What if the problem isn’t what we believe, but what we no longer question?
Reflection after Yom Kippur
We go somewhere for one reason and leave with another entirely — that was my experience during Yom Kippur.
I was in the synagogue, surrounded by the prayers of the faithful. Some knew the texts by heart, others read them, but the same words came out each time, as they had since time immemorial. Watching the faces and listening closely, a question came to me: Do we still think about what we are saying?
Yom Kippur is meant for introspection; we must submit to it, review our actions, admit our wrongs and ask for forgiveness, and look for what needs to change. This is a process that should not belong to the individual alone but should apply just as much to our societies, our states, our religions, and the communities we are part of.
Perhaps we have forgotten why these texts exist
The question of God’s existence is not what concerns me here. Nor am I trying to establish whether one religion or another holds the truth. My point is of a different nature.
Take the texts, religious and philosophical alike, that the centuries have handed down to us, dealing with justice, dignity, forgiveness, violence, solidarity, responsibility, or the way we stand in relation to others. They have been translated, commented on, passed from one generation to the next. And yet we sometimes stop at reading them merely to learn something from them. Some use them as a marker of identity.
“I am Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist,” we tell ourselves. In the end, belonging can take precedence over substance. The text is defended because it is “ours,” without our ever asking what it actually demands of us. That is a major difference.
If there is identity in a religion, we can also see in it a kind of school of life.
This is the case with Yom Kippur, for example. The introspection it demands rests on a concept that is far from easy, yet simple: questioning oneself.
To do this, we must take responsibility for ourselves before seeking to blame others. With such a principle, we are well beyond the realm of religion
Imagine a government that occasionally examined its own conscience, or an international institution that admitted its own wrongs instead of merely pointing out those of others; or a community that held itself to the same rigor regarding its own faults as it does toward its adversaries. That would be revolutionary.
Religious texts also speak of us
There are no ready-made answers to the questions we ask when we turn to the great religious traditions. Each has its own theological architecture, its own customs. Yet beneath this diversity lies a shared foundation of human concerns: otherness, violence, justice, the meaning we give to our actions, and how to exist in the world without losing ourselves in it.
Take Christianity and its teaching on love of one’s neighbor. The matter seems simple as long as it stays abstract, but the principle proves far more demanding when it comes to saying who this “neighbor” actually is. Should it be understood as someone close to us, from our community or our language? Does it include the stranger, the one who disturbs us? The question is radical, because it allows no refuge in the comfort of preference.
In the Quran (5:8), justice is linked to hostility in a wholly explicit way. This carries great moral and intellectual weight: enmity or resentment cannot be allowed to silence fairness. In other words, the rightness of one’s judgment cannot be made to depend on affinity. Justice is a discipline of the soul, a requirement of moral intelligence — nothing less.
Buddhism, for its part, exposes the logic of the cycle of hatred. It is clear that responding with matching violence solves nothing — it feeds the cycle, and suffering starts over again. Rather than condemning the aggression itself, the Buddhist view dwells on the inner workings of resentment and destructive attachment. This is an essential shift in perspective, one that leads us to understand the conditions for liberation rather than to pass judgment.
The Bhagavad Gita, for its part, delves deeply into duty, action, and detachment. It values neither inaction nor blind impulse, asking instead how to act rightly without becoming a slave to the outcome. A distinctive ethic follows from this: commit fully, yes, but without narcissistically claiming the act as one’s own or seeing oneself as the sole author of its effects.
The spiritual experience of Yom Kippur is, for Judaism, an occasion to offer an ethical insight of great depth. It teaches that one cannot dwell on a neighbor’s wrongs without the humility to look at oneself honestly. This is the whole substance of teshuvah, with its call to return and to an inner reorientation: it is not about stopping at regret for what was done, but about asking how one is responsible. This gives rise to a moral discipline of the first order, one that demands we ask the most demanding question — “what have I done?” — well before questioning the attitude of others.
The teaching of Yom Kippur reaches beyond its liturgical setting. It sketches an anthropology of responsibility in which one begins with oneself in order to act justly. Understanding is worth more than condemning, and it is better to be judged by one’s own conscience before being judged by others. This is a lesson from Judaism whose universality needs no proof: it is by changing how we see ourselves that we transform the world.
Whether one believes or not, these texts can be seen as revelation, spiritual heritage, or cultural construction. One can reject their religious authority while still recognizing the soundness of their insights. Some formulations impose themselves on human understanding regardless of one’s faith.
Self-mastery, responsibility, fairness in the face of hostility, consideration for others… Such demands are not the preserve of sacred vocabulary; they are part of a basic anthropology, a rigorous conception of what it means to be human. In this way, religious texts speak to our everyday conflicts, our moral efforts, our blind spots, and what is great within us — not only to God or transcendence.
This is no doubt what makes them so enduring: they place ancient words on today’s dilemmas, beyond any denominational difference. They do not spare you the effort of thinking — they force it on you, so that you become more aware of what you are doing, of what falls to you, and of what you are doing to yourself.
So perhaps the problem is not belief itself
One could say that belief itself is not the problem, but rather the closed-mindedness that follows once it is no longer subject to questioning. The way we tend to separate believers from non-believers all too often lends itself to caricature: souls imagined as bound by dogma, set against minds supposedly free of all illusion.
The real danger lies elsewhere: it arises when a conviction, whatever it may be, hardens into a self-enclosed certainty — clinging to a fixed identity, evading the slightest refutation, and no longer tolerating exchange. This is not seen only in religion, but also among proponents of certain cut-rate rationalisms who want to explain everything while refusing any contradiction, or in exclusionary nationalisms, political ideologies, and dogmatic economic discourse.
What I object to is the absolutizing of belief, not belief itself. A group or individual convinced it holds the truth no longer needs to listen, finds nuance suspect, and sees dialogue as a waste of time. A society that refuses this will have no choice but to replace deliberation with confrontation.
We don’t need to believe the same things
It is not up to us to believe identical things; that is a basic given in a pluralist society. Respecting another does not require sharing their faith, and cooperating does not depend on sharing the same worldview. Whether it comes to God, religion, philosophy, politics, or the social order, our points of view can differ.
Yet we must come together on the essentials: respect for human dignity, for justice, for responsibility; the protection of the weakest; the ability to admit one’s wrongs; the prohibition against arbitrary violence. Such principles sometimes have a religious foundation, sometimes they are held without any reference to one, and that is precisely what gives them their universal merit.
One might ask whether we need new texts. We are searching for new answers, theories, doctrines, or ideologies — and for good reason, human experience has already produced an extraordinary library: the Torah, the Gospels, the Quran, the works of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, or Kant, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist writings, and so on.
What is at stake is not so much a lack of answers. It is the art of reading that has escaped us — reading in order to understand rather than to prove ourselves right; reading in a way that lets us be unsettled, and lets us see that the other may hold a part of the truth.
I left with a question.
Watching the worshippers around me, I was struck by humanity’s extraordinary gift for keeping texts alive across millennia.
It is not enough to simply teach our children the words; we must show them how to uncover what lies behind them, because we are not handing them an identity from hand to hand — we are giving them discernment.
Far from instilling in them only the object of their faith, we must help them understand that a conviction can run deep without turning into a prison.
The lesson I take from that day is that not believing the same things is not what matters; what matters is recovering the ability to think together
Eric Gozlan
Systemic geopolitics specialist
Co-director of I-Transform
Member of the EU Hub on Prevention of Radicalization
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