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Sunday night and Monday are supposed to be our holiest days of the year. We gather in synagogues to contemplate our sins over the past year, pray for forgiveness, and hope that we will be written in the Book of Life for another year.

We fast to teach ourselves self-denial, which is essential to self-improvement. Our attention is supposed to be on tshuvah, or repentance, and on little else as we ignore the outside world.

But with battles raging not only in the West Bank but on Israeli streets, it will be hard to block out the bloodshed that threatens our family and friends as well as Israel's Palestinian neighbors.

Rosh Hashanah was already marred by violence, and the way things look, Yom Kippur could be as well.

Whose fault is it? Did Likud leader Ariel Sharon instigate this latest episode of violence by visiting the Temple Mount with 1,000 Israeli police a week ago? Or were the Palestinians looking for an incident — any incident — that would justify giving vent to their frustration?

It doesn't much matter who is to blame. What matters is how the violence can be brought to an end before more people die.

Many of us had hoped that this High Holy Day period would be marked by a peace treaty with the Palestinians. Negotiators came close, but not close enough. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has to please his constituents just as Israeli leader Ehud Barak does. And neither seems to be doing a good job of pleasing anyone.

In the meantime, the bloodshed continues and peace appears as elusive as ever.

Tshuvah means return as well as repentance — return to our faith, our Torah, our values. And one of those values is completing God's work by working to build a world in which swords shall be beaten into plowshares. True peace, or shalom, is not simply the cessation of hostilities. It is the establishment of a state of harmony.

Before the gates of repentance shut, let us pray together to bring our world — at home as well as in Israel — closer to shalom. Let us pray that world leaders can move beyond the blame game and work toward solutions.