On November 2 I had the pleasure to engage in a public conversation with journalist/author Peter Beinart in a program co-sponsored by Jewish Currents and my congregation Tzedek Chicago, We explored a wide range of issues arising from the current moral-political moment in Israel Palestine.
I was particularly grateful to interrogate the issues raised by Peter in his recent book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning:”
• Is the Jewish community currently facing an unbridgeable ethical divide?
• Is it possible to make community with Jews whom we believe support – or remain silent over – the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza?
• Does Peter identify as a Zionist now? What is his opinion of the growing movement for antizionist Judaism?
I appreciated Peter’s honesty and willingness to engage over these issues – and many others. The entire program is available on the video recording above.
This Yom Kippur, amazingly, is Tzedek Chicago’s tenth Yom Kippur. And since Yom Kippur is a day for taking stock of the year that’s past, I want to to share some thoughts about our congregation’s first ten: to explore our history, our growth and perhaps most importantly, to offer some thoughts about what has changed in the Jewish world since Tzedek Chicago first began.
This will be a significant sermon for me for a number of reasons, so let’s just get it out of the way at the outset: this is not my goodbye. It may be my final sermon at Tzedek Chicago, but the year is young. There will be time for goodbyes later – but for now, please know I’m not going anywhere just yet. And there is so much work to be done in the coming year.
When I think back over the first ten years at Tzedek Chicago, I can clearly see critical milestones that fundamentally and irrevocably shaped our congregation. Like most things in life, the majority of these milestones were wholly unexpected. And yet they ended up being transformative.
How we began is a classic example. Just to give some context, in early 2015, Israel had just finished a military assault on Gaza it called “Operation Protective Edge.” At the time, it was Israel’s most brutal attack on Gaza yet, killing nearly 2,500 Palestinians and wounding 11,000 over the course of a month. It’s hard to imagine now, but at the time it felt like the most devastating massacre any of us could possibly fathom. Of course, we couldn’t begin to fathom the nightmare Israel would unleash upon the Palestinian people of Gaza nine years later.
Still, like other Israeli assaults before it, it was a last straw for many Jews, including me. A few months earlier I had painfully resigned from the congregation I had served as Rabbi for 16 years and I was fairly sure I’d never work as a congregational rabbi again. And there were others in Chicago who felt Jewishly adrift – many of us knew each other through our connection to the Chicago chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and had marched together in Palestine solidarity protests for years.
At the time, we felt as if we were at a crossroads, not knowing where or how to express our Judaism in a community that seemed so thoroughly enmeshed in Israel and Zionism. But beyond the political, we had an underlying, perhaps still imperceptible yearning to be part of a religious community that expressed a different kind of Judaism.
So after Rosh Hashanah 2014, we began to meet semi-regularly as a havurah, a completely lay-led group. We got together for occasional Shabbat dinners and some Jewish holidays, including a memorable Palestine solidarity Passover seder. In those days, we called ourselves the Haymarket Havurah. Very quickly, it felt like we were organically creating the spiritual community we had been yearning for. We were celebrating Jewish life together, observing the Jewish rituals that we cherished so deeply, but we also included readings, prayers and music that reflected our political convictions, consciously centering solidarity with Palestinians as a sacred Jewish value.
Eventually, we started to talk together about what it would mean to actually turn our group into a formal congregation. Some of us had been members of synagogues for many years, others had never belonged to one in their lives. None of us however, had any experience founding a congregation. We decided fairly quickly that if we did start something, it would have to be a consciously intentional community. So before we recruited a single member, we drafted a list of core values that would be foundational to the life of our congregation. We listed them under seven categories: “A Judaism Beyond Borders,” “A Judaism of Solidarity,” “A Judaism of Nonviolence,” “A Judaism of Spiritual Freedom,” “A Judaism of Equity,” and “A Judaism Beyond Nationalism.”
By spelling out our values so specifically, we were consciously going against a major tenet of liberal synagogue life, which is to hew to the path of least resistance. If truth be brutally told, the central value of most liberal synagogues – most liberal congregations for that matter – is growth. I can’t tell you how many times, in my former congregations, I’ve sat at board and committee meetings convened to discuss the question, “What are our strategies for growth?” “What is our outreach plan?” “How can we attract more young families with school age kids?”
In building our new congregation, we approached this question from the opposite direction. We knew our congregation wouldn’t be for everyone, and we didn’t expect it to be. At the same time, we just knew there was a genuine desire for the Judaism we wanted to see in the world. So if we had a plan for growth, it was to be loud and proud about our values, and let our growth take care of itself.
So during the summer of 2015 we held a series of orientation meetings in people’s homes throughout Chicago. As word began to spread, the meetings got larger and larger. When we held our first High Holiday service that fall at Luther Memorial Church in Lincoln Square, over 200 people attended. Here is what I said at my very first Rosh Hashanah sermon:
I’ll be honest with you: I still can’t quite believe that we pulled this off. It was only a short time ago that we even began to think about creating this new congregation. The leadership of Tzedek Chicago began these conversations a few months ago, and we held our first orientation meeting just this last summer. Our start up period has been astonishingly short – but I think I can speak for the entire leadership of Tzedek when I say I’m not surprised by how far we’ve come in this relatively brief period of time. I’ve known in my heart that there is a very real need in the world for a congregation such as ours.
Those who attended that service will attest to the excitement we felt in that sanctuary on that first Rosh Hashanah when we said the Shechehianu blessing together. It all felt so right and so transgressive at the same time, which I guess means it felt so Jewish.
When we started out we were almost completely lay-driven. Our first board was a volunteer steering committee, led by our founders, Susan Klonsky and Mark Miller. My wife Hallie was our first part-time administrator. And I served as part-time rabbi for the congregation while I worked full time at the American Friends Service Committee, who very graciously allowed me to organize this new congregation as my side gig for our first five years. Our first family education program was created by our member families themselves, organized by member Erin Weinstein, of blessed memory.
In those early days, we were essentially a part-time congregation, careful to do what we could within our capacity. We held Shabbat services and Torah Studies once a month, observed all the major holidays and held educational programs throughout the year. We also became a regular presence in the Chicago justice community. One of our first acts of solidarity was with the hunger strikers at Dyett High School, which was one of 50 Chicago public schools closed in 2015 by then mayor Rahm Emanuel. On the second day of our first Rosh Hashanah, in fact, we hosted a solidarity action with hunger strikers at Chicago City Hall.
Despite our size, however, word about us spread fairly quickly. I remember getting regular emails from folks asking if there was a congregation like us in their community. We knew that we had tapped into a very real and growing desire in the Jewish world for a synagogue that centered justice-focused core values such as ours.
In 2019, we marked an important milestone when I made the decision to leave AFSC to serve as Tzedek Chicago’s full-time rabbi. When I officially started at the beginning of 2020, our first order of business was to find a more permanent rental space for our congregation. Of course, we all know what happened that year. When the pandemic descended upon us, everything changed for everyone.
We all recall the profound fear and uncertainty of those days. It was a time of so much grief and loss, so much fear and isolation. We weren’t sure what the future would hold but we knew the world would never be the same. We also knew we had to find creative, unprecedented ways to connect with each other and create community, which we realized more than ever was so essential to our collective well-being.
So like the rest of the world, we did find new ways to connect and care for each other. Our Chesed Committee, tasked with community care, quickly became our most important committee. We instituted a weekly virtual check-in gathering for members and friends that still meets every Wednesday. We also went from being a part time congregation to a full-time one, expanding our services and programs significantly. This was when we initiated our weekly Friday night online candle lighting and Shabbat morning Torah study. These gatherings also continue to meet every week, and are still the anchors of our congregational schedule.
Our congregation also grew. Significantly. By the end of 2020, we had almost doubled in size. But we didn’t only grow in numbers – we also grew geographically, gaining members throughout North America and from around the world. We attracted people from far outside our shtetl in Chicago who had long been seeking a Jewish congregation such as ours. We now had regularly attending members from across North America and as far away as the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Singapore. We also gained members who were disabled and immunocompromised who never had access to a congregation before. By going online, our community became available to the outside world in ways we never could have imagined.
To put it simply, that year transformed Tzedek Chicago into a Chicago-based, world-wide Jewish congregation. And that will always be the case. As we continue to grow, our leadership remains committed to maintaining this balance, to find creative new ways to build community in a congregation that is both local and global. And while this may be a challenge, it also makes perfect sense. Our congregation was never a neighborhood shul. We’ve always been more values-based than location-based. I personally never dreamed I would be leading Shabbat services and Torah Studies from my laptop every week, but then again, everything about our congregation has been a leap into the unprecedented.
I am also mindful that it would be a mistake to refer to this milestone as a historical or past tense phenomenon. Of course, the pandemic is by no means over. As I look out into our sanctuary now, to a room full of masked people gathering for Yom Kippur, I see a powerful visual of our congregation’s commitment to the health of all its members. This value will always be sacrosanct to us as well. Whether you’re a member or a guest with us today, we’re grateful for your readiness to honor our congregation’s mandatory community health policy – our congregation’s commitment to our collective well-being.
Another major milestone for our congregation occurred in 2022, when we voted to formally change our core value from “non-Zionist” to “antizionist.” Once again, it began rather unexpectedly, as an initial board conversation, that eventually turned into a unanimous vote. Since the board did not want to approve of this change unilaterally, however, it facilitated member meetings over a series of months, to discuss what this change would mean for our members and for our congregation. In the end, we held a vote and more than 70% of our membership quorum voted to approve the change. Since then, Tzedek Chicago has been, openly and officially, an antizionist congregation.
This was much, much more than a semantical change – it was a decision that reflected our moral commitment as a congregation. In our original core values statement, we define Zionism as “the creation of an ethnic Jewish nation state in historic Palestine” and affirm that “(Zionism)” resulted in an injustice against the Palestinian people – an injustice that continues to this day.” In other words, we make it clear that Zionism, at its core, is a form of systematic oppression.
The term non-Zionist, however, is a neutral term. It doesn’t take a stand or make a judgement about this injustice. In our deliberations, many of us were impacted by Angela Davis’ famous quote: “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist – we must be anti-racist.” That is to say, we cannot remain neutral about systems of oppression. If we truly oppose them, we must affirm transformative justice: we must commit to dismantling oppressive systems and replacing them with ones that are more equitable and just.
I strongly recommend reading and sharing the board statement that explained the reasoning behind our decision; it is, in its way, just as important as our original core values statement. I truly believe it offers a critical vision for the direction and future for Jewish life, reflecting a consciousness that far transcends the simple label “antizionist”:
While we affirm that Tzedek Chicago is an anti-Zionist congregation, that is not all we are. This value is but one aspect of a larger vision we refer to in our core values statement as a “Judaism Beyond Borders.” Central to this vision is an affirmation of the diaspora as the fertile ground from which Jewish spiritual creativity has flourished for centuries. Indeed, Jewish life has historically taken root, adapted and blossomed in many lands throughout the world. At Tzedek Chicago we seek to develop and celebrate a diasporic consciousness that joyfully views the entire world as our homeland.
Moving away from a Judaism that looks to Israel as its fully realized home releases us into rich imaginings of what the World to Come might look like, where it might be, and how we might go about inhabiting it now. This creative windfall can infuse our communal practices, rituals, and liturgy. We also believe that Jewish diasporic consciousness has the real potential to help us reach a deeper solidarity with those who have been historically colonized and oppressed.
When Tzedek Chicago was first founded, we were something of a voice in the Zionist hegemonic wilderness. In 2015, one newspaper article about us included a snarky quote from a rabbi who said, “Statistically, they don’t exist.” Ten years on, I think it’s fair to say that antizionist Jews are now standing up to be counted. If there could be any doubt, just look at the dramatic increase in political efforts to label and legislate antizionism as antisemitism. Why would Israel and Israel advocates bother if they didn’t take us seriously? This is a reactionary response to a phenomenon that is very real – and growing.
Today, our congregation is on the vanguard of this emergent movement. Jewish Voice for Peace formally became an antizionist organization in 2019 – and for the past several years, JVP has coordinated a growing network of antizionist Jewish ritual spaces. Some are congregations with rabbis, some are lay-lead havurot, some are more traditional, some are more progressive in their liturgy, but all are committed to creating and building a Judaism beyond Zionism.
In addition, there are educational initiatives such as Jewish Liberation Learning in New York City, an “antizionist education program for kids,” Achvat Olam Diaspora Community Day School in Boston and Shel Mala, a queer, antizionist Talmud study program that meets online. There are antizionist Jewish student groups proliferating on universities and college campuses across North America. There are antizionist artists creating new Jewish liturgy and ritual art. There are antizionist spiritual resources such as “For Times Such as These,” the already classic “radical Jewish guide” to the holidays written by my colleagues, Rabbis Jessica Rosenberg and Ariana Katz.
Speaking of antizionist rabbis, more and more of them are being ordained every year. I know many of them through the JVP Rabbinical Council and Rabbis for Ceasefire: gifted, passionate Jewish leaders who have much to offer our community. Perhaps more than anything else, the emergence of new Jewish leadership is the most powerful signifier that antizionist Judaism has a real future – that it will continue to grow and thrive.
Though we’re still at the nascent beginnings of this movement, its emergence is surely a sign that Jewish life has changed dramatically over the past ten years. It’s also a validation of the leap of faith we took when we founded Tzedek Chicago, just knowing in our hearts there were growing numbers of Jews out there who shared our passionate vision for the kind of Judaism we wanted to live – or more to the point, the kind of world we wanted to live in.
I’ve just highlighted a few of the milestones that I believe have been critical in our congregation’s growth during our first decade of existence. In the coming year, we will mark another one: this spring Tzedek Chicago will be hiring a new rabbi to lead us into the next chapter of our journey.
Naturally, I have all kinds of feels about this, but mostly, I’m excited and proud. I’ve been doing the work of a congregational rabbi for a very long time – since I’ve been in my twenties, actually – and I’m genuinely ready for this change. But I’m also so proud that we’ve created a robust and thriving congregational community that will provide a full-time rabbinical job to one of the growing number of very talented antizionist rabbis who are emerging into the Jewish world.
As I said before, this is not goodbye yet. And I also want to say that while I’ll be stepping down from the day to day work of the synagogue, I’ll still be around. Soon enough I’ll have a conversation with the board about what an appropriate future involvement with Tzedek Chicago might look like for us. But for right now, there is still much work for us in the year ahead – and I’m eager for the blessings and challenges that the new year will bring.
I’d like to end on a personal note. I have often said, one of the most painful experiences of my life – resigning from my former congregation – led to one of the biggest blessings in my life: the opportunity to help found Tzedek Chicago. To be the rabbi of a congregational community of conscience, where I could for the first time in my rabbinical career, be my authentic self and speak my authentic truth.
I cannot begin to tell you how liberating this has been for me. I’ll offer you one small but telling example: Last year, as I was considering participating in the Rabbis for Ceasefire Passover action at the Gaza border, I was stressing because it came during a particularly busy, event-filled week in the congregation, not least of which was our annual Pesach Seder.
When I mentioned my hesitance to our then board president Nate Goldbaum, he said to me, “You have to do this. You need to be there. We need you to be there.” Mind you, this was the president of a congregation telling the rabbi that their congregation needed him to protest at the Gaza border. It was only later when I realized how revolutionary this actually was, how rare it is that any of us are given the permission to be our full moral selves, to speak our consciences openly, freely and without fear.
The opportunity to be one’s authentic self is a rare gift, and it is one that I have never taken for granted. I fervently hope that Tzedek Chicago has provided this gift to you as well. Because at the end of the day, isn’t this what our spiritual communities should be: places of authenticity and conviction, where no one has to bury their most deeply held values, where we have the permission to express our truest and best selves? It really shouldn’t be too much to ask: that our congregations reflect the world we want to see, or as I so often put it, the world we know is possible.
I don’t think I can put it any better than I did in 2015, at the conclusion of my first sermon for our congregation. So I will conclude with those very same words:
I want to express once more how blessed I feel that I have been granted such an opportunity at this point in my life and my career. I am so very grateful and excited to be embarking on a journey such as this with all of you and many more who will be joining us as we make our way. I know it will be a complex and challenging journey in many ways. We’ve set our sights high and it goes without saying that we will be learning together as we go.
To be sure, it is not easy to do this kind of work. It is challenging, it is painful, it can often mean being alienated or isolated from family and friends, from the larger community. But for so many of us, we don’t have a choice but to do this work – and we know that we will ultimately find the strength to continue through the sacred relationships we cultivate along the way. In the end, this is a journey we must take – and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather take it with than all of you. Speaking for myself and the leadership of Tzedek Chicago, thank you for putting your faith in us and in one another. Wherever our steps may lead us, I know we will be going from strength to strength.
And finally, please join me in expressing gratitude at having been sustained long enough to reach this incredible new season together:
Holy One of Blessing, your presence fills creation, you have given us life, sustained us and brought us all to this very sacred time together.
On Yom Kippur, we say the hard truths out loud. On Yom Kippur, we proclaim together as a community: chatanu, we have sinned. We have failed. We have not lived up to our promises of the past year.
I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced these words more brutally than I do this year. In last year’s Rosh Hashanah sermon, I ended with these words: “A year from now, when we are back here, we will have to have an answer. We can’t find ourselves just asking the same question. We must be ready to answer: what did we do in the last year to bring this genocide to an end?”
We have failed. It is now one year later and Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza is continuing toward its second year mark. As I speak these words, the Israeli military is literally leveling the entire northern region of Gaza to the ground. Earlier today, Israel issued its final warning for Palestinians in Gaza City to evacuate, saying everyone who remains will be considered a “terrorist.” Many are refusing to leave, many are unable to leave.
It is horrifying to even say these words out loud: on this Yom Kippur, the day when we plead to be written into the Book of Life, Israel is systematically erasing Gaza from the map – and the people of Gaza along with it.
I’ll be honest with you: I’ve struggled mightily over what I could possibly say tonight that would be worthy of Yom Kippur. I could discuss the geo-political causes that have been prolonging this genocide. I could discuss craven US politicians and corporate gangsters who are planning to carve up Gaza for their own profit. I could spend my time excoriating the Jewish establishment for supporting this genocide – and too many Jewish communal leaders for their silence. But frankly, none of it would be particularly new. None of it feels worthy of the grief pervadingthis sacred moment of Yom Kippur.
I also don’t want to spend this sermon describing the specific litany of the atrocities being inflicted on the people of Gaza – to reduce them to trapped, powerless victims. We’re all too familiar with the horrors of the past two years. Like so many of you, I’ve been scrolling daily through unbearable pictures and videos live streaming Gazan’s agony, their erasure. There’s something obscene about the casual way we’ve been viewing these horrors on our mobile devices, right alongside memes and texts and emails as we go about our daily business.
And yet at the same time, I know we must bear witness. We owe it in particular to the courageous young Gazans reporting on their own erasure from the ground even as Israel maintains a total media blackout. We cannot and must not look away. This has been our sacred responsibility to the people of Gaza. It is precisely through this bearing witness that we affirm their essential humanity.
As I thought about what I could possibly say to you tonight, I kept returning the same basic truth: if these days are to have any meaning for us at all, it is Yom Kippur’s sacred challenge to publicly affirm our accountability to the Palestinian people – as Jews and as human beings of conscience. We cannot let ourselves become complicit in their erasure. If we are truly serious about Yom Kippur, we must vow that solidarity is our sacred obligation.
When I think about Jewish accountability to the Palestinian people, I must mention our profound debt to Prof. Marc Ellis, of blessed memory, the great Jewish scholar, writer and theologian, who was an important teacher to me and a friend to our congregation from our earliest days. I quoted Marc in my very first sermon at Tzedek Chicago and many more times over the years. He was a prolific writer, but more importantly he was a courageous writer. Among other things, he wrote a great deal about what he called “revolutionary forgiveness” and the imperative for a collective Jewish confession to the Palestinian people. As he put it:
Revolutionary forgiveness in Israel-Palestine begins with a confession by the Jewish people. The confession is simple. What we as Jews have done to the Palestinian people is wrong. What we are doing to the Palestinian people today is wrong. With that confession, we agree to begin to walk the path with Palestinians towards justice and equality. As that path begins to be walked, the memories of each people, broken by history, remain. But as that path is walked, new memories begin to be created. As those memories of justice and equality are created, they begin to dominate the history of both peoples until in the end an injury against one is an injury against all. Revolutionary forgiveness; confession, justice at the center.
Marc died last year, far too young, as Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people was raging in full force. I yearn to talk to him now about this confession. I so want to ask him if he would still, in this terrible moment, be writing about mutual, revolutionary forgiveness? I want to ask: is forgiveness even possible any more? Or is what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people truly unforgivable? And if that is the case, is there really any future at all? Can there ever be any hope for real justice in Palestine/Israel?
For the past two years I’ve been in touch with my friend Rachel Betarie, an antizionist Israeli Jew and activist and former director of the organization Zochrot. Over the months, her words to me have become progressively more despairing as she’s described how it feels to live in Israel at this terrifying moment, in a country where the majority of its citizens support the genocide.
Recently, Rachel told that she was part of a new working group organized by Zochrot, as she put it, “of activists in Palestine, colonized and Anti-Zionist colonizers, who have been meeting since April to think, re-imagine, and suggest concrete processes through which the right of return for Palestinian refugees from Gaza could be realized after the genocide.” She went on to write:
It is not easy to imagine a better, more just future at a time when the ground is crumbling under our feet. Some of us have families in Gaza and most of us have deep ties there. All of us see our future here in Palestine, between the river and the sea. The question arose again and again in our meetings: Is it even relevant to talk about the future right now? Isn’t this just escapism? Still, we chose to trust each other – a work in progress – and our deeply held values, and extract some ideas from our process of learning and discussing. With every meeting it became clearer to what extent the Nakba, and the ongoing system of settler colonialism – not October 7, 2023 – was and still remains the root of the problems we face today, and that return is the core of every future solution that has a chance to bring any stability, justice and peace to our communities, and that entails dismantling of the Zionist colonial regime.
Through this work, we came to the conclusion that return from Gaza must begin – not at some distant point in the future. Our discussions did not only focus on the design of return but also raised questions of community, of collective and individual healing, and of how social processes of repair can accompany physical return. With our hearts shattered daily by the horrors of the genocide, and with fear and hopelessness engulfing us, envisioning this still possible future is in itself a remedy.
I’m so inspired by their effort, their determination to come together, Israelis and Palestinians – or as Rachel put it, colonized and colonizers – even in this unbearably tragic moment, to vision a future of reparation and return. They know full well that they are a tiny minority in Israeli society, a small island of hope amidst an ocean of trauma and fury. And yet they are determined to keep this vision alive despite it all.
As I think further about how we might envision the future this Yom Kippur, particularly here in the diaspora, I keep returning to one basic truth: Palestinian voices must be centered in our observance. Quite frankly, I don’t know how we can do the work of teshuvah, of repentance and return if we don’t hear their stories directly, open up fully to their voices and honor their experience.
As I said earlier, as we gather tonight for Yom Kippur, Israel is erasing the entire northern region of Gaza City, the most populous, built-up region of the Gaza Strip. According to reports, the scale of these demolitions are unprecedented. Over the past few weeks, the Israeli military has been systematically destroying every high-rise building in Gaza City. Satellite pictures show that the most populous region of Gaza has been reduced to a lunar landscape. Israel has already done this to large swathes of the Gaza Strip, including the city of Rafah in the south and the town of Beit Hanoun in the north.
These words, however, are mere reportage. I believe it’s critical that we hear the story of this erasure from those who are most directly impacted. And so I’d like to share with you two extended testimonies for this Yom Kippur, our day of reckoning. The first is the voice of Taher Herzallah, who comes from Gaza City and works as the Director of Organizing for American Muslims for Palestine. These are the words that Taher recently posted his Facebook page:
Gaza has fallen.
I’m not a sensationalist, nor am I someone who likes to shatter people’s hopes. But what we are witnessing today is the complete and utter annihilation of a people. It really feels like the end of Gaza City, and I don’t say this lightly, especially since I have family members and friends in Gaza who follow me on this page. This is the city where my father was born and where my family has lived for centuries.
Many of my relatives held out for two years under the worst conditions human beings can live under. But for more than 700 days, they’ve endured and found ways to survive in Gaza City.
No longer.
They’ve decided to leave Gaza City for the first time since this all started. It is just no longer possible to live there. With Israel’s systematic destruction of many of the major residential high rises in the city this week, the message is unequivocal: all of Gaza City will be leveled to the ground, the way Rafah and Jabalya and Khan Younis and Beit Hanoun were.
The images of displacement today broke something inside of me. People, looking back at Gaza with tears in their eyes, are moving south into another uncertain reality. Death and suffering are still a high likelihood as “safe zones” don’t truly exist. They know a return to Gaza is unlikely and they will be stuck in a cycle of displacement and suffering for years to come. But what choice do people have?
Some people refuse to leave Gaza. Not only out of stubbornness but also because they don’t have the means to leave. With the lack of aid organizations or large-scale efforts to facilitate the transfer of the population to another area, everyone in Gaza is left alone to figure out how to move their families to safer zones.
I have family members in Gaza who have gone back and forth from Gaza City to Deir El Balah 3 or 4 times to find a small plot of land to set up their tents. Finding an apartment or a built structure to live in is an absolutely hopeless endeavor. The best-case scenario now is to find a small plot of land large enough to erect a tent. With 2 million people squeezed into a small area on the Gaza coast, even that has become nearly impossible…
The stories we are hearing out of Gaza are heartbreaking and soul-crushing. A 10-year-old child in Gaza City was asked what his hopes are for ending this war. His response: “I only hope for one thing–to find my dad’s body and to bury him.” This is the extent of the boy’s hopes and dreams. To find consolation in burying the body of his father, who was killed at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site.
Other people have similar stories. They refuse to leave Gaza City, not because they don’t think it’s dangerous, but because they have loved ones buried under the rubble that they have not retrieved and can’t fathom moving on in life without burying them. The psychological and physical trauma of this genocide is so severe that people know that carrying that trauma will be the end of them anyway, and would rather die in Gaza City than endure years of more suffering…
To my family reading this: I am sorry. I have failed you. I don’t know what else to say. I hope you forgive me.
For the rest of us: whatever happens next will be very difficult. So prepare accordingly.
The next Palestinian voice I’d like to share with you is that of Asem Alnabih, an engineer and PhD student and spokesman for the Gaza municipality, who recently evacuated from the Shujayea region of Gaza City. Shujayea is one of the largest neighborhoods in Gaza and once had up to 100,000 residents. It is also a historically significant neighborhood, located in the southern quarter of Gaza’s Old City. Shujayea dates back to the 13th century and is named after Shuja’ al-Din Uthman al-Kurdi, a Muslim commander who died fighting the Crusaders. In the Ottoman period, it was the only mixed quarter in the Old City, where Muslims, Christians and Jews once lived together.
I remember Shujayea well when I visited Gaza in 2017 as a staff member for the American Friends Service Committee. It’s residents were clearly proud of their home, of its history, its deep sense of community and especially of its resilience. Although Shujayea was heavily bombed by Israel in its 2009 and 2014 assaults, residents rebuilt their homes each time.
Here is Asem Alnabih’s testimony, which he wrote in an article for Al-Jazeera:
My neighbourhood in east Gaza, Shujayea, is gone! The streets that once echoed with the laughter of children, the calls of vendors, and the familiar rhythms of daily life now lie in silence, smothered by dust and destruction. What was once a vibrant community, full of stories and memories, has been erased in a matter of moments.
A few days ago, my brother Mohammed went back to Shujayea to check on our family home. When he came back he told my father that nothing remained except for a few broken walls and scattered columns. A few hours later, we were shocked to learn that my father himself had braved extreme danger to see it with his own eyes. In a place where every step can mean death, he chose to walk through the ruins of our past.
This was the house my grandfather and father had built with years of effort, the house that carried my dad’s dreams and bore the marks of his sweat and sacrifice. It was where he raised his children, where we celebrated weddings and birthdays, where countless family memories were made. And now, it is nothing but rubble.
But our family’s loss is not just this one house. My father’s destroyed home is now added to my own burned apartment, my sister Nour’s bombed apartment, my sister Heba’s demolished home, and my sister Somaia’s two apartments – one reduced to rubble and the other burned. To this list are added my uncle Hassan’s destroyed building, my uncle Ziad’s building, my uncle Zahir’s home, my aunt Umm Musab’s apartment, my aunt Faten’s apartment, and the completely destroyed homes of my aunts Sabah, Amal, and Mona. And these are only the losses within our immediate family. All around us, countless relatives, friends, and neighbours have seen their homes obliterated, their memories buried under the debris.
This is not simply about the staggering material value of what we have lost. Yes, the homes were filled with furniture, personal belongings, and cherished possessions, but the destruction goes far deeper than material things. What has been taken from us is irreplaceable. A house can be rebuilt, but the sense of belonging that comes from walking familiar streets, from living in the same neighbourhood where generations of your family have grown up – that cannot be reconstructed with bricks and cement.
Shujayea was more than just buildings. It was a community stitched together by relationships, shared histories, and the memories of ordinary lives. It held the neighbourhood bakery where we bought fresh bread at dawn, the small corner shop where neighbours gathered to chat, the ancient Ibn Othman mosque that echoed with prayers during Ramadan. These were the spaces where children played, where families celebrated, and where neighbours supported each other through good times and bad.
When a neighbourhood like Shujayea is erased, it is not only walls that fall; it is a whole way of life. The destruction severs ties between neighbours, scatters families across shelters and refugee camps, and leaves a deep wound that no reconstruction project can truly heal. A rebuilt house may have four walls and a roof, but it will not be the same home that once carried generations of stories.
The pain of this loss is not unique to my family. Across Gaza, entire neighbourhoods have been flattened. Each pile of rubble hides the history of a family, the laughter of children, the wisdom of elders, and the love of a community that once thrived there. Each destroyed home is a silent witness to the human cost of this war, costs that cannot be measured in money or damage assessment.
What we have lost is not just property, but identity. A home is where a person’s life unfolds, where milestones are celebrated, where griefs are shared, where bonds are formed. To see so many homes destroyed is to see an entire people uprooted from the places that defined them. It is a calculated erasure, not only of lives, but of memory, heritage, and belonging.
Rebuilding will not bring back what was taken. The new buildings, if they ever come, will stand on top of the graves of our memories. They will not bring back my father’s years of hard work, nor the sense of comfort and security that once came with having a home. They will not resurrect the neighbourhood we knew, the one full of warmth, familiarity, and life.
The destruction of Shujayea is a wound that will remain open for generations. It is not simply a matter of humanitarian aid or reconstruction funds. This is about the deliberate dismantling of a community’s heart and soul. No amount of concrete can rebuild trust, restore memories, or bring back the neighbours who have been killed.
Shujayea is gone. And with it, a part of us has been buried. Yet even as we grieve, we hold on to the stories, to the love that once filled our homes, to the hope that someday justice will prevail. Because while they can destroy our houses, they cannot destroy the bonds we carry in our hearts, nor the memories that no bulldozer or bomb can erase.
On Yom Kippur, we say the hard truths out loud. And this Yom Kippur we must vow to hear them directly from the voices of those who would otherwise be silenced. Those whose lives would otherwise be erased. We cannot even imagine atonement if these voices are not with us during this most sacred observance.
On this evening of Kol Nidre, we admit publicly that we will fail to live up to the vows we make in the coming year. Does that mean we should adjust our vows to be more realistic, more achievable? Does it mean we should not make them at all? I personally find that prospect unbearable. On Yom Kippur, we are obliged to strive for our highest selves, even as we know we will not fully succeed.
So tonight, let us hold tight to these vows. Let us vow that our movement will end this genocide in the coming year. Let us vow that the armies will withdraw, that Gaza will be rebuilt, that the dead will be given dignified burials, that the dispossessed will find home and shelter.
And further, let us vow that Israel will be held accountable for its crimes, that the refugees will return, that reparations will be paid. Let us vow that Palestine will be free, that all will be liberated from the river to the sea.
Yom Kippur demands that we make such vows, as unreal as they may seem to us now. Because as Asem reminds us, “even as we grieve, we hold on to the stories, to the love that once filled our homes, to the hope that someday justice will prevail. Because while they can destroy our houses, they cannot destroy the bonds we carry in our hearts, nor the memories that no bulldozer or bomb can erase.”
On Yom Kippur we vow these vows because we know that as long as we hold on to these stories, to these memories, to this love, then nothing and no one can ever truly be erased. And the hope for justice will never die.
Ken Yehi Ratzon – May it be God’s will. V’chen Yehi Retzoneinu – And may it be our’s.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed a significant surge in Jewish protest over Israel’s starvation/genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. On July 28, two Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, released a comprehensive report that reached the “unequivocal conclusion” that “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” A week earlier Omer Bartov, a noted Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote a widely distributed op-ed for the New York Times entitled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know it When I See It.” Even Jeremy Ben – Ami, the president of the liberal Israel advocacy organization J Street, waded ever-so-gently into the fray with this delicately worded statement: “(While) I am unlikely to use the term (genocide) myself…I cannot and will not argue against those using the term.”
There has also been an increase in rabbis (many of whom consider themselves to be “liberal Zionists”) publicly stepping up and speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. On July 28, eleven mainstream rabbis protested by blocking traffic in front of the Israeli consulate in midtown Manhattan, with eight taking arrest. One Jewish communal figure noted, “The protests we’ve typically seen at the Israeli Consulate in places like that are from the further left of the community.”
A day later, in Washington DC a group of 27 rabbis affiliated with the advocacy group Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza entered Senate Majority leader John Thune’s office, displaying banners reading “Rabbis say: Protect Life!” and “Rabbis say: Stop the Blockade.” Then this past Monday, hundreds gathered (and more than 40 protesters took arrest) in front of the Trump International Hotel in New York City at a protest organized by IfNotNow under the banner “Stop Starving Gaza.” Among the speakers were Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T’ruah, Ruth Messinger, former head of American Jewish World Service and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. Needless to say, none of them were previously known for taking a stand against Israel in such a dramatic and public manner.
I must admit I have a great deal of cognitive dissonance over these developments. First and foremost, I will say that it is a welcome development that ranks of Jewish leaders in the movement to end the genocide against Palestinians is broadening. In the end, when otherwise mainstream American Jewish leaders are willing to call out this genocidal behavior for what it is, it only further isolates Israel. When lives are literally being taken by Israel in massive numbers on the daily, this is truly an “all hands on deck” moment. Those of us who have been on the front lines of the movement since 2023 can ill afford to cynically dismiss their participation.
At the same time however, I can’t help but feel cynical over the kudos given to these leaders (many of whom have been silent or equivocal on the genocide until now) for their “bravery” while scores of Palestinians have been organizing, leading protests and crying out in a myriad of different ways for years. Palestinian witness has been insidiously discounted during this genocide just as the Palestinian people have been denied the “permission to narrate” their oppression for over 70 years. I can’t help but grieve the sad irony that any strategic success resulting from this new resurgence will come from the further decentering – and dehumanizing – of Palestinian voices.
Moreover in this moment, when the images of starving Palestinian children are spurring so many Jewish leaders into action, it’s worth asking whether this protest movement can be sustained and transformed into one that brings true justice and lasting for Palestinians.
I’m not convinced. I couldn’t help but note that in their speeches, many of these liberal Zionist rabbis and Jewish leaders lay the blame for this genocide firmly on the policies of Netanyahu and the current government. A recent op-ed in the Forward by Rabbi Jill Jacobs summed up this attitude perfectly:
(Our) own fear must not distract us from the reality that the biggest threat to Israel, and indeed to Judaism itself, is coming from Israel’s governing coalition. Israel is increasingly becoming an autocratic and theocratic state. This is the moment for American Jews — including both leaders and ordinary Jewish community members — to raise their voice.
It has become a common trope in the “liberal Zionist” world to personalize this genocide as “Netanyahu’s war.” In fact, the biggest threat to Israel and Judaism is not Israel’s current governing coalition – it comes from a Jewish ethno-national nation state that was established and is maintained through the dispossession of Palestinians for the sole reason that they are not Jewish. Indeed, Israel is not “becoming” an autocratic and theocratic state – it has long been one.
I was also struck by Jacob’s misleading claim that “the vast majority of Israelis want the war to end.” While this is true, it is overwhelmingly due to Jewish Israelis desire for the return of the hostages – not their concern for Palestinian human rights. A more telling poll, which was released this past Tuesday, found that a vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 percent – say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population. And according to a poll from last May, 82 percent of Jewish Israeli respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza’s residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.
These polls indicate that this is not a problem of the current government. It is not Netanyahu. It is not an issue of bad policy. It is, in fact, Zionism itself. The real problem is that the entire enterprise of Zionist Judaism has infected Jewish life, as Jewish Currents editor Arielle Angel recently and powerfully wrote, “with a voracious rot.”
So yes, it is welcome that increasing numbers of liberal Jewish leaders are finally speaking out against Israel’s carnage in Gaza – but I feel compelled to ask: what will it take to get them to finally break with the Zionist enterprise? When the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is complete? When Israel annexes the West Bank (which the Knesset approved 71-13 in a recent symbolic vote)? When an even more extremist government is elected into power by an increasingly extremist Israeli populace?
If ever there was a moment for Jewish anti-Zionists to proudly show up and be counted, this is it. There could be no more terrifying demonstration of the end game of Zionism than the genocidal violence Israel has been unleashing on Gaza.
It grieves me to my soul that these words are still relevant in August 2025. May the Jewish people and their leaders find the courage of their convictions to call out a genocidal ideology that has caused – and continues to cause – such untold suffering to the Palestinian people in the name of Jewish supremacy. And may this day come soon.
5 month old Gazan baby Sinwar Ashour, starving to death (photo: BBC)
This is what it has come to: Israel is forcibly starving Palestinians. And when Palestinians go to the places Israel has designated as food distribution sites, they shoot them to death.
I will repeat that: Israel is forcibly starving Palestinians. And when Palestinians go to the places Israel has designated as food distribution sites, they shoot them to death.
Health authorities in Gaza said that 19 people died of starvation yesterday, including at least one infant.
Also yesterday, Israel killed 115 Palestinians – 92 of whom were shot while seeking food from the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Aid Foundation” in Zikim, in Northern Gaza. Israeli troops opened fire and massacred at least 79 Palestinians as they gathered to wait for 25 aid trucks from the UN World Food Program.
One of those killed was Raed Sindy, who was killed while attempting to access aid for his family. His brother Ahmed said, “They go out just trying to stave off their hunger and the hunger of their children, but they come back wrapped in shrouds.”
And this was just Sunday. Identical massacres and reports of death by starvation have been occurring regularly for months. We know this.
We know this because it has been happening in plain view of the world. Although this news has been all but pushed aside in the mainstream media, it is readily available on Al-Jazeera and alternative news sites and through social media.
Most importantly, we know this because Palestinians themselves have been telling us: reporting on their own genocide every day, in real time. Every day, I scroll through my mobile device and see videos of decapitated babies, corpses pulled from the rubble of bombed houses, bodies burned beyond recognition.
We also know that Israel is building a concentration camp for Palestinians in Rafah, a major southern center which has been completely reduced to rubble. The Israeli Defense Minister is calling it a “humanitarian city,” which will accommodate an initial group of some 600,000 displaced Palestinians. It would then be expanded to accommodate Gaza’s pre-war population of some 2.2 million people. They would not be allowed to move to other areas in Gaza but would instead be encouraged to “voluntarily emigrate” to unspecified countries.
So many of us who have been protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza for the past year and a half have warned that this what it would come to: the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Now it is happening in front of us, for all too see: by bombs, by bullets, by starvation and by forced emigration.
In the decades after the Holocaust, a number of books were written that took the American government and the Allies to task for its inaction during the genocide against European Jewry. But even in that case, it could be argued that while we knew much of what was going on, we didn’t know the full extent of the heinous reality that was the Final Solution. In this case, we have no such excuse. This plans of this genocide are being announced openly and without shame by its perpetrators.
They are doing so because they know they no one will stop them. Not the US government, which is funding and supporting this genocide, not the international community, which is either aiding and abetting or simply wringing its hands. Not the UN, nor the ICC nor the ICJ, which can make pronouncements but have no power of enforcement.
The destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza is the moral outrage of our time. Shame on every government and institution that has the power to stop it and has refused. Shame on every individual who had the power to lift their voices against this outrage and has remained silent.
Five-year-old Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil, trying to escape a burning classroom at the Fahmi Al-Jargawi School in Gaza City, May 26, 2025
Warning: this post contains descriptions of extreme violence.
After the Holocaust, no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that is not credible in the presence of the burning children.
This famous phrase comes from a 1974 essay, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” by theologian Rabbi Irving Greenberg, in which he attempted to lay out a new Jewish theology that could respond to the monumental cataclysm of the Holocaust. For Greenberg, the image of burning Jewish children was the ultimate moral obscenity – as well as a critical theological challenge. As he put it, “The cruelty and the killing raises the question whether even those who believe after such an event dare talk about God who love and cares without making a mockery of those who suffered.”
I thought of Greenberg’s words last week when, on Monday, May 26, the Israeli military conducted a series of airstrikes in northern Gaza, killing 54 Palestinians – most of them in a school building sheltering displaced families. The Fahmi Al-Jargawi School in Gaza City housed hundreds of peoplefrom Beit Lahia, which had been under intense Israeli military assault. At least 35 were reported to have been killed when the school was hit, half of them children. The Israeli military claimed, without offering proof, that it had been targeting “a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control center” there.
Videos shared online showed large fires engulfing the school, with graphic images of severely burned victims, including children, and survivors suffering critical injuries. Faris Afana, Northern Gaza ambulance service manager, arrived at the scene with crews to find three classrooms in flames. “There were sleeping children and women in those classrooms,” he said. “Some of them were screaming but we couldn’t rescue them due to the fires. I cannot describe what we saw due to how horrific it was.”
In one widely shared video, five-year-old Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil can be seen silhouetted against the flames, trying to escape a burning classroom. Ward had witnessed the deaths of her mother and five siblings: Abd al-Rahman, 17; Muhammed, 14; Maria, 13; and Silwan, 11. Her father remains in intensive care. Her uncle Iyad, who found her at Baptist hospital, said, “She told me that she saw them burn to death and she couldn’t do anything. She tried to escape the fire before some men arrived and pulled her out.”
Tragically, this horrifying incident wasn’t the first time that Israel engaged in military operations that burned Palestinian children alive. On October 14, 2024, Shaban al-Dalou, his mother and younger siblings Abdul and Farah were engulfed in flames in their tents during an Israeli attack on Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital. Last April, five children, four women, and a man from the same family died from severe burns after an Israeli airstrike hit the tent where they were staying in Khan Younis. On the same day, UNICEF announced that 15 children, including a child with disabilities, were burned to death in their tents over a period of 24 hours.
It should be added that the Israeli military has burned Palestinian children to death well before the current moment. During its military assault in 2008-2009, “Operation Cast Lead,” human rights organizations extensively documented Israel’s indiscriminate use of white phosphorous – a chemical substance that causes grievous burns, often to the bone. In its report, Amnesty International quoted Sabah Abu Halima, a mother of 10, who was gravely injured and lost her husband, four of her children and her daughter-in-law from a devastating white phosphorus artillery attack on her family home. In her testimony to Amnesty, Sabah said:
Everything caught fire. My husband and four of my children burned alive in front of my eyes; my baby girl, Shahed, my only girl, melted in my arms. How can a mother have to see her children burn alive? I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t help them. I was on fire. Now I am still burning all over, I am in pain day and night; I am suffering terribly.
In truth, the Palestinian children have endured burning at the hands of the Israeli military going back in the establishment of the state of Israel. During the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, Jewish militias killed 110 Palestinians and committed well-documented atrocities against civilians, including women, the elderly and children. There are numerous testimonies to these events from Jewish soldiers and eyewitnesses. One photographer, Shraga Peled reported, “When I got to Deir Yassin, the first thing I saw was a big tree to which a young Arab fellow was tied. And this tree was burnt in a fire. They had tied him to it and burned him.”
Almost ten years ago, the late Jewish scholar and writer Marc Ellis noted the tragic irony of Greenberg’s theological statement in a post for the blog Mondoweiss. During “Operation Protective Edge,” a military assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which the Israeli military killed over 2,000 Palestinians – including over 500 children – Ellis wrote:
As the news reports show and Palestinians know by experience, burning children has become a way of life for Israel. It makes sense to Israel’s government and Jews around the world who support the invasion of Gaza and even Op-Ed writers in the Wall Street Journal. The burning children of Gaza are collateral damage to a larger more important story.
For Greenberg, who viewed the the establishment of the state of Israel in theologically redemptive terms, the only response to the Holocaust that makes any sense is the continued survival of the Jewish people following their near annihilation. This is what comes of attaching sacred meaning to ethno-nationalism. And this is what it has come to: we are watching the result play out every day in a live streamed genocide where we are actually able, obscenely, to watch children burn to death on our mobile devices.
For the record, here is what Rabbi Greenberg had to say about Israel’s current actions in Gaza:
(How) can Israel deal with the fact that it is killing thousands of civilians including many children? Jewish tradition teaches that every human being is created in the image of God and is of infinite value. It is heartbreaking to kill so many individuals and devastating to realize that the price of saving Israel is the death of so many people (including, not to forget, hundreds of Israeli soldiers). One thinks of Golda Meir’s comment that we can never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their children. Still, it is important for the world to know that Israel continues doing what it can to reduce civilian casualties.
I’m not sure that theology is really of much use in this terrifying moment, but I will say this: any statement, theological or otherwise, made in the presence of some burning children and not others is nothing short of chillul hashem: a desecration of God’s name.
In December 2023, just three months into Israel’s genocide on Gaza, Tzedek Chicago’s board released a public statement entitled, “In Gaza, Israel is Revealing the True Face of Zionism,” arguing that “ongoing Nakba is the essential context for understanding the horrifying violence of the past three months.” A year and a half later, these words are resonating with an even more powerful urgency. There is every indication that Israel is beginning the process of engineering the wholesale destruction of Gaza – and the Palestinians who live there – by any means necessary.
We are now three months into Israel’s total blockade of food, fuel and humanitarian aid – and Gazans are gripped by an increasing famine. On May 4 it was reported by Gaza’s government media office that at least 57 Palestinians have already starved to death, more than 3,500 young children face imminent death from starvation, another 70,000 children are being hospitalized for severe malnutrition, and 1.1 million Palestinian children lack the minimum nutritional requirements for survival. Over 20 UN human rights experts have determined that Israel is wielding starvation as a weapon of war, concluding that “these acts, beyond constituting grave international crimes, follow alarming, documented patterns of genocidal conduct.”
At the same time, the Israeli military has been stepping up its bombing campaign, killing Palestinians at a higher rate than any point since the beginning of the genocide. As of this writing, Israel has killed 100 people in the past 24 hours in a series of bombings throughout northern Gaza. In footage taken by NBC News, the bodies of young children could be seen lying among the dead at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
There are ominous, compelling signs that we are indeed witnessing the end game of Israel’s Nakba in Gaza. On May 4, the Israeli government approved a military operation called “Gideon’s Chariots,” directing the Israeli army to seize complete control of the Gaza Strip and displace the entire population to a small area of land in the south. Though this was technically a leaked story, some Israeli politicians have been unabashed about the plan. Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich put it very plainly: “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” as a result of an Israeli military victory, and that Palestinians will “start to leave in great numbers to third countries.”
On top of this news, this past Wednesday, Reuters recently reported that the US and Israel have discussed the possibility of Washington leading “a temporary post-war administration of Gaza.” According to five sources, there would be no set timeline for how long the US led administration would last. They compared the proposal to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003, shortly after the US led invasion that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. As journalist/commentator Mehdi Hasan correctly pointed out in an interview today, the US’s administration of Iraq was an “absolute disaster.” As Hasan put it, “It increased sectarian tensions. It increased violence. It divided the country. It fomented more violent resistance.”
On May 15, the Palestinian people will observe Nakba Day, their collective observance of their dispossession and ethnic cleansing from their homes. For Palestinians this is not only an acknowledgement of an event that occurred in the past but a commemoration of an injustice that is still unfolding in real time. And yet the genocide in Gaza – as well as the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank – are completely absent from the mainstream press and international governmental concern. How long will the world allow this decades-long crime to continue?
I can’t help but note that this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Acharei Mot (which means “after the death”) describes an elaborate sacrificial rite of collective atonement. As I read these words, it is so clear to me that our complicity in this ongoing sacrilege continues to deepen the longer we allow it to unfold. The news out of Gaza has long since receded into the background, even as the Palestinian people continue to cry out to the world.
The world is watching. Will Member States live up to their obligations and intervene to stop the slaughter, hunger, and disease, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity that are perpetrated daily in complete impunity?
…The decision is stark: remain passive and witness the slaughter of innocents or take part in crafting a just resolution. The global conscience has awakened, if asserted – despite the moral abyss we are descending into – justice will ultimately prevail.
I’m sure I’m not the only anti-Zionist Jew who experiences cognitive dissonance when we get to the line that ends every Passover seder, “Next year in Jerusalem!” In the age of Zionism, what do these words really mean: when a Jewish person can fly to Jerusalem not next year, but tomorrow, and become an instant citizen upon arrival? How can we joyfully shout these words knowing that Israel ethnically cleansed half of Jerusalem in 1948 and militarily conquered and occupied the other half in 1967? What do they mean while scores of Palestinians who have deep generational ties to the land are forbidden from even setting foot in that city?
Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I can say this line with moral integrity is to understand the word “Jerusalem” not as referring to a physical city but to a spiritual ideal. This ideal, in fact, is central to Jewish tradition. After the destruction of the Temple and the ruination of Jerusalem by the Romans, the rabbis posited the existence of two Jerusalems: Yerushalayim Shel Mata (“Jerusalem Below”) and Yerushalayim Shel Mala (“Jerusalem Above”). Earthly Jerusalem is the physical city we know while the Heavenly Jerusalem is the messianic Jerusalem: a mirror reflection of the city on high: the Jerusalem of our highest aspirations.
In other words, while a small number of Jews always lived in the city after the destruction of the Temple, for the majority of Jews who lived throughout the diaspora, the concept of Jerusalem became a spiritualized symbol. I’ve often been struck that diaspora cities that were centers of robust Jewish life have typically been referred to as “Jerusalems.” In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for instance, Amsterdam was referred to as the “Jerusalem of the West” following the immigration of Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal. Likewise, Vilna was known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” and Tlemcen, Algeria was called “Jerusalem of the Maghreb.”
When the ideology of Zionism emerged, and this spiritual ideal was subsumed into a physical place, the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” became a literal battle cry. But when we limit our understanding of Jerusalem to one specific city, we do damage to the very idea of Jerusalem itself. It’s tragically ironic that while the Hebrew word Yerushalayim literally means “City of Peace,” it has rarely known a moment’s peace in its history. It certainly hasn’t since the establishment of the state of Israel.
While the metaphor of Jerusalem still has a prominent place in Jewish tradition and liturgy – the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” mark the end of Yom Kippur as well as the Pesach seder – this ideal can be deeply meaningful even for those of us who do not ascribe to the messianic aspects of Jewish tradition. They can continue to be deeply aspirational, indicating our hope for a future of justice, equity, and peace throughout the world – and our commitment to the work it will take to make that future real.
For anti-Zionist Jews, these words are not only a statement, but an affirmation of our opposition to the violence and dispossession that continues to be wrought in the name of the Jewish people in that city and throughout the land. “Next Year in Jerusalem” can mean “Next Year, a Jerusalem for all its inhabitants.” It means “Next Year in Jerusalem without Jewish Supremacy.” It can mean “Next Year, may there be a return for all who have been dispossessed from their homes.” When we affirm that Jerusalem is not only an earthly location, we affirm the true Jerusalem cannot be destroyed, conquered or reconquered: it continues to live in our hearts and motivate our actions.
May it be so this and every Passover: “Next Year in Jerusalem!”
Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of violence to children.
As the Jewish community prepares to observe Passover this year, I’m thinking a great deal about the centrality of children to the Exodus story we tell around the seder table. In particular, I’m struck that this narrative from the Torah begins with a terrifying description of atrocities committed against children. As Exodus opens, a new pharaoh arises over Egypt who openly dreads the demographic growth of the Israelite minority. After oppressing them with forced labor, he orders Hebrew midwives to kill newborn male children. When they resist his demand, he charges the Egyptians to throw all baby boys into the Nile. Shortly after, Moses is born and is saved from this decree of death by his mother, his sister and the pharaoh’s daughter, who adopts him.
Among other things, the Exodus story drives home the tragically familiar truth that children are not mere casualties of wartime atrocities, but are actually targeted by state violence. According to a 2014 report in The New Yorker, “The specific targeting of children is one of the grimmest new developments in the way conflicts have been waged over the past fifty years.”
Those who participate in the Passover seder are required not only to read the story of the Exodus, but to examine its relevance, as the Haggadah instructs us, “in every generation.” As such, the opening of the narrative presents us with all too disturbing parallels — and a critical moral challenge. This Passover — the second to come amidst the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, we would be grievously remiss if we failed to acknowledge the scores of children who have been killed, maimed and traumatized by Israel’s ongoing military onslaught.
The official death toll in Gaza has now broken the 50,000 mark, including more than 17,000 children. (The medical journal The Lancet has concluded that the total number of those killed is likely 40 percent higher.) On March 18, the day that Israel broke a two-month ceasefire, the Israeli military killed more than 400 Palestinians, including 183 children and 94 women — on what observers call the single bloodiest day of the genocide.
More recently, on April 3, Israel bombed the Dar al-Arqam School-turned-shelter in Gaza City, killing 29 people, 18 of whom were children. In its report on the attack, Al Jazeeraquoted a spokesperson from Gaza’s emergency rescue workers: “What is going on here is a wake-up call to the entire world. This war and these massacres against women and children must stop immediately. Children are being killed with cold blood here in Gaza.”
For those who stand in solidarity with Palestinians, certain reports and images have become seared into our hearts and minds. For many, the tipping point moment into the abyss occurred in early 2024, with the phone recording of 6-year-old Hind Rajab, pleading with her mother for rescue before the Israeli military shot 335 bullets into her family’s car. One month later, the world was horrified by the image of Sidra Hassouna, a 7-year-old Palestinian girl from northern Gaza, hanging dead off the ledge of a destroyed house with half her body missing.
On May 26, 2024, a 1-year-old baby, Ahmad Al-Najjar, whose headless body was held aloft by a terrified, grief stricken man following what has come to known as the Rafah Tents Massacre — a night in which 45 Palestinians, most of them women and children, were killed, burned alive and beheaded. One doctor who witnessed the carnage commented, “In all my years of humanitarian work, I have never witnessed something so barbaric, so atrocious, so inhumane. These images will haunt me forever… And will stain our conscience for eternity.”
Denial can take many forms. For some, it is rooted in racist dehumanization of the other; others may be just too overwhelmed to allow themselves to comprehend the massive slaughter of children in such a heinous fashion; still others rationalize the truth of it away, dismissing mass murder as “collateral damage” or Hamas’s use of “human shields” (a cynical claim that has been consistently debunked by human rights observers).
For Israel’s supporters, it is even more unthinkable to face the increasing evidence that the Israeli military might well be intentionally targeting children for mass murder. A recent Al Jazeera “Fault Lines” documentary, “Kids Under Fire,” makes a compelling case for this claim, with extensive eyewitness interviews with volunteer American health care workers and human rights experts. Their accounts, corroborated across hospitals and over time, suggest a systematic pattern: increasing numbers of child victims were not injured as a result of bombing raids, but of direct gunshot wounds, often to the head. One of the doctors interviewed in the film, Tammy Abughnaim, an American emergency physician from Chicago, commented:
More and more, I started to see children with penetrating injuries like gunshot wounds. After five, six, seven, eight, I came to the realization that somebody is shooting children. I didn’t want to believe that children were being shot. Nobody wants to believe that. Nobody wants to think that other humans are capable of annihilating children in that way.
Abughnaim’s testimony is corroborated in the film by Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina: “The target at the end of a scope is unmistakable. They are a young human being, and when that trigger gets pulled on that target, it is not by accident. At all. Ever.”
At one point, the interviewer asked Miranda Cleland of Defense for Children International – Palestine, “How you ever thought through ‘what’s the strategic reason to shoot a child? What message should we take from a military that would target children?’” Cleland’s reply: “I’ve thought about it a lot and the only conclusion I can come to is that Israeli soldiers are shooting Palestinian children because they want to. And I think they do it because they are allowed to and nobody has stopped them.”
Nabeel Rana, a vascular surgeon from Peoria, Illinois, put a finer point on it: “You’re wiping out a certain number, maiming a certain number and permanently mentally and emotionally disabling the rest. And that’s going to be passed down to the next generation. So, this is how you cripple a society.”
As centuries of state violence against oppressed communities have long demonstrated, the most direct way to undermine and even eradicate a society is to target its children. In December 2024, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) released a report, “Generation Wiped Out: Gaza’s Children in the Crosshairs of Genocide,” examining Israel’s crime of genocide against Gazans, including the genocide of children. The PCHR report concluded:
The killing of children, infliction of serious physical and mental harm, and subjection to harsh living conditions that destroy their lives cannot be dismissed as mere collateral damage of military attacks. Instead, these actions are part of a systematic strategy aimed at erasing Palestinian identity and annihilating future generations.
There are ominous indications that this annihilation is well underway. A Reutersanalysis of data from the Gaza Health Ministry revealed that at least 1,238 families — defined as married couples and any children they might have — have been totally erased, with no survivors. In an AP article on this issue last year, Omar Shabaan, a Gazan researcher and economist, observed that of Gaza’s 400,000 families, none have been spared, causing permanent harm to Gaza’s society, history and future. “It is becoming clear,” he said, “that this is a targeting of the social structure.”
This dramatic upsurge in the killing of Palestinian children is not limited solely to Gaza. According to a recent report on the “Gazafication” of the West Bank, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found that Israel is now using the military tactics of its assault on Gaza throughout the Occupied Territories, “where Palestinians face mass forced displacements, a surge in airstrikes and a sharp rise in attacks on children and other civilians.” B’Tselem reported that 180 children have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the Gazan genocide began, making it the deadliest period of Israel’s nearly 60-yearlong occupation for adults and children alike.
Reports of violence against children are indeed reminiscent of reports from Gaza. In an article entitled “Child Deaths Surge Amid ‘Gazafication’ of the West Bank,” the Guardian, interviewed Rigd Gasser, the father of 14-year-old Ahmad Rashid Jazar, who was shot in the chest in the village of Sebastia by an Israeli soldier while on an errand to get bread in January. Gasser was in a cafe when he heard the gunshots and rushed out when he heard calls for help. “I got closer and recognized my son. I knew him by his clothes, his body was all covered in blood,” he said.
The article also reports on the killing of cousins Reda Basharat (8) and Hamza Basharat (10) who were killed near home by an Israeli drone strike on January 8. The children were sitting outside with their 23-year-old cousin Adam when Hamza’s mother Eman heard the explosion. When she ran outside, she found Hamza injured and struggling to breathe. “He died in my arms,” she said. Eman added, “When I think about what happened to my son and remember the images of their bodies, and I see what is happening in Gaza on TV, I felt suddenly that they are doing the same thing.”
While these individual reports portray unspeakable cruelty, it’s important to bear in mind that it ultimately serves a larger purpose. Just like the violence inflicted by the pharaoh in the Exodus story, Israel’s violence toward children stems from the view of an entire people as a “demographic threat.” This view itself stems from Zionism: an ideology and movement that seeks to create and maintain a majority Jewish nation-state in historic Palestine. As such, the targeting of children is part of a larger effort to ethnically cleanse Gaza through a variety of means, including demolition of homes, population transfer and, as the PCHR report puts it, “erasing Palestinian identity and annihilating future generations.”
In this regard, Israel’s open fire policy toward Palestinian children is inseparable from other draconian actions that clearly seek the depopulation of Gaza and the West Bank. As of this writing, the AP has reported that Israel now controls 50 percent of Gaza as it enlarges its buffer zone, razing Palestinian homes, farmland and infrastructure to “the point of uninhabitability.” The military has also destroyed 90 percent of the southern city of Rafah, after issuing evacuation orders to its residents.
If there could be any doubt as to Israel’s intentions, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi, of the Likud party, like so many other Israeli politicians and military leaders before him, recently made Israel’s end game all too clear. In a radio interview he said pointedly that Israel should “wipe Gaza off the face of the earth,” adding, “There are no innocents there.… I have no mercy for those who are still there. We need to eliminate them.” More recently he commented in a TV interview: “You can’t live with these creatures next to us.… There is no peace with anyone here.… Every child born now — in this minute — is already a terrorist when he is born.”
Notably, Vaturi has also made similar comments about the West Bank region of Jenin, where 40,000 Palestinians were displaced by Israel in the month of February alone. “Erase Jenin. Don’t start looking for the terrorists — if there’s a terrorist in the house, take him down, tell the women and children to get out.” While Israel’s apologists dismiss comments such as these as hyperbole, it is critical to note that these very clear statements of intent are being backed up by very clear action.
As a congregational rabbi, I’ve been asked recurring questions over the last two Passovers. How can I celebrate this holiday while a genocide is being committed in my name? How can I observe a festival of Jewish liberation while a Jewish nation-state is acting as a pharaoh over an entire people? While I understand the anguish behind these questions, I believe the Passover ritual actually offers us an important opportunity: to squarely face the way the Exodus narrative is playing out in a very real way in our own day, to ask hard questions and avoid the simple, pat answers.
In his searing book about Israel’s genocide, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, writer Omar El Akkad writes:
A woman’s leg amputated, without anesthesia, the surgery conducted on a kitchen table. A boy holding his father’s shoe, screaming. A girl whose jaw has been torn off. A child, still in diapers, pulled out of the tents after the firebombing, his head severed from his body.
Is there distance great enough, to be free of this? To be made clean?
This Passover, the season for asking questions, El Akkad’s challenge pounds insistently on the collective conscience of the world.
It’s difficult to describe the feelings I experienced this past weekend, as I watched hundreds of thousands of Gazans in a long and seemingly endless line, heading on foot to their homes in the north. Crossing the Netzarim corridor – the border the Israeli military demarcated separating north from south – they headed back with whatever possessions they were able to carry. Family members who thought each other dead clutched each other in tearful embrace. It was truly a wonder to behold: this resilient people who had defied and withstood the most destructive miliary onslaught in modern times. As Gazan activist Jehad Abusalim put it:
Gaza today, for now, disrupts and defies the global agenda of rendering entire populations disposable and rightless. This was achieved through the resilience of an entire population that has endured months of displacement, starvation, disease and bombardment.
Though this is a fragile and temporary ceasefire, it’s striking to note the depth of Israel’s failure to achieve any of its stated objectives of its genocidal war. It failed to destroy Hamas and the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza. It failed to rescue hostages taken on Oct. 7 through military means. It failed to implement its so-called “General’s Plan” – its blueprint for ethnically cleansing northern Gaza. And perhaps most importantly, it failed to break the will of the Gazan people to survive its genocidal war.
Jehad’s words “for now” are appropriate. The overwhelming number of Gazans are returning to homes that are rubble – and it is by no means certain how they will be able to rebuild their lives. The ceasefire is a tenuous one; there is still no agreement on the second or third phases of deal and there is every possibility that Netanyahu will use the deal as cover to eventually depopulate Gaza of Palestinians. Trump’s recent comments (“I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people…we just clean out that whole thing”) have made his intentions clear, even if his plan has been rejected outright by Arab states.
As I read the reports and analyses in the wake of this ceasefire, one thing seemed consistent to me: as ever, there is little, if any, concern for the humanity of the Palestinian people. On the contrary, every pronouncement by Western governments and the mainstream media treats their mere existence as a problem to be dealt with. In this regard, Jehad’s reference to “the global agenda of rendering entire populations disposable and rightless” is spot on. Palestinians in general – and Gazans in particular – have always been the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to the use of state violence against “problematic populations” deemed “disposable” by authoritarian states seeking to consolidate their power.
“Entire populations rendered disposable and rightless” certainly applied to events in my hometown of Chicago this past Sunday, where the Trump launched “Operation Safeguard,” a shock and awe blitz spearheaded by ICE, the FBI, ATF, DEA, CBP and US Marshals Service. Led by Trump’s so-called “border czar” Tom Homan (and surreally videotaped live by “Dr” Phil), heavily armed and armored forces terrorized Chicago neighborhoods all day, mostly going door to door, staking out streets in search of undocumented people, taking them away in full-body chains. While there is no definitive information on the numbers of people taken, federal immigration authorities claim to have arrested more than 100 people in recent days.
On a positive note, however, we are seeing that the strategies employed by local immigrant justice coalitions are making a real difference. My congregation, Tzedek Chicago is part of a local interfaith coalition called the Sanctuary Working Group, which has been mobilizing Know Your Rights trainings and Rapid Response teams. From our experience in Chicago over these past few days, we’ve seen that this kind of mobilization really does have an impact. Perhaps the strongest validation of these resistance strategies came from Homan himself, who said on an interview with CNN:
Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, very well educated, they’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE. They call it “Know Your Rights.” I call it how to escape arrest.
in my previous post, I wrote that “the current political moment has left many of us breathless.” But over the course of the last several days, we’ve seen it is indeed possible “to disrupt and defy the global agenda of rendering entire populations disposable and rightless.” If we had any doubt at all, let us take our inspiration from the Gazan people, who have refused to submit after 15 months of merciless genocidal violence and are returning to their homes, vowing to rebuild and remain.
The most powerful shock and awe in the world could not break them. Let this be a lesson to us all.
Shalom Rav 