this recoupling its form.

As organizers ourselves, we observe that we Jews are more practiced at organizing than recoupling. This is evident in our left political institutions and in nascent Abolition Judaism’s promising green shoots: a tiny handful of synagogues, new prayerbooks, places to study, ritual guides, prisoner support, and a growing number of other kinds of Jewish institutions — including one run by Rabbi Andy Kahn, one of the authors of this piece — now coalescing in response to a clear need.

We understand “recoupling our culture with the political” as a challenge to go beyond anti-Zionist polemics, statements of commitment to our neighbors, or finally removing the American and Israeli flags from the front of the room — as helpful and necessary a step as each of those actions is.

“Abolition is a vision of a restructured society,” writes Mariam Kaba, “in a world where we have everything we need … foundational to our personal and community safety.” Given current events (the last two years, the last 400, or even the last 5786 years), a restructured society is hard to envision. Perhaps this is why such vision pervades our prophetic texts.

On Yom Kippur, most Jews read the prophetic book of Jonah, about which it helps to know the basics: God picks Jonah, seemingly at random, to travel to Nineveh — a city of non-Jews — to pass judgment upon them. Fearing the Ninevites will kill him when he shows up to scold them, he flees by boat. God responds by creating a storm that threatens to capsize the boat, on which Jonah happens to be the only Hebrew (a tribal-cultural predecessor to the eventual Jews). Knowing that he is the cause for the danger, Jonah is pitched overboard at his request, where he is swallowed by a big fish — the storm abates, saving the others on the boat. After some time inside the fish, he accepts his assignment and announces Nineveh’s judgment. The residents immediately do the work of repentance and atonement, and God forgives them.

Most don’t follow the story to the end—because when God forgives the Ninevites, Jonah works himself up into a carceral tantrum. Where is the retribution Jonah threatened? The fire and the brimstone God visited on Sodom and Gomorrah? When Jonah gives himself heatstroke, God miraculously sprouts a plant to protect him from the sun. Jonah catches his breath, the plant crumbles and dies, and Jonah returns to his histrionics. God then asks Jonah, “Are you so deeply grieved about the plant?” “Yes,” he replies, “so deeply that I want to die.” God reproves him, pointing out both Jonah’s fundamental irresponsibility, and his lack of solidarity with the Ninevites who are, of course, sibling humans created by God, though not sibling Hebrews.

We, the readers of the story, are positioned as Jonah. We do know, in our bodies, what it is to want to see punishment exacted, to have our righteousness affirmed in violence visited upon another. But by rewarding the Ninevites and forcing Jonah to put aside both his desire for recognition by others’ suffering and for benefit without labor (the plant), God affirms the example of the Ninevites — the holiness of the work of repentance, an example of restorative justice. This is the cornerstone of the kind of world God expects us to make. Or, as Gilmore puts it, “freedom is a place we make.”

Abolition Judaism posits that teshuvah can help us see the world that can be, the World to Come, and position our work, and our solidarity in this world, accordingly.

This abolitionist parable showcases the Jewish approach to repentance, best defined by the historic authority on the topic, Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides. He was a medieval rabbi who blended Aristotelian thought, Muslim philosophy, and Jewish halachah (law) into forms that nearly all Jews — no matter their affiliation — have held central to this day. In Maimonides’s estimation, one who errs and does the work of teshuvah (repentance) is viewed as on a higher moral level than one who never erred at all, as the hard work of climbing to a greater standard of behavior is more laudable than having never improved. The whole point of being human is trying to do better — trying to mindfully improve ourselves and each other while working towards olam habah.

In Maimonides’s framework, teshuvah is accomplished first through publicly confessing to one’s wrongdoing, then appeasing any injured party, and resolving to never commit the wrongdoing again. Maimonides writes in the Mishneh Torah that the completion of teshuvah is seen when “a person who confronts the same situation in which he sinned when he has the potential to commit [the sin again], and, nevertheless, abstains and does not commit it because of his teshuvah alone and not because of fear or a lack of strength.”

This year, as they did last year, as they have done for many years, mainstream Jewish leaders confront the same situation — the Israeli genocide of Palestinians — and fail to make a different choice. (Perpetuating the lie of “Judeo-Christian values,” most also fail to mention the importance of Muslim ideas to our own.) Something seems to have gone awry with their teshuvah.

Studying abolition helps us understand why these leaders and the organizations they lead consistently choose false promises of “Judeo-Christian values” over the holy promise of solidarity. By contextualizing them inside the global structures and processes (i.e., political economy) we can understand, without excusing, their failings. We can move from pleading a moral case to figuring out the political reorganization that would move them past being the Jonah who flees his responsibility, bringing the threat of capsize on the whole boat, or the Jonah who indulges in histrionics when people name Israel what it is: a genocidal project. Consumed with their own supporting role in what Gilmore calls a “political culture in search of ‘infinite prosperity’ that is dependent on a perpetual enemy that must always be fought but may never be vanquished,” they are not taking up her more pressing question, “How do we find the place of freedom?”

We find some guidance in God’s description of the Ninevites as people who “Do not yet know their left hand from their right” — meaning people in formation, who are learning and growing by doing teshuvah in multi-ethnic community so as not to commit the same offenses again. The traditions of Judaism, and this season of Yom Kippur, can support us in jettisoning our carceral expectations and the false promises of “Judeo-Christian values,” and stepping into solidarity. Abolition Judaism posits that teshuvah can help us see the world that can be, the World to Come, and position our work, and our solidarity in this world, accordingly.