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Was Israel’s war in Gaza unjust?

If anyone ought to know the answer to that question, it’s Michael Walzer, the author of Just and Unjust Wars, which half a century ago set the agenda for how we discuss justness in combat to this day.

Throughout Israel’s war with Gaza, Walzer has maintained that Israel had ticked the box for “Jus Ad Bellum,” meaning that Israel had a justified reason to go to war, while he has wavered on the question of Israel’s “Jus In Bello,” meaning the justness of Israel’s methods in fighting the war.

In other words, Walzer maintained that despite certain issues with the war’s prosecution, the fact that Israel was at war in the first place was justified.

In a new essay for The New Yorker, however, writer Jordi Graupera writes that Walzer has changed his mind on this assessment.

What caused this change? Well, at a conference in Jerusalem, Walzer stated it plainly. “Once there was a political way to defeat Hamas and to free the hostages, the war became unjust.”

Fair enough, except for the fact that no such political option has ever existed. Walzer speaks here as if the political solution to ending the conflict with Hamas was a completely obvious and available path that Israel ignored. The opposite is true. It is a path Israel has pursued, despite not existing.

Despite our current ceasefire, Hamas has retained its control over Gaza, refused to demilitarize, and has insisted again and again that it will commit further October 7th-style attacks the second it has the opportunity.

Ceasefires for terrorist insurgent groups are little more than opportunities to regroup and rearm. They are not a way to “defeat Hamas.” Walzer obviously knows this.

The fact remains that there is no political solution when dealing with a terrorist group that seeks your total destruction. Indeed, it was hallucinated political solutions of the kind that Walzer suggests that were employed by Israel with regard to Hamas for the past twenty years. They did not bring peace; rather, they provided excellent cover for a terrorist group planning one of the most sinister jihads in human history.

Later in the essay, Walzer says to Graupera, “There’s a sense in which the carnage of Gaza, the ongoing carnage, simply made the war unjust.”

He added: “Most wars don’t reach anything like the carnage of Gaza.”

The truth is that the Gaza war is not superlative in any way. It was not the deadliest conflict of the 21st century. It did not cause the most displacement of any other conflict in the 21st century. It was not the fastest-moving conflict of any conflict of the 21st century.

It is surpassed in all these categories by nearly every other conflict that we have witnessed in recent years: Ukraine and Russia, Sudan, Congo, the Syrian civil war, and Iran’s brutal suppression of protesters, which killed something like 40,000 individuals in the space of a month or two.

But most interesting of all is Walzer’s suggestion that the carnage “simply made” the war unjust, as if it were an act of transfiguration.

This recalls the way in which the world has decided that even though Israel’s war shares no characteristics with any historic genocide and meets none of the criteria for how we have traditionally defined and understood genocide, it simply “is one”.

The result of this kind of thinking is that we have seen organizations like Amnesty International and B’Tselem quietly change their definitions of genocide in order to conclude that Israel has committed one. That Israel is committing a genocide is the axiom, and all other data points must bend to fit this truth.

“Carnage,” which is to say violence, tragedy, and destruction, do not magically make a war unjust. What’s more, this is very reason that Michael Walzer wrote his book in the first place, so that we would be able to look at something as brutal and ugly as war and still make serious moral appraisals.

But alas, it seems that towards the end of his career, Walzer has been taken in, at least partially, by the very moral confusion which it has been his life’s work to dispel.

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Cathy Ames is evil.

According to the narrator, the femme fatale at the center of John Steinbeck’s Biblical allegory East of Eden, was just born that way. Some people are born different, he writes. They have extraordinary physical abilities or strange deformities. So too with a person’s interior self. Some people come out wicked, and that’s all there is to it.

Cathy is a controversial character. A close friend of mine told me that Cathy’s lack of depth was the reason she didn’t finish the book. To her, Cathy’s one-note wantonness seemed an affront to women and to good writing.

I haven’t yet watched the new Netflix East of Eden series (I’ll save that until I finish the book), but I’ve become aware that this issue with Cathy is one of the main ways in which the source material has been revised in Zoe Kazan’s adaptation.

This new Cathy, played by Florence Pugh, was not just born that way. Rather, a flashback scene portrays her as a sweet and innocent child who was, it is implied, sexually abused by an older boy. This trauma, it is suggested, is what makes her into the sinister and murderous deviant that she becomes.

In a New York Times review by Caroline Darya Framke, these changes to Cathy’s character are described as “humanizing” and “nuanced.”

“Zoe Kazan and Florence Pugh’s nuanced take on the Netflix show’s villain has rankled Steinbeck purists by making her a human being,” reads the essay’s sanctimonious subtitle.

“Zoe Kazan is too fascinated by Cathy’s motivations to let her be two-dimensional,” Framke writes. “Instead, she digs into Steinbeck’s subtext to excavate an astonishingly human portrait of a traumatized woman committed to self-preservation above all else.”

The idea that all of this is humanizing deserves scrutiny. Today, almost every villain is subject to this kind of treatment, retrofitted with a traumatic past that serves as the origin story for their wickedness.

Cruella De Vil is not a materialistic aesthete who values fashion more than life, she is a wounded woman whose parents were killed by a rich and ruthless member of the capitalist elite.

The Joker is not an anarchist psychopath, he’s a sensitive artist pushed to the edge by society.

And of course, the Wicked Witch of the West is not a “bad witch” hungry for power. She is a rebel and a revolutionary defamed as a terrorist by evil Emerald City imperialists.

This way of understanding evil has spread to our political discourse as well. When a terrorist drove his car into a Jewish preschool in West Bloomfield, Michigan, Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed infamously explained the attacker’s motives by saying “hurt people hurt people.”

What did he mean by this? Well, the terrorist in question was seeking to avenge his brother, a Hezbollah commander who had been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon a week prior. He was therefore a “hurt person,” whose trauma and tragedy drove him to inflict his inner pain on others.

Thus, in El-Sayed’s “nuanced” version of the story, the Jews themselves become the real villains, while the terrorist becomes the victim.

The idea that our current actions are not truly choices for which we are responsible, but rather reactions to past traumas, suggests a mechanistic understanding of what a human being is. According to this understanding, we react mindlessly to what happens to us without any real capacity to heal, reflect, or make choices.

Compared to this, the “flat” Cathy of the book is actually much more interesting, precisely because she is not mechanistic. Her character is more than the sum of her circumstances. There is something inside her that we can’t understand or explain away.

I’m not arguing that she’s the best written character in the history of literature. She’s not. But let’s not pretend that a vague traumatic backstory counts as “character development.” It’s a lazy, overused device. And worse, it is naive about the reality of evil.

East of Eden is based on the book of Genesis, and one of the most profound insights of Genesis is that humans have an inborn capacity for evil, and also for good. “Sin couches at the door; Its urge is toward you, Yet you can be its master.”

It’s not a pretty thing to think about ourselves. God Himself doesn’t want to accept it, and attempts to wipe out wickedness with a flood, preserving only righteous Noah and his family.

This attempt ultimately fails. “Never again will I doom the earth because of humankind,” God concedes, “since the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth.”

God learns the hard way that evil cannot be so easily washed away.

Not with a flood and not with a rewrite.

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Recently, a colleague of mine—Rabbi Nikki Golomb—was fired from her position at Emory University’s Hillel, allegedly due to the anti-Zionist politics and activism of her partner, an activist named Sam Stein. Hillel disputes that this was the reason for the firing.

I’ll state up front that I stand with my former chevruta (study partner) Nikki. If this was indeed the reason for her termination, and I have no reason to doubt Nikki’s account, Hillel made a huge mistake here, and it’s the students who will be worse off for losing a wonderful rabbi.

Nikki, I’m sure, will be fine. She’s intelligent, compassionate and dedicated, and I have no doubt that she will quickly find a new position where her contributions are valued.

It seems that we are caught in a moment of spiraling, mutual McCarthyism. On one side, we see widespread cultural boycotts targeting anyone Israeli or with ties to Israel. And on the other, a rabbi fired for the crime of being romantically involved with someone who doesn’t toe the line on Israel.

It’s not too late for us to reverse course. And I don’t mean that Hillel has to start hiring anti-zionist rabbis if they don’t want to. Hillel is one of the only non-hostile environments for Zionist students on American campuses and they have a right and, I believe, an obligation to remain as such.

But there is a world of difference between hiring rabbis whose values match those of the organization and firing rabbis for merely associating with individuals who don’t espouse those same values. The former is a reasonable personnel decision. The second is a hysterical overreaction that betrays an inability to tolerate any whiff of dissent.

But if Hillel wants to do some real cheshbon nefesh (introspection) here, they might ask themselves a more challenging question—not just whether or not their rabbi should have been fired for her relationship with Sam Stein, but whether or not he’s actually the anti-Zionist boogieman they’re imagining in the first place.

Sam is not some Jew-of-privilege keyboard warrior calling to globalize the intifada because it’s fashionable. Rather, he’s a longtime advocate of nonviolence who has again and again put his safety on the line to confront violent extremists in the West Bank.

One thing I know for sure is that every single Jewish person I speak with—including the most fervently Zionists that I know—is fed up with the violence going on in the West Bank right now, and wishes that someone—anyone—would do something about it.

Ok. So here’s someone doing something about it. At tremendous personal risk, he has repeatedly uprooted his comfortable life in North America to make a better future for Jews and Palestinians in the land of Israel. Compared to that, how much does it matter that he wears a watermelon kippah?

If there’s one thing I wish anti-Israel Jews in the United States understood, it’s that you can be deeply engaged with Israel and be critical of Israel at the same time. It’s hard to imagine what else “engagement” might mean. For Jewish college students who love Israel but are struggling with what they see taking place in the West Bank on a daily basis, it could prove to be a powerful experience to encounter a Jew who spent time bouncing back between studies at Pardes Institute of Jewish Learning in Jerusalem and protective presence in the West Bank.

Like it or not, an increasing number of Jews in the United States describe themselves as anti-Zionist. And just to be clear, I think this is misguided. I oppose the anti-Zionist movement. But even so, we must remember that identity labels are not the whole story of who someone is and what they stand for.

Of course, all of this is somewhat irrelevant to the question of the firing of Rabbi Golomb, who deserved to be evaluated on the basis of her own considerable merits and not the politics of her partner.

But since the conversation has been raised, I feel the need to say it again: a person is more than a label.

We love to say, as Jews, that Judaism is a religion concerned with deeds.

Don’t Sam’s deeds speak for themselves?

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On one side of our apartment in Haifa is a city street like any other. There’s a municipal school and if you follow the street around the bend, you’ll get to a minimarket and a small park.

On the other side, however, a narrow paved path leads to a gate. Cross the gate and you are, quite suddenly, out of the city, in a mountain wadi that feels like the heart of an enchanted forest, surrounded by tall, verdant trees on all sides.

So it is with these neighborhoods carved into the Carmel Mountain, where the Prophet Elijah once preached. Nature and urbanism exist side by side, and sometimes the residents of one domain spill into the other.

I’ve seen jackals, hedgehogs, and mongooses. One night, as I passed an alleyway, I caught sight of an enormous porcupine, quills fanned out about her like a grand dame in an extravagant fur coat.

And of course, there are the boars.

Haifa is known for its wild boars, which are the unofficial mascots of the city. When I first saw one of these magnificent creatures, it occurred to me that these are the descendants of the very boars that my ancestors were forbidden to eat. In other words, we have been not eating these boars for thousands of years. There is therefore a rather deep simpatico between us, a mutual covenant of non-aggression and coexistence.

Or at least, there used to be. In recent years, Haifa’s mayor has been engaged in an aggressive culling campaign against these intelligent and sensitive creatures, empowering hired guns to go out and shoot them in the streets—eschewing less violent means of managing their presence in the city, such as increasing the sanitation budget and installing fences near the entrances to the wadis.

Many people I have spoken to support the culling, citing the danger the boars pose to the human population. Indeed, there have been cases where boars have caused injury. They are, after all, wild animals. Generally speaking, if one gives them space, they give space in return, but this is not always the case.

As of today, I haven’t seen a single wild boar in over six months. It used to be that I came upon them regularly. Not often, but regularly.

It was always rare enough to be special. There was one standing outside our apartment when we came home late one night from a movie. Another, with her young piglet, trotting down the street when we left synagogue on Shabbat. Another drinking from a fountain in the town square.

We all know the feeling of seeing a wild animal. Most commonly, in America, people have this experience with deer. Everyone quiets down, grows excited, and takes in the sighting. There is a sense that one has been chosen to witness something special. Like seeing a shooting star, we feel uplifted and singled out by these encounters.

It is no different with a boar. Like deer, they have a dignity and a beauty that can only be ascertained in person. They grab your attention and make you present. In the midst of a workday, on a busy city street, one becomes still and focused and quiet.

This week, we will read the story of Noah and his ark. There is no suggestion in the biblical text that there was any friction between Noah and the animals during their time together on the high seas, though it is hard to imagine how such a thing could be avoided.

The midrash, thankfully, fills in the picture. In one midrash, Noah’s sons complain of the great difficulty of taking care of the animals. Each one had different needs. Some needed to be kept wet and others dry. Some ate at night and some in the day. Each had its own diet. Noah’s sons had to become zoologists and zookeepers in one.

In another midrash, we learn that a lion attacked Noah when he was late in feeding it, leaving him permanently scarred.

When we share space with animals, conflict is inevitable. This goes for domestic animals as well. My partner Yoav just had to get a tetanus shot after a friend’s chihuahua took a bite out of his gorgeous nose.

But Haifa is a special city because the wild parts have been allowed to remain. This includes the greenery, the mountain wadis, the howling jackals, and yes—the wild boars.

They are creatures we have known for a long time. In Leviticus, God tells us not to eat them.

In Genesis, God tells Noah to load them up on an ark and save them.

No such commandment has been given to us. We need not build an ark to save the boars.

But the least we could do is to leave them alone and let them live.

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In a recent conversation between comedian Ilana Glazer and children’s entertainer Miss Rachel, the two discussed Ed Sheeran’s refusal to speak out against Israel’s war in Gaza.

“If you’re so famous and un-cancelable,” Miss Rachel asks, “why are you afraid to say that kids in Gaza should have hospitals and schools? Can’t you risk something to help save lives?”

“It’s so obviously a genocide!” Ilana responds, thrilled.

“And it’s so important to say ‘genocide’ right now,” Miss Rachel adds, “because saying it will move the world to stop it.”

There are plenty of issues with this conversation. For one, the idea that Israel’s war is a genocide is not “obvious” at all. Throughout the war, Israel consistently took well-documented measures to limit civilian casualties in Gaza. These included warning of attacks in advance, moving civilian populations out of combat zones, facilitating the movement of aid, and facilitating a vaccination program. In light of all that, we must at admit that if Israel indeed committed a genocide, it was, at the very least, a distinctly non-obvious one.

But the bigger issue is the claim that if enough people accuse Israel of genocide loudly enough, the world will become safer for Palestinian children.

Here’s what we know. Gazan schools and hospitals were used consistently throughout the war as military installations by Hamas, stripping them of their protected status under international law and transforming them into military targets. Ambulances were used as military transports. Hospitals and clinics were used for weapons transfers and for trafficking Israeli hostages.

When Mohammad Sinwar, the number one Hamas target at the time, was killed by the IDF, he was killed in a bunker built underneath a hospital.

When the number two target at the time, Mohammed Deif, was killed by the IDF in a targeted strike, he was in a civilian safe zone.

Let that sink in.

Now this is a pretty sinister thing to do. But can we blame Hamas for this tactic when we see how brilliantly it worked? Hiding top brass under a hospital will have one of two effects. It either serves as a deterrent to Israel attacking, or, if Israel attacks anyways, transforms a military loss into a propaganda win.

In war, you usually have to choose the less terrible of the bad options available to you. But Hamas has figured out to manufacture a win-win.

So no, Miss Rachel, you are 100 percent wrong that accusing Israel of genocide will make all of this stop. In fact, you are guaranteeing that it will continue. With every insipid interview, you are showing Hamas that their strategy of using hospitals and schools was successful beyond their wildest dreams.

And because this conflict is ongoing, we know for a fact that in a future Gaza Strip where the hospitals and schools are rebuilt, they will once again, because of you and people like you, be used as shields military operations, leaving Gazan children vulnerable.

So while you condemn Ed Sheeran for his silence, know this: he is not the one complicit in crimes taking place in a far off land.

You are.

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I was saddened to learn of the recent passing of author Annie Dillard, who died at age 81 on September 15th. I had only just encountered Dillard for the first time, reading her Pulitzer Prize winning collection of essays, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” just a few months ago. And as I read it, I had that rare and precious sense of having discovered a new favorite author, with all the great sense of potential that comes with such a discovery.

The essays detail Dillard’s time living by Tinker Creek in Virginia. In her writing, she approaches nature as if it were a holy text to be studied with devotion.

But certain passages of that holy text are often quite challenging for Dillard. She discusses the theological problem presented by the case of the male praying mantis, whose body continues to thrust into that of his mate long after she has devoured his head.

She describes the crisis of faith she underwent after witnessing a giant water bug inject venom into a frog, which paralyzed it and liquified its innards, before slurping them out like a smoothie, leaving the frog’s deflated skin floating on the water like an empty wrapper.

What do such grotesque and amoral displays suggest about the creator of all this? What does it mean for human faith and value?

In asking these questions, Dillard reminded me of many Jews, myself included, in our ongoing confrontation with Torah, which also contains many challenging passages.

The book of Numbers is an unending tale of violence, death and woe. The book of Deuteronomy is shot through with terrifying threats of divine punishment and exhortations to do unthinkable violence. There is also the beauty and tenderness of the Torah, the moral sensitivity of the prophets, the heartbreaking beauty of the psalms.

“What is going on here?” Dillard asks about nature. “The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork–for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl–but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”

When I read this passage, I was reminded of the first time I truly fell in love with Torah. I was reading the chapters describing the High Priest’s garments and came across the following verse:

“On its hem make pomegranates of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, all around the hem, with bells of gold between them all around: a golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, all around the hem of the robe.”

I remember the moment so vividly. I felt I had never heard such beautiful words before. Perhaps I even swooned over them. The thought that God, creator of heaven and earth, could concern Himself with the fanciful ornamentation of a hemline was a grace.

The creator loves pizzazz.

“What I aim to do,” wrote Dillard, “is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality.”

This, I believe, is how we should approach Torah as well—with an openness to the “fullest possible force of [its] very reality.” To let ourselves be stirred by the description of a holy hem, to be curious about the Torah’s rough beauty, its violence, its dealings in blood and smoke and gore and fire.

What makes “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” so powerful is not just that Dillard puzzles over the gruesome details of nature, but also that she finds these details so utterly fascinating. She describes Edwin Way Teale’s The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects as “a book I couldn’t live without.”

It is this love of detail that we need.

When asked to summarize the Torah on one foot, Rabbi Hillel stated: “What is hateful to you, do not do unto others. The rest is commentary.”

A lovely sentiment, but wholly untrue. The Torah cannot be summarized. Like the vast expanse of nature itself, the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible are a wild landscape, populated by diverse species with different agendas.

There is poetry and prose, history and myth. Some books attempt to discern what God wants of us. Others plaintively cry out to God for help, or accuse God of abandonment.

The details, like those of the ecosystem of Tinker Creek, might make you swoon, overwhelmed by beauty. Others, like the frog drained by the water bug, will turn your stomach. But if you are open to really looking, to really seeing, you will never find yourself lacking for something to wonder at, or for a question so vital it feels that everything in your life hinges on finding the answer.

And perhaps also you will find that the looking itself can make you more alive, as it did for Dillard, and more aware of the pizazz all around us.

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At a Yom Kippur event in New York City organized by Rabbis for Ceasefire, JVP, IfNotNow and others, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil took the stage in front of a sign that read: “Al Chet - For the Sin of Committing Genocide.”

This is a riff on a section of the Yom Kippur prayer called “Al Chet,” which means “For the sin…” During this recitation, we read a long list of sins and beat our chests.

“For the sin that we sinned against You in taking bribes.”

“For the sin that we sinned against You with wicked speech.”

“For the sin that we sinned against You in unfair business dealings.”

Etc. Etc.

“At this time of repentance,” Khalil said to the gathered crowd, “I really ask God to remember that Israel is committing genocide. That Israel is killing children. That Israel displaced my grandparents in 1948.”

Now, I personally believe that the genocide accusation against Israel is demonstrably false. But this essay is not about that, so I’ll leave it aside for a moment.

Rather, it is something else about this ceremony that feels, to me, like an inversion of what Yom Kippur is supposed to be.

Because Yom Kippur is not about sanctimonious grandstanding about what you perceive as someone else’s sins. It’s about looking inward with honesty at where we have sinned, fallen short, and caused harm.

In an Instagram post about the event, IfNotNow wrote: “On our holiest of holidays, we pray in remembrance, refusal, and recommitment to keep fighting until Palestine is free.”

And so, while others were beating their chests and saying “we sinned,” these groups were pointing their fingers and saying, “you sinned, and we are gathering to keep fighting against you.”

If there is one part of Yom Kippur ritual that this anti-Israel rally actually did resemble, it is the scapegoat ritual practiced in the days of the Temple, where the sins of the people were displaced onto a goat and sent off into the wilderness. But even that process began with a confession, not a “refusal.”

The tendency to look outward rather than inward is common. I’m reminded of Tisha B’Av, the holiday that warns us against “baseless hatred,” and which everyone uses as a pretext to condemn the baseless hatred of others.

It’s not hard to understand why we do this. Looking inward is painful.

This Yom Kippur, I spoke in my sermon about Etty Hillseum, a Dutch Jewish diarist who was killed in Auschwitz at age 29.

Etty believed in the power of inner work to change the world. In a sense, every day for her was Yom Kippur, an opportunity to look inward, to take account of herself, to try to be better, to feel more, to contain more compassion for others.

In one entry, she wrote, “Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”

This is the work of Yom Kippur.

And the truth is that every Jewish community and faction, Zionist and anti-Zionist alike, needs to do this work.

Pointing out the sins of others is easy. It can also be quite satisfying - even fun! Complaining about Mamdani, Macklemore, and Greta Thunberg is much more enjoyable than asking questions like:

In my love of Israel, have I become closed to information that challenges or complicates that love?

Do I feel empathy with Palestinians? For what they have lost?

Am I able to see anti-Zionist Jews as brothers and sisters? Or have I written them off?

On Yom Kippur, we read a section of the book of Isaiah in which the prophet condemns false piety and fasting while people continue to ignore their true sins.

It is perhaps one of the most powerful parts of the day, and if it doesn’t make you quake in your sneakers, or feel humbled in your certainties, you’re missing the point.

On Yom Kippur we must lay down our crusade against others and look inward with honesty at where we have stumbled or charged into sin, even when we felt we were most girded with noble intentions.

Only then will our “Al Chet” be worth anything.

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In 2013, I uprooted myself from the United States and moved to Tel Aviv.

I did it out of a profound love of Israel and a desire to join my fate to the fate of the Jewish people in our ancient homeland.

And yet, despite all that, I refused to call myself a Zionist.

Even then, the term was controversial, and I told myself that I preferred to be more precise with my language, eschewing one-word labels that are sure to be misunderstood.

But then, in 2015, something changed. I had officially made Aliyah. While I had initially come to Israel on a visa, in 2015 I became a citizen through the Law of Return - a law which allows any Jew in the world to become a citizen of the Jewish state.

And when I received my Teudat Zehut (Israeli ID card), I realized that it would be dishonest, perhaps even ungrateful, to make use of this most Zionist mechanism while still pretending that I was somehow above using the label.

And so I began calling myself a Zionist, and decided that I better find out what this word means to me, even if I can’t control what it means to everyone else.

Today, the Jewish world is debating this very issue.

In an interview with Haviv Rettig Gur, Sam Harris—one of the most persuasive and passionate defenders of Israel working today—argued that the term is a liability, something hurting our cause rather than helping it. “It sounds like racism and can be spun as colonialism… it has this vast attack surface, but we’re so attached to it that we just keep using it.”

Around the same time, Jewish podcaster Jonah Platt said the term should be “put out to pasture.”

According to a Washington Post article about this issue, Jewish consultants have appealed to young Jewish leaders to use words “that have an agreed-upon meaning.”

The problem is that words—especially those concerning politics, religion, and identity—rarely meet this criteria.

The term “Christian” holds Martin Luther King Jr. and Billy Graham alike. “Socialist” encompasses Chairman Mao and Bernie Sanders. And yes, “Zionist” encompasses both Itamar Ben-Gvir and Hen Mazzig.

The real issue isn’t that the term Zionism is especially confusing, rather that there’s a well-organized campaign going back nearly a century to link Zionism with racism, white supremacy and colonialism.

If Zionism has become a liability, the semantic indeterminacy of words is not the culprit. The problem is people who are ideologically committed to making Zionism a liability.

In another age, simply being Jewish was considered a liability. As the nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine famously said of his conversion to Christianity, baptism was “the admission ticket to European culture.”

Thirty years or so after his death, shortly before the rise of Hitler, it seemed as though things had changed. Many Jews in Germany believed that they had transcended the Jew-hatred of the past. And many Germans believed this too.

In twentieth-century Germany, to be against the Jews because of their religion was considered backwards—an unsightly sin of the past.

But then the term “antisemitism” was coined. And what many don’t know is that it was coined by an antisemite, Wilhelm Marr, in order to describe opposition to Jews on the basis of their racial inferiority and corrosive cultural influence.

“But I repeat, and I believe it: I am not animated by even the slightest ‘Jew-hatred.’”

This quote comes from Wilhelm Marr himself, but it could have easily been said by Macklemore, or Greta Thunberg, or anyone else who crusades against Zionism while claiming to harbor no ill feelings towards the Jews.

For Marr, religious Jew-hatred was backwards and wrong. But Antisemitism was modern, justified, and more importantly, principled.

Today, antisemitism is backwards and wrong. But anti-Zionism is considered modern, justified, and principled.

The goalposts move, the terms change, but the message stays the same: those people (us) are the problem.

Which means that the search for the right term, the term that will finally make us unimpeachable—that will take the target off our backs—is a vain pursuit.

And so for now, with all due respect to Sam Harris, I will continue calling myself a Zionist, even at the risk of being misunderstood.

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In Hebrew School, I was taught that Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world.

Not the planet, but everything. The whole universe.

And so I understood that the first day of the month of Tishrei is when God began creating, and said: “Let there be light.”

But there is a problem with this answer, because for a day that’s about the world, about the emergence of Yesh from Ayin, about the entire universe — why are we so focused on ourselves, our deeds, and whether we will be inscribed in the book of life or the book of death.

If this is the birthday of creation, let us celebrate creation! Let’s trade the shofar for a telescope and gaze into space at night, counting the countless stars and realizing how small we are in a universe of unthinkable beauty, wonder and expansiveness.

Let us go to the beach and praise God for the mighty sea, the great waves, the beautiful steel blue color of the sea and the sky.

Let us look OUTWARD instead of INWARD.

But it turns out that there is a reason why we do Rosh Hashanah the way we do.

The first of Tishrei is NOT actually the first day of creation, the day when God said “let there be light.”

According to the Midrash, the First of Tishrei was the sixth day of creation, the day when God said, “let us make Man in our image.”

In other words, today is our birthday - the birthday of humanity.

And as we humans enter our 5787th year, I think it’s fair to say that we’re having a bit of an identity crisis as a species.

We have created a technology in our own image. It thinks and it speaks. It reasons and it writes. It creates.

For centuries, we have defined ourselves by what we can do that no other being can do.

We are the smartest, the most creative beings in the universe. We can build things. We can reason. We can write poetry and novels. We can paint great works of art. We can transform the raw materials of the earth into great wonders.

But throughout the years, our own technology has challenged this understanding of ourselves by doing precisely those things that we supposed only we could do.

At first it was just technical things.

We comforted ourselves by saying, it’s only doing the technical work. But only humans can reason and strategize.

Then a computer beat a chess master at chess for the first time, and so we moved the goalposts, insisting that reasoning and strategizing were not uniquely human skills, and moving our focus to creative, interpersonal, and emotional skills, for which we still needed a human.

But now technology can write a poem and tell a joke.

This raises a whole host of questions about our economy and our culture — but the real question is this:

Who are we?

What makes us human?

We could move the goalposts again, find something that AI is still not able to do and say — THAT’S what makes us human.

But why bother? Give it five years, or one, and AI will be doing that thing as well, and we will be left with the same problem.

But there is one area in which we remain unchallenged by AI. This is the power to experience the world.

Experience is something we share with animals, possibly even with plants, but the experience of life that humans have is unique, for we can not only experience, but reflect on experience, and ask questions about its meaning.

Experience is the greatest mystery in the universe. And we live so close to this mystery, really, we ARE this mystery, that we hardly regard it as a mystery at all. We mostly take it for granted.

We know what happens in the brain when a person looks at a rose, we can see it in scans, but none of this minimizes or even comes close to explaining the mystery of red, the very fact of experience, that, in the words of Anil Seth, when I open my eyes, a world appears.

AI can analyze a photo, but it cannot see.

It can process speech, but it cannot hear.

It can describe the world, but it cannot experience the world.

Did not the Torah warn us about just such a creation? Here, a psalm discussing idols.

פֶּֽה־לָ֭הֶם וְלֹ֣א יְדַבֵּ֑רוּ עֵינַ֥יִם לָ֝הֶ֗ם וְלֹ֣א יִרְאֽוּ׃

They have mouths, but cannot speak,

eyes, but cannot see;

אָזְנַ֣יִם לָ֭הֶם וְלֹ֣א יִשְׁמָ֑עוּ אַ֥ף לָ֝הֶ֗ם וְלֹ֣א יְרִיחֽוּן׃

they have ears, but cannot hear,

noses, but cannot smell;

יְדֵיהֶ֤ם ׀ וְלֹ֬א יְמִישׁ֗וּן רַ֭גְלֵיהֶם וְלֹ֣א יְהַלֵּ֑כוּ לֹֽא־יֶ֝הְגּ֗וּ בִּגְרוֹנָֽם׃…

כְּ֭מוֹהֶם יִהְי֣וּ עֹשֵׂיהֶ֑ם כֹּ֭ל אֲשֶׁר־בֹּטֵ֣חַ בָּהֶֽם׃

Those who fashion them,

all who trust in them,

shall become like them.

Those who fashion them,

all who trust in them,

shall become like them.

This last line is most important, because we’ve been focused on the wrong question. We’ve been asking, when will the robots become human.

We should be asking, are we humans becoming robots.

I fear that we are giving up on experience, giving up our senses, our inner world. Our presence. And therefore, our humanity.

The average person in Israel spends twelve hours a day looking at a screen, whether it is a phone, an Ipad, a television, or a laptop. We are only awake for about 16 hours a day. To spend 12 hours a day looking at a screen is to spend one’s life looking at a screen.

For the youngest among us, this number is even higher. Childhood, a time in life that ought to be all experience, all senses, the smell of summer, the feeling of grass beneath one’s feet, the energy and the desire to run and jump and tumble, is being dominated by screens, which now seem more real to children than reality itself.

There is something about scrolling content that is powerfully narcotic. It dulls the mind, shuts us off. It is designed by some of the most brilliant minds of our generation to be as addictive as possible.

Even those who aren’t caught in the snare of social media still have constant notifications, email, whatsapp, a sense that wherever we are, we are in demand, available to everyone on earth, pulled in a thousand different directions.

When we sit at home with our families, we are also at work. The whole world is our office!

To be in multiple places at once is to never been in any one place fully, to never be present with the people in our lives, to be scattered.

Today, when you go to a concert, you see an ocean of people holding up their phones, filming the event. Traveling, walking, eating, all of this must be compulsively filmed and shared. No matter what we are experiencing, we feel the need to place a screen between it and ourselves.

Because what matters is not what happens within us, in the realm of experience, but what happens in the world of images, that can be shared and liked and commented on.

As we face this crisis of experience—Rosh Hashanah has an answer for us, and it is found in the laws of the Shofar.

It is an obligation for all Jewish adults to hear the blast of the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah. And when it comes to blowing the shofar, this is something that only a human can do.

I don’t mean that a machine couldn’t blow a shofar technically. We all know that it could. Perhaps it could even do so better than a human being — louder, with more force, producing a deep, even sound, and of course, never running out of breath.

But this would still be an invalid shofar blowing.

Why? We can answer this question in two ways. The first is halachic. We listen to the blast of the shofar because we are commanded to hear it, but only if it is blown by someone who is ALSO commanded in this mitzvah will it successfully release us from our obligation.

There is another way in which the shofar can never be replaced by technology, which is not halachic but rather aggadic. According to the midrash, the cry of the shofar is a cry. The midrashim say that it is like the cry of sarah imanu, the cry that she let out when she learned that Abraham had taken Isaac to Mount Moriah to make of him a sacrifice.

It is the sound of a human heart breaking.

Or perhaps the desperate cry of hope to God, the prayer of Sarah, to avert this decree.

This is precisely the shofar has the capability to break past all our defenses and touch the most inward part of our soul.

Because it comes human being, from a heart that beats, a heart that can be broken, a heart that has experienced the beauty and hope and heartbreak of the world.

So this year, let our teshuvah be a return to our humanity, with the laws of the Shofar as our guide.

Another Law: A recording of the shofar can not count as your listening. Even if it was live, if you heard a shofar only through an amplifier, this would not count as your shofar blast. If you heard a shofar in a cave, you would need to be sure that what you heard was the shofar itself and not an echo.

You can coat the outside of a shofar with gold, but not the inside, because it is the inside that makes the sound, and you would not actually be hearing the sound of the shofar, but the sound of a golden horn.

The shofar, which is the cry of the human heart, cannot be experienced through a screen. It must be heard directly.

Why? Because this is what Hashem wants for us on Rosh Hashanah. For us to really EXPERIENCE this cry.

For it to hit us directly.

With no intermediaries, no screens, no middlemen.

But not only on Rosh Hashanah.

And not only with the Shofar.

God wants us to experience this world.

With all its beauty and pain and possibility. A world filled with other people, created—like us—in the image of God. A world that we have been closing out, hiding from, in a labyrinth of screens, flat images, distractions.

We are embarking on a strange new era of human history. As we become more reliant on AI, as it becomes a more dominant part of our world and our society, we may witness humans being devalued, being replaced, being dismissed.

So we MUST take this Rosh Hashanah to remember what makes humans beautiful, holy, and infinitely valuable.

Not that we are the best at chess, or writing essays, or anything else.

But the fact that we have an inner world, an experience of life.

What would it look like to remember this?

Imagine a teacher, after reading through a dozen smooth, perfect, character-less AI written essays, comes across a typo, a bizarrely constructed sentence, a rough edge.

In the past, he would have been circled with a red pen. Perhaps today, it will be underlined, cherished, as a signpost that a human was here, thinking, writing, trying.

A mother, after having been inundated with millions of pictures of perfect meals, perfect homes, and perfect lives presented by influencers on social media, is suddenly struck by the beauty of a sock on the floor, dishes in the sink, dust on the shelves — signs of a real life lived.

A child, who never let his mind wander, who has been entertained by scrolling content every second since he was a baby, finally puts down his screens and experiences for the first time nature without trying to capture it and post it.

Let us be inscribed this year in the book of life.

Real life. Life filled with joy and sorrow and boredom and excitement.

A life of the senses.

The other day, as I went about the house tidying up, I lifted my eyes and saw out the window a bush in bloom with countless plumbago blossoms. These small blue blossoms are everywhere right now in Haifa.

The window itself was transformed into a rectangle of color and life, as if I had an original monet hanging on my wall.

For a moment I froze, transfixed by the beauty. And instead of taking out my phone, I just appreciated it in the moment.

Stam. I took a picture and sent it to my family Whatsapp.

I’m not saying we need to abandon technology.

But we need more moments where we can meet the world, and meet one another, the way we meet the shofar blast.

Unmediated.

Unrecorded.

Totally present.

I started by saying that today is a day about humanity, not the world. Alas, we have made our way back to the world.

We have made our way back to creation - to the wonder and thrill of it.

Every atom of it is holy.

So let us open our eyes and let the world in, not an echo or a recording, but the world itself, into our human hearts.

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“You’re a loser.”

The words came at me from across a short distance. The boy who said them sat on a donkey, his sidelocks flapping about in the hot, dry breeze.

“Fat loser,” he continued. “Look at your watch. You think you’re an important guy with that watch? I’m surprised it fits around your wrist, fatty. Man, how much do you have to eat to be that fat.”

I rolled my eyes and tried to stay calm.

“Gay, fat loser. Your hat is dumb too.”

This was my second shift doing protective presence in the West Bank, which entails going to specific areas where Palestinians are repeatedly harassed, intimidated, and attacked by settlers in order to accompany and document. The hope is that the presence of non-Palestinian observers will have a deescalating effect on the situation.

On my first shift, I was hit in the neck with a stone. This time, I was merely verbally assaulted—read for filth by a kid on a donkey who zeroed in on my insecurities—my weight, my accent, the dashing new hat I had purchased specifically for these trips to the West Bank—with the adeptness of a high school bully.

“Go back to America, fatty.”

“I don’t live in America,” I said. “I live here.”

“Shut up,” he said. “You have an ugly accent. You sound dumb. You can’t even speak Hebrew.”

Now that’s crossing the line, I thought. I don’t sound dumb. Having an accent means I speak two languages, which actually makes me really smart.

I opened my mouth to say as much but the boy cut me off.

“Pleeease stop talking, I can’t hear that ugly voice anymore! Go back to America. You don’t belong here.”

“Sure I do,” I said.

“This land belongs to Jews,” he shot back.

“I am a Jew.”

“No you’re not.”

“You think I’m not a Jew because I have an accent?” I asked. “I made aliyah. I moved here—from somewhere else. That’s literally how this country was created. Your parents or grandparents did the same thing.”

“No they didn’t,” he responded with a smile. “My parents are from Israel.”

“And their parents?”

“Israel.”

“And theirs?”

“Israel.”

He said it with confidence, without any hint of dissembling. I got the sense that he believed himself to be telling the truth. Of course, anyone who knows the history of Israel knows that this is highly improbable.

There has been some Jewish presence in the land since the days of King David, but the vast majority of Jews in Israel are the descendants of Olim—immigrants—who came in the twentieth century.

Did he not know this?

He suddenly looked uncanny to me. A Jew without history or memory is like an object without a shadow. Unreal, flat, depthless—like everything else in that landscape under the yellow noon sun.

Throughout the Torah, memory shapes reality for the Israelites. Their memory of Egypt plays a particularly important role. In the book of Numbers, this memory haunts them, becoming distorted by pathological nostalgia until they forget the hardship and oppression that they faced and begin longing to go backwards.

In Deuteronomy, the memory is transformed into a source of moral authority. “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The obligation to deal justly with the Other is not presented as a categorical imperative hovering above history, but rather as an obligation that emerges from history and which is vouchsafed by memory.

But what happens to this commandment when the memory of being an outsider is lost, or erased?

For this young man before me, there was no memory of Egypt, no remembrance of the vulnerability of exile. Instead, there was only the fantasy of an eternal now in which we had always been, and always would be, masters of the land.

When the sun at last began to set, and shadows returned to the land, the boy on the donkey trotted off back to his home, and I headed back to Haifa.

That night, as I fell asleep, the hilly landscape of Taybeh felt like it was tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. I could not stop seeing it. And when I dreamed, I dreamed of donkeys and flocks of sheep, of olive trees and long, wild sidelocks, of hot wind and stones.

When I awoke, I realized that my mind had been busy inscribing the memories of the previous day, creating a memory that I would never shake loose, and I wondered what it would all come to mean for me.

The Book of Deuteronomy in its entirety is a commonplace book of memories. The commandment to remember appears more in this section of the Torah than anywhere else. We are to remember how we provoked God in the wilderness, that we were slaves, what God did to Miriam, and what Amalek did to us.

But Deuteronomy is not just a book of memories. It is a guide to the act of memory itself, instructing the Israelites to inscribe these memories on their bodies, on their gates, and to dwell on them day and night. The possibility of forgetting looms in Moses’ speech as a real and terrible danger.

This is not merely an academic exercise. God is unconcerned with archiving history for the sake of history. Rather, memory serves an end. Everything drives towards the goal of being a free and righteous people in the land of Israel. As it is written:

“Therefore impress these My words upon your very heart…to the end that you and your children may endure, in the land that GOD swore to your fathers to assign to them, as long as there is a heaven over the earth.”

With this, Moses gives the Israelites, and the world, one of the greatest insights to be ever written down.

It is an insight that is at the heart of Parashat Eikev and Deuteronomy as a whole. It is an insight upon which everything depends.

Our grasp on our future is only as strong as our grasp on our past.

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According to Rhonda Byrne, author of the 2006 self-help phenomenon The Secret, tsunami victims are responsible for their own miserable fates.

Through negative thought patterns that align with the frequency of a tsunami, they “attracted” the disaster all on their own.

If they had instead engaged in positive thought patterns which aligned with money or fame or health, this is precisely what they would have received.

This is not an exaggeration. Byrne has stated repeatedly that “the law of attraction,” which sits at the core of her teaching, has no exceptions—not even in the case of natural disasters. Everything that happens to us is something that we manifested for ourselves.

This is a nasty and immoral way to see the world. Despite that, the book was a major success, launching its author into superstardom, which seemed only to confirm her message: you can get anything you want in life—if you know the secret.

Byrne is not the only person to preach this message. Today, in 2026, The Secret is a bit passe, but countless identical manifestation-based self-help philosophies have arisen to replace it.

Nor was Byrne the first. She simply found an effective way to repackage something that had been in the American zeitgeist for over a century.

In her polemic, “Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America,” the late Barbara Ehrenreich traces the history of this philosophy, more broadly called “the New Thought Movement.”

In the nineteenth century, one of New Thought’s biggest champions was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science religion, whose adherents famously refuse medicine, believing that all illness originates in mind, and thus can be cured with correct faith.

Which is to say that a person who dies of cancer is not really the victim of an aggressive but morally neutral multiplication of cells, but rather a victim of their own thought patterns.

Control is the key word here. New Thought gives us an illusion of control. We can’t control our bodies or the stock market or the San Andreas Fault, but we can at least try to control our minds.

I’m reminded of Byrne every year at Tisha B’Av—the Jewish day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. Like clockwork, when the month of Av arrives, we begin trotting out the Talmudic teaching that the Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam—baseless hatred—amongst Jews of different factions.

People gravitate to this teaching because it challenges us to choose unity and love over division and hatred. But at its core, it is a theology that suggests that calamity is morally deserved.

This teaching is attempt to give meaning to history, to make history’s cruelty less arbitrary. It is also an attempt to use a tragedy as an opportunity to make ourselves better—which is certainly noble.

None of this is cynical or ill-intentioned, but it veers dangerously close to New Thought—to the idea that the vast, beautiful and frightening mystery of creation can be mastered, conquered, explained and ultimately controlled, as well as the idea that victims are responsible for the terrible things that happen to them.

Were this put forward as an explanation for the Holocaust or October 7th, we would be rightly offended. So why do we accept it as an explanation for the destruction of the Temple? Simply because the destruction of the Temple happened in the mists of ancient history? This is no excuse. Though it took place longer ago, the destruction of the Temple was no less real a tragedy than anything that happens in our time.

In truth, the Temple fell for a complex combination of reasons, among them being the imperial cruelty of the Romans, who saw the people of Judah not as a people with their own ambitions and rights, but rather as a problem to be dealt with swiftly and cruelly so as to make an example of them.

Thankfully, Jewish thought contains within it challenges to its own certainties about the logic of history.

In one Talmudic midrash, Moses asks to see the reward that will be given to Rabbi Akiva, the greatest scholar of his day. God shows Moses a glimpse of the future, in which he sees the Romans flaying Akiva’s skin with metal rakes.

“That’s his reward?” Moses asks, indignant at the lack of divine justice.

“Silence!” God answers brusquely. “So it arose in my mind.”

This story reveals that there is an absurdity to history that admits of no easy answers or comforting platitudes. He who seeks to find an explanation for everything will come up empty handed. Even Moses.

Another example is the book of Job, which tells the story of a righteous man who loses everything, and the friends who gather around him to insist that it was his own fault—that he must have sinned in some way, even if only in his mind—in order to earn his own tragedies.

At the end of the book, God emerges from a whirlwind, and warns Job against any attempts to explain God’s doings in neat terms of punishment and reward. God is the one who conducted the riotous symphony of the Big Bang, who laid the foundations of the earth, who fuels the fires that burn in a billion suns.

How—considering this vastness and complexity—would a human presume to understand why anything happens?

As for the Temple, the answer of “baseless hatred” is complexified by the unanswered questions posed by Book of Eicha, the lament read on Tisha B’Av, which opens with the word “Eicha?”

How?

Why?

What now?

Tisha B’Av should not be an occasion to bandy about cheap answers to the great questions of history.

Instead, it should be a moment to sit with the question — Eicha?

It is the question that Moses asks when he sees Rabbi Akiva in the hands of the Romans.

It is the question that Job throws accusingly at heaven.

It is the question we asked on October 7th and have asked every day since.

It is a question that has no answer. This is its tragic power and this is the power of Tisha B’Av—which calls us to see ourselves as we are—mortals before the mystery of life and fate who do not know the secret.

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   “So what’s your take?”

So begins every episode of “Subway Takes,” the short vertical TikTok show in which host Kareem Rahma interviews celebs on the subway about their strangest and most controversial opinions.

“Either invite me for dinner or don’t, but f**k your potluck.”

“Leaf blowers need to be eradicated from the face of the earth.”

“Dating apps should have a 30-day expiration date for all your photos.”

“You don’t need school after eighth grade.”

To each take, Rahma responds with “100% Agree” or “100% Disagree.” There is no in between.

Honestly, it’s a great format. The opinions are funny and controversial, but not in the way that would actually offend anyone. At a dinner table, they’d provoke lively debate, but no one would leave the table in huff.

Which is why it was so shocking when Julian Casablancas, frontman of The Strokes, came on the show and, after dispensing with a few “typical” Subway Takes (audio messages are annoying, for instance), dropped a take of an entirely different order.

“American Zionists get the benefits of white-privilege but talk like they are Black people during slavery.”

Needless to say, Rahma 100% agreed. The two then went on to compare Hamas’ massacre to a slave rebellion, which is to say that they justified it as a legitimate uprising instead of condemning it as an indefensible assault on Jewish life.

It goes without saying that this well-loved, anodyne TikTok show would not casually slip in such a view about any other people. There will be no “Subway Take” about how Black people complain too much about the police or how brutal ICE raids are actually justified.

Only the Jews get this punch to the gut, this sly dog whistle about “American Zionists,” and are left looking ridiculous when we raise the alarm about something as silly and obviously harmless as “Subway Takes.”

The Casablancas episode was widely covered, but it was hardly the only example of this casual, “blink and you miss it” antisemitism in a Subway Take.

In another episode, actor and comedian Ramy Youssef shared his take: “all people are good at heart — they’re just infected with different things that make them evil.”

When asked for examples of what it is that infects them, he lists “capitalism; the military-industrial complex; and AIPAC money.” Alongside war and greed, a pro-Israel lobby run by American Jews is singled out as a corrupter of souls.

In another episode, a young Muslim woman explained her take: “Boomers should not be told when content is AI. Just let them enjoy the fantasy!”

“If my Dad wants to believe that Morgan Freeman has become a Muslim,” she continued, “why should I ruin that for him? If my aunt wants to believe that a cat learned the whole Koran, why would I take that away from her?”

She then grabs an example from outside the Muslim community: “If a MAGA American wants to believe that Jesus was white and not Palestinian, why spoil his fun?”

There’s an irony here, of course, which is that she’s been taken in by the same internet propaganda as her father and aunt.

To believe that Jesus was Palestinian is no less absurd than believing that a cat memorized the Koran and no less false than believing that Morgan Freeman converting to Islam.

Except that the cat thing is just AI slop, whereas the Palestinian Jesus thing is a deliberate attempt to scrub Jews from our own history, erase our ties to the land of Israel, and replace us with someone else.

Of course, most viewers won’t catch this.

That’s the point. If the same ideas came from a neo-Nazi or an internet provocateur, they would be recognized for what they are.

But on Subway Takes, they are swallowed down like a pill in peanut butter.

And before viewers have a chance to question any of it, Rahma smiles, nods, and says, “100% Agree.”

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The Real Crisis at Progressive Rabbinical Schools

Back in May of this year, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch opened the Re-Charging Reform Judaism conference by denouncing the Reform Movement’s policy of admitting and ordaining anti-Zionist students at its seminary, Hebrew Union College.

Many applauded Rabbi Hirsch’s clarity, while others blasted the proposal as a call for a political “litmus test” out of step with the principles of liberal education.

The truth is, Rabbi Hirsch is correct that there is a problem at progressive rabbinical schools right now. That said, the problem is not “anti-Zionists.”

The problem is radicalism.

Having been ordained at Hebrew College—a non-denominational rabbinical school in Boston—I witnessed this firsthand.

In some cases, radicalism meant a radical embrace of violence as a legitimate means of political expression. I witnessed students justify the October 7th massacres as “resistance” and praise Luigi Mangione—the alleged killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson—as a hero.

Other times, the radicalism looked like a radical reimagining of Judaism into a cult of Israel-bashing, in which nearly every ritual—Hallel on Yom Ha’Atzmaut, the reading of the Book of Esther on Purim, and Hakafot on Hoshana Rabbah—was repurposed as an opportunity to publicly excoriate Israel for the crimes of “genocide” and “stolen land.”

But radicalism is not just a set of opinions. It’s also a culture, one that makes little room for dissenting views. And so, as being a public Zionist became a social liability at Hebrew College, many chose to go into the closet.

Banning anti-Zionist students, as Rabbi Hirsch proposed, might indeed solve this problem.

But it would also shut the doors to rabbinic ordination in the faces of many compassionate, wise and needed future leaders.

At Hebrew College, I met many students who care deeply for the land of Israel and the people who live here. They care as much as I do, but while I call myself a Zionist, they call themselves anti-Zionists.

I wish they didn’t. For me, the term “anti-Zionism” designates far more than a political stance, and is irrevocably tangled up with the conspiratorial, antisemitic global movement that wears it so proudly as a label.

But for these students, the label means something else. Labels are tricky like that.

Some of them believe that the best future for Israel is a single binational state, and while I disagree, they take this position out of a wholehearted desire to see peace and equality.

Some of them strongly and unequivocally opposed Israel’s war in Gaza. Again, while I disagreed with many of their analyses, I recognized that their hearts were in the right place.

And they were able to recognize this about me as well. Which is to say, they didn’t write me off for being a Zionist.

Some of these students travel regularly to Israel. They speak Hebrew. They have a relationship with this place. They are invested. In this, they are a model for American Jews.

Often, they put their safety on the line to do protective presence work in the West Bank, accompanying Palestinian shepherds and trying to prevent settlers from harassing or attacking them.

If you are a Zionist who hates seeing headlines about such settler attacks, you should consider your feelings about the “anti-Zionists” attempting to do something about it.

Often, these students became close friends of mine, even as we continued to debate and challenge one another.

Right now, American Jewry is in crisis. On the one hand, the debate over Israel and Zionism is dividing parents from children and causing long-standing communities to fracture. On the other hand, antisemitism is now a brutal fact of American Jewish life and everyone feels it.

In such a moment, the question of who is being admitted and ordained by rabbinical schools is one of the most consequential questions that we should be asking.

What’s obvious to me is that we need rabbinical schools that are training grounds for future rabbis to learn how to have deep, challenging, and compassionate discussions about Israel, because this is what they will need to do throughout their careers.

If they see Zionists as Nazis, they will be unable to lead the Jewish people, which remains largely, if not uncomplicatedly, Zionist. Similarly, if they see anti-Zionists as “un-Jews,” as Gil Troy and Natan Sharanksy suggested, they will also be unfit to meet the Jewish world where it is.

We need rabbis who are mature and nuanced in their thinking, regardless of where they stand on the two-state solution, on the Gaza war, or on Bibi.

We need rabbis who identify with Isaiah’s vision of a world at peace rather than a vision that romanticizes radical violence.

We need rabbis who see Israelis and Palestinians as human beings created in the image of God, and who are pained by the wanton killing of either.

We need rabbis who understand the importance of Israel to the future of the Jewish people—even when they disagree with Israel’s policies and leaders.

Unfortunately, achieving this is not as simple as separating “Zionists” from “Anti-Zionists.”

What’s needed desperately is discernment—the ability to look past the political labels and see the people underneath.

This means that admissions teams must start having long and difficult conversations with students about their worldview before sending an acceptance letter.

Not for the sake of conducting political litmus tests.

But rather to see what middot—virtues—these students have developed within themselves, or failed to do so.

Oh, and maybe they should start looking at their social media pages too.

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The Unfair Fight Between Lies and Truth

In February of 2026, news outlets began publishing that Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French acronym MSF) had suspended all their non-critical work at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital due to the overwhelming use of the facility by Hamas gunmen.

In a public statement, the organization said the following: “MSF teams have reported a pattern of unacceptable acts including the presence of armed men, intimidation, arbitrary arrests of patients and a recent situation of suspicion of movement of weapons.”

A news story like this is less than worthless.

To those who actually care, this is old news. To those who actually need this information, it comes woefully late.

The media spent much of the Gaza war implying that Israel was a wanton and senseless attacker of hospitals. This was a key component of the genocide claim, and a compelling one at that. Hospitals are where people go to heal, to help, to give birth, to survive. To attack a hospital, it follows, is an attack on life itself.

Israel insisted that this was not the case. In famous cases like the bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital, it turned out that Israel was not even the source of the fire. In other cases, the hospital was not targeted out of malice or a desire to cause grievous harm, but because Hamas top brass was using it as cover for a military bunker, or using ambulances as military transports, or using hospitals to transfer weapons and hostages.

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This essay is part of a series I’m writing on the inner dimension of the Ten Commandments. This essay comes from a chapter about the Fourth Commandment -observe the Sabbath.

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A Taste of This World

Jewish thinkers tend to wax poetic when speaking about Shabbat. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called it a “cathedral in time.” The Kabbalists of Tzfat praised it as a bride, rushing out to the fields at dusk to welcome her with song and merriment.

In the Talmud, Shabbat is called “a taste of the World to Come,” a day on which we have a brief, flickering vision of the utopic conditions that will prevail once the messiah has come and set things right.

Having grown up in a secular Jewish home, these written descriptions were my first exposure to Shabbat. These texts inspired me to take on this ancient Jewish practice as my own. But I quickly discovered that my own experience of Shabbat was worlds away from the sublime and transcendent day of Pure Being that I had read so much about.

My own Shabbat was ordinary. There were Shabbat dinners with pleasant enough conversation. Experiences at synagogue that were perhaps inspiring, but hardly transcendent. And there was sometimes boredom, frustration, or loneliness.

Over the years, as my Shabbat practice deepened, I occasionally glimpsed Heschel’s transcendent cathedral, but I have also come to appreciate that Shabbat has another dimension. Far from the high-minded prose and mystical enthusiasm, this other Shabbat is homey and terrestrial, though no less sacred.

After the morning prayer service is done, the remainder of the day—which in the summer can stretch to nearly nine at night—is spent napping, reading, going for strolls, visiting friends, reading some more, singing a song, grabbing another fistful of challah, dozing off again, and other such languid, repetitive actions.

Shabbat can be dull. Without a delightful array of screens at our disposal to fill every moment of silence with noise and color and novelty, the hours can stretch into eternities.

Shabbat can also be physically inconvenient. If you follow its many restrictive laws, you will learn that it is not precisely a day of rest. It comes with a number of energy-intensive obligations, like attending synagogue, and hosting guests. It requires that we do things the hard way—such as walking instead of driving or preparing meals in advance rather than cooking when convenient.

Most challenging of all, Shabbat can be lonely—especially for younger and single Shabbat observers who are not surrounded by family.

But these are not the “downsides” of Shabbat observance—necessary costs to be incurred in order to get some reward. Rather, these experiences are also counted among Shabbat’s treasures.

Shabbat boredom is a spacious and regal boredom. On Shabbat, and only on Shabbat, I often find myself staring into space or daydreaming. In those moments, I am transported to my own childhood, when time was thick and expansive. Boredom is at the heart of everything wonderful about childhood—its creativity, its dreaminess, and the sense that those years stood outside of time. So too is boredom to be cherished on Shabbat.

As for inconvenience, this is merely another way of saying that on Shabbat we take the scenic route through the day—which is also the frictive, tactile, sensuous route. Convenience comes at the cost of texture. We order online instead of going to the store. We text instead of call. We ask AI rather than trying to conceive of solutions on our own.

As for Shabbat loneliness, this is no different than the loneliness we feel throughout the week, which we otherwise dull with technological substitutes for companionship—a medicine that only worsens the disease. On Shabbat, there are no such medicines, and so we are forced to find a true cure: a community of real people who are close enough to touch.

It may indeed be that Shabbat is a taste of the World to Come, but I cannot say for sure. What I do know is this - Shabbat is a taste of this world. And it is this world that we should be worried about never tasting.

Our hours are spent working, and when an opportunity for rest presents itself, we increasingly choose to spend that time hidden behind our screens, hypnotized by an opiate-like endless scroll of content. One can live a whole life like this, which is to say that one can live a whole life without living.

Beyond the soaring descriptions found in books about Shabbat, the Seventh Day is actually quite a simple matter. It is a day to be with people, to eat and drink and sing together, to be idle and to daydream, to walk slowly and with no particular destination.

Not a glimpse of utopia.

But rather a taste of this ordinary beautiful world.

Surely that’s enough.

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The other day, here at my synagogue in Haifa, we hosted a group of children from one of the local preschools.

They came in white, with baskets of flowers, ready to learn about the festival of Shavuot—the holiday which commemorates the receiving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, which begins this Thursday evening.

I had a whole lesson planned with silly games and songs. The preschool teacher, however, had a different sense of what would be appropriate.

“Remember, children,” she exclaimed. “This is a HOLY PLACE. No jokes. No nonsense.”

At one point, curious to get a better view of the Torah scroll I had withdrawn from the ark, a child stood up on his chair. The teacher upbraided him: “We don’t ever stand on a chair in a synagogue. This is a holy place. That chair is HOLY.”

I turned red. She couldn’t have known this, but my lesson plan involved inviting a kid up to the front to step on a chair, pretending it was Mount Sinai, to receive the Torah and hold it up for the rest of the children, who would play the part of the children of Israel.

I didn’t want to contradict her, so I decided to improvise something new, but before I could even say a word, the teacher shouted up to me: “Rabbi! Explain to the children why we eat dairy on Shavuot.”

I froze. The truth is I didn’t know. I had heard different theories and none of them were too convincing. Most likely, it was a marketing ploy by the Tnuva company to push cheese.

“Why don’t you tell them,” I suggested.

She leapt at the opportunity. “We eat dairy on Shavuot because all the words of the Torah are as white and pure as milk.”

She went on and on like this for a while, adding adjectives, savoring them as she pronounced each word. “The words of the Torah are white, pure, fresh, clean, and bright!”

Later that day, long after the children had left, I sat down in my office to study Parashat Nasso in preparation for this Shabbat. Parashat Nasso contains the priestly blessing, with which parents bless their children to this day:

May YHWH bless you and watch over you!

May YHWH shine his face toward you and favor you!

May YHWH lift up his face toward you and grant you shalom!

As I read these beloved words, I began to reflect on my morning with the preschool children, and what the teacher had said about the Torah, and how all of its words are “white and pure and beautiful like milk.”

Suddenly it occurred to me precisely what I didn’t like about this approach, which is that it doesn’t engage with the actual Torah. It engages with a fantasy of the Torah, one that simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Because, in truth, it’s not all pure and white. Some parts are inspiring, some are troubling. Some passages immediately grip us. Others require patience. Some parts are relatable. Others feel strange and confusing.

Despite this, I love the Torah. Or perhaps, because of this.

I love the Torah not because it’s perfect, but because of its profound honesty. The Torah does not take an overly sentimental view of humanity, the world, or even of God.

Nor does it offer a flattering portrait of the Jewish people. It records every one of our mistakes. It shows the moments when we achieved greatness, but also the many moments when we fell short. It shows our capacity for holiness as well as our capacity for folly.

It is the record of our people trying to rebuild after a great national ordeal—trying to transform ourselves from refugees into a nation, and trying to build a society rooted in holiness and justice. Again, with penetrating honesty, it shows the progress we made towards this goal, and also the failures along the way, and ends not with “happily ever after,” but rather refuses to end in any conclusive way at all.

Does this sound familiar?

I never study Torah without being moved by the beauty of its language, its capacity to say so much with so few words, and its remarkable insight into the nature of things.

This doesn’t mean that it all goes down easy like a glass of milk.

And this isn’t just a modern problem. Our sages found the text difficult as well. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have left behind so much commentary.

As we know, the best way to understand a comment of Rashi’s on the Torah is to ask, “what’s bothering Rashi?” In other words, what troubled him so much that he needed to add his voice to the text?

Interpretation works much the way that a pearl is formed. Which is to say, it starts with irritation. If the Torah didn’t trouble us, we would never look deeper.

What I wanted for the children who visited was not that they would leave thinking the Torah is perfect.

Perfect is perfectly dull. And someone who thinks the Torah is only filled with perfect things has likely never read it, and likely never will.

If you can learn to love difficulty, you can learn to love Torah.

And if you can learn to love Torah, you can learn to love life.

Because the Torah reflects life.

It is complicated, wild, confusing, and fascinating. It may not be perfect, but it is beautiful and holy and it is ours.

Its imperfection is an invitation for us to get involved, to try and make things better.

So love the difficulty.

Become curious rather than offended or bored.

Because as long as we are curious about the Torah, it will always be alive for us.

Shavuot is not a day to engage with fantasies of what we wish the Torah was.

It is a day to celebrate a book that, despite reading it for thousands of years, still has the capacity to shock us, delight us, and even leave us speechless.

And which indeed contains words as pure and white and flowing as milk.

May YHWH bless you and watch over you!

May YHWH shine his face toward you and favor you!

May YHWH lift up his face toward you and grant you shalom!

Chag Shavuot Sameach!

• The translation of the Priestly Blessing used in this essay is from Everett Fox for “The Schocken Bible, 1995.”

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This is part of a series on the Ten Commandments, also known as the Ten Words.

The Third Word: The Power of Names

Don’t take the name of YHVH in vain.

What’s In a Name?

A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet. This familiar adage, from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, remains our culture’s favorite bit of popular wisdom when it comes to names.

The idea is that names describe reality, but they are not reality itself. The central conflict for Romeo and Juliet is not merely that their families are locked in a bitter multigenerational feud, though this would be troublesome enough.

It is rather that their families have lost the ability to engage with reality, and can only engage with the world of names—a hollow simulacrum of life.

As Juliet herself says, “Tis but thy name that is my enemy.”

Names are the concern of the taxonomist, who seeks to control creation through obsessive labeling and categorization. They are not the concern of the lover, who seeks to peel the name away and delight in the human person underneath.

But the Shakespearian view prevails in modern secular culture, where names are usually understood as mere conventions with no whiff of the sacred about them. As a result, we have become uniquely careless with our names. Where generations past reserved the use of one’s name for intimate contacts alone, hiding it behind titles and honorifics for everyone else, today’s teachers, clergy, and sometimes even parents eschew those outdated formalities and insist on being called by name.

As a young child, none of my friend’s parents wanted us to call them Mr. or Mrs, let alone Sir or Ma’am. Instead, it was all, “Please! Call me Cheryl!”

But even though I had never known anything else, I was oddly embarrassed by this lack of formality, and did whatever I could to avoid actually saying “Cheryl,” which felt somehow indecent—exposed and exposing—upon my lips.

As an undergraduate and also as a rabbinical student, I attended academies where the use of first names for our professors was standard operating procedure. As an eighteen-year-old creative writing student at Sarah Lawrence College, I saw this as a charming and desirable feature of a progressive education, but by the time I was at Hebrew College, I had become more steeped in the Jewish perspective on names, and was beginning to question the Shakespearian assumptions I had once taken for truth.

Our professors were great scholars and wise rabbis. By calling them by their first names, I feared we were missing an opportunity to learn something about the power and nature of names.

Today, as a rabbi who often feels uncomfortable introducing himself by his title, I cannot help but blame my education for failing to teach us how, in a profession where boundaries are hard to maintain and burnout is common, to protect my name—which is to say, myself.

All of this is a necessary preamble to the question of God’s name. In a secular culture with no notion that names have power, the Third Word—which adjures us not to take God’s name in vain—makes little sense.

As a child, I occasionally met Christian kids who were sensitive about “taking the lord’s name in vain.” Practically, I understood that these individuals did not like it when you cried out the name of their lord and savior upon stubbing your toe. But on a deeper level, the nature of their complaint was opaque to me. What did it mean to “take a name” as opposed to just saying it? And what did it mean to take it “in vain?”

This phraseology is not at all natural to contemporary English, and so I had no sense what was really behind this sensitivity. I wrote off these kids, who said things like “gosh” and “darn” as prudish pollyannas.

But the Third Word has nothing to do with family friendly language. Rather, it speaks to the very heart of the human relationship with words, with truth, and with God.

Adam Names the Animals

From the very beginning, names play an important role in the Torah’s story of humanity. After creating Adam, the first human, God creates the animals and presents them to Adam to be named.

According to midrash, when given a chance to try, the angels, jealous of Adam, demand a chance to try their hand at this task. But they lack the requisite skill, a mix of discernment and creativity. Naming belongs to humans alone.

Adam is not merely stringing together syllables, but looking profoundly at each creature, seeing past its outward features to its inner spirit, and calling its name based on this deep act of looking.

In his retelling of this midrash, Louis Ginzberg writes that Adam’s naming of the animals confirms his prophetic status. “Without the gift of the holy spirit, Adam could not have found names for all; he was in very truth a prophet, and his wisdom a prophetic quality.”

In this sense, every parent briefly becomes a prophet when they name their new child. When we call something by its proper name, we are witnessing a divine secret, looking past the surface of things to the way God sees them.

But what exactly does this mean? How is it that God sees things, and what does this have to do with names?

A hint comes to us from a somewhat shocking detail of the above midrash. After Adam names the animals and himself, God asks, “And me? What is my name?”

Adam responds “Adonai,” My Lord.

It is an inherently relational name. The final “ai” sound is a pronominal suffix meaning “my.” The word thus implies the existence of its speaker, just as the word “mother” implies a child.

This is even true in the case of the animals.

God does not bring the animals to Adam to be named for the sake of heaping up abstract knowledge about the animal kingdom.

Rather, God is attempting to find a companion for Adam to relieve his existential loneliness in the garden of Eden.

Names then, from the very start, are a way for Adam to break out of himself, to exit his loneliness, and to forge connection.

God’s Name

In the Torah, God has many names. Some, like Adonai, are the names forged in the human throat to name the great source of being that we have perceived throughout history.

Others are names that have been disclosed to us by God, like the tetragrammaton, or the four-letter name of God, which Jewish tradition regards as so sacred that we refrain from pronouncing it, saying instead “Adonai” or “Hashem,” which means “the name.”

In Exodus, God introduces himself to Moses with this most private name. “I am YHVH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by my name YHVH.”

This disclosure of God’s most private name to Moses is the necessary prerequisite to the creation of a new kind of relationship between God and the people.

For now, though, only Moses himself is trusted with the name, and when he asks who he should tell the Israelites sent him, God responds: “I will be what I will be. Tell them ‘I will be’ sent you to them.”

Why can’t the Israelites be trusted with God’s name? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they are still steeping in a culture of idolatry, in which gods are things and even people are regarded as things. To such people, the name of God is bound to be misunderstood as the name of another thing among things.

Later, when they are delivered from Egypt and brought to Mount Sinai, God will finally present this private name to the entirety of the people as the heart of the First Word.

God’s name is thus presented as the medium in which covenant becomes possible.

The Power and the Vulnerability of God’s Name

Every time we pray, or utter a blessing before consuming food or drink, we take up God’s name. Why “take” and not utter? Because there is something altogether more active in this kind of speech.

When I say God’s name in a blessing before sipping coffee, I am involving God in this mundane moment of consumption. When I pray with God’s name, I am entering a dialogue with God. When I swear in God’s name (hypothetically, as the practice is not recommended in Jewish law even when we have the best intentions), I am calling God to be witness to my integrity and to vouchsafe the truth of my words. In all these cases, I am calling God into the moment as a participant.

What does it mean, then, to take the name in vain? In Jewish law, it means to say God’s name with no good reason, or to swear falsely by God’s name, or to say it casually, or to recite a prayer without really praying, or to pronounce the words of a blessing without actually blessing.

In other words, to take the name is vain is to take it without any real intention of connection.

When we cry out God’s name after stubbing our toe, we are treating God’s name as an expletive, and not a name. We have thus robbed it of its communicative power. When we later need that power, will the name be for us? When, in despair or gratitude we turn our eyes to our creator and look for words, will we find anything adequate to the moment?

Perhaps this is the reason why this commandment, of all commandments, is considered unforgivable in a certain sense. The full text of the Third Word is “Don’t take the name of יהוה in vain, for יהוה will not clear anyone who takes his name in vain.”

Perhaps what’s being described is less a punishment than a natural consequence.

When language is degraded, it loses the essential prophetic quality that it had when Adam named the animals and becomes instead a mere label, as arbitrary and confining as Montague or Capulet.

I and Thou

In I and Thou, the Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber insists that the most important name of God is “You.” In a sense, it is only this name that can never be taken in vain. It can only be uttered in address.

“Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much,” he writes. Still, “all names of God remain hallowed—because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.”

For Buber, the greatest violation of the Third Word is not necessarily the cri de cœur when we stub our toes, but rather the abstract god-talk that passes for real relationship with the Eternal One. When we alienate talk about God from talk to God, the relationship between God and mankind languishes.

But while I agree with Buber that speaking to God is essential, we cannot fully dispense with speaking about God.

Many Jewish communities are bashful when it comes to talking about God. When it is in Hebrew, in the context of a prayer, it’s fine. We also let it slide when discussing God as a character in a particular narrative from the Torah.

But actually talking about God, about our faith in God, our experiences of God, our love of God, our anger at God, our doubt in God, our yearning for God—well, I’ve heard from some that it just feels too Christian.

I have seen some rabbis deliberately erase God’s name from the record, saying that “God talk” in the synagogue can be alienating to some, and in the name of creating an inclusive environment, they’d rather just say “the universe” or “truth.”

A worthy ideal, but if the space is not open to God, is it truly inclusive?

The Third Word warns us not to take God’s name lightly, for no purpose. But the implication of such a precept is that we will take God’s name for the right reasons.

The late Indian spiritual teacher Krishnamurti once said that “the day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.”

In other words, names can have a distorting effect on reality, flattening the vivid world of sense experience into a sort of solipsistic funhouse in which the only thing we encounter are our own preconceived notions of other beings, but not the other beings themselves.

My own experience does not accord with that of Krishnamurti.

Instead, I find that it is only when I learn the name of a bird, or a tree, or a flower, that I actually begin to see it.

In my neighborhood in Haifa, for instance, the trees whose names I know—the cypress, the fig, the orchid tree—stand out as individuals against a background of undifferentiated greenery, which appears as such precisely because I lack the words to name it. The same goes for the birds—the hoopoe, the myna, and the yellow-vented bulbul.

This insight is shared by the author Jenny Odell in her book How to Do Nothing, who notes that as she began to know the names of the creatures in her bioregion, she began “increasingly identifying with a totemic complex of fellow inhabitants.” “Redwoods, oaks, and blackberry shrubs,” she continues, “will never be ‘a bunch of green.’ A towhee will never simply be ‘a bird’ to me again, even if I wanted it to be. And it follows that this place can no longer be any place.”

In that spirit, here are just a few such names to practice upon.

Rachmana—the merciful one, who makes space for all things in the universe and nourishes them.

Ha’Makom—the place, for God is the very substance in which we dwell, and God’s creation is not separate from Godself.

Tzeva’ot—armies, a militaristic image for when we call on God as rescuer or a warrior.

Shalom—peace or wholeness, to remind us that the pursuit of peace, within ourselves and between people and nations, is also the pursuit of God.

Atik—ancient one, for when we want to recall God’s vastness in time, and for when we want to feel small in time, as we feel small in space when we look out at the night sky full of stars.

Ha’Echad—the One, for when we need to be reminded that God is One, and all things are One in God, and that all separateness is illusion in God’s eyes.

Take these names. Take them up. Not in vain. Not as abstract theology.

Call them like you’d call the name of a child who had slipped out of sight in the grocery store.

Exclaim them like you would when reuniting with a close friend who you haven’t seen in years.

Whisper them like the name of the beloved, trusting that you’ll be heard.

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In January of last year, famed anti-Zionist Jew Peter Beinart published “‘Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.”

Since then, whenever I have seen it at a bookstore or on a friend’s coffee table, I haven’t been able to resist the impulse to pick it up and skim a few pages.

These random, cursory glances never failed to reveal an utterly illogical, incoherent or ahistorical claim. In other words, it didn’t seem like something worth reading.

But when I read that Beintart had won a PEN America award, I knew I wanted to take a closer look.

And so I purchased the book and read it in a single sitting cover-to-cover.

What I discovered is that a book need not be good, original, moral, or even true to win such a prestigious award. Here are a few passages that illustrate this point. They were not hard to find. In fact, there were too many to choose from.

1. Historical Revision

If you ask an anti-Zionist how the Palestinian refugee problem arose, they will tell you that Israel ethnically cleansed the Palestinian population to create a state on their land.

If you ask an Israeli the same question, they will tell you a different story. The Palestinians were not ethnically cleansed, but were rather refugees of a war. After Israel declared its independence in 1948, seven Arab armies initiated a “war of extermination” and invaded the newly formed Jewish state with the intent to drive the Jews into the sea.

The ensuing fighting displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled from Israel’s borders.

Beinart takes aim at this version of the story by pointing out that many Palestinians had already been displaced before the War of Independence even began. This argument implies that Palestinians weren’t refugees of war, as Israelis claim, and therefore were victims of ethnically cleansing.

What this framing excludes is that the Arab war against the Jewish state’s existence actually started in 1947, when Palestinian mobs and militias began attacking Jewish civilians the day after the UN voted in favor of partitioning the land into a Jewish and an Arab state.

This was the start of what’s known as the 1947 civil war. When Israel declared independence in the midst of this war, it galvanized the neighboring Arab states to join the Palestinian militias in a conflict that was very much underway.

It’s a clever sleight-of-hand using a single fact, divorced from context, to push a false narrative. But let’s be clear about what narrative this framing pushes.

The ethnic cleansing vs refugee debate isn’t about “who started it.”

Something much more important is at stake in this debate.

Anti-Zionists insist on a version of history in which the creation of a Jewish state necessitated Palestinian displacement. One could not happen without the other.

This is not the case. There were other ways this story could have unfolded. Palestinians could have accepted the Peel Commission partition plan. Or the UN Partition plan. They could have chosen partnership over war. Their Arab Neighbors could have urged restraint and conciliation rather than belligerence.

To say that Jewish statehood and Palestinian statehood were mutually exclusive in 1947 is to imply that the same is true today — and indeed Beinart believes this. Like other anti-Zionists, he believes that the only solution for Palestinians is the deconstruction of Israel as a Jewish polity.

He may hope that this happens nonviolently, but groups like Hamas have other plans.

And he’s ready to make their case as well, which brings us to…

2. Apologetics for Terror

Beinart compares the October 7th invasion of Israel to various slave rebellions against colonizers that have taken place throughout history.

“October 7 has more in common with the murder, torture, and rape of thousands of Europeans in newly independent Haiti in 1804, or the Fort Mims massacre of white settlers by Creek Indians in what is now Alabama in 1813, or the Lari massacre by Mau Mau rebels seeking to overthrow British colonialism in Kenya in 1953—gruesome, pitiless attacks by oppressed peoples resisting dispossession.”

Let’s review the history.

Israel was founded by Jewish refugees who had been ethnically cleansed en masse from Europe and the Middle East and had come back to their ancient homeland hoping to build a society where they could live in freedom, safety, and dignity.

In no way is this analogous to Europeans who came to a place where they had no historical connection and no motive other than profiteering and exploitation, and who were later killed by the people they kidnapped, enslaved, and forced to work on their plantations.

This analogy fails when it comes to historical coherence.

But it succeeds when it comes to morally justifying the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israelis by aligning Hamas with African slaves and Israelis with plantation owners.

But this is far from Beinart’s only instance of severe category confusion…

3. Idolatry

In making the case that Israel has become the Golden Calf of the Jewish people, Beinart writes the following:

“In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself. In Israel, there is no religious requirement for election to the Knesset. Of the fourteen prime ministers in Israel’s history, only one, Naftali Bennett, has observed Jewish law. But there is a Zionist requirement: political parties cannot oppose “the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Were the Knesset a synagogue, or a rabbinical organization, it would indeed be strange that so few of its leaders have been Jewishly observant.

It would also be strange that members are expected to affirm Zionism but not to affirm the Torah.

But the Knesset is not a Jewish religious institution. It’s a state government composed of political parties with politicians who are Jewish, Arab, religious, secular and otherwise.

If they were expected to observe Shabbat, this would hardly be a step in the right direction for Arab-Israeli lawmakers.

Beinart casts Zionists as people who have conflated the state with God, but his own analysis reveals a confusion of his own about how religion and state operate in Israel.

But this is not the only place where Beinart fails to grasp nuance…

4. Purim

Of Purim, Beinart writes:

With the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry. That’s the origin of Purim. Purim isn’t only about the danger gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them.

There are acts of violence described by the Torah that make me morally uncomfortable. The war against the Midianites, for example, or Joshua’s wars.

The Purim story, however, is not one of them, and Beinart’s reading is implausible.

As described in the Book of Esther, on a day when ordinary people across the Persian empire rose up to slaughter their Jewish neighbors, the Jews defended themselves, and were victorious. This is what we call a happy ending.

But Beinart doesn’t see it that way.

Throughout his book, he discusses what he sees as a Jewish obsession with playing the victim. But actually, it is not Jewish victimhood that Beinart finds troubling, but Jewish strength.

He rails against the “They Tried to Kill Us, We Survived, Let’s Eat” model of Jewish holidays as overly simplistic, but his issue with Purim is precisely that it defies that paradigm. The Jews in the Purim story don’t just survive, they hit back.

When it comes to Hamas’ means of fighting, however, Beinart is an eager defender.

5. Human Shields

Beinart writes:

The human shields argument piles fallacy upon fallacy. Under international law, using civilians as human shields means forcing them to live alongside military targets. It doesn’t mean fighting in an area that just happens to have civilians around. Hamas certainly does the latter. It fights from within Gaza’s population, and thus puts civilians at risk. But that’s typical of insurgent groups.

Oh? Is that what Hamas does? They fight from areas that just happen to have civilians around?

Well that’s not so bad. And Israel does that too. As Beinart writes:

The Israeli military locates its headquarters in central Tel Aviv.

But let’s review what we actually mean when we talk about Hamas’ use of human shields.

When the second-in-command of Hamas Mohammad Deif was killed, he was hiding among innocents in a civilian safe zone.

Two other top Hamas’ personnel were killed in a bunker under a hospital.

Hamas uses ambulances as military transports, and also transports fighters in a fake World Central Kitchen vehicle.

Hamas uses hospitals for weapons transfers, a fact that even Doctors without Borders has admitted.

And most damning of all, in the words of Haviv Rettig Gur, Hamas built the most sophisticated and comprehensive bomb shelter system ever known to mankind, and didn’t let a single child use it during the entire war.

All of this is to hamper Israel from attacking, or else to ensure that if Israel does attack, it will be painted as villainous for fighting in hospitals or civilian zones.

This is what we mean when we talk about human shields, and I doubt that even Peter Beinart thinks that’s the same thing as Israel having a military HQ in Tel Aviv.

6. Excommunication

Beinart likes to complain that he’s been excommunicated.

How does someone like me, who still considers himself a Jewish loyalist, end up being cursed on the street by people who believe Jewish loyalty requires my excommunication?

He has repeatedly called for Jewish organizations to be more welcoming to anti-Zionist Jews, the way they are welcoming of different observance levels.

Synagogue and Shabbat are optional. Israel, however, constitutes “a core element of Jewish life.”

This, he argues, is a sign of our warped priorities.

But here he would be wrong.

Shabbat, kashrut, God — Jews can disagree about all of this. In fact, we inevitably disagree about all of this. These are the things that we, the Jewish people, argue about with one another.

Israel, too, is something we—over here in the Jewish club—like to debate. We debate the politics, we debate the direction of the country, we even debate the war.

It’s not that dissent about Israel isn’t tolerated. Israel is a complicated place and is certainly not entirely innocent—not in general and not in how it has prosecuted its wars.

But even pluralistic spaces, in which a wide variety of views are accepted, have boundaries. In the Jewish organizational world today, defending Hamas, comparing the Bibas family to European slave owners, and rewriting history to make Jews look monstrous, all fall outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. May it continue to be so.

So no, Peter Beinart isn’t excommunicated. He’s still a Jew, and I’d have no issue counting him for a minyan. But having written a book that whitewashes the murder of his fellow Jews, he may find that less of them want him around.

And so, I will say to you directly, Peter, that you shouldn’t despair over this.

You lost some friends, but you also gained some friends.

You get to rub elbows with Ta-Nehisi Coates and the New York Times will always clear space for your latest thoughts on world affairs. And to boot, you get a PEN America award.

At a time when Jewish authors are confronting a massive cold shoulder from the publishing world, when Jewish literary organizations are boycotting any writer or festival that has anything to do with Israel, and when bestselling authors are refusing to have their work translated into Hebrew, it turns out that a Jewish writer can still catch a break.

And the book doesn’t even have to be good.

So before you start complaining about excommunication, remember, there’s a reward for standing with the enemies of your own people.

And there’s also a cost.

And if you’re interested in supporting human writers in general, or this substack in particular, please consider a paid or free subscription.

Please help me get the word out by sharing this with people who might be interested!

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If there is a suspicion of Tza’rat (a scaly leprous affliction that can strike skin, clothing and homes alike) upon a house, one must take everything out, because when the priest declares the home impure, everything in it becomes impure as well.

If the items are removed before the priest makes his declaration, however, the items are unaffected.

There is an absurdity to this detail. It’s like riding in a car with a friend who discovers later that day that they have covid. You say to yourself that you’re at no risk of infection because your friend hadn’t yet declared they had covid while you were in the car.

But Impurity isn’t Covid. It’s not a disease. Purity and impurity are, according to the Torah, more like a game we have agreed to play. Like tag.

When children play this game, there is a ritual magic to the words “Tag! You’re it!”

They create a change in the status of the individual. So too with the priest’s declaration.

So if it’s all the game — why play it?

It doesn’t seem very fun.

Because it gives us language to talk about something real.

Life and death.

Sickness and health.

Trauma.

Healing.

The ritual game of purity and impurity allows us to name and confront the dark corners of our lives.

And then gives us rituals for transcending them. As it is written:

the priest shall order two live clean birds, cedar wood, crimson stuff, and hyssop to be brought for him who is to be cleansed.

The priest shall order one of the birds slaughtered over fresh water in an earthen vessel;

and he shall take the live bird, along with the cedar wood, the crimson stuff, and the hyssop, and dip them together with the live bird in the blood of the bird that was slaughtered over the fresh water.

He shall then sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed of the eruption and cleanse him; and he shall set the live bird free in the open country.

It sounds like witchcraft. Indeed, a midrash recalls a non-Jew coming to Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai and accusing him of witchcraft over a similar purification ritual—one involving a red heifer, where similar items—scarlet thread, hyssop—are tossed into a fire and mixed into water along with the ashes of the red heifer to make a tincture of purification.

Is this not what a witch does, casting a frog, an eyeball, paprika, and a lock of hair into a bubbling cauldron?

But there is no magic here. Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai says it plainly. There’s nothing about a corpse that actually makes someone impure and nothing about hyssop and a red heifer that makes someone pure. It’s all a game. Or a performance. Or a poem.

In other words, a ritual.

These items mean something. Hyssop. Crimson. Blood. Water. A slaughtered bird and a bird set free to the field.

This ritual speaks a language that is coherent, but it is a dream language. Which is to say that each symbol is rich with multiple meanings.

These items from the ritual are, of course, the very tools with which we ritually protected ourselves when the angel of death swept through Egypt killing the first born. We painted blood on the lintel and the mezuzah with a hyssop.

The slaughtered bird and the living bird recall the two goats of Yom Kippur. One for God, to be sacrificed, and one to be sent out to Azazel, the wilderness, carrying the sins of the people.

Like the goat for Azazel, the bird survives the bizarre ritual, and goes out from the tightly organized human world of pure and impure, right and wrong, black and white, to a place of wideness, and wildness, and freedom.

The person who is purified is let back into the camp after this ritual. Which is a great relief.

But also, he is being let back into the very system that deemed him impure and exiled him.

And so, perhaps this bird is a symbol the human soul that longs for wildness, who — when it is let back into the camp — longs, in a strange and melancholy way, for the exile of impurity, which sent him beyond the boundaries of the known and the judgemental examining eye of the Priest.

Is it so strange? These rituals? Do they speak a language that we no longer understand? Or, if we let ourselves, can we discover that we still speak the dream language of our ancestors.

I heard a story in a podcast years ago that has stayed with me. It was maybe seventeen years ago that I heard it but when I looked it up yesterday, I found that I remembered it almost word for word.

It’s the story of a man, Andrew Solomon, who was a researcher on depression, and he also suffered from very serious depression himself. He went to Africa to research how traditional African societies understand and treat the condition.

He found himself at the center of a ceremony meant to rid him of the foreign spirit that was causing his depression.

The whole village comes out and surrounds him, taking a day off from their labors in the field. He strips naked. They give him a ram. The ram pees on him.

The village is drumming and dancing around him and throwing blankets on him and the ram. And it’s hot. And the energy is rising.

All of a sudden, the blankets are pulled off, the ram is grabbed and slaughtered, along with two chickens, and he is covered with the blood.

So now he’s naked, outside, covered head to toe in blood. But it’s not over.

They wrap him up in the intestines of the ram. The women of the village come to surround him and spit on him. And finally, at the end, he washes himself, and everyone has a big feast and eats the cooked ram meat together.

Shortly after, he spoke about his experience to someone who told him that after the genocide in Rwanda, some Western therapists had come to help people, but in the end, the locals asked them to leave.

The therapists wanted people to sit in a room and talk about their trauma.

As opposed to the ritual method, which got people outside, showed people that the whole community was with them, and had drumming and dancing to get the blood flowing. Most importantly, the ritual told them that their depression wasn’t them. It was something external, that could be sent away.

Which is a better way to treat someone?

I think this is why I remember this podcast so vividly. It was an early experience of humility towards what we call the “primitive.” A realization that perhaps there is sense in what seems so nonsensical to the modern, Western eye.

The man telling the story, who underwent this ritual, felt it’s incredible power, even if he didn’t believe in the theology of the tribe.

Even the Torah seems to not really believe in its own theology of purity and impurity. As we said, it’s a game. It’s not impure unless we say it’s impure.

This isn’t covid. It isn’t a germ theory of disease. It’s a language that speaks directly to the unconscious, that speaks to the spirit.

A person can be impure.

An item of clothing also can be impure.

So too with a house.

Which is to say, we keep our pain in our bodies, we wear our pain and drag it around with us, and we dwell inside our pain.

The ultimate source of all impurity, according to the Mishnah, is death.

We have all had contact with death in one way or another.

We have lost people close to us.

We have been sick.

We have, all of us, faced the fear of death in these days and years of war.

We have mourned those lost to the war — those who we knew and those who we didn’t know, but felt like we knew, those who we came to think of as our own parents, our own friends, our own children, even if we never met them.

We cannot erase this pain.

Even Vayikra’s purity-impurity system, which seems so binary, understands this.

The bird that is set free is marked with the blood of the bird that was slaughtered.

But nonetheless, it flies again.

It flies out to the field at the edge of the known, where it rejoins its own kind, and lives.

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