The air we’re breathing is thick with war. We see videos of rocket fire explosions lighting up the sky. We hear the sounds of sirens, of weeping mothers holding dead children, of desperate men clawing through rubble with their bare hands as they look for survivors. It is too much to bear. I want to look away.
Two weeks ago, while listening to NPR, I heard the beginning of an interview with a very articulate and angry Gazan. She described what was going on for her, an innocent noncombatant. My first reflex as she spoke was to turn off the radio. I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. Not because I thought it was a lie or propaganda. On the contrary, I couldn’t stand hearing her story because it was real. She was sharing her struggle to stay alive, to look out for her elderly grandparents, and to keep her young children safe in a world where there is no safe place.
I didn’t want to listen because I knew I would feel empathy. I knew allowing for her humanity would mean I had to open my heart and feel her struggle. In this current disastrous moment, the last thing I wanted to do was to complicate the narrative.
Keeping this war a binary, good guy-bad guy struggle is not difficult for me. Hamas is unequivocally the bad guy. Their charter of hate, violence, and nihilism expresses a determined desire to wipe out the Jews from the river to the sea.
And here, if I may digress… Let’s be clear. A poster or a social media post that says, Free Palestine, I can tolerate. It expresses the desire for a Palestinian state. But when it says from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, it is not implying – it is declaring that the land of Israel will be, in the words of the Nazis, Judenrein, without Jews. It is not, as Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib stated, “… an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.” It’s a dog whistle connoting the opposite of peaceful coexistence.
Hamas is a brutal, uncompromising foe, and they must be destroyed, or at the very least, rendered impotent. The part that is not simple, not binary, is recognizing that innocent Gazans are humans. Their grief, their terrible losses, are all real. To turn away from a grieving mother, to change the station lest my heart break for a Palestinian man who has lost 12 members of his family, is terrible. It’s unforgivable not to pay attention, not to absorb the appalling pain of innocents. That is not who we are. Jews cannot look the other way.
We cannot surrender our empathy. To do so is to abandon the foundation of Judaism’s take on the world, that we are all created in God’s image. So we walk around with these multiple truths: that our people were murdered in cold blood, that our enemy must be broken, that the Occupation has been cruel, and that innocent people are dying.
The complexity of our reality is sobering. It’s morally and spiritually complicated. This is why the pro-Palestinian demonstrations happening all over the world concern me. There is no acknowledgment of the deep history of the Jewish people and our attachment to the land of Israel. To label us ‘colonizers’ or part of the white, hegemonic empire builders of the 19th and 20th centuries is absurd. There is no nuanced perception of what it means to have been a persecuted minority for 2000 years. The sheer lack of empathy in so many letters, demonstrations, and protests regarding Jews and our connection to Israel is staggering and dangerous.
I am standing for Israel proudly and without reservation. And as a Jew standing for Israel, I am raising up my empathy for innocent people dying in Gaza. I refuse to turn away as much as I may want to do so. I will not shrug my shoulders and say, “c’est la guerre”. This makes the road ahead dark and opaque. But I will not surrender my empathy for others. And I challenge those demonstrators who turn away from my narrative to put down the poster for a moment to accept the challenge to empathize. There is too much at stake.
Before Shabbat 