This was my D’var Torah on Saturday morning, July 19, 2014, Parashat Mattot. I am uploading this online this 2026, as wars involving Israel, the U.S., Hamas, Hizbollah, and Iran continue in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. The specific references from 2014 are important and the message is still germane.
This week is another week of war in Israel. While people in our families or families we know are being mobilized, we are over here, watching the news and hoping for the best. Elaine Brody told us that her son-in-law Ofer’s brother was called up, and he was sent to the fighting because he has a special ability to drive an ambulance and shoot a gun to defend the ambulance at the same time. From this side of the sea, that seems like such an absurd proposition. What would my great-grandfather have said at the thought of this, for a Jewish boy! But only from the safety of this side is it so absurd.
It seems like all we can do is to observe, to comment on strategy and the ethics of war among ourselves, and to pray. To be thankful for the safety of the people we know, and the safe return of people who have been in Israel. Of course that’s not all, as I have been saying each week. There’s continuing to reach out and to people in Israel, to let them know that we are connected as individuals and that our whole community is paying attention and standing with them in solidarity. There is letting our representatives in Congress know that they should vote for the resolution of support of Israel. And we should all be knowledgeable beyond the snips on the news, to read every day an Israeli newspaper, all of which are available in English online.
It’s obvious that we are not in the same position as Israelis, when it comes to this war. But there is one way we are all in the same situation, as Jews. What will become of us as Jews the longer we are in this conflict with the Palestinians? What has happened to our identity and to our beliefs, as what will continue to happen?
We try to hold together many things: our solidarity as Jews, our love of Israel, a stubborn hope for peace, a belief that Israel is not just about survival but about justice as well.
For the younger generation, for people in their 20s today for sure, it’s not holding together. Many of them are walking away from a commitment to Israel, because they can’t square their beliefs in peace and justice in the world with an unending war and the suffering of Palestinians. I worry on the other side that as the extremists all over the Arab world become stronger, we as Jews will let ourselves off the hook. The better informed we are, the more we know about Islamic terror, the more we might say that increasing terrorism justifies any response. It’s always easier to fight if you can demonize the other side. But we need to be people who live with the cognitive dissonances of this time period. We say prayers for peace all through our services even today, when we know there will not be peace today or anytime soon. I hope that in the Israel that I love, that is so magical and idealistic, that this dissonance doesn’t disappear.
This is a war of self-defense, against an enemy launching rockets against Israel cities and civilians. I am not afraid to use the word enemy. Israel has enemies, and the United States has enemies, and Hamas is an enemy.
So against that backdrop, I want to share a couple of teachings from Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook, the great chief rabbi of Palestine between the two world wars. It comes from his ethical writings, from his teachings about love.
Rav Kook taught that love is supposed to include “all created beings without exclusion, excepting no people or language.” He taught that even Amalek, a nation the Torah describes as in an eternal war with God, has somehow a place in God’s love. A truly righteous person will strive to find a point of love for Amalek even when he is engaged in an earthly struggle against evil.
I should say that Rav Kook was not a person hidden in a yeshiva. He experienced World War I, and in fact was trapped for some years in exile because of the war. In Palestine between the wars, he did not separate himself from the secular, communist, anti-religious leaders and groups that were building the Yishuv. He lived out this kind of love for all parts of Am Yisrael, even those who were very far from his religious outlook and his own vision of a national redemption.
In a challenging passage that I think is very pertinent today, Rav Kook wrote:
When love faces obstacles or contradictions, whether from the world or from the Torah, it is further purified until it ascends to the very divine love which brought all creatures into being, and which sustains them alive at every moment.
When love faces obstacles or contradictions, whether from the world or from the Torah. Obstacles from the world — that’s now, that’s the war right now. Israelis are being shot at, the Palestinians in Gaza at least are for some reason backing Hamas, which wants to eliminate the Jewish state.
Obstacles from the Torah — Rav Kook was talking about parts of our Torah reading today. As you’ll soon read, the Torah commands in excruciating detail a war against the Midianites, who were considered a threat to the Israelites because of their idolatrous ways.
Rav Kook believed that when you see evil, you fight against it, but at the same time there is what he called love, which has to confront obstacles and be purified. He wasn’t stupid — he knew that Jews had enemies, and that Jews were murdered for being Jews in Palestine between the wars. He took that not as a refutation of love and concern, but as a further challenge. Where are those people, those enemies, in our moral universe?
Rav Kook wrote elsewhere that passages like the wars against Midian or Amalek or the Canaanites are “isolated passages” of Torah, “stumbling stones.” They are there, he says, to test us — to make sure that we arrive at a kind of love that is not vague and abstract, that isn’t simplistic and unrealistic, that doesn’t ignore the bad things that are done by others.
What could he be talking about?
I think what Rav Kook was talking about is exemplified in the visit by Jews to the home of the family of Muhammed Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian teenager who was murdered in an attack of revenge for the three Israeli boys, Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Frankel, and Gilad Shaar. We all know that Muhammed’s murder was a chillul ha-shem, a desecration of God’s name.
A group of Jews went to the Abu Khdeir home, to express their condolences and to show, even in the midst of their mourning for Eyal and Naftali and Gilad, that this is who Jews really are. Among them were rabbis like Danny Gordis, who some of you may read online — and who comes from one of the great rabbinic families of Conservative Judaism in this country. Some Palestinians paid a condolence call too at the Frankel home.
The story we want to hear is that somehow, the Jewish and Arab families experienced a moment of shared humanity, and expressed some understanding of each other. Some of the press reports presented it this way, but that’s not what happened according to one person who was there.
In fact, there was some resistance among the Abu Khdeir family, some who didn’t want the Jewish mourners. They felt it might be a publicity stunt. But they said they would greet the Jews because to them the value of hospitality to visitors is a surpassing value. One of the Jewish visitors said he was concerned about wearing his kippah into East Jerusalem when there was so much tension. He wore a baseball cap for the ride, and when he emerged into the Palestinian home, he put on the biggest kippah he had, so it would be clear that this was a Jew coming by.
In the middle of the visit, Muhammed’s father received a phone call from the uncle of Naftali Frankel, one of the Israeli boys who was kidnapped and killed. And Mr. Abu Khdeir said that he believes that it was not Arabs but Jews who killed the three Jewish boys, as a pretext for bombing Gaza. When he hung up, he told the Jewish visitors that Israelis are racists, that everyone in Israel is the problem and not just the West Bank settlers. The rabbis and the other Jewish visitors were quiet, and then they left.
Where does that story leave you?
Does it leave you in despair, that there is no possibility of a human moment beyond politics? Are you angry to hear that a Palestinian would lump all Israelis together, the criminals and those who made a perhaps dangerous shiva call? Does it make it just a little bit easier to justify the civilian deaths in Gaza during Israel’s offensive?
Sure it does. But the point of the shiva call in East Jerusalem was not to reach understanding or to move the needle even slightly toward peace.
It was about: What is a Jew, who is a Jew, during this conflict. The Jews who went decided to visit a Palestinian in mourning, to do teshuvah on behalf of the Jewish community, even while rockets were being fired toward Jerusalem by Palesinians. They went despite the lukewarm words about the murder of the Jewish boys from Palestinian leaders. They went at some danger to themselves, because they felt impelled to express a humanity, what Rav Kook called a love, for Palestinians — despite what Rav Kook called the obstacles, from the world and from Torah.
That kind of action, that kind of love, must never leave us. I hope you hear me from the bimah saying the critical things about Palestinians, and expressing exasperation and horror for their rockets. There is a time for war. But Rav Kook charges the Jewish people, even against our enemies, never to give up the search for a point he calls love. What a strange word to use here and now.
Even in war, we here on this side of the sea, have to be on guard. We have to do the hard work of saying: There are Palestinians who still want peace. There are children in the neighborhoods of Gaza. Islam is not synonymous with Hamas or the extremists in Iraq and Syria.
Who are we as Jews, during this time of war? What does it mean to be a Jew, to stand together as one people here and in Israel, to come here on Shabbat and pray our prayers of peace?
Our soldiers in Israel are heroes, putting their lives on the line to defend the Jewish people, not only in Israel but us as well. May they fight as peole who know the terrible truth that it is people who are killed in war, not just enemies.
The Jews who went to the Abu Khdeir home are our heroes too. We must have both kinds of heroes. If the conflict will not be ended soon, we must have both kinds of heroes, if we are really to be Jews hearing the call of Torah.
Adonai oz l’amo yiten, Adonai y’varech et amo vashalom. (Psalm 29:11) — May God give strength to our people, and may God bless our people with peace.
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