From the Holocaust to wrongful convictions to identity-based hate, uncountable wrongs have unfolded all around us.
We needn’t personally be the victims of personal wrongs, or large-scale wrongs, to carry them in our hearts. Plus, it’s likely that we all carry our own personal hurts from wrongs done to us.
Ideally repentance happens. Ideally there are apologies and, where possible, repair. But if we’re not made whole – if recipients of wrongs and injustices aren’t validated – what then? How can we re-balance after unrequited injustice?
It’s a question for the ages – and for exactly now.
Ethics Note: These remarks touch on current public matters. New York’s Rules Governing Judicial Conduct generally ban me from making public comment that might cause my impartiality reasonably to be questioned. As permitted under this 2023 judicial ethics ruling, where I touch on matters of public interest, I do so only to the extent of “the law, the legal system and the administration of justice” – here, the law’s intended protection of LGBTQ+ equality and equal dignity – and only for the emotional and spiritual valences of finding balance anew after unrequited injustice.
By Rabbi David Evan Markus
Yom Kippur 5787
Gut yontif on this holy Yom Kippur day that puts our souls and the meaning of our lives front and center. Our ancestors harnessed this day for soul-healing leaps of faith. If ever we needed leaps to restore balance, it’s now. It’s why restoring balance is our theme.
With so much off-kilter, true inner balance compels us to face the inner freight we carry from unrequited injustices – the unfair hurts we carry from others in our lives, or no longer in our lives, or in public life.
Whether these hurts are at the front of our awareness or buried deep within, they can be among our heaviest inner burdens precisely because there is no repentance, no validation or repair, and seemingly little we can do. Their emotions can stifle us, corrode us, and cause us to act out in turn. It really is true that hurt people hurt people.
Today I want to introduce you to three people who experienced profound injustice, without apology or repair. They model for us a path through the minefield of our own injustices and unrequited hurt.
 | Please meet Fred Terna. I met Fred in 2022; he died soon after, just shy of his 100th birthday. Fred was a teen in Prague when Nazis arrested him for being Jewish and imprisoned him for being Jewish. Fred would be moved between four concentration camps, on one death march after another. At Fred’s liberation from Auschwitz, he was age 22 and weighed 78 pounds. Fred tried valiantly to find his family: all of his relatives were murdered. |
Needing to go on somehow, Fred recalled secretly drawing pictures in the camps, so he studied art, then immigrated to New York.
For years, Fred’s art depicted tragic memories. It wasn’t long before Fred saw that part of him was still in the camps:
When Fred shifted to abstracts, it wasn’t long before Fred saw himself hide fires and prisons in his art:
Fred said, “It taught me that the memory of the Holocaust was a part of me, that it would not go away, and that I would have to live with it.”
How Fred learned to “live with it” became his life mission. Along with being an internationally acclaimed artist, he became a Holocaust educator and study subject for modern art therapy. To his dying day, Fred climbed up to his fifth-floor art studio in Brooklyn, bringing canvas to life and helping others navigate unresolved injustice in their lives.
I sat with Fred before he died, his Auschwitz tattoo on his forearm. He beamed with life – no evidence of anger, all joy. I asked him how he did it. How did he live joyfully while haunted by so much death?
Fred took my hand. In his piercing eyes I felt like I was looking back in time to the ancestors – his, mine and yours. Then he said:
It’s always with me: it’s never not with me. But you decide that what happened is actually not unusual: injustice is part of life, and you are alive! To live as a victim is to live dead. So yes, inside me is a crazed double bass playing a haunting tune. I decided to play a fiddle above it so there’d be some harmony to my life. I live with memory by adding to memory, by living into one ‘and’ after another – Auschwitz and art and love and passion and service. That way, there is life.”
Then Fred went silent. He looked away for a moment, as if looking back 80 years to the ancestors – his, mine and yours. Then Fred said: “By adding, we become our own teshuvah, even without apology or repair. We become our own repair.”
Fred found balance not from someone else’s teshuvah, but from his own – not by subtracting memory but by adding, without any help from the guilty. Nazis didn’t apologize and Hitler didn’t apologize. No apology could remove the Auschwitz tattoo from Fred’s arm. No apology could restore Fred’s family. There was no going back.
So Fred went forward. He harnessed the power of evil for good. He lived his decades making daily tikkun (repair) by his own hands, by modeling resilience for adult generations, by teaching around the world, and by investing himself in advancing art therapy. And at age 65, like a modern Abraham and Sarah, Fred and his wife had a son. They named him Daniel, in Hebrew “God is my judge.” Why? Fred said, “It’s more important to become a tradition than to have a tradition: of all people, it’s on us to break the cycle of anger.”
Fred Terna – prophet of DIY teshuvah and renewing balance.
 | Next please meet Jeffrey Deskovic. At age 17, a New York jury convicted Jeff for raping and murdering a high school classmate. For the next 16 years Jeff was imprisoned, insisting all the while that he was innocent. |
In 2006, after enduring half his life in prison, Jeff was exonerated when untested DNA evidence from the scene finally was tested: it matched someone else.
Imagine if you were imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit. How would you feel? No apology could make you whole… but Jeff didn’t get even that. He sued; he got $10 million, but money could not make him whole either.
Jeff used the money for college and then law school. With the rest, Jeff created a foundation to help convicts believed to be innocent. Proper evidence testing now has freed hundreds. Each exoneration is a miracle, and a double justice failure: the innocent wrongly convicted, the guilty free to re-offend.
 |  |
Jeff spoke of being a teen in prison for a crime he didn’t commit:
“I was angry… then I felt this anger destroying me. Y’know, I’ve got to let this go! I lost so much and I don’t want to, in effect, lose the rest of my life. [So] I take that energy and channel it, and today it fuels my advocacy work.”
Jeff Descovic – redeeming others’ lives to help redeem his own.
 | Third up is Julia Curley. Julia had a stellar 20-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency. Julia led the daily intelligence briefing for three presidents of both parties – an exceptionally difficult and prestigious role, essentially the Nobel Prize of the intelligence world. |
Then a so-called “enemies list” outed Julia as a trans woman.
Julia had made no secret in government about her identity. During the first Trump Administration, she wrote about being trans in the CIA and the White House. She always wrote under a pseudonym because CIA officers never self-identify. Her articles were so powerful that the CIA used those articles to recruit at colleges. Vice President Pence so heavily relied on Julia that he invited Julia’s mom to the White House and greeted her with a hug. He said to her, “You must be so proud of your daughter.”
Julia stayed on into the Biden Administration. After the 2024 election, most leaders in the intelligence community and political branches urged Julia to leave, but President Biden himself urged her to stay. He said to her, “They will need you, even if they don’t know it.”
On January 20, 2025, with an inauguration approaching at noon, smart money bet that she’d be gone by 12:15pm, but for months nobody was in place to fire her. But something did happen at 12:15pm that day: it became official U.S. policy to ban Julia and all other trans persons from federal bathrooms.
Julia began using a coffee shop. “Back in my office,” she later said, “I closed the door. I cried quickly, efficiently, no sound, the way you do when the walls have ears and everyone thinks you’re fearless.”
Julia’s grandfather had taught her, “Work hard, don’t complain: the country will take care of you. We came to America for small things … no pogroms, no leaky roof.” So Julia put service above politics, country above self. She clung to that promise, in her words, “as I became a man, a husband, a father, a CIA officer, a wife, a mother.”
Day 3 purged 160 career National Security Council staff; day 33 purged 100 intelligence officers – all of them, according to Julia, “for taking part in an LGBTQ group chat.” All were gone, except Julia. “We need you,” her new boss told her, “but be discreet.” That lasted until the so-called enemies list. Julia was purged on day 68.
At first Julia stayed quiet. CIA staff are supposed to stay quiet. But in August 2026 she spoke out. Here’s Julia in her own words:
The October 2026 edition of The Atlantic magazine includes Julia’s piece, “The Wrong Kind of American.” She has been on the network news circuit, sounding alarms about undermining national intelligence and attacking identity. The end of her article says this:
Flailing regimes dehumanize minorities to distract from their failures. When the economy collapses or a war goes badly, they find a tiny group of people, make them the enemy within, and rally the country against them. This is how it’s gone in Iran. Hungary. Russia. I wrote PDBs about it. This will not stop with trans people. It never has.
But that caricature works only if people like me don’t exist – and I exist. I speak because somewhere, a trans kid is watching. I want that kid to know that they are not alone. I was a trans kid too, and I’ll be damned if I let another generation grow up the way I did – told they don’t belong, they don’t deserve a job, a bathroom, a future. If I could brief presidents and serve in the White House – twice – so can they.
I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA. [They] took my calling, but [they] will not take my pride, or tell me I don’t belong, or I must disappear. I once wrote under a pseudonym so I could keep serving. I write now in my own name for the same reason.
Julia Curley – public warrior for a public service that is truly great for all.
Three unrequited injustices, one message. Re-balancing after injustice begins with our agency so that we are not passive victims. To live as victims is to live as if dead – and we’re alive! Re-balancing after injustice is not mainly about another’s repentance – though it’s great to have – but about our own transformation of unrighted wrongs.
Judaism teaches us that if the world is shattered, it’s our task to raise up the shattered fragments so the shards can refract new light.
We all experience injustices and wrongs, and we all commit them. Maybe we carry them today. Repair and apology can go a long way. I hope you make them, and I hope you get them. But even if we carry unrequited hurt or injustice from others, it’s still on us to seek balance anew not by passively bearing them but by actively harnessing them for goodness.
We needn’t be international painters, or millionaires, or White House officials, to make it so. Fred, Jeff and Julia were not born privileged. They were not made of anything different from you or me. Life experience refined them, galvanized them and deployed them.
It is the same with us: life experience refines us, galvanizes us and deploys us.
If Jews clutched victimhood, the weight would crush us – and sometimes I worry that the weight does crush us. Still, our people has transformed adversity by contributing more to society per capita than maybe any other. Fred’s freedom came by painting and teaching. Jeff’s freedom came by freeing others. Julia’s freedom came by publicly sounding the alarm after all else failed.
What hurts do you carry that ache to be transformed? Even if some stay with us, shaping us, becoming part of who we are, they need not own us. They need not forever embitter us even if we don’t receive the validation or justice we deserve.
The injustices and wrongs of our times are profound. The big ones in the news, and the ones from our lives, can hurt deeply. Some are even dangerous. We don’t know what the future will bring.
What we can know – what we can choose – is a life orientation that fulfills our innate ability, in the awesome words of Viktor Frankl who himself survived Auschwitz, to “choose [our] own way” no matter what injustice or other circumstance we face. Even in Auschwitz, Frankl discovered that personal choice of attitude and inner orientation – noticing a bird, helping another – always are possible, and that this power of choice can be everything. This last and perhaps greatest of the human freedoms – to choose our own way – never can be taken from us without our own consent.
So it was for Fred. So it is for Jeff and Julia. So it is for you.
When bad things happen to good people – when someone hurts us, unrequited and unrepentant, when teshuvah the right way doesn’t happen – we are not powerless victims. No matter what, it is on us to redeem the wrong and the hurt by transforming some part of it for goodness however we can. It is on us to leave no hurt unturned. That is the turning – literally, the teshuvah – at the core of this sacred Yom Kippur day.
Let us scour our lives, urgently. Where we owe repair, let us commit to do it with all we’ve got. And if we are owed repair but don’t get it, each and every hurt is a calling for us to do some version of what Fred, Jeff and Julia did. As Fred taught us, “It’s more important to become a tradition than to have a tradition: of all people, it’s on us to break the cycle of anger.” Let that be our tradition, our part in rebalancing our off-kilter world.
May this Yom Kippur inspire a new cycle of repair, return and rebalance – the truest teshuvah there is – for ourselves, our loved ones, and our world just waiting for us, in the immortal words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to bend the long moral arc of the universe toward justice anew.
