Yom Kippur 5787 - True Believers
10 Tishrei 5787 | Sept 21, 2026
Rabbi David Edleson | Temple Sinai | South Burlington, Vermont
TRUE BELIEVERS
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
Ten years ago, when I first went back to be a congregational rabbi after over a decade working primarily in higher education, I did my first High Holy Day sermon using Frost’s Mending Wall. It was 2016, before Trump was first elected and “Build the Wall” was being chanted as his rallies.
Mending Wall is the poem that has the famous line, “good fences make good neighbors,” but of course, Frost’s meaning is the opposite.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
I talked about how walls give us a false sense of safety and keep us from solving deeper problems. I said that it wasn’t Trump’s wall, or the Separation Barrier in Israel that worried me most, but the walls of certainty we were building between ourselves and those we disagree with. People were certain they were right, and that certainty seemed to me perhaps the most dangerous part of that election.
When we are certain, there is no room for growth and change; there is no room for teshuvah. Certainty walls off the humility that teshuvah requires.
Well, ten years have gone by, and many things worry me – AI, Climate Change, Antisemitism, Polarization - still, the thing that worries me most is the certainty with which so many people hold their opinions.
The certainty with which I hold to my opinions.
If we’ve become more and more secular, why are our political beliefs so dogmatic?
True-believers scare me – especially when it’s me.
During those years when I was working in higher ed, I taught Introduction to Ethics courses almost every semester, and if there is one thing you learn from studying formal ethics it is that there is almost no way to logically prove your ethics are right. There are approaches and some of them work well for some situations, but none of them work all the time. Mostly, we feel something is right deep inside, and we craft arguments to support what we already believe.
The great Scottish philosopher and ethicist, David Hume famously taught that when a discussion moves from “is” to “ought” it has left the realm of reason and moved into the realm of emotions, or passions as he called them.
In preparing for this sermon, I reread some of Hume’s essays, and particularly his 1754 essay Of Superstition and Enthusiasm. In it, Hume sees religion as a good in the world but also sees how it can become dangerous. He distinguishes between two ways religion can go way off the rails.
One is “superstition.” Superstition, Hume argues, comes from ignorance and fear. We have irrational fears and a terror of powerlessness. We deal with that by creating equally irrational remedies that give us the illusion of control.
The other is “enthusiasm”, but it turns out, enthusiasm meant something very different until the 19th century, something dangerous. In ancient Greece, enthousiasmos meant to be possessed by a god. En-theus, and was a kind of madness brought on by religious fervor. Ancient Greek society had strictly defined rituals and times in which mystery cults induced such madness, because such enthusiasm without strict boundaries was seen as one of the most dangerous threats to the stability of society.
By the time Henry the Eighth was beheading Anne Bolyn, enthusiasm had come in English to mean overly pious and religious, too fervent in religious zeal, a fanatic in religious observance and strictures. It was irrational, volatile and dangerous.
Hume argues that this sort of enthusiasm was the result of certainty and over-confidence. The enthusiasts, in their religious rapture, come to believe that they are chosen by God, touched by God and see the truth that others are missing. Enthusiasts were, to Hume, people who, full of religious passion, believed that God was instructing them to do deeds in defiance of law and social taboos. “Human reason and even morality are rejected, “ wrote Hume about enthusiasts, “as fallacious guides, and the fanatic madman delivers himself over blindly” to what he believes to be Divine inspiration, but what may in fact be overheated self-importance or frenzied rage.”
True Believers need not believe in God; their cause becomes god-like to them.
True Believers rely on emotional reasoning and confirmation bias reinforced by their circle of affirming fellow believers.
Facts that challenge their narrative or opposing views that challenge their core beliefs are seen as heretical.
True believers too often see negotiation or compromise as a form of moral failure or betrayal of belief. This makes actual progress and peaceful resolutions to complex problems nearly impossible, further destabilizing society.
True believers often see those who disagree as corrupt enemies, agents of evil.
Eventually, because they see their cause as holy and more important than any other issue, extreme measures—such as coercion, censorship, intimidation, or physical violence—are reframed as righteous acts of resistance and purity. Believing one possesses ultimate truth makes collateral damage, cruelty, or violence feel justified rather than tragic.
That sort of enthusiasm, that sort of “true believer” is a problem in a democracy where compromise and tolerance of disagreement is essential.
It’s interesting that as a culture, Americans put so much value on enthusiasm, on passion, on conviction. It must be part of our individualism and general can-do ethos, but I think it also comes from our True-Believer Puritan roots, where having the right faith, the right beliefs are the key to salvation and eternal life.
Looking around at the activist groups that have come to dominate American politics and religion, I see a lot of True Believers. Whether it was the MAGA or the DSA, there is a lot of religious fervor and certainty in our politics.
It’s gotten me to thinking a lot about a little book I read in college. It was assigned as part of an upper-level Political Science course I was taking on Mass Movements and Revolution. The book was by a man name Eric Hoffer and it was titled, True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.
Hoffer observed that mass movements of believers arise when large numbers of frustrated people, believing their own individual lives to be meaningless or spoiled, join a movement demanding radical change. He wrote, “A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.” People, he writes “find salvation… by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.”
He also observed that hatred “is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”
He continues:
“The enemy—the indispensable devil of every mass movement—is omnipresent. He plots both outside and inside the ranks of the faithful. It is his voice that speaks through the mouth of the dissenter, and the deviationists are his stooges. If anything goes wrong within the movement, it is his doing. It is the sacred duty of the true believer to be suspicious. He must be constantly on the lookout for saboteurs, spies and traitors.”
Hoffer saw the religious structures and motivations behind mass movements, whether they were religious or secular.
Secular movements pride themselves on not being like the religions they attack, but they have much more in common than they think. Populist politicians on opposite sides of the aisle might see themselves as totally different to their opponent, but to me they seem to have a great deal in common. They are True Believers. They seem to traffic in an almost Christian idea of the battle of the forces of light against the forces of dark. Their followers often veer toward zealotry and view those they disagree with as heretics and sinners.
Our politics have become fundamentalist. We have replaced religious moral certainty with political moral certainty; it is not better.
We are in an age of zealots and True Believers, some religious, some atheistic, all convinced they are helping to solve some big problems, while making the core problem of polarization, division and zealotry worse.
It is hard to see, when you are a True Believer, that you might be doing as much harm as good; if not more. It’s hard for me to see it.
It’s easier to see looking at other places and peoples. We see it in India today, home of Gandhi, where today factions of militant Hindus, inspired by Modi and the dream of Hindustan has led to violent attacks on mosques and on Moslems. They are certain they are doing God’s work, and that violence and war is only way forward.
We see the dangers of True Believers in the actions of Hammas, of Hezbollah, Iran, the Taliban and Al Shabab. We saw it 25 years ago in the actions of Al-Qaeda. They are certain they are doing God’s work, and that violence and war is only way forward.
We see it in the attacks of Hilltop Youth, the Israeli settlers that have been violently attacking Palestinian villages in the West Bank. They are being tacitly encouraged by other zealots in power, like Ben G’vir and Betzalel Smotrich.
We see, especially after October 7, parts of the Zionist movement moving toward apocalypticism, violence and extremism. They are certain they are doing God’s work, and that violence and war is only way forward.
And we see it right here at home.
As I discussed on Rosh HaShanah, social media and other influences are creating not only polarization, but an apocalyptic sense that right is on “our”side and the other side is evil.
Even though 86% of Americans say they feel exhausted by the division in the country, 80% of party members believe that the other party “poses a threat that if not stopped will destroy America as we know it.” (NBC News). This is not only put in political terms, but in religious terms: 45% of Americans think members of the opposing party are “downright evil.” (Agora)
I’m not here to argue about the sides; instead, I want you to think about the certainty with which we hold to our political views, and the religious language and emotionality that we bring into our language about politics. We don’t use the language of disagreement; we use the language of sin and salvation, evil and redemption. For many, our politics have become our religion. When challenging our political beliefs becomes heresy, we’ve become zealots.
The tragedy of the zealot is that they always begin with a cause that feels holy. They see a broken world, a real injustice, or a threat to their survival, and they feel a sacred spark of anger. But a mass movement of True Believers is more like a fire that was meant to warm the house but ends up burning it down. The zealot’s fire consumes curiosity, smothers compassion and melts away the ability to see the humanity in anyone who dares to disagree or challenge their motives.
Unchecked zealotry—whether religious or political—has fueled and is fueling crusades, mass atrocities, and the collapse of democratic systems. It is threatening our democracy, democracies all over Europe, and it is certainly starting to tear Israel apart.
That is why this year, what I feel I need to repent for the most is just how certain I have been that I am right. It is hard to stay open when you are being attacked. Still, I feel many of us need to repent for the safety we have taken in our certainty that we are on the side of good and right. We are in the army of light. The longer I live, the fuzzier and more complicated it becomes to know what is right, much less, be certain of it.
On Rosh Hashanah: the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. That is a story of a man who at one point famously argues with God and questions God’s morality, but here, in a time that demanded questions, Abraham has become a True Believer. The rabbis tell us he rose early in the morning to saddle his donkeys because of his enthusiasm to fulfill God’s command to sacrifice Isaac. He was certain that God was speaking just to him and telling him to kill his son.
There are many places in the Bible where someone shows way too much enthusiasm for doing violence in the name of God. Sometimes they are prophets; sometimes they are kings or queens or patriarchs or matriarchs, but they are certain that what they are doing is not only right, but holy.
This troubles all of us, and it certainly troubled the rabbis who saw their entire civilization destroyed by zealotry, extremism, and war. Two thousand years ago, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, our people were trapped inside the city walls. The Talmud teaches that the city actually had enough storehouses of wheat, barley, and oil to sustain the population for twenty-one years. Survival was possible. Compromise or strategic endurance was on the table, but our people had divided into factions of True Believers, each seeing the other as the threat. Inside the walls, two factions of Jewish extremists called kinaim and the biryonim—the Zealots and a group that the rabbis called thugs because of their violent intimidation tactics—the kinaim and the biryonim wanted an immediate war with Rome. They had no patience for the long game, and absolutely zero tolerance for fellow Jews who advocated for caution or strategy.
To force everyone into battle, the Zealots did the unthinkable: they burned down their own people's storehouses of grain. They literally starved their own brothers and sisters to force a war but that was what was needed for the resistance. The Zealots were so blinded by their own righteous rage that they destroyed the community they wanted to save. They believed they were acting for the sake of God, but they brought about the destruction of the Second Temple through sinat chinam—gratuitous, baseless hatred of Romans and of other Jews who disagreed with them.
The rabbis who survived set about to recreate, from the ashes, a tradition rooted in study, in Torah, in helping those in need, and with debate and argument as holy in avoiding the sort of zealotry they saw destroy the Temple. They advocated for faith tempered by skepticism with a keen eye on unintended consequences of actions that feel righteous. They put forth the radical idea that two people can deeply disagree about a moral issue and both be speaking righteous words.
The truth, the rabbis knew, was always more complicated than the True-Believer could see, and the unintended consequences of extremists were often as bad, or worse, than whatever they were fighting.
The Judaism that the rabbis created did the thing that is most infuriating to True Believers. They insisted on seeing a question from every side, from both principles and consequences, from balancing human nature with justice.
It is not very satisfying. It does not give us slogans, or easy answers, or confidence in the rightness of our beliefs. It takes patience. It does not offer easy solutions. It does not offer any clear form of salvation.
Judaism was not meant to be easy. It was meant to temper the sin of zealotry.
In one of my favorite stories from the Talmud, Reish Lakish, would challenge everything his friend Rabbi Yochanon would argue with 24 questions. They would go back and forth, each challenging the other. After Lakish died, the rabbis sent another scholar to console Yochanon, but all he did was agree with him and tell him he had good arguments.
Being agreed with instead of challenged literally drove Yochanon out of his mind and to his death.
The opposite of zealotry is not an opposing zealotry. The opposite of zealotry is holy humility. The opposite of zealotry is listening.
Tonight, at the end of our services, we will do Havdalah and sing Eliyahu Hanavi. Eliyahu was a fiery zealot. He was a True Believer. He fled to the desert, furious at the people's flaws, claiming he was the only truly loyal person left. But God admonished him by showing him the Divine presence was not in the rushing wind, not in the earthquake, and not in the raging fire. God was in the kol demamah dakah—the still, quiet voice.
This year, let us try to listen to the still, quiet voice of humility, to be people strong enough in our faith to admit we aren’t sure, we have doubts, we have questions.
Let us slow our roll to pick a side.
Let’s try saying, “I’m not sure” more often.
I know I need to do t’shuvah over my own certainties, and the times since October 7 that I rested in my certainty for comfort, because I was too raw to challenge myself.
This year let us ask forgiveness for the sin of being zealots in a time that demands a different discourse. It is a style of discourse that our tradition has always held up to the world. The Jewish tradition of moral complexity and asking questions instead of giving answers is more needed than ever.
This year, if we want to work for tikkun olam, let’s embrace that most essential of Jewish values: the value of questions over answers.
Shana Tova.
