Shared with the Board of Trustees of Westchester Reform Temple, October 28, 2025 | 7 Cheshvan 5786
The signature text about B’rit or Covenant in the Jewish tradition is found in Genesis 17, from this week’s parasha, Lech-Lecha. The verses I’ve extracted make clear the bilateral nature of covenant: God promises Abraham and Sarah that they will give rise to a great nation, in the land promised to them and their descendants. As partners in the covenant, Abraham and his household are made to swear loyalty and to mark a sign of the covenant in their flesh — the “Covenant of Circumcision” or B’rit Milah, as we call it (“B’ris” in Ashkenazi common parlance). In order to be effective, a covenant must be mutual, bilateral: I do for you; you do for me.
I wanted to spend a few minutes tonight speaking about the B’rit, the Covenant, that Rabbis and Cantors make with the Jewish community and vice-versa. We see ourselves, and we hope you see us, as more than just employees. We are bound by covenant with our congregations, a covenant that goes beyond the terms written in a contract. Indeed, our sense of covenant, as Jewish clergy, extends even beyond the individual organizations that we may serve, binding us in service to the entire Jewish People and to humanity — to serve as teachers, guides, and ambassadors of Jewish teachings and Jewish values.
That is our covenantal obligation to you, as Jewish clergy. And you have covenantal obligations too, which include to join one another and to be present in community, to live out the fullest and most dimensional meaning of a Jewish life — in keeping with the mission of our synagogue and the values of our sacred Jewish tradition.
When we conceive of our roles as a covenantal mutuality, it can truly be a beautiful thing. Clergy will feel bonded to their communities in ways that far transcend the terms of a contract. And communities will, God willing, come to know and cherish their clergy as more than transactional functionaries of Jewish life.
All of us clergy feel so blessed to experience our service to the congregation of WRT as a covenant.
Which is why all of us are so concerned about what we’re seeing happening right now in the wider Jewish community. Please know: this Board has been exemplary in managing this moment; but others in our community are in need of a “covenantal course-correction.”
To wit: a lot of chat, some of it polite, much of it rude and hysterical, is being devoted (chiefly online, but also in person), to the subject of a certain letter signed by over 1,000 Jewish clergy, calling attention to concerns over political anti-Zionism and naming politicians such as Zohran Mamdani for consistently trafficking in anti-Zionist rhetoric in ways that make many Jews, in New York and beyond, feel concerned, and yes, unsafe.
These concerns are shared by all the clergy of this congregation. But let me be clear: Rabbis and Cantors had plenty of compelling reasons to sign that public letter, and rabbis and cantors had plenty of compelling reasons not to sign that letter.
Reasons for signing emerge from an intention to alert the Jewish community and the wider world to the danger of normalizing anti-Zionism in American political life. Reasons for not signing may include: restrictions imposed on the Rabbi or Cantor by a synagogue Board, or longstanding community norms that discourage clergy from endorsing or disqualifying political candidates. Notice that it is entirely possible not to support Zohran Mamdani and his execrable rhetoric, and still conclude that it’d be best not to sign a public letter. Clergy are painfully aware that, in 2025, a signature on a public letter may follow a rabbi or cantor around for the rest of one’s career. Other clergy may vehemently disagree with Mamdani but, especially if living and working in New York City, may want or need to engage with him and his administration if he wins the election, and would prefer to enter such dialogue with as clean a slate as possible. Demonizing those who chose not to sign is both unwise and unhelpful. And frankly, it’s un-Jewish. We can’t cancel each other. We need to work together. And we need to remind ourselves, as was memorably said to me recently, that “gossip is not activism.”
Most of all, the energy presently being devoted to canceling Jewish leaders who thoughtfully elected not to sign a letter saddens me, because it suggests that the clergy-community relationship is built on a shaky foundation, one not rooted in a sturdy covenantal understanding.
I implore us as leaders of this Jewish community to stand up for our sacred Clergy-Congregation Covenant, and to push back on those who wish to define one’s rabbi or one’s cantor entirely by this one issue. Please consider the full breadth and depth of discourse and viewpoints shared in public by your clergy before judging us with absolutes like “strong” or “weak,” “morally courageous” or “morally bankrupt.” We need each other — rabbis, cantors, and communities — in order to live this covenantal tradition together with shalom, with mutually beneficial collaboration, and, above all, with joy.
If so, The Temple Mount, with its Western Wall below—holiest shrine in Judaism—and Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock above—holiest shrines in Israel for Muslims—is the “navel of Jerusalem.”
This morning our Westchester Jewish Council (WJC) Multi-Faith Clergy Delegation visited these holy sites—as tourists, but also as spiritual leaders who recognize that in today’s fractured world, there are still places that loom large and centrally in the imaginations of millions of people of faith, and which summon us to live for a noble purpose: to serve God and humankind.
On this mount (Mount Moriah by name), Jewish tradition tells us Abraham bound his son Isaac. The passage can be found in this week’s Torah portion, Vayera (see Genesis Chapter 22). (Islamic tradition tells the same basic story but has Ibrahim (Abraham) nearly sacrificing Ismail (Ishmael).). I heard a Bar Mitzvah boy chanting this portion at the Kotel as I paused there to pray, followed by singing and dancing with his family on the nearby plaza.
The same mythical location that inspires us to nobility, sacrificial service, and joyful observance of our traditions is also associated with acts of religious extremism and even violence. The holy site is often a flashpoint for religious tensions and provocations.
But this morning, Jerusalem is at peace, and we give thanks. May God continue to spread a shelter of peace over us, over Jerusalem, and over the hurting human family.
Tuesday, November 12th, 2024 11 Heshvan 5785
Dear WRT Family,
Today our Westchester Jewish Council (WJC) multi-faith delegation spent part of the morning at the Max Rayne Yad b’Yad (Hand in Hand) Jerusalem School, one of six bilingual, bi-cultural schools (elementary through high school) in Israel where Jewish and Palestinian-Arab Israelis learn together in Hebrew-Arabic classes with paired Arab and Jewish teachers, dual holiday observances, and a unique curriculum designed to foster dialogue and listening between disparate cultures and lived realities.
We met with Noor, who is a spokesperson for Yad b’Yad (pictured with our group, and with me), an Arab woman who grew up in Israel and who interacted with her first Jewish person at age 19. Asked about how the school, and especially the students, have responded to the horror of October 7th and the ensuing brutal war, Noor shared that the philosophy of Yad b’Yad is that through sustained, painful dialogue, what seems impossible can become possible. The hard work of building commonality across a chasm of difference begins with sharing personal and family stories and listening intentionally to another person’s pain. Unfortunately, very few Israelis — Jewish or Arab — are exposed to this mixed-learning environment. The vast majority of Israelis attend separate schools for Jewish kids and Arab kids. And by high school, most of the Jewish kids transfer out, while Arab students remain at Yad b’Yad (largely because the quality of the academic program exceeds what is available to most Arab youth in Israel). Nevertheless, the families who began this bold project 26 years ago led from a vision of a different future for their children. As is written in this week’s Torah portion, “On the mountain of the Eternal, there is vision” (Genesis 22:14). They remind us that with vision, we can move from the way things are to the way they ought to be. Yad b’Yad offers a small glimmer of hope in the darkness.
Wednesday, November 13th, 2024 12 Heshvan 5785
Dear WRT Family,
The Torah portion we are studying this week—Parashat Vayera (Genesis 18:1-22:24)—begins with Divine messengers visiting Abraham’s tent days after the covenantal circumcision of the males of his household. The Rabbis read into this passage the mitzvah of bikkur cholim, visiting the sick. It is a Jewish imperative to give comfort to the ailing, the wounded, and the bereaved. The Babylonian Talmud (Sotah 14) understands all of these compassionate behaviors as ways of emulating the Divine. That’s the best way I can make sense of our visit, this morning, to Ofakim and the Nova Festival site, two of the many targets of the Hamas massacre of October 7th.
Ofakim, a sleepy city about 35 km from the Gaza border, lost more than 50 of its residents, and 364 individuals were murdered in cold blood at the Nova festival. Taken together, the victims of these two sites represent about 1/3 of the people slaughtered by Hamas on October 7th. It is hard to describe the feelings of numb rage and mute sorrow that accompanied our visit this morning. From what I could tell, we were the only American visitors to the site, a small cluster of pastors and rabbis who nodded silently to the many IDF soldiers there to pay their respects to their murdered friends, family, and fellow citizens. What little comfort I found in making pilgrimage to what has become Israel’s “Ground Zero” of sacred remembrance came from the same Talmudic passage referenced above, which also observes that a person who visits someone who is ailing “takes away 1/60 of that person’s suffering.” “One sixtieth” is an idiomatic way of describing “the smallest measurable portion.”
It’s a passage I take seriously, if not literally. I have seen time and again how simply showing up for people in pain—whether through a hospital visit, or a shiva call, or, indeed, this trip to Israel—can alleviate a tiny bit of suffering.
Just a little.
The smallest measurable portion.
May God comfort those who mourn and bring consolation to the broken-hearted.
Thursday, November 14th, 2024 13 Heshvan 5785
Dear WRT Family,
The faces of the hostages and the murdered stare back at you from every street corner and park bench in Tel Aviv.
We’re here, in the cosmopolitan heart of Israel, for the last day of our mission, and the pictures I’ve included below were all taken within a 5-foot radius from Rothschild Boulevard, one of Tel Aviv’s main arteries and the home of Beit HaAtzma’ut, Independence Hall, where David Ben Gurion declared Israel’s independence in May 1948. That’s the squat building with the torn-up façade behind a spiderweb of scaffolding. It’s been “under construction” for several years now, but the sad truth is that the project has been mismanaged, has run out of money, and remains in limbo. Directly across the street from this monumentally significant building (in such a monumental state of disarray), the face of 25-year old Eden Yerushalmi (z”l) murdered in a tunnel beneath Gaza in August—whose body was recovered in the arms of fellow captive Hersh Polin (z”l)—implores the reader, Remember me, ok?
I imagine the two are in dialogue with each other: the symbol of Israeli independence—battered and gutted but still standing—and the face of a murdered hostage, each imploring the other: Remember me, ok?
At the end of this week’s Torah portion, Vayera, God promises Abraham:
“I will bless you, making your descendants as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the sand upon the shore of the sea, and your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes” (Genesis 22:17). That promise—like our unfinished Beit HaAtzma’ut, House of Independence—is still a work in progress, still being built (and rebuilt), with great struggle and sacrifice.
But here, even now, Am Yisrael Chai: the people of Israel lives.
It has taken me a year to write this letter. I’ve agonized over what to say, not finding the words. I needed to write this letter to clear my head. To clarify my thoughts. Maybe it will also open a dialogue between us. I hope it will.
With so much dividing us these days, we also share an overriding commonality. We are Jews, which means we are family, just 15.8 million, a sliver of a sliver of humanity. No matter how sharply we may disagree, we cannot disown each other.
We Jews need to stick together. Family should not demonize their own. You have been maligned. You feel misunderstood. You are wondering where you fit within the Jewish community these days.
The Haggadah speaks of a child called rasha. Usually translated “wicked,” the rasha in fact refers to one who chooses to stand outside the Jewish community, asking, “What does this ceremony mean to you?” The rasha challenges accepted Jewish norms. The Haggadah goes on to rebuke the rasha’s perspective, but never excommunicates that child from the community.
We share a common language of Jewish values. You’ve expressed that your anti-Zionism emerges from your understanding of Tikkun Olam, the directive to repair a broken world. You’ve reminded us that Judaism abhors the shedding of blood. Images of broken bodies and broken families and broken buildings clash with Judaism’s emphasis on love of neighbor and compassion for the vulnerable. You insist “Never Again” is a universal imperative, one that applies not only to the Jews. This is very Jewish.
You also assert that Judaism can thrive without Zionism, that Jews do not need a state of our own, that Diaspora gives us everything we need. It’s easy to make that statement from the relative comfort and safety of America. The half of our family that lives in Israel, about 7.5 million of us, the vast majority descended from refugees whose only hope could be found in the Jewish State, begs to differ.
We are Jews, each deserving a place at the family table of the Jewish People. At the same time, I feel terrible angst about anti-Zionism entering the Jewish mainstream.
In order to help you understand why, here’s my story.
It begins well before most students on today’s college campuses were born, almost thirty years ago, when I first set foot in Israel, in June of 1995. All Reform Jewish clergy spend a year immersing ourselves in the culture, history, language, and land of Israel.
I arrived believing, like many at the time, that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was around the corner. Two years earlier, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with PLO leader Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn, with President Bill Clinton between them, nudging them closer than either preferred. What made this possible was something called the Oslo Process, a series of bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, designed to achieve peace and pave the way for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
This was neither fantasy nor love-fest. It may seem hard to believe today, but at the time, a majority of Israelis, Palestinians, and Jewish Americans supported the peace process. A two-state solution had emerged as the only just conclusion to decades of hatred, mistrust, and violence.
It was never intended to inaugurate a warm and loving marriage, but rather to effectuate a “divorce,” if you will, ending a resentful entanglement between estranged partners who nevertheless had concluded that both had legitimate claims to the same small strip of land.
As Rabin memorably wrote after that fateful handshake: “We don’t make peace with friends. We make it with enemies.”
That Palestinians and Israelis remained enemies even throughout the Oslo Process became apparent as I got ready to move to Israel. Jewish extremists and Islamic fundamentalists used horrifying violence to sow panic and mistrust.
At the time, mass shootings and suicide bombings were not the stuff of everyday headlines. These were game-changing attacks, carried out by fanatical Zionists and anti-Zionists, who, ironically, shared a common goal: disrupt and destroy the peace process by any means possible. Apocalyptic religious visions seduced extremists on both sides to choose hate over love, war over peace, conquest over compromise.
And yet, as I arrived in Israel in the summer of 1995, the peace process moved forward: hobbled, but not incapacitated.
Saturday night, November 4th, I had returned to my apartment after an evening spent playing trivia games and drinking beer with some friends, when the phone rang. A classmate. “Turn on the radio,” she said. “Rabin’s been shot.” We had classmates at the peace rally in Tel Aviv where the Prime Minister had been speaking to a crowd more than 100,000 strong. Rabin himself had expressed astonishment at how many Israelis had shown up to support peace with the Palestinians.
Israel’s most idealistic youth turned out in force. People, it seems to me, a lot like you: Jews determined not to accept the status quo, willing to be the rasha at the Seder table. Jews, mostly young, who recognized in Israel’s Palestinian neighbors the faces of suffering human beings. Jews who detested the fact that, more than a quarter-century after the Six-Day War, the West Bank and Gaza still remained under Israeli control (this being ten years before Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza), with Palestinian mobility, freedom, dignity, and aspirations thwarted. Jews, full of passion and compassion. Again, a lot like you.
In 1995–unlike today—it was not unusual to identify as both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, wanting the same thing for both: a safe home to call their own.
That’s why those idealistic youth showed up that electric November night, jumping with their pro-peace banners into the plaza’s fountains with unbridled joy while Rabin sang along to Shir La-Shalom, the beloved “Song for Peace,” as the rally was wrapping up.
At that moment, a 25-year old Jewish law student and religious extremist named Yigal Amir quietly stepped out of the crowd and put two bullets in the back of the Prime Minister at near point-blank range. Rabin was declared dead an hour and a half later.
In hindsight, many of our hopes and dreams died that night as well. If you had been there, I believe yours would have, too.
The next day, numb with shock and grief, I found myself standing in line with hundreds of thousands of Israelis, to honor our fallen hero. I shuffled by his casket as it lay-in-state on the plaza of the Knesset. I watched his funeral procession from my apartment balcony and could pick out President Clinton’s motorcade. I remember Rabin’s family members stumbling through the words of the Mourner’s Kaddish. But the image I will never shake is of a silent man, sitting cross-legged in Jerusalem’s Zion Square, a sign around his neck with one Hebrew word written in blood-red paint: בושה. SHAME.
The rest of my year in Israel went by like a restless night, all of us trying to keep things as normal as possible: field trips to explore Israelite archaeology; Biblical grammar quizzes; tutoring a 12-year old Jewish Ethiopian immigrant boy whose Hebrew was as rudimentary as mine; singing Reform Jewish camp songs with my classmates Friday mornings on Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem’s pedestrian mall; navigating the sensory assault of the shuk (the outdoor market); figuring out how to argue like an Israeli when someone cut me off in a supermarket checkout line or when the laundromat lost every other sock I owned, only to be rebuffed that “you Americans don’t understand the pressure we Israelis live with every day.”
On February 25th and March 3rd, 1996, loud explosions startled me from a sound sleep. Within two miles of my apartment, Hamassuicide bombers had carried out twin bombings on Jerusalem public buses, one week apart, murdering 45 people. A rash of similar attacks followed in swift succession, every couple of weeks or so throughout the winter and spring: on buses, residential streets, near the popular Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv. The victims included a number of young American students. I have to be honest – I was scared. Sad. Angry. And so, so homesick.
We rode out the rest of the school year in an uneasy mixture of dread and hope, bound by the commitment that, as Jewish leaders-in-formation, we were all in this together. None of us left Israel. Most of us stopped riding the buses. Many of us leaned into activism, animated by a belief, however naïve it may seem today, that the voices of moderation would prevail, that the momentum toward a just solution to the conflict would override the voices of religious extremism and uncompromising nationalism: ideologies that make no room for the other, that view the world in binaries: black and white, good and evil, my team or no team.
The school year ended. Following Rabin’s assassination, Israeli society had fractured over the best way forward. Rabin’s heir apparent, veteran statesman Shimon Peres, pledged to revive the peace process and proceed with Oslo. His opponent, a charismatic 47-year old, promised to be tough on terrorism and hard-nosed with Arafat. Until the day of the election it looked like it could go either way.
On May 31st, 1996–the day I arrived back in the US–Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Israel’s next Prime Minister.
There is so much more I could tell you about the last thirty years. As my Zionism has grown and deepened, so has my appreciation for the complexity with which Israelis live; how, for them, the world’s only Jewish State holds the keys to their past, present and future; how they will willingly lay down their lives and send their children into harm’s way to protect the only place in the world that protected them and their families when the rest of the world showed them the door, forced their conversion, stole their property, and murdered them; how, when their government fails them, they take to the streets to demand better; how, when the global Jewish community fails them, they feel grievously betrayed, because it is their own family turning their backs on them.
I have also seen how the status quo has failed the Palestinians. I have been to the border of Gaza and inside the West Bank–many times. I have been to the checkpoints where Palestinian laborers idle in interminable lines, carrying their lunches in see-through plastic bags so as not to arouse suspicion, subjected at times to humiliating inspections, all in order to earn a living wage—because the best-paying jobs are to be found in Israel, not in the territories.
I have seen peace offers come and go, some more promising than others, the best of them rejected by Palestinian leadership; opportunities to re-engage ignored by hardline Israeli governments who apparently have little regard for what Rabin said about making peace with your enemies, not your friends.
I have seen years of terror and years of quiet–quiet enough, at times, to lull us into a false sense of security that the conflict had evaporated (a complacency shattered on October 7th).
Since my year in Jerusalem, a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians has grown up behind fences and walls, erected to save Israeli lives, which, thank God, they have and still do.
But a byproduct of these barriers is that, for twenty years, Palestinians and Israelis have inhabited separate and dissimilar realities, growing up with their own mythologies and prejudices about the other, untempered by human interaction.
Israel has become an economic and technological powerhouse. Palestinians have languished in squalor, victims at least as much of their own autocratic, cynical, and feckless leaders as they are of Israeli repression. And Hamas persists, unwavering to the end in its jihadist ideology, unbending in its determination to “liberate” Islamic lands from the Jew.
You rightly point to the ugly inequality of Jews and Palestinians living in the West Bank. Just know that when Hamas talks about “ending the occupation,” they don’t mean IDF-controlled West Bank highways, enclaves, and checkpoints, unchecked Jewish settler violence, or encroachment on Palestinian farms and olive groves; they don’t even mean the blockade of Gaza’s borders which Israel administers jointly with Egypt.
No. For Hamas, Tel Aviv is “occupied.” Haifa is “occupied.” Eilat is “occupied.” Hamas, like its ideological confederates in Hezbollah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Islamic Regime in Iran, the Houthis, and like-minded movements across the globe, envisions a world that is Judenrein, the word the Nazis used to mean purged of Jews. Theirs is a zero-sum game.
One cannot understand October 7th or what has followed without first understanding that Hamas has spent the last seventeen years putting every last dollar that could have been used to care for the people of Gaza into building a vast apparatus for asymmetrical warfare: training tens of thousands of fighters in land-, air-, sea-, and cyber-combat; building a massive, impenetrable fortress beneath Gaza; using its civilians as human shields; all while brainwashing Gaza’s children to become martyrs devoted to the cause of eliminating Israel.
I don’t blame you for not understanding this. It is incomprehensible that a people can be so filled with hate, so committed to another people’s utter destruction, so callous about human life—in fact not seeing Jewish lives–our lives, yours and mine–as human at all. It is difficult for our liberal Western sensibilities to comprehend. The savagery of October 7th–the butchery, the torture, the rapes, the kidnappings, the grotesque glee expressed by perpetrator and spectator alike–is not incidental to Hamas’s aims. It is part and parcel of a decades-long program to render co-existence with Jews and the Jewish State impossible.
And, truth be told, the Israeli enemies of peace, whose malign intentions became clear following the Rabin murder, have not gone away, either. A number of them now exercise outsize influence on Israel’s political agenda–including from their seats in the government–fomenting bitter infighting in Israeli society.
You are not wrong to protest the suffering of the Palestinian people. You are not wrong to protest the Israeli government, or the way it prosecutes war. Critiquing Israel does not make one a Jewish traitor. Israelis themselves are quite good at it. Israeli democracy tolerates an extraordinary degree of dissent and it could be argued that argument is the national pastime.
But I write this letter to implore you to manifest your compassion for the Palestinian people in ways that do not erase the reality of the other half of your Jewish family. For every one of us, remember that another Jew is marking Rosh Ha-Shanah in Israel today. Your mirror image. Your twin.
Back in 2007, the year Hamas violently seized power in Gaza, my Rabbi, Jan Katzew, wrote words that resonate with even greater force today.
“We live in an either/or world,” he observed.
“Either you are for us or against us. Either you are right or you are wrong. Either you are good or you are evil…. Either you win or you lose.… It may be simple to live in an either/or world…. An either/or world is inhabited by two types of people, friends or enemies, citizens or barbarians, members or infidels, brothers or others, people who have the truth and people who do not. In extreme cases, an either/or world is divided between people I would die for or people I would kill, people of God and people without God. We are all witnesses to an either/or world, but we do not have to accept it and live according to its norms.”
Judaism offers a different precept, known in the Talmud as “eilu va-eilu.” The phrase comes from a famous debate between the rival teachers Hillel and Shammai, which had become so intractable that it had to be resolved by a Divine proclamation: “Eilu va-eilu divrei Elohim chayim,” meaning, “These [opinions] and those [opinions] are both the word of the living God… even though the law follows Hillel” (Eiruvin 13b).
Our tradition rejects “either/or” and embraces “both/and.”
The enemies of shalom live in an either-or world. They say you must choose: you cannot be both a Zionist and a champion of equality and justice for all God’s children. They say that this little strip of land is big enough for only one people, “mine” or “yours,” not both.
Eilu va-eilu: there is another way. You can critique Israel without making common cause with those who seek Israel’s destruction. You can support Palestinian lives without denying Israeli lives. You can be a Zionist without being a messianic triumphalist.
Eliu va-eilu: we need to accept once and for all that there is no reasonable or just outcome to this awful conflict where one nation emerges victorious and the other vanishes into thin air, or where one lives forever hunted and haunted by the other.
Eilu va-eilu;both must live. That can happen only when Palestinians turn from a vision of Israel’s destruction and choose to build a future alongside the sovereign state of the Jewish People. It can happen only when Jewish religious and national extremism and anti-Arab racism are seen as betrayals of our values and dead ends for Israel’s future. It can happen only when the champions of both/and prevail over the patrons of either/or.
So I close my letter to you with a plea:
Come out of the makeshift tents on campus, and back to the big tent of Jewish communal life.
Stop canceling speakers who affirm Israel’s right to exist, and instead engage in dialogue and debate.
Please! Get off of social media and participate in face-to-face conversation.
Step away from the fringes, the easy comfort of slogans and moral certitude. Come rejoin the messy middle: the place with no easy answers, but where compromise and connection are, God willing, still possible.
A blistering cover of the original recorded by the Temptations a year earlier, “War” became a runaway hit, holding the number one spot on the Billboard charts for three weeks in the summer of 1970.
“Say it again: War! What is it good for?”
We ask, as we mark eight months of war.
We ask on behalf of our hostages.
We ask on behalf of the Israeli people, still reeling from the physical, sexual, and emotional violence inflicted on October 7th.
We ask for the sleepless Israeli parents with children serving in Gaza, in the North, in the West Bank, in all the places we tourists dare not go.
We ask for the more than 100,000 Israelis still displaced from their homes, for the residents of the northern towns burned by incendiary rockets fired by Hezbollah just this week.
We ask for the Palestinian civilians in Gaza killed and maimed and displaced from their homes, for the hungry and the thirsty, the sick and the frightened, whom Hamas has victimized by making them human shields, by stealing their food and water and medicine and fuel, and, worse: their hope.
We ask for the Jewish students for whom this war has become an inescapable fact and feature of collegiate life, abused with hate speech, accused of genocide. Kids who just want to hang out with their friends and drink beer and even attend classes or study in the library free from harassment.
We ask alongside the growing number of Israelis who are tired of this war, sick and tired of politicians whom they do not trust to prosecute this war. We ask alongside the tens of thousands of Israelis who protest every week, begging their government to shift focus from bombarding Rafah to bringing hostages home.
“War! What is it good for?”
This is a reasonable question to ask, eight months into a terrible war.
It is, however, a difficult question to answer.
We turn to the Jewish tradition. Our prayer book is a love song to peace. Oseh shalom bimromav—“May the One who makes Peace in the heavens bring peace upon us”; Shalom rav al Yisrael am’cha—“May a great peace come upon Your people Israel”; Sim shalom, tovah u’vracha—“Grant peace and goodness and blessing….”
If the Siddur were all we had, you’d probably conclude there is no place for war in the Jewish tradition. But the Torah, TaNaKh, Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash, the collections of Rabbinic teaching and storytelling, the annals of Jewish history and codes of Jewish law, all make clear that war is not only sometimes permissible, but even, sometimes, imperative.
The Torah itself provides conditions for going to war and the rules governing military conscription, exemption, and ethical conduct in war. This week’s Torah portion, Bemidbar, opens the Book of Numbers with a census of the Israelites, mustering them tribe by tribe in the Sinai Desert for a planned invasion of the Promised Land. Military conscription, at least for the men, was part and parcel of being numbered among the Israelite ranks.
You and Aaron shall record them by their groups, from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms (Num. 1:1-2).
The Book of Numbers describes how, over the course of their wilderness journey, a debilitated band of escaped slaves will be rehabilitated as a fighting force to be feared by Israel’s enemies. It leads to Deuteronomy, in which Moses readies the troops for combat, straight on to the Book of Joshua, a logbook of the military campaign against the Canaanites.1
Wars are, of course, fought for numerous reasons, among them economic, political, and territorial; wars are fought over ideology and religion, and, even, sometimes, out of revenge.
Judaism designates two primary categories of war: Milhemet Reshut, or Discretionary War, in other words, a war that you may fight; and Milhemet Mitzvah, or Commanded War, a war that you must fight. (Literally, a war that is a mitzvah to fight.)
RaSHI and Maimonides, each writing in the 12th Century, defined Milhemet Mitzvah as a defensive war that one fights only in response to an already-launched attack. (Cf. RaSHI to Bavli, Sotah 44b, and Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 5:1).
The Sages are divided over how to categorize wartime operations designed to prevent an enemy from attacking. The Meiri, writing in France in the 13th century, concludes that “one can launch a preemptive strike against an enemy amassing forces on a border,” which he considers “sufficiently defensive to be categorized as a Milhemet Mitzvah,” a war of obligation (Commentary to Sotah 44b).
In sum, the more a war can be seen as defensive, the more likely Jewish tradition will classify it as obligatory; the more offensive or expansionist, the more likely to be classified as discretionary.
At no time does Judaism give permission to conduct war wantonly, without regard for civilian life, not in the traditional literature, nor in the ethical code of the IDF known as Tohar Ha-Neshek or “Purity of Arms.”
But principle and practice are not the same thing and in the chaos of war, bright lines blur; decisions are made without good intelligence; and terrible suffering is inevitably inflicted on non-combatants.
This is a grievous fact of war, but it is neither unusual nor even necessarily immoral. War is not a war crime. The morality of war is not measured in the proportionality of body count between one belligerent and another, but rather in the proportionality of the effectiveness of wartime measures taken, against the identified military objectives.
The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6th, 1944–eighty years ago yesterday—resulted in somewhere between 4,400 and 10,000 Allied casualties and an estimated 4,000 to 9,000 German casualties. But no one evaluates the merit, or morality, of that invasion this way. How many Allied lives were worth sacrificing in order to defeat the Nazis? How many German lives? These questions are strictly rhetorical.
What to do about the War in Gaza? This is not a rhetorical question. It is also one without any easy answers.
There are reasonable people advocating for the war to continue until Israel’s aims have been accomplished; and there are reasonable people—including a growing number of Israelis—who believe that a cease-fire and exchange of hostages, followed by longer-term efforts to eradicate Hamas’s fighters and its political leadership, would be the way to go.
There are reasonable people who would point out that even with tens of thousands dead in Gaza, a two-to-one combatant to civilian ratio of wartime dead is better, in fact more humane, than any other urban war of the modern era, noting as well that no other army has ever had to fight a jihadist militia that intentionally puts its own civilians in harm’s way.
Indeed, we would note that since coming to power in 2006–the same year tonight’s Chai Society inductees joined the temple—Hamas has done exactly one thing, which is to prepare for October 7th, by training tens of thousands of fighters in land-, air-, sea-, and cyber-warfare; diverting vast resources into into building massive infrastructure for launching and asymmetrical war; all while brainwashing the children of Gaza to become Islamofascist martyrs devoted to the cause of eliminating Israel.
There are also reasonable people who would point out that further pulverization of Gaza only makes it easier for Hamas to raise up a next generation of jihadists sworn to Israel’s destruction.
There are certainly plenty of reasonable people—especially Israelis—who do not trust Netanyahu and his bedfellows to represent the interests of the Israeli public.
And most reasonable people agree that this war will not truly end until a political roadmap, not a military one, is developed and implemented.
What is not reasonable, I would submit, is excoriating the war as a “genocide,” or celebrating the perpetrators of October 7th, or harassing Jewish people for the “sin” of being Jewish, or calling for “Palestinian liberation” when what is meant is not an end to Palestinian suffering in Gaza and the West Bank, but the elimination of Israel.
What is not reasonable is the incessant hectoring about Israel’s war in Gaza without a scintilla of moral outrage over the half a million human beings who perished in the Tigray War which consumed Ethiopia just two years ago; or the more than a half a million dead in the Syrian Civil war of the last decade; or the more than 150,000 killed in war in Yemen, also lying in freshly dug graves, coupled with another 227,000 dead of famine; or, for that matter, the dead of the Russian-Ukrainian war, now also well into six figures after more than two years of fighting. Protest war all you like, but at least know what you’re protesting, and why you choose to protest only this war, especially given the ample menu of bloodshed on offer from just the last few years.
Judaism is in fact not a pacifist tradition, meaning “the belief that any violence, including war, is unjustifiable under any circumstances, and that all disputes should be settled by peaceful means.” Judaism is not pacifist, even though it is deeply and pervasively peace-loving.
Jewish history, Jewish text, Jewish morality, and Jewish lived experience at this very moment, all offer an answer to the question, “War! What is it good for?”
That answer is not, “Absolutely nothing.”
From the Sinai Desert to the Normandy Beaches, from June 6th, 1944 to October 7th, 2023, to this day, eight months later—the only reasonable answer is this:
War is only good for anything when every alternative is worse.
Shabbat Shalom.
In this way the Book of Numbers presages the oft-stereotyped transformation of the image of the Jew in the 20th century, from the feeble bocher bent over his books in some decrepit shetlyeshiva of Europe to the tan and muscular Israeli wielding his military rifle with pride, or the young pioneer dredging swamps and building kibbutzim, planting vegetables at dawn and dancing the hora at night. This transformation, cartoonishly exaggerated and trafficking in stereotypes thought it may be, nevertheless passes through the crucible of War. It is war, more than peace, that defines and unifies a people around a purpose. I say this not to glorify war but to help us understand its purpose and power: Even on October 8th, 2023, Israelis understood no less than Americans understood on September 12th, 2001 that even given other clear military aims, we would have to go to war to restore our wounded pride and purpose as a nation. ↩︎
An article by Rabbi Shlomo Brody published last week in Tablet magazine reviews the historical development of the Yizkor memorial service. As I read it, I remembered, vaguely, that I had written a term paper on this very subject for a liturgy course in rabbinical school. My area of academic concentration was Medieval Jewish literature which, despite every reasonable conjecture to the contrary, has proved relevant to my work as a congregational rabbi on more than one occasion.
I spent my HUC days poring over martyrdom texts written by Ashkenazi Jews between the 11th and 15th centuries. As a tradition that values human life above nearly all else, Judaism generally frowns on martyrdom, with a few notable exceptions.
The first arises after the failed Bar Kochba rebellion in the 2nd Century, when a self-styled Messiah (Shimon Bar Koziba, a.k.a. “Bar Kochba,” meaning “son of a star”) leads a doomed rebellion of Jews against the Roman Empire—the second failed revolt against Rome in 60 years—and a group of prominent leaders and teachers of Torah, most famously Rabbi Akiva, is rounded up by the Romans and executed to public spectacle. These martyrs are recalled in the Yom Kippur afternoon service, in a liturgy known as “Eleh Ezkra,” “These do I remember,” or as it’s called in English, “the Martyrology.” Judaism praises these martyrs for accepting death rather than desecrating the name of God, or so the reasoning goes.
The other exception arises starting in 1096, when Ashkenazi Jews (that is, Jews of the Rhineland, straddling modern-day France and Germany) were brutally attacked by Christian Crusaders on their way to “liberate” the Holy Land from Muslim “infidels.” In response to this trauma, Jewish writers wrote commemorative verses for martyrs who took their own lives rather than submit to the Christian marauders who inflicted physical, sexual, and emotional torment on their victims the likes of which none of us had seen in our lifetimes before October 7th, 2023.
During this period, numerous piyyutim, or devotional poems, were composed, lauding the martyrs, castigating the assailants, and testifying to the sanctification of God’s name for which these pious Jews had died. (To this day, the traditional term for martyrdom is Kiddush Ha-Shem, which means “sanctification of the Name.”) Similar poems proliferate after Jews are put to death (often by burning at the stake, sometimes whole communities at a time) for alleged crimes like murdering Christian children to use their blood for making matzo (the notorious “blood libel”).
A paucity of reliable eyewitness testimony or other contemporaneous artifacts suggests that the proportion of Jews who chose martyrdom over forced conversion or worse was actually very small; but in literature, if not in life, their numbers are exaggerated to match their esteem.
In Germany, a controversial custom arose in the wake of the attacks: writing down the names of the dead in a Memorbücher, or “Memory Book,” called Sefer Zikaron in Hebrew. As Brody points out, “The list of names was introduced with the prayerful wish: ‘May God remember [Yizkor Elohim].’ Alongside the martyrs, communal leaders or benefactors were listed. These names would then be read aloud in the community. Reading the book turned into a communal ritual.”
Several prominent rabbis initially opposed this practice, questioning its theological efficacy (could a prayer really effect divine mercy for the soul of the dead?) and even likening the practice to a kind of idolatry: worship of the dead. As often happens to rabbis in congregational life (I told you this stuff was relevant), the traumatized community’s need for a collective memorial practice overrode the rabbis’ theological objections, and became a cherished part of Jewish life, with names of the dead often inscribed on the walls of synagogues and in books of remembrance, and read aloud before Kaddish (all customs practiced at WRT).
In times of collective grief, new prayers were composed to commemorate the slain. One, called Av Ha-Rachamim (“Father of Mercy”), “beseeches God to remember ‘the pious, upright, and blameless, the holy communities, who laid down their lives for the sanctification of [the] Name.’ It further calls on God to take revenge for their spilled blood” (Ibid) and exact vengeance on their enemies. The prayer gained further traction when, in the middle of the fourteenth century, pogroms broke out against Jewish communities in the wake of the Black Plague.
When, in the middle of the 17th Century, the Cossack warlord Bogdan Chmielnizki led a massacre of tens of thousands of Polish Jews, another new martyrdom prayer entered the liturgy: El Malei Rachamim, “The God of Abundant Compassion,” a prayer asking God to shelter the souls of the righteous beneath the wings of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) and to bind up their souls in the bonds of life everlasting”—words that are recited today at every Jewish funeral, but which began as a response to communal trauma.
Taken together, these prayers and poems and lists of the dead gradually coalesce into the Jewish practice of Yizkor, the memorial service that will eventually be adopted into the liturgy for Yom Kippur and the Shalosh Regalim, the three pilgrimage Festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. So we offer Yizkor prayers four times a year. (By “we,” I mean Ashkenazi Jews; to this day, Sepharadim do not have a communal Yizkor, because the precipitating catastrophes for this liturgy did not happen in Sephardic lands.)
And, for the most part, our Yizkor, though a communal experience, is centered around the emotional and spiritual needs of the individual mourner. You will find in our Siddur a wide array of poems, both traditional and modern, and formulas for saying Yizkor, with the emphasis on personal bereavement.
And yet, today is also the first Yizkor since the last Yizkor, which was recited collectively throughout the Jewish world on October 7th and 8th, 2023—on the Festivals of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah—the conclusion of Sukkot.
One of the great ironies of human life is that we experience mourning as the loneliest of ordeals when in fact it is the most universal. It is a cruel trick of Nature that the human psyche has evolved to respond to the death of a loved one as uniquely shattering. “No one can know my pain,” we think; “no one understands what this feels like.” This was not just someone’s husband, wife, parent, child, or friend: this one was mine, and now, I am utterly alone. Such is the force of death and such the devastation of loss. And still, the force of death is a mirror image of the force of life even as grief is reflected love.
Judaism, in its compassionate wisdom, saw fit to merge the intensely personal experience of grief with the intensely Jewish need to be in community, and vice versa. Yizkor: what began as collective remembrance in the face of unfathomable communal trauma also became the sacred container for every individual bereavement. In so doing, Yizkor makes plain its meaning: you are not alone.
We need Yizkor this year, more than ever. We need to be together in our grief and heartbreak, for the trauma of October 7th and the trauma of every day since. By way of giving us some space for memory—alone and together—I will share this poem by the Adi Keissar, an acclaimed Israeli poet whose family arrived as refugees from Yemen beginning in 1882 on her father’s side, and, on her mother’s side, in the wake of the expulsion of Yemen’s Jews in the 1950’s.
We met with Noor, who is a spokesperson for Yad b’Yad (pictured with our group, and with me), an Arab woman who grew up in Israel and who interacted with her first Jewish person at age 19. Asked about how the school, and especially the students, have responded to the horror of October 7th and the ensuing brutal war, Noor shared that the philosophy of Yad b’Yad is that through sustained, painful dialogue, what seems impossible can become possible. The hard work of building commonality across a chasm of difference begins with sharing personal and family stories and listening intentionally to another person’s pain.
Rabbi Jonathan E. Blake 