[Excerpted and reprinted with permission from Jewschool.com (12/26/24). A postscript from the author follows below.]
When I was a kid, we listened to a cassette tape in the car from the Baltimore Board of Jewish Education (in the days before PJ library). I think it was in that tape’s telling of the Hanukkah story that the narrator described the Maccabees returning to the Temple and finding it defiled grotesquely, covered in pigs’ blood. That image made a strong impression on me as a kid. The Temple that had once been the most holy and pure place to connect with God, destroyed and treifed up beyond recognition, smeared with blood.
I have been scared to say out loud what has been going on for my spirit this year. The bombardment of Gaza and its human toll have been live streamed from the beginning. Basically every day for more than a year, I’ve seen images on X and other social media that shatter my heart. Smiling holiday and family portraits with names, flinching again and again as I realize everyone depicted has been killed.
I could see, even in the early days after Oct. 7, when Israel started dropping bombs on entire buildings, that this could not possibly be a mission of restraint, that was sparing civilians with care, or that it even had a goal of rescuing the hostages. How could it? It just wasn’t plausible, given what I was seeing. Why would an army that was trying to preserve life or show care bomb Gaza until it looked like the moon, destroying universities, hospitals, mosques and burying so many families with children in the rubble of their own homes? Why would soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces loot homes for sport and pose with the things they found if the mission had a defensible and limited purpose?
I don’t have an unusual amount of access to Palestinian voices on the ground in Gaza. But when I found voices speaking out, I listened and followed. The Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha, now living in Egypt, posts almost every day, sharing the names of former students, writer friends and family acquaintances as they are killed. He sometimes posted that a particular family was trapped under rubble after their home had been bombed, trying to direct emergency responders there. I read an article by two American doctors — one of them Jewish, Mark Perlmutter — who returned from Gaza saying they had treated one child after another who had been shot in the head, not something that could plausibly happen by accident. I watched parents wailing over the white-shrouded bodies of their dead children. I watched footage from tent encampments on fire. I saw photos from inside hospitals after days under siege.
We’re not allowed to kill people. We’re not. I’m totally clear on this. We’re not allowed to kill people when we think those people don’t like Israel or don’t like Jews. We’re not allowed to kill people to make it absolutely impossible that they could conceivably hurt us later. We’re not allowed to kill people because we are angry about some other harm done to us. We’re not allowed to kill children or their grandparents. We’re not allowed to kill doctors. We’re not allowed to kill journalists. We’re not allowed to kill people because we believe we are indigenous, and we’re not allowed to kill people because we believe they aren’t indigenous. Goodness knows we’re not allowed to kill people because our racism makes us feel like they’re not quite as human as we are — we of all people have been warned our whole lives to be vigilant about where demonizing a certain people leads. WE’RE NOT ALLOWED TO KILL PEOPLE.
Why does it feel like a shameful betrayal to say this out loud in Jewish spaces?
I walk into shul on Shabbat, like normal. Normal friends say kindly, “Shabbat Shalom. How are you doing?”
This used to be easy. Now it is work. How am I?
We’re not allowed to kill people to make it absolutely impossible that they could conceivably hurt us later.
This week I saw photos of a round-faced little boy named Osama, a 2-year-old, who was killed along with the green parakeet perched on his shoulder, and his mother. I’ve been really upset about it. No. Can’t say that.
I can’t stop thinking about the photos of Tala, a 9-year-old who was killed by an airstrike with her pink roller skates still on. It broke me. No.
There’s this little boy Ahmed in Gaza; his father posts videos on Instagram. This little guy has my son’s smile and mannerisms, and he made a video of how he is planting a garden, and he reminds me so much of my son it breaks my heart open. No, no, no.
They just said Shabbat Shalom. This isn’t hard. Say something normal. (Flash of panic. Breathe.)
“We’re doing OK, thanks. How are you?”
I am not a theologian. But I believed in the Judaism I was raised in with my whole heart. I’m maybe 11 years old when an author of a book about Jewish spirituality speaks at our Conservative synagogue. He opens by asking a room full of adults about how we know that the Torah is holy, or maybe it was how we know that the promise God made to Abraham was holy or something like that. People kept saying because it was passed down, because our teachers taught us, because the rabbis transmitted it, because our parents told us. It isn’t the answer he was looking for. Little serious me raises my hand and says, we know it is holy because we can feel that it is holy. We experience that it is holy ourselves. That’s how we know. (The man took my father aside to say I should go to rabbinical school someday. I did not.)
But I did experience the holy, over and over again, when Jews sang together in prayer, when we stood together silently during the Amidah, whispering to God. Starting from early childhood, we were asked to think about the consequences of our actions as important — and important to God. We cast off our “sorries” before Yom Kippur. We were taught that our tradition puts the saving of life above all the other commandments. That everyone is made in the image of God. That saving even one life is like saving an entire world. I spent a lot of my volunteer time over the past two decades helping to support Jewish prayer spaces that felt redemptive, where that holiness was made real. We learned new melodies, set up and took down chairs, organized spreadsheets of volunteer roles, all for moments that felt redemptive and sacred.
Suddenly, in the past year, no one in Jewish institutions seems to want to talk about responsibility. We won’t even acknowledge deaths in Gaza. We save seats for the hostages or pray for the Israeli soldiers but don’t name even one of the tens of thousands of human beings killed in Gaza, with American weapons, under the flag flying in front of our building. We say Kaddish and honor our own mourners and grieve our own dead by name, individually. But surely, the grotesque horrors being live streamed from Gaza are worthy of our attention, particularly in the United States, where the president says he is arming Israel for all Jews’ safety, where it is our American weapons being dropped on children every day?
I am 5 years old, in Mechina Sunday school, and the teacher is explaining that we cover our eyes to say the Shema so that nothing can distract us from the Oneness of God. I always cover my eyes ever since to say: God is One.
“Hey! Shabbat Shalom. How are you?”
On my phone this week, I saw video of people pulling two dead children out of the rubble of their home, embracing each other — still in their flannel pajamas. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about their terror, hearing bombs falling from the sky on them, holding onto each other until the end. My kids wear pajamas like that. No, no. No.
14 pages of babies. They published a list of the people killed in Gaza so far by age, and the document began with 14 pages of infants under 1. No. Of course not. No.
The Israeli human-rights report on the torture of Palestinian prisoners — I couldn’t get past the first page. They’re torturing and humiliating people just because they can, with no due process and no consequences. It makes me want to scream. Is this who we are? Absolutely not.
“Tired, it’s been a long week. How are you all?”
I’m not a theologian. But when so many Jews and Jewish institutions get into arguments about the words that people use to describe the carnage in Gaza, it makes me feel like I’m not in the same religion I thought I was. If we believe in any kind of transcendent Anybody, it is Someone Who knows the truth about the violence in which we are complicit. We can’t tell the Master of the Universe that it’s antisemitic to expect us to look directly at how some of the worst things humans can do to each other are happening in Gaza, with our tax dollars and even our blessing. Any God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is in the rubble with people suffering. How could it be otherwise? Their blood cries out from the ground. Every one of them is made in the Divine image. God knows what Israel’s soldiers are really doing, whether The New York Times headline uses the passive voice or not. God knows what the real casualty numbers are, God knows the horrors. Isn’t this why we wear kippot (head coverings), to be mindful we are always operating in view of heaven? Shouldn’t it be the reverent thing for every person in every synagogue in America to do a heshbon hanefesh, an “accounting of the soul,” of every way we helped create the conditions in which this horror is now possible?
These children in Gaza, who have been living under relentless bombardment for hundreds of days in a row, cannot be mentioned in our Jewish communities. To do so would be intolerably controversial.
Hani Almadhoun founded the Gaza Soup Kitchen, where teams prepared food and fed hundreds of people every day. Most days, they post a dozen photos on Facebook, portraits of the children who came to receive food. I try to look at every face. I pray a little prayer for them to be OK. I want to take them away from all this violence Israel is raining down on them with American weapons. Many of these children would not look out of place at Tot Shabbat in any synagogue or at Ramah Day Camp, or on the bimah reading Torah as a bar or bat mitzvah. These are children like our children, so much like our children that I often think, “She looks like this Jewish child I know; he reminds me of so-and-so.”
I have to imagine them into our Jewish communities in order to imagine their lives being honored and valued in our Jewish communities. In any synagogue, I know these same children would be cherished and loved, and fed as much as they could eat, and even their boo-boos attended to — let alone guarded from coming to bodily harm. But these children in Gaza, who have been living under relentless bombardment for hundreds of days in a row, cannot be mentioned in our Jewish communities. To do so would be intolerably controversial.
I no longer think of myself as praying in the direction of Jerusalem. I pray facing Gaza. I try to imagine explaining to the father of Tala, the girl killed in her roller skates, why I continue to pray in so many rooms that are flying the Israeli flag, the state that killed Tala for roller skating outside. I try to think of the excuses, sentimental ideas I was raised with about it being a symbol of pride and refuge for my people. I imagine trying to explain that the flag has to stay there on account of certain important donors to the synagogue. I try to explain why our religious and spiritual leader, the rabbi, can’t take the political risk of taking the flag down. I could not make any of these excuses to the parent of a child killed in Gaza. Long before I said any of these things, I would be devoured by shame. In matters of uncertainty, we set aside all other considerations to save even one life. We cherish and honor children. If Tala’s father would not accept my explanations, why do I think God would?
Why isn’t it the “Jewish” position to oppose continuing to drop bombs on the places where children live and play?
I am so disgusted that anyone thinks it does me any good to kill Tala and destroy her father’s dreams. I try to convince myself that these places where American Jews gather to pray are still holy, that God still attends to our prayers in these places, as the IDF continues to bomb hospitals in Gaza, assassinates one of the beloved chefs of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, continues destroying encampments people evacuated to — by burning them alive. I tell myself that it is I who am disgusted and ashamed, while God’s lovingkindness is forever. I try and try to feel that I am still in a holy community, praying holy words in a holy space. I usually end up just crying instead. Sometimes, I leave and walk around outside.
The horrors there and my life here sometimes rhyme. The week last year when my dear friend gave birth to long-wanted and much anticipated twins, my community buzzed with joy and organized itself to provide meals and plan naming rituals. On my phone, a video of a hijabi mother from Gaza wailed in grief at the death of her 10-year-old twins, who had just celebrated their birthday. She had not been able to provide a real treat — there is not enough access to food in Gaza — but had promised that next year, the war would be over and there would be cake. (It has been a year. The twins in my life are about to turn 1. They lived to eat their cake.)
I have given what I can to relief organizations, to the Gaza Soup Kitchen, to the GoFundMe’s of Gazan families trying to survive until they can evacuate. I’ve attended rallies with IfNotNow, got arrested in the Capitol Rotunda, called my legislators to oppose further transfers of weapons for Israel to drop on more families in Gaza. (The weapons packages have all gone through anyway.) Twice, when my congressman and one of my senators voted against further weapons for Israel after I had called to ask them to do so, the local Jewish Community Relations Council bemoaned that these legislators were no longer being “strong supporter[s] of the American Jewish community.” What is going on? If our children are entitled to roller skate and sleep in their pajamas in homes on which bombs are not being dropped, why aren’t theirs? Why isn’t this the “Jewish” position, being against, not for, continuing to drop bombs on the places children live and play?
But I mostly just feel trapped and helpless in a nightmare, in which beloved teachers and elders have become monstrous. Former religious-school teachers, leaders in local Jewish preschools, posting snarky memes about events I know killed real people in Gaza because I watched the carnage on my phone with my own eyes. People sharing the terror and fear of Israeli families having to go into shelters during rocket attacks, while failing to acknowledge that Gazan families have been under relentless bombardment for months, getting buried alive when their homes collapse on them, with nowhere to flee to and no way out. Safety for just us, absolute silence for them. God is One. I’ll be damned if I let anything distract me from this, the one thing I know for sure. God is One.
I keep up appearances, but I may be losing my mind. I have been up in the middle of the night, trying to imagine bombs from the sky falling onto my home and the room where my children are sleeping. Some nights, I drink, until the sadness overflows my body and fills the room. I have found myself bingeing “Law & Order” and crime shows. Why? Maybe I’m craving stories in which the killing of just one person is treated as a breach of justice so important that the whole rest of the show tracks down the perpetrator and holds them accountable. One weird night, I bargained with God that I would give up every single thing I loved about Judaism — every melody, every prayer I know by heart, my tallit, everything — I would give it all back if it could save even one of these beautiful children. I know one human being is more sacred than any of these things. It was a deranged prayer that made no sense. I prayed it anyway, sobbing.
We’re the people who will be known in the United States for the rest of my life as the people who equivocated and defended the horrors the IDF is perpetrating in Gaza now. What is known only to God now will become known to the world. When Jewish leaders make space for “pluralism” and assure me that people like me are still welcome, it treats defending the killing of 14 pages of babies as a normal difference of opinion that a moral community can tolerate. My head explodes. I know this war is not because of American Jews. But we need to reckon with why our own religious community, descended from generations of reverent ancestors who never wavered from proclaiming the Oneness of God — why our religious leaders and institutions cannot say, with clarity, that the grotesque violence against a trapped civilian population in Gaza is indefensible and wrong. Starving people as a weapon of war is wrong. Torturing and humiliating people is wrong. This is the kind of thing that should be at the heart of what our communities exist to say in the world, not a marginal area of legitimate disagreement.
I’m not a rabbi. I’m not a theologian. I’m not an expert on international politics. But I know what is holy because I experience it myself, and I know for sure that we’re not allowed to kill people.
I think about why I am bringing my children into these spaces, multiple times a week, into Jewish spaces that are continuing to wave Israeli flags and defend a nation that has killed thousands of children no less precious than they are. It’s because I want them to be good and gentle people. I want them to honor the dignity in everyone, to revere the holy in everything. I no longer remember why I am so confident that more time in these communities can be expected to have that outcome.
Sometimes, I have asked myself if I am still going to be Jewish after this is all over. It’s a terrifying question that upends the rhythms and principles around which I have constructed my adult life. It has painful implications for every other member of my family. It’s worth asking because some of the pro-Israel voices in our communities seem so eager to cast me out. Counter protesters have called us “fake Jews.” A former friend on Facebook described me as “anti-Jewish.” A rabbi disinvited me from speaking to his synagogue (on an unrelated topic) because my Facebook posts against the war were a “desecration of God’s name.” But it’s a silly question. Of course I’m Jewish. It was in a Jewish idiom that my body was shaped from earliest childhood to experience God, through Jewish prayer and practice. I am the descendant of my biological Ashkenazi and my spiritual ancestors. I might leave shul in tears and walk around the building sometimes. But there’s no easy way out of what we’ve all watched happen to our sanctuaries. They’re ours, and what has happened to them is on us. If we want God to dwell there again, then we have to make them holy again.
Postscript
I wrote this for Hanukkah, and now we have just passed Shavuot.
Today, things are much worse in Gaza. Horrors pervade my social-media feed and haunt my quiet moments. The famine, starvation deployed as a weapon of war, haunts me, too — with every bite I feed my children and every gathering to eat around tables of abundance with other Jews. There are some things to do, and I do them. We are mostly helpless to intervene. The horrors rage on.
In some ways, my piece in Jewschool didn’t change anything. But it changed everything for me, because it opened so many pained conversations and brought forth emails from all over the world from Jews who wanted me to know they felt this way, too. “I’ve been sobbing for 10 minutes,” a Reform rabbi texted me after reading it. “Every word echoed so much of my own emotions and reactions to the ongoing horror and our Jewish community’s hillul Hashem.” I still weep in shul sometimes or get so uncomfortable I need to leave the room. I am not as lonely as I felt last fall and winter, knowing that many Jews praying in many types of communities do so in anguish at the violence in which we’ve all been enlisted.
But the carnage escalates and accelerates, and the Jewish institutional party line is monstrous in the face of mass murder and starvation, and I’m not sure all that crying in shul, especially in the many shuls outside our Reconstructionist movement where they pray for the IDF and name only murdered Jews, really matters.
Over this time between Hanukkah and Shavuot, I’ve seen some meaningful shifts in Jewish communities and had many heartfelt conversations. I still cannot square the way my religious community is showing up in general, the grotesque and unrelenting horrors our institutions have become party to without real protest.
My distress has given way to a deep sadness. I don’t think the people I grew up with singing songs in Hebrew meant the same things I meant when we sang them together. Standing and swaying together all those years, filling our children’s bellies with latkes and challah and hamantaschen, without cultivating our hearts and theirs to see what God sees … it was a terrible mistake. We will spend the rest of our lives reckoning with how we went so wrong.
From now on, I insist that we talk to each other out loud in English about what we really think about God, that we talk about whether we think God could possibly bless the murder of nine children born in one place to “protect” one child born in another; that we talk about whether experiencing violence entitles us to engage in absolutely any other destruction and violence we wish to against the people near those people, indefinitely; that we talk about whether we think God only requires us to feed the hungry when those starving people are not trapped inside a place under Israeli military control; that we talk about whether we really in our hearts believe God somehow only hears the Names we were given and listens to prayers only in the language in which we were taught to pray and does not attend to the prayers of those crying out with other Names and in other languages from under rubble and in tents under fire? Isn’t that a strange and unlikely coincidence, to have been born by happenstance into the only group of people whose lives and safety matter to God? What luck, to be the only people whose children are precious, somehow? Such theology is so indefensible that it crumbles when spoken aloud. I’ll never get over it, that we ended up here. I’d give back all those melodies and spit out the hamantaschen. What is wrong with us?
In the months since I published my piece, I started receiving a kind of message that I call, as a group: “Rabbis Confide Their Humanity to Me.”
“Hi Joelle, I have so appreciated your moral courage and voice,” a Conservative rabbi I know only a little bit messaged me in mid-May. “I am feeling stuck and beyond distraught at the horrific ethnic cleansing and annihilation and starvation of children and families in Gaza, and don’t know what to do to make any kind of difference. Do you have any suggestions?”
Isn’t it a strange and unlikely coincidence, to have been born by happenstance into the only group of people whose lives and safety matter to God?
I share that I, too, am distraught. That I appreciate their reaching out. That I don’t have too many suggestions, but I can connect them with the ways I have found to bear witness to the human beings being bombed, starved, burned and torn apart in Gaza, by Israeli soldiers with American bombs, and with some of the avenues I know of to send help or to speak out.
But what I do not say to them is that I protest with my whole being this devastating inversion of our Jewish sanctuaries and those who would teach us Torah there, that I weep over the ruins of my sacred American Jewish communities now covered in blood, where the most indefensible violence is taking place in our names, and where, 600 days in, the rabbis quietly (in secret) whisper to their students that they have no idea what to do about it.
