Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
Brad Lander spoke at an anti-Israel rally in Brooklyn on Yom Kippur, hijacking and perverting the entire purpose of Yom Kippur itself.
He wrote what he was going to say on his Substack:
For those Jews like me, who do feel a deep connection to Israel, who still believe in & hold hope for the vision of a Jewish and democratic state, when we confess together before God, how can you not join me in seeing the wanton destruction of Gaza, the famine exacerbated by lack of aid, the land-thefts and murders in the West Bank, at the center of our transgressions?Ashamnu — We have been culpable.Bagadnu — We have betrayed our deepest value, that every human being is created in God’s image.Gazalnu — We have stolen homes, and olive groves, and the futures of children....Titanu — We went astray, and we are at risk of letting our whole tradition be dragged astray with us.Mercifully, that tradition teaches that we are never beyond the pale of redemption, not even for complicity in genocide.....On this Day of Atonement, if we are serious about reckoning with our collective transgressions, then we must not only honestly recite them.We must put Palestinian liberation at the center of our t’shuvah. Not only for the human rights and dignity of Palestinians. But also for our own possibility of redemption.
Lander is not confessing his sins. No, he himself is blameless. He is confessing the alleged sins of his fellow liberal Jews. He is making baseless accusations against Jews who still have a shred of pride — and calling it his own teshuvah.
The irony is that he starts the article by noting the famous joke of a rabbi and cantor both crying on Yom Kippur "I am nothing!" and when a simple congregant joins in, the rabbi turns to the cantor and says scornfully, “Hmph. Look who thinks he’s nothing!” That is precisely the self-righteousness that Lander himself is exhibiting, in public: claiming that he is confessing the many sins of Jews when his vidui is purely performative accusations against the Jews who do not share his false view of Israel.
Lander conspicuously leaves himself outside the indictment; he uses the communal wording of the vidui to pretend that he is confessing his own sins at the same moment he is committing them. Many of the terms in the short vidui applies to Lander far more than to Zionists. For example:
Dibarnu dofi - slandering his fellow Jews as if they really support genocide, which is a form of Holocaust inversion
Tafalnu sheker - attaching himself to falsehood by parroting false claims
Yaatznu ra - giving false counsel, telling Jews that they must center Palestinian "liberation" when Palestinians themselves make it clear that this means real genocide against Jews
Niatznu - showing contempt for Jews who care about Israeli lives and who prioritize their own people over those who want to destroy them
And the longer Al Chet is even more damning. It asks forgiveness for sins committed through speech, deceit, slander, scoffing, passing judgment, talebearing — and, remarkably, “with mere verbal confession.” Lander has managed to turn confession itself into another opportunity to sin through speech.
His performance is not only a public ritual meant to make himself look righteous and tear down his fellow Jews. It endangers Jews in New York and America. It gives license for antisemites to say "we aren't against all Jews, we like Jews like Brad Lander, but even he admits that the rest of them support genocide and must be treated with contempt."
Because that is what his little speech is: contempt for Israel, contempt for Jews who care about their own safety and security, and dividing Jews into the "good Jews" like Lander and the "bad Jews" who blame Hamas' use of an entire population as human shields for the destruction of Gaza.
Lander, wearing a tallit and peppering his speech with real Hebrew phrases, should care a little more about what he actually performed on Yom Kippur in front of the cameras: a textbook example of a chilul Hashem.
