Two weeks before the Hamas attacks in Israel, Delphine Horvilleur gave a speech in Paris on the occasion of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. “Worried”, as she relates in an interview with Le Monde taken after the attacks of October 7, about the political evolution of the country, led by a far-right government, the rabbi decided to mention in her sermon “this political question, this threat which weighs on Israel, in its illusion of omnipotence. “The State of Israel, born in the ashes of the Shoah, promised the Jews of the world that there would always be a force at their side, that their absolute vulnerability was over,” she explains. in this interview. The almost permanent threat to its survival over the last seventy-five years has only reinforced this narrative of force which has swelled and swelled until it partially exploded today. »
“In a way,” she continues, “Israel has just regained awareness of the flaw and vulnerability that have been a constant in Jewish history. When I wrote my Yom Kippur sermon three weeks ago, I had no idea how it would resonate almost immediately. » Here we provide the main extracts from his speech to read.
Document. Perhaps I should begin this Yom Kippur sermon by asking you for “forgiveness.” Not simply because it is the day of atonement, but for a simpler reason, which I could state in a single sentence: “I tried, really tried, not to write the sermon you are about to hear. But I didn’t get there. »
I told myself, again and again, that it wasn’t a good idea, that I’d better talk about something else, that we might get angry… (…)
Dear friends, this evening, the solemn day of Yom Kippur which we are entering, we are precisely on an anniversary date, known to all. Fifty years ago, to the day, at the service of Kol Nidré 1973, in a few hours the terrible war which would forever bear the name of this solemn day would begin: the Yom Kippur War. (…)
You see me coming, with my big clogs (or, should I say, my big artillery): these last few days, while thinking about writing this sermon, it seemed to me that I had no choice and that this evening I had to speak to you about Israel… to speak to you about this pain that many of us feel today in the face of the terrible crisis that this country is going through, the extreme polarization which brought to power a government and ministers far-right, an ultranationalist messianism and, faced with this, for the 38e week in a row, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets to express their concern (and that’s an understatement) for democracy, their concern about the rise of religious fanaticism, political violence, the threat to the law women, the rise of fundamentalism which suddenly demands that they cover themselves in the street or sit at the back of the bus, which pushes others to tolerate or cover up the violence of young Jews against Arab villages, attacks against minorities. And the rise of discourse of supremacy or violence against religious diversity, against non-orthodox Jewish sensitivities. And the questioning of judicial institutions in their role of counter-power, the multiplication of populist arguments or ultraorthodox demands.
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