What Are the Jewish Values Underlying the Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza?

When I became a bat mitzvah, my parents gifted me a volume of Pirkei Avot (“Wisdom of the Ancestors”), and inscribed the inside cover with Hillel’s paradigmatic teaching:

אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי. וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי. וְאִם לֹא עַכְשָׁיו, אֵימָתַי

If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when? (Mishnah Avot, 1:14)

My grandparents are all survivors of the Shoah, who lost nearly everyone they knew in the Nazi death camps. Though they did not say it explicitly, when I received this gift and inscription from my parents, I understood it as a deep lesson in the ethics of survival.

A month ago, I was invited to write a piece for Evolve, “reviewing the Jewish values on which a ceasefire position is based.” I’m very grateful for the chance to write this essay and to continue this urgent conversation with my mentors, colleagues and broader community. I am also devastated that this essay is still necessary, and that nearly five months in, we continue to awaken every day to this nightmare. The loss of human life and the level of destruction incurred since Oct. 7 are incomprehensible to me.[i] Hillel’s text has kept me awake night after night.

When I am for myself alone, מָה אֲנִי, what am I? What are we, and what are we becoming, as Jewish communities, if we stand for ourselves alone and do not stand for the lives of Palestinians?

And yet, If I am not for me, who will be for me? I know that many of us are afraid that no one will stand for us or with us. But to respond to that fear with Jewish supremacy — buckling down on the idea that only Jewish lives matter — is a dangerous misreading of Hillel’s famous teaching, with terrifying outcomes.

Hillel pointedly refused to prioritize one of his statements over the other, urging us to hold both values simultaneously and without contradiction: We are capable of both ahavat Yisrael and veahavta lere’akha kamokha — a love of our own people, and the practice of loving our neighbors as ourselves. When we are fiercely committed to both, I believe we live most fully into Hillel’s teaching, among many teachings in Jewish tradition that obligate us to care simultaneously for our own and others, all of us ultimately part of a greater whole.

Solidarity means that we must be for ourselves — love and defend those we consider our own. And we must never fall victim to the belief that our lives matter more than someone else’s.

Many of us in the Jewish community share a deep aspiration for this war to stop. We share this aspiration across our diverse political affiliations, and our distinct and differing views about Israel, Palestine and Zionism. We know that every day it continues is catastrophic for those most immediately in harm’s way and dangerous for all. But we differ around the call for a ceasefire. Some harbor suspicion that the call for a ceasefire is not one equally invested in the safety and humanity of both Palestinians and Israelis, or part of a broader vision for human safety that includes Jewish safety. We are intensely activated by our personal, familial and collective traumas. Many in our communities want the war to end but fear that a ceasefire puts Israeli lives in too much danger.

My experience working with Rabbis For Ceasefire,[ii] allies and partners across lines of faith, members of Congress supporting a ceasefire call and the secretary-general of the United Nations, who hosted a delegation of our group for a private meeting,[iii] have proven to me that ceasefire is a call made by those who genuinely value Jewish safety and survival, equal to and alongside Palestinian safety and survival. Our call for a ceasefire is born out of a dissolution of the binary between the two.

Our call for a ceasefire is not a betrayal of Jewish values but an authentic expression of them.

We are calling for an end to siege, bombardment, rockets and missiles. An end to ground invasions. A de-escalation of violence. A call for immediate release of all hostages and political prisoners. We are calling for political and diplomatic engagement in a long-term, non-military solution that addresses the root causes of injustice and inequity in Israel and Palestine, and that honors the humanity of all people who live there.

As such, it is a call for life.

Every day I fear for the lives of my loved ones and the beloveds of my loved ones — in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas. I fear the regional and global implications of this war. This current crisis exists in a decades-long context of dehumanization, displacement, violence and blockade that Palestinians have suffered under Israeli occupation and control, beginning with the 1948 nakba, which displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians, including many who have today been displaced again in Gaza. As Jewish refugees, including my own family members, sought safety in the foundation of the Israeli state, Western powers and war-profiteers pitted Jews and Palestinians against one another towards their own gains. It is harder than ever to imagine an enduring and just peace that could be possible on the other side of such a historied and escalated calamity. Below are some of the Jewish values that ground me in a belief that a ceasefire is the first necessary step.

A Call for Life

There are countless Jewish principles on which the imperative to protect human life is based. Many in our communities have uplifted Betzelem Elohim, the core theological principle that all human beings are created in the image of the Divine.

It is true that Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 was a grave violation of the principle of Betzelem Elohim, and those with whom I join to call for a ceasefire continue to mourn this tragic and brutal loss of innocent life in our communities. It is also true that Israel’s response has been a brutal rejection of Betzelem Elohim, and a disavowal of Jewish and Palestinian shared humanity.

Torah, like all sacred texts, can be used to justify both violence and peace, dispossession of human beings and universal humanistic principles alike. Though I’ve heard those who support the war and those who support its end both make claims about which position is authentically Jewish, I don’t believe that Torah is a Magic-8 Ball we can look into for one clear answer. How, for example, do we understand the Torah imperative to care for the stranger, the suffering and the oppressed among us, alongside the Torah imperative to conquer the land that we now call Israel and Palestine? Our texts contain both the blueprint for Jewish supremacy — the belief that one people is destined to dominate another — and the arguments for its undoing. It would be dishonest to claim that all of these positions are not present within our tradition or that they don’t have origins in our sacred texts. They do.

Our interpretive, evolving tradition calls upon every generation to exercise our spiritual agency and reconstruct a Judaism that pushes towards what we understand in our lifetimes to be an etz hayyim, a branch on a living tree. A source of life. From my teachers, I have learned the Talmud’s principle of וחי בהם, ולא שימות בהם (BT Yoma 85b) — that we should live by Torah and not die by it. That mitzvot, Torah and Judaism should be a source of life in the world, not a source of death to ourselves or others.

The Imperative to Redeem Captives

Another essential Jewish value of this crisis is pidyon shivu’im, the halakhic imperative to redeem captives, of which our tradition argues there is no greater act of justice. The call for a ceasefire is a call for the safety and release of the hostages (who are Israelis, Palestinians and foreign nationals), for whom a ceasefire has so far been the only effective method of ensuring their release in significant numbers and whose lives are further endangered every day without one. Pidyon Shivu’im goes hand in hand with Matir Asurim, the theological plea for the Holy One to release all those held in captivity. These values are our imperative to also demand that Israel release the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including children, who are being held, indefinitely and without charge, in its prisons, subject to abuse and torture.

Solidarity and Mutual Safety

If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when?

Hillel the Elder lived at the turn of the first century of the Common Era in a time of great disruption, dispossession and uncertainty for the Jewish people. His teaching is my sacred inheritance as a person who descended from survivors of state violence and ethnic supremacy, much like Hillel himself did. We must be for ourselves — love and defend those we consider our own. And we must never fall victim to the belief that our lives matter more than someone else’s; for that is ultimately an expression of the same supremacy that has long dispossessed, marginalized and even enslaved our own people.

In today’s movements for peace, we call this value Solidarity, and as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I know that it is sacred. We needed it then, and we need it now.

Solidarity moves us beyond the zero-sum framework we’re too often given for Israel and Palestine — that we can only be on one “side” or the other. In the words of student Rabbi Allen Lipson, “In this view, the possibility of future harm to innocent Israelis outweighs the present certainty of devastation to innocent Palestinians.”[iv] Those of us calling for a ceasefire believe that Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom are not a zero-sum game. That Jewish safety does not require collective Palestinian death; rather, it requires Palestinian liberation.

In the words of Rabbi Margot Meitner: “I am a rabbi for ceasefire because of my love for the Jewish people, my deep care for our safety and security, and because I know in my bones that violence will only beget more violence; that collective punishment and the mass destruction of Palestinian lives will not ensure anyone’s safety.”[v]

We are two traumatized peoples. We need a way out of deaths that lead us only to more death. We deserve more. We deserve to live.

We call for a ceasefire as a step towards imagining a different path of safety, one that no longer pits Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety against one another. And though it can feel bleak and complex to imagine what this looks like on the ground, especially after nearly five months of slaughter and devastation, and more than 75 years of injustice and inequality for Palestinians, our tradition calls us back to moral courage and moral clarity. We can, and have to, believe in mutual survival.

De-escalation of Violence

In the Mishnah, we learn:

מצווה גוררת מצווה, עברה גוררת עברה

One right act will bring another right act, one transgression will bring another transgression. (Pirkei Avot, 4:2)

Our ancestors knew then what we are living through now — that each act we take can either lead us deeper into a cycle of violence, revenge, warfare and dehumanization, or that we can begin to lay the steps, one act at a time, on a ladder that we will use to climb out of the dark. That each mitzvah will lead to another and another — and to a more peaceful, just, generous and livable world.

While the concept of lex talionis,[vi] retaliatory harm, is part of the biblical legal code, our rabbinic tradition has rejected the principle that if a person harms another, they should receive that same harm in retaliation.

The Talmud discusses this biblical law for pages, bringing early rabbinic voices and arguments together who advocate both for and against it. Ultimately and formatively, the Stamma of the Gemara re-reads the scriptural passage to mean עין תחת עין ממון, that a person’s injury is compensated monetarily rather than through physical retaliation (Bava Kamma 83b). The rabbis debate, interpret, and ultimately, legislate “an eye for an eye” out of existence on the grounds that it is logically unsound and that it has the potential to perpetuate an endless cycle of violence, even of death (Bava Kamma, 84a). In the place of “an eye for an eye,” we inherit a different process, teshuvah, through restoration and reparations.

These are ancient concerns ever-present in our current reality.

In the words of Rabbi Elliot Kukla, there is “epigenetic evidence that mass traumas like the Holocaust affect the genes of the children and grandchildren of survivors on a cellular level, leaving us predisposed to chronic disease. … I’m the child of a Holocaust survivor,” he teaches, “I know the trauma inflicted on Gaza will last generations.”[vii]

The heart-shattering reality of what Gazans have endured compels my ceasefire call. And as a descendent of those who both perished and survived such mass trauma, my conscience urges me to denounce and protest mass trauma performed in my name.

Rabbi Linda Holtzman teaches: “Some have said that it is for pikuach nefesh (the saving of lives) that the killing of thousands of people in Gaza is necessary, but we know that that is not true. This killing is not self-defense, and it will not keep anyone safe; it neither saves lives in the present nor the future. Everyone’s life matters, and the killing of Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank is ending the possibility of a future for anyone in Israel and Palestine.”[viii]

We are two traumatized peoples. We need a way out of harms that lead to more harms, transgressions that lead to further transgressions, deaths that lead us only to more death. We deserve more. We deserve to live.

Who Is to Say That Our Blood Is Redder?

The world I want to live in is a world that equally values Palestinian and Jewish lives, bodies, families, children, cultures and survival. In the words of the rabbinic sage Rabbah: “Who is to say that your blood is redder than his? Maybe his blood is redder than yours” (BT Sanhedrin 74a). Who is to say whose lives matter more, who deserves to live and who deserves to die?

The Torah commands,

לֹא תַעֲמֹד עַל־דַּם רֵעֶךָ

You shall not stand by the blood of your neighbor. (Leviticus 19:16)

So much blood has been shed. We are commanded not to stand idly by; to mourn every human death as the death of a whole world; and to hold our leaders accountable for their complicity and ourselves for ours.

On Shabbat each week, I sing the words עץ חיים היא למחזיקים בה, as we place the Torah back into the ark. I cling to these words, begging The Merciful One to actualize them in the world: Torah is a Tree of Life for all those who hold fast to her. In shul, I feel overwhelmed by the dissonance between this abundant, generative image of Torah as a deeply rooted source of life, and the moment of destruction that I’m witnessing, that I and my community are part of. Too often these days, Torah seems to be the grounds on which tragedy and massacre are justified. But the liturgy continues: דרכיה דרכי נעם וכל נתיבותיה שלום, Torah’s ways are gentle, and all her paths are peace. The Rambam elaborates on this verse, “for the entire Torah was given to bring about peace within the world.” (Maimonides, Mishnah Torah, Hanukah u’Megillah 4:14)

I pray for the spiritual agency and audacity to expand and evolve Torah as our ancestors did. Judaism is not a univocal tradition; it is an ever-unfolding prism. If our tradition can both harm and heal, what is the Torah we want to uplift for future generations?

We are inheritors and interpreters; the Torah we live and transmit will reverberate for our children and their children’s children. It will shape a world. May we push Torah along pathways of courageous moral clarity for the sake of a world imbued with peace, a world that chooses life. I pray that more and more of us will come to trust that the call for a ceasefire in Gaza and Israel is a deeply Jewish call for Palestinian and Israeli life. For all of our lives.

[i] At the time of my writing this, more than 1,300 Israelis and 29,000 Palestinians, including more than 11,000 children, have been killed. Israeli bombing has destroyed 70% of Gaza’s homes and at least half of its buildings, leaving roughly 2 million people homeless and displaced. Hospitals, schools and universities in Gaza are now rubble, and the medical infrastructure of Gaza is completely dismantled. World heritage buildings and archeological sites no longer exist. Israel has restricted power, fuel, clean water and food access in Gaza, where disease and starvation run rampant. The entire region is in a state of full humanitarian collapse. Though we don’t know how many are still alive, there are an estimated 130 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza. Though a small number are starting to serve jail time as conscientious objectors, most Israeli young adults are required by law to enlist and serve in a war that their political leaders seem to promise has no end, with 500-plus soldier deaths since the crisis began and no clear strategy to rescue the hostages. In the West Bank, settler violence has escalated to extreme levels, supported with impunity by the Israeli military. Around the world, acts of antisemitism and Islamophobia have steadily risen since Oct. 7.

[ii] A coalition of more than 285 rabbis and other Jewish clergy across denominations and political affiliations are speaking out with one voice at this moment of great moral reckoning to call for a ceasefire. rabbis4ceasefire.com

[iii] A delegation of Rabbis For Ceasefire had the honor to meet with Secretary-General of the U.N. António Guterres. He appreciated our Jewish leadership aligned with his support for ceasefire and his commitment to pursuing peace. Some 160 U.N. staff members have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7.

[iv] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ceasefire-reconsidered-reflections-for-centrists/

[v] https://rabbis4ceasefire.com/hineini/

[vi] “If there is harm, you will give a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burning for a burning, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise.” (Exodus 21:23-25, Leviticus 24:20)

[vii] ost-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2023/11/22/elliot-kukla-holocaust-survivor-gaza-children/stories/202311220034#:~:text=Photo%2FMohammed%20Dahman-,Elliot%20Kukla%3A%20As%20the%20child%20of%20a%20Holocaust%20survivor%2C%20I,Gaza%20will%20last%20for%20generations&text=Nearly%2082%20years%20ago%2C%20my,captured%20and%20murdered%20by%20Nazis.

[viii] https://rabbis4ceasefire.com/hineini/