Rabbi's Week in Review Blog

Over the past weekend, I attended a rally in support of a cease-fire in Gaza, uplifting the rights of Palestinians, seeking full humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza, and uplifting the work of the Palestinian American Medical Association, which has been working in Gaza to save Palestinian lives under the most challenging and dangerous circumstances. I did not agree with every viewpoint expressed at the rally, but I do believe in the fundamental demands: that we need a cease-fire (I signed on to a demand for a cease-fire from Rabbis for Cease-fire, back at the end of October), that there truly is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza with suffering of thousands, if not over a million innocent Palestinian citizens. Moreover, as I listened to the speakers report on the ongoing suffering in Gaza, I felt a sense of enormous sadness.

This was followed up by a story on CBS News’ Sunday Morning about a play by Moises Kaufman titled Here There Are Blueberries. The play is based on records found of SS officials at Auschwitz who lived a troubling “normal life,” seemingly unaffected by their brutality and inhumanity. I immediately thought of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” As has often been my experience, I felt the weight of the Holocaust as a Jew, feeling sadness, anger and deep pain for all that has been inflicted on our people, including the brutal Hamas attack on peace-loving Jews near the Gaza border on October 7.

Early on in the present war in Gaza, President Obama said this moment calls for us to hold seemingly conflicting truths. Embedded in these conflicting truths is that focusing on the suffering and pain of the other in no way ignores our own pain. My support of Palestinian rights and feeling a sense of outrage at the Netanyahu government — which not only ignores those rights but also inflicts enormous suffering on innocent civilians, has no end goal to move all of us forward in a humane way and has failed to do anything positive to bring the Israeli hostages who were taken on October 7 back home — in no way conflicts with my pain as a Jew over the atrocities inflicted by Hamas. 

This moment demands that we see the pain of Palestinians, the pain of the other. Doing so will reconnect us with our most basic Jewish values of B’tzelem Elohim — that everyone is created in G-d’s image, to not oppress and to love the stranger — and Pikuach Nefesh — the sanctity of all human lives. It is the only way we can break the decades-long cycle of violence and find paths of peace for the generations that will follow us.