Rabbi Zvika Krieger, Chochmat HaLev
October 1, 2025

We’re living in a time where life is moving fast. Things are changing at unprecedented speed. I don’t think anyone can keep up with the news cycle these days. We’re constantly reacting to what is being thrown at us. Everything somehow feels simultaneously urgent and futile. Yom Kippur calls on us to reflect on the year that has passed – but how do we do that in this moment in history when every day has felt like a year? Yom Kippur also calls on us to set intentions for the year ahead – but how do we do that when the future has never felt so uncertain?

To answer this question, let’s turn for guidance to Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, known as the Ari, one of the most significant mystics in Jewish history. On Rosh Hashanah, he pointed us toward the story of the first human, told in the book of Genesis, created as two people, connected back-to-back, and then split into two separate beings. This process starts on Rosh Hashanah, but the two sides only become fully differentiated 10 days later – tonight, Yom Kippur. 

The Torah refers to these two distinctive qualities as Zachar and Nekeivah. These terms often get translated as man and woman, or as masculine and feminine. But that distinction does not work for the Jewish mystics – partially because the mystics love gender-bending (don’t tell Donald Trump), but even more so because the mystics believe that all people, regardless of gender, have both qualities. 

So if they’re not male and female, what are they? The answer to this question is key to the work of Yom Kippur; the Ari teaches that since the differentiation between Zachar and Nekeivah culminated on Yom Kippur, they each have something essential to teach us about the healing and repair we need for ourselves, for our relationships, and for our communities in these turbulent times. 

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Let’s start with Zachar, the first energy referred to in the Genesis story. The Ari points out that Zachar comes from the Hebrew root meaning to remember. This is the part of ourselves that looks toward the past, toward the source. This orientation is essential: In order to know where you’re going, you need to know where you came from. Contemporary psychology confirms what the Jewish mystics have been saying for centuries: that the wounds from our early lives have a significant impact on how we move through the world today.  

When you notice that every time someone raises their voice, you shrink inside — and then you remember the way anger thundered through your childhood home. That memory helps explain you as an adult, and with that awareness you can begin to respond differently. When you realize your drive to overachieve isn’t only about ambition but about an old longing to be noticed — suddenly you can show yourself compassion instead of just exhaustion. When you trace a conflict in your relationship back to patterns you learned watching your parents fight, you gain the freedom to choose a new way forward.

But there is a risk in being too rooted in the Zachar energy. It’s a dynamic called wound-worshipping – that instead of viewing wounds as experiences to be processed and eventually integrated, some people cling to them as a central part of their identity.

People can become attached to their suffering because it provides recognition, sympathy, or a sense of belonging. In some circles, sharing wounds becomes a kind of “currency” — the more wounded I am, the more authentic, deserving, or powerful I appear. 

Maybe you’ve caught yourself replaying the same breakup or the same betrayal again and again, unable to move forward because the real pain of the past somehow feels safer than the possible pain of the future. Memory can move from being a source of insight to becoming a prison. Take a moment in silence to reflect on where that might be true for you.

In my 20s, I spent a lot of time processing my past – and let me tell you, there was a lot to process. Through that work, I gained important insights about how experiences in my early life, and the behaviors I adopted to cope with those circumstances, fueled a lot of my behaviors as an adult. One example: I learned how feeling abandoned by my father as a kid led me to pre-emptively reject people before they have a chance to reject me. Insights like these helped me break some of my particularly unhealthy patterns. 

But, if I’m being honest, I became a little addicted to that healing work. I spent an inordinate amount of my free time in therapy and coaching, attending personal growth workshops and trainings and retreats, reading piles of articles and books about trauma and wounding. If I was not actively working all the time on healing my past wounds, then I feared that I would regress or unconsciously hurt someone. 

All this work, which was meant to help me find a sense of inner value, was just feeding my wounded need to seek validation through accomplishment and external validation; I was trying to get an “A” in healing. Continuing to do “the work” became a proxy for my emotional health. With too much Zachar energy, my healing work became my life.

And then one day, I had a realization. I was in the middle of a week-long silent meditation retreat. I was feeling spacious, light, even care-free. And then I heard this voice in my head that said: “I’m fine.” Two simple words that tore me open. “I’m fine.” Tears started streaming down my face as I let that sink in. I didn’t need to be obsessively working on myself in order to be worthy of love. I could still make mistakes or act from old patterns and still be totally fine.  

All that self-work I did was really important – and I strongly encourage everyone to engage in work to excavate and heal past wounds. This is the gift of Zachor. But as Toni Jones sings on her R&B album I See Me:  “My healing is not my purpose. My purpose is to live.”

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That spaciousness I felt on the retreat might be what the Torah calls N’Kevah – or what the mystics call Nukvah in Aramaic. It is the second half that emerges after the first human was split in two, and can be the balancing energy to Zachar’s focus on the past. Nukvah literally means to slice a hole in something. It is the energy of creating something new where none existed before. It is the energy of cutting through caution tape. It is the energy of the future.

Nukvah is the moment you finally decide to leave a job that has been stifling your spirit, or a relationship that is toxic, even though everyone around you insists it’s “safe.” It shows up when artists experiment beyond the boundaries of their training and birth entirely new forms, or when a community member shares a fresh take on a Torah verse, breathing new life into timeless wisdom. 

This is a potent energy as we enter the Jewish New Year. It pushes us to cut loose what is no longer serving us. It encourages us to let go of what was and instead imagine what could be. As said by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, “Every ritual, every command, every syllable of the Jewish story is a protest against… blind acceptance of fate… Jewish faith is written in the future tense.”

Take a moment to consider: How are you being called to channel Nukvah energy this year? What new endeavor are you being called to launch? What might you need to cut this year? 

The risk of Nukvah is that we forget the lessons of the past. That we charge forward into the fresh and exciting, not realizing that we’ve been here before, and we’ll have to keep making the same mistakes again. It’s the start-up that promises to “disrupt” everything, but ends up eroding trust, destabilizing livelihoods, and forgetting the human cost in the chase for novelty. It’s a person who jumps from relationship to relationship, chasing the thrill of beginnings but ending up alone — and leaving behind a string of fractured connections. 

When unchecked, Nukvah’s drive for the new becomes a kind of compulsive slashing — tearing holes faster than they can be tended, mistaking destruction for creation. Have you been on the giving or receiving end of that? How did it feel? 

We live in a time when the future feels frightening and uncertain, so many of us feel the pull of Zachar energy — clinging to familiar wounds, familiar stories, familiar identities. At the same time, we are tempted by Nukvah energy — the headlong rush to invent new ways of living, new technologies, new identities — sometimes without pausing to remember what has been. We are living in the turbulence between memory and imagination.

As the Jewish mystics teach, the work of Yom Kippur is to harness both of these energies, but in balance. The Ari illustrates this dynamic with an image from Shir HaShirim, the sacred Jewish book of erotic love poetry: “The left hand is under my head, and the right hand embraces me.” We need to be like a lover embraced equally by both the right and the left hand. Too much Zachar, and we get stuck. Too much Nukvah, and we get lost. 

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So those are some ways in which Zachar and Nukvah work on the individual level. But both approaches are also important for the interpersonal work of the High Holy Days. Yom Kippur is about repenting for our own sins, but also forgiving others. Zachar energy forces us to grapple with whether we are ready to let go of the past. Take a moment to consider places in your life where you might be withholding forgiveness — and if that is true for you, what might be standing in the way? 

Maybe there are good reasons: Holding on to the wounds of the past is a way to ensure we don’t get hurt again in the future. Even in the Torah, there are certain enemies whom we are never supposed to forgive. “Zachor,” the Torah commands. Remember what they did to you. Actively rehash and relive and refresh those painful memories, year after year, so that they don’t happen again. Zachar energy can be an important form of protection.

But there are situations when withholding forgiveness can cause more harm to you than on the person who hurt you. Forgiveness here doesn’t mean ignoring facts, excusing harm, or reconciling without safety. It means releasing the chokehold the past has on our nervous system so we can breathe again. A good discernment test is this: does holding on still protect me, or is it mostly punishing me? If it no longer protects, it may be time to let go. 

As I mentioned earlier, Nukvah is an energy that is historically correlated with women. The word for women in Hebrew is Nashim, which comes from the same root as the word  “to forget” in Hebrew, as Joseph said at the end of the book of Genesis:

כִּי נַשַּׁנִי אֱלֹהִים אֶת־כָּל־עֲמָלִי וְאֵת כָּל־בֵּית אָבִי
“For God has made me forget all my hardship and my father’s house.”

Some traditional commentators tie women to forgetting because women aren’t counted in the census. Nashim can thus be translated as The Forgotten. Not exactly a title that I think any of us would feel proud to claim. 

But I think there’s a way to reclaim that name if we bring it back to Nukvah energy. If Nukvah is the counterbalance to Zachar, then forgetting is the counterbalance to remembering. Forgetting can be as potent a spiritual practice as remembering. What are you willing to forget this year? What is something you’ve been holding on to that no longer serves you? Perhaps it’s a grudge? A resentment for the way someone treated you? Is there someone in your life who has generally tried to make amends, and it is you who are the one who is still clinging to the past? Rosh Hashanah is called Yom HaZikaron, the day of Remembering. At Yom Kippur, we’re called to the other side of that practice; we are called to be Nashim – not the Forlorn Forgotten, but Sacred Forgetters. 

A few years ago, I finally met up with my father after not having seen or spoken to him for 20 years. When he walked in the door of a bagel shop in Jerusalem, I barely recognized the old man, hunched over with a white beard and rumpled clothes. 

My first thought was, “This is the monster that has been living rent-free in my head for the past four decades? This is the person who has been infecting my relationships, fueling my perfectionism and careerism, driving my compulsive need for validation and my fear of commitment?” I realized that my father wound took on a life separate from the actual person of my father, and that clinging to those early memories of abandonment was hurting me more than it was punishing him. And it was in that moment that I finally let go. 

Choosing to forgive my father doesn’t mean I absolve him for the pain he caused me. It doesn’t mean that I trust him not to hurt me again. It doesn’t even mean that I need to have a relationship with him. It just means that I don’t need to walk around carrying all that anger toward him. And I don’t have to let that resentment or fear color the way I live my life. 

This experience helped me better understand the advice from the great Jewish mystic Rebbe Nahman, “Most people regard forgetfulness as a serious deficiency. But in my view there is a great virtue in forgetfulness.” Zachar helps us remember so we can learn; Nukvah helps us forget so we can be free. What do you need to forget this year? 

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This dance between Zachar and Nukvah plays out for us individually and interpersonally. But it also plays out at the level of communities, countries, nations. In many ways this has been the defining tension in Judaism across our history. How much fealty do we pay to the past, versus changing to meet the demands of today and tomorrow? 

I’d argue that the way Israel-Palestine is tearing apart Jewish communities is tied to this tension between Zachar and Nukvah. 

For most of Jewish history, Jews were minorities under the rule of other powers. We had little control over our own fate, and so we had to prioritize taking care of ourselves and our own. This led to a markedly particularist strain in Judaism, where Jewish lives are seen as more valuable than non-Jews. It’s an uncomfortable truth in our tradition, but there are too many texts and sources to deny it, like charging non-Jews interest but not Jews, or the harsher punishments for killing Jews than killing non-Jews.

At its best, Zachar is the call of memory and peoplehood—the sacred insistence that we are a covenantal family with a story to guard, a lineage to protect, and real enemies to remember. Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsh, the great 19th century Torah commentator and Hebrew etymologist, ties the word “zachar” to the biblical root “sachar”, which means to close. It is the instinct to gather close, to circle wagons. 

When Zachar swells out of balance, particularism hardens into tribalism. Memory becomes a wall rather than a root. We justify almost anything that preserves “us,” even when it corrodes the conscience that is meant to define us. This is the spiritual shape of a hyper-particularism now ascendant in parts of the Jewish world: profound love of Am Yisrael, the People of Israel, and Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, that can eclipse compassion for those beyond our borders and bonds. My friend Rabbi Jay Michaelson argues that this extreme “fails as a spiritual, ethical practice” because it “will always prefer Jews to non-Jews. It will always inculcate powerful feelings of tribal cohesion, love, and separateness that influence how people reach ethical conclusions.”

So if Zachar is the tendency to “close,” Nukvah is the counter-movement of holy opening — the courage to pierce the veil of fear and expand the circle of concern. It reflects the reality of living at a time when we do have influence and power, in ways our ancestors could never even have dreamed about. Nukvah insists that the Image of God in every human sets a floor under how we treat all people, not only our own. There are many sources in the Torah and our tradition that support this universalist world-view as well. 

But Nukvah can also distort when it forgets Zachar. A universalism unmoored from peoplehood can dismiss the real vulnerability of Jews and undermine the value we get from communal care. It too flippantly ignores the likelihood that history will repeat itself — and the real possibility that if we don’t take care of ourselves, we may not be able to rely on others to do so. 

Yom Kippur calls us to a different stance: Zachar and Nukvah in embrace, “the left hand under my head and the right hand around me.” Balanced Zachar says: We will not apologize for loving our people fiercely. Balanced Nukvah says: Our love of our people cannot license the degradation of any people; our covenant must widen our conscience, not narrow it. Together they say: We will hold grief and responsibility at the same time; we will hear the cries of our siblings and the cries of our neighbors; we will stand against antisemitism and against dehumanization—especially when we have power to harm.

Practically, that balance asks each of us to do a cheshbon hanefesh, a spiritual accounting, that is both inward and outward. Where has my Zachar become an alibi — rehearsing pain to excuse callousness? Where has my Nukvah floated free of duty — proclaiming love for all while neglecting the concrete needs of my own community? 

I believe what is happening in Gaza is a spiritual and moral crisis that will forever change Judaism. How, we don’t yet know. Perhaps it will lead to irreparable rupture between those pushing for a particularist Zachor version of Judaism and those pushing universalistic Nukvah. My prayer is that this crisis leads to deeper integration between these polarities. Let our particular love sharpen — not dull — our universal ethics. Let our universal ethics deepen — not dissolve — our covenantal bonds. This is the teshuvah of a people that pull close and stretch open, that carries yesterday with integrity and makes room for a more human tomorrow.

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We’ve spoken a lot today about the past and the future. So I’d like to close by focusing on one element of time we haven’t spoken about: The present. 

While there are certainly gifts to be gained by remembering what has happened and envisioning what is to come, excessive focus on either can prevent us from experiencing the gifts of being fully present in the moment. Perhaps that is why Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi poet-mystic, wrote, “Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.” 

This, to me, seems like the goal of the spiritual practice prescribed by the Ari for Yom Kippur. We rehearse our death through wearing white, fasting, and listing possible grim fates – all of this a reminder to live in the now. As we embark on 25 hours full of prayer, I invite you to find moments of stillness between words of the liturgy, feel your feet on the floor, your chest rising and falling. Let the past soften its grip; let the future loosen its lure. 

Let’s practice right now. Close your eyes, and take a breath. Notice what’s holding you back from being present – right now, and in your life. Do you find ruminations on the past clouding your attention, or is it worries about the future? For 5786, are you calling in more Zachar or more Nukvah? What lessons do you need to remember? Or what might be your practice of sacred forgetting this year?

As we embark on this sacred integration prescribed by the Ari, I’ll close with a blessing:

Mi Sheberach Avoteinu VImoteinu V’Horeinu, May the Sacred Oneness who blessed our ancestors bless us tonight with balance. 

May we be blessed with the wisdom to heal our wounds without worshipping them, and with the courage to blaze new trails without tearing what must be tended. 

And may HaMakom, the God of the Present Moment, bless us with Zachar and Nukvah energies in balanced embrace.

When the world is conspiring to keep us clinging to the past and despairing about the future, may we blessed in 5786 for moments when we can relax into the blessings of the here-and-now, surrounded by sacred community, for a year full of ease, connection, and peace. Amen.

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Rabbi Zvika Krieger is the spiritual leader of Chochmat HaLev. You can read more of his teachings here.

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