One of the teshuva themes likely to be echoed in sermons this Elul is that last year’s teshuva was, somehow, so lacking that the result was October 7.

While the concept could certainly make one ask, how can I step up my teshuva this time around, the idea is both un-Jewish and morally repugnant.

The implication, however well meaning, is that if we had only done a more sincere, a more heartfelt, a more legitimate form of teshuva, the massacre, the hostage-taking and the loss of more than 700 IDF members would never have happened.

Here’s the problem… Judaism does not believe in collective guilt. So where’s the legitimacy—or spirituality—in the idea that my teshuva was weak tea, but I get to live and others must die for my spiritual shortcomings?

We’ll read later this Elul in Devarim 24:16, “Fathers shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” In other words, we have rejected collective punishment since the earliest days of our faith.

It’s understandable that rabbis crafting shiurim and sermons must come to grips with the atrocities that occurred almost a year ago and that tragically carry on to the present moment.

You have to say something.

But to turn our collective allegedly faulty teshuva from last year into a giant check engine light for the Jewish people is facile and utterly lacking in humility.

Each of us—in our own way—can speak about God, but who among us is truly qualified to speak for God? What human being has access to God’s thoughts and intentions? Tehillim reminds us that His thoughts are not like our thoughts, and they remain—in this lifetime—undecipherable, unknowable and even, for mortals, unthinkable.

It’s understandable that our rabbis would want to come to grips—for their own sakes, as well for ours—with the brutal dilemma that God is either good or just. So by placing the blame on the Jewish people—by claiming that our teshuva was poor—they are letting God off the hook. The massacres were our fault, not His.

According to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, zt”l, we Jews have a sense of collective responsibility—as made clear by the Talmudic dictum, “All Jews are responsible one for the other.” However, also according to Rabbi Sacks, this line does not mean that Jews bear responsibility for one another’s shortcomings.

In other words, maybe our teshuva did fall short of the mark last year. But that should result in bad outcomes for ourselves, not for others.

“What about Sodom?” One might ask. Wasn’t the destruction of Sodom a collective punishment? Or, for that matter, the “mabul” or great flood? Many commentators see those moments as special cases—not as precedents for the way God runs the world today.

So how, then, are we to interpret the events of October 7—if not as a function of insufficient teshuva?

Maybe the answer is that we humans have no right, no ability, to interpret those events at all.

Humans are meaning-making creatures—when things happen, we create stories and meaning to explain why those things happened and how to encourage or discourage such events in the future. It’s how we get through the night.

So it’s only natural for us to want to find some explanation for something as horrific as October 7. The problem—to quote the eminently non-biblical singer Bob Seger—is that we’re “working on mysteries without enough clues.”

Yes, we can seek to explain away horror and tragedy—whether it’s the Holocaust, October 7 or a child who, God forbid, dies of cancer—but the hard truth is that we’ll never know.

In the Talmud, some difficult discussions end with the acronym, “Taiku,” meaning that the real answers won’t be learned until the arrival of the Mashiach, when Eliyahu HaNavi will return to explain the Talmudic questions the rabbis couldn’t resolve.

If some basic halachic issues can’t be hammered out until Eliyahu HaNavi gives shiur, why do we think that unspeakable evil can be explained?

It’s incumbent on our rabbinic leaders not to take the easy path and remove the responsibility for these events from those who perpetrated them. It’s convenient not to blame God, because otherwise, we’re left with a much messier problem—how do we love and pray to a Being that permits atrocities like these? In other words, are we praying to a God who is potentially unjust?

That’s a “Taiku,” if I ever heard one.

This year, as we enter into the teshuva process that precedes and informs our High Holidays, let’s have the humility not to speak for God—not to believe that an explanation is available, nor to blame ourselves for events utterly outside our control.

Your teshuva and mine—however good or poor—did not cause October 7. Let’s pray for a better world and to be better people in that better world. But let’s not lawyer for God.

New York Times best-selling author Michael Levin is the publisher of Jewish Leaders Books.