Jewish Organizational Cheshbon Hanefesh

Reflections for the 2026/5787 High Holiday Season

During the High Holiday season and the Ten Days of Teshuva (repentance/return) individuals may conduct a cheshbon hanefesh, accounting of the soul, to reflect on the past year and find opportunities for improvement.

What if, as an annual SRE practice, our organizations undertook one, too?

A Jewish organization is more than its mission statement. Organizational values are revealed through the choices we make - how we exercise power, create culture, cause harm, repair, grow, and evolve.

The steps of teshuva include regretting our harmful actions, apologizing for them, and committing to change. The questions in this reflective guide can help us along these steps.

Instructions

This reflective High Holiday resource is intended for individual reflection, leadership teams, boards, staff meetings, or facilitated organizational learning. You do not need to answer all ten questions at once. Choose the questions that challenge you most and sit with them. The goal is to notice where you and your organization may be called to learn and change.

Note: If using these in a public or organizational conversation, be mindful that the questions may surface experiences of harm, exclusion, or inequity. Create sufficient time, space, and psychological safety for honest reflection. Avoid asking participants to disclose personal experiences publicly unless the setting is specifically designed and supported for that purpose.

Download the Reflection Questions

May this season of reflection help us not only become better organizations, but more deeply Jewish ones.

May this new year be one in which our organizations do more than speak about justice, kindness, humility, safety, respect and equity. May we embody them.

Shana Tovah,

The SRE Team

10 Questions for the Jewish New Year

Drawing from Micah 6:8, The Torah of SRE places safety, respect and equity in conversation with the Jewish values of justice, kindness, and humility. It asks us not simply to name these values, but to consider what they require of us in practice. As we enter a new Jewish year, the following questions draw from the Torah of SRE and invite us to reflect on our organizations, and on ourselves as leaders and professionals within them.

“You have been told, human being, what is good, and what God seeks from you: Only to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” - Micah 6:8

1. What do our values ask us to do?

The Torah of SRE draws attention to the verbs in Micah's famous formulation: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly. It asks how Jewish wisdom can make our organizational values and work more resonant, and how those values become lived action.

Reflect: If someone looked at how our organization behaves, what would they conclude that we actually value?

- Where do our values show up in our decisions, policies, relationships and culture?
- Where is there a gap between what we say and what people experience?
- What would someone have to experience in order to know that our stated values are real?

Teshuvah prompt: What is one value we need to translate more fully from words into action?

2. Do we truly see the inherent dignity of every person?

The Torah of SRE grounds respect in the Jewish idea of kavod habriyot, the inherent dignity of every person. Rabbi Sandra Lawson connects being created in God's image with a responsibility for how we treat others

Reflect: Who experiences our organization as a place where their dignity is recognized and protected, and who might experience it differently?

- What would it mean to exercise power in a way that consistently protects dignity?
- What would change if every person who encounters our organization was treated as inherently worthy of dignity, regardless of role, status, or power?
- What would have to be true about our culture, leadership, and practices for every person in our organization to truly thrive and have the opportunity to drive change?
Teshuvah prompt: Where could we more intentionally center human dignity?

3. Who is visible to us, and who remains invisible?

The Torah of SRE includes Rabbi Erica Brown’s description of humility as walking with “eyes wide open” to those in need and having the ability to “make those invisible visible.”

Reflect: Whose experiences, needs, and harms are we seeing clearly, and whose might remain invisible to us?

- Who benefits from the way things currently work in our organization?
- Are the people most affected by our decisions meaningfully participating in making them?
- When does our pursuit of what we believe is right inadvertently leave people feeling unseen, unheard, or unsafe?

Teshuvah prompt: Whose perspective do we need to listen to more deeply this year?

4. What does justice require of us when someone has been harmed?

Heschel's teaching in the Torah of SRE moves justice beyond an abstract principle. Injustice is not merely about breaking a rule; it is about a person being hurt. At an organizational level, justice requires us to examine decisions, structures, policies and the distribution of power. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat reminds us that justice is also about cultivating empathy.

Reflect: When harm occurs in our organization, do we primarily see a violation of policy? Do we also see a person who has been hurt?

- What does our response reveal about how we live out our values?
- How might our response change if the person's experience was our starting point?
- Where did we choose justice this year, and where might we have chosen what was easier or more convenient?

Teshuvah prompt: What would a more just response to harm require from us?

5. What does kindness require of us?

The Torah of SRE draws on Jewish teachings that understand kindness not simply as an attitude, but as something we do for others through acts of care. Similarly, Ruth Messinger teaches that responding to the needs of others is one way we repair the world.

Reflect: Is kindness simply about being nice?

When does kindness require courage, intervention, accountability, or change?
What have we normalized or asked others to tolerate for the sake of kindness?
What does kindness look like when we are exercising organizational power, setting boundaries, and making difficult decisions?
Teshuvah prompt: Where could we practice a deeper form of kindness?

6. Can justice and kindness coexist?

One of the central tensions that the Torah of SRE asks us to grapple with is: What is the relationship between justice and kindness? Can these values work together, or can they sometimes be in tension?

Reflect: When justice and kindness seem to pull us in different directions, how do we decide what each requires?

- When does kindness deepen justice?
- What do we do when accountability feels unkind, or kindness feels like it might undermine accountability?
- When might a commitment to justice become so rigid that we lose sight of people's humanity?

Teshuvah prompt: How do we exercise power with care?

7. Does our pursuit of justice actually create equity?

The Torah of SRE asks, “How does justice plus kindness equal equity?” and connects equity with meaningful pathways, access, and fairness. It deliberately brings diverse Jewish voices, including women, Jews of Color, LGBTQ+ Jews, and Sephardi/Mizrachi Jews, into conversation. It also quotes Rabbi Heather Miller who writes about the steps we can take towards justice.

Reflect: Where might we believe we are being fair while our structures or practices continue to produce inequitable experiences or outcomes?

- How do we make room for the voices we have excluded or overlooked?
- Whose experience might challenge the story we tell ourselves about our organization?
- Who gets to be regarded as a source of Jewish wisdom and authority in our organizations?

Teshuvah prompt: How might our understanding of Jewish values or ourselves change if those voices were genuinely centered rather than simply included?

8. Are we willing to be changed by what others tell us?

In the Torah of SRE, David Suissa describes humility as recognizing that “we may not own the whole truth.” We can consider humility’s place in social justice work.

Reflect: When someone tells us that their experience of our organization differs from the experience we believe we are creating, what do we do with that information?

- Who can challenge us or tell us something we do not want to hear?
- How are people treated when there is disagreement or conflict?
- What might our organization need to acknowledge that we don't yet know or understand?

Teshuvah prompt: What would we need to do differently to see and hear what we may currently be missing?

9. What would organizational teshuvah actually require?

The Torah of SRE connects Micah's teaching with change in behavior, rather than simply expressing belief or making a sacrificial offering. We can extend this idea to Jewish organizations: “Communities and organizations must be willing to reflect, admit where something is missing and turn to trusted partners to grow.”

Reflect: What do we need to change in order to say that we have done teshuvah?

- What relationship needs to be repaired?
- What needs to be apologized for?
- What policy, practice, or pattern needs to change?
- What accountability have we avoided?

Teshuvah prompt: What one concrete act of organizational teshuvah are we prepared to undertake?

10. If we review these questions again next year during the High Holidays, what will be different because of our reflections today?

The Torah of SRE connects Jewish values to a vision of a Jewish communal landscape that is safe, respectful, and equitable and where people can thrive and organizations can fulfill their missions.

Reflect: If we gather again next Rosh Hashanah, what will we be able to point to and say: “Because of our reflection and accounting in 2026, we changed this”?

- What will actually be different?
- What resolutions emerge when we align ourselves with the values of safety, respect, equity, justice, kindness, and humility?
- How can we hold ourselves accountable in our journey of growth?

Teshuvah prompt: What is the one change we are willing to make now?

This organizational High Holiday reflection guide has been developed from the teachings in The Torah of SRE and related article, developed by Rabba Yaffa Epstein and Dr. Guila Benchimol (2025).

High Holiday resource prepared by Dr. Guila Benchimol, Senior Educator and Founding Senior Advisor, SRE Network (2026).

For questions, email info@srenetwork.org.

SRE Network envisions a Jewish communal landscape where safety, respect, and equity are lived realities, every individual belongs, and organizations thrive.