Dear Aaron Family JCC Community,

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There's a strange detail in the Yom Kippur liturgy that most of us say every year without noticing.

The Vidui, our confession, is written entirely in the plural. Ashamnu, Bagadnu, Gazalnu. We have sinned, we have betrayed, we have stolen. Not I, we.

You could be standing alone in synagogue, having never stolen anything in your life, and you still beat your chest and confess to theft. Judaism does not let us confess our way through Yom Kippur in the first-person singular. It insists, structurally, grammatically, that atonement is a communal act, not a private one.

That has always struck me as one of the most radical ideas in our tradition: Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh BaZeh, all of Israel is responsible for one another. On the holiest day of the year, when the stakes are our own souls, Judaism still will not let us stand alone.

I think about that a great deal in this work.

Every day at the J, someone walks through our doors carrying something we cannot see. A senior who has not had a real conversation since Tuesday. A parent quietly unraveling under the weight of a difficult diagnosis. A member who just lost a loved one and does not yet know how to say the words out loud. Yom Kippur asks us to confess in the plural because none of us are actually managing our lives in isolation, no matter how convincingly we perform otherwise. We are carrying each other, whether we notice it or not.

That is not incidental to what a JCC is. It is close to the whole point.

This Yom Kippur, as you fast, reflect, and stand before God with your community, I would ask you to hold two things at once. First, the deeply personal work of cheshbon hanefesh, the honest accounting of who you were this year and who you intend to become. And second, the recognition that your atonement was never meant to be a solitary project. It was designed, deliberately, to be tied to the person praying next to you, and the one you'll never meet.

That is what this building tries to be, 365 days a year, not just on the holiest one. A place where no one has to carry the weight alone.

On behalf of everyone at the Aaron Family JCC, I wish you and your family an easy and meaningful fast. May you be sealed for a year of health, connection, and the kind of community that shows up before you have to ask.

G'mar Chatimah Tovah.