所有类别 - Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman

Combatting Antisemitism, and why we're doing it all wrong

1/5/2026

Vayiggash 5786 - Jewish Joy

When I was a kid, and all the way into my twenties, we would gather at my grandmother’s house on the Saturday night on which Hanukkah fell for latkes and brisket and presents as a family - my mom and sisters, my uncles, and their kids. And we would of course light the hanukkah candles. But at some point, I think when I was maybe 14 or 15, it was like the 3rd night, and my grandmother seemed unimpressed with the number of candles on the hanukkiah, and so she yelled out ‘light em all!’ Which is already a funny thing to say until you add in the fact that she had kind of a high voice, and an accent from growing up in a village in Poland so it sounded like ‘light em all!’ And of course, because she was matriarch of the family, and because it was fun, we indeed lit them all.

And this was really her whole philosophy of life. Maximize joy. Laugh easily. Surround yourself with family. Maybe it’s because she was my grandmother - the elder of our tribe - that we always looked to her as something of a guide to life. Her wisdom and approach to doing things always seemed to carry more weight than anybody elses. It could also be that as a Holocaust survivor, we all understood that we lacked the kind of profound life experience to fully grasp what was truly important in the world. Or maybe it was just that she seemed to have a life that was fulfilled and contented that her example and her advice carried more weight than most other people.

We live today, in 2025, in a post-post-modern era in which I think much of American society doesn’t seem to who it is or where things are going. You certainly can’t get a sense of moral direction from the speeches of major politicians anymore, or their actions. Between instagram and tik tok and the president recently renaming a venerable American institution after himself among other egregious acts, we’ve normalized narcissism and selfishness. American historians used to call the 1980s the ‘me’ generation, but I think the 80’s have got nothing on the 20’s.

Judaism, too, is in a bit of crisis, and has been for quite some time. The dominant narrative of the American Jewish community, particularly if you read it through the lens of the way the news covers us, is antisemitism. Last year when universities were battlegrounds for students protesting the war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, there were some ugly moments and some ugly slogans. And we spent an inordinate amount of time locked in a discussion of the definition of the thin line between antisemitism and antizionism. About two years ago we had Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, create a foundation called ‘Stop Jewish Hate’ and spend $10 million to run a super bowl ad announcing that they shouldn’t be antisemitic. And with it came a foundation that spent $60 million dollars in 2024 on, among other things, little blue square pins to send out all over the world to make people become aware of antisemitism. And a few months ago, many of my colleagues joined together on a joint letter to condemn the vituperative and divisive language that New York presidential candidate Zohran Mamdani has used in condemning Israel. If you just read the newspapers or listen to NPR, this is Judaism in the 2020s.

To be clear, Zohran Mamdani has said some dumb things, and public figures get held to account for the things that they say - that’s the way it works. And all of things I mentioned above cannot be removed from the context in which they exist, and that context is a bitter, bloody war in Gaza that we will spend the next decades trying to make sense of. And with that war came a rise in antisemitic acts that was very troubling. And here in Pittsburgh we have good reason to be vigilant towards hatred of Jews.

But, overall, there is a significant rise in an effort to refocus the bulk of discussion, time, and money on something called ‘combatting antisemitism’.

And all of it – ALL OF IT – has made me profoundly uncomfortable.

Simply put, I think we’re doing it wrong - or maybe more accurately, the elites and those with the resources in Jewish community are doing it wrong. The Jewish community has either accidentally or intentionally absorbed the me-me-me instagram generation’s obsessive narcissism to center the narrative about themselves, and feels the need to tell the world that the narrative they’ve formed about us is wrong.

Superbowl ads against antisemitism? Why is anyone spending money on that? Why spend money on telling people what they should think? And what kind of message is it to say to most Americans ‘hey, I know some of you folks out in rural Nebraska have never met a Jew and you don’t know anything about and you don’t really know much about Jews - but here’s the main thing you need to know about us - don’t hate us.’ If you gave me $10 million dollars, I’d send every kid in Pittsburgh to Jewish day school or EKC. I’d make Hebrew school almost free. I’d pay an army of Jewish kids to stand in front of giant eagle every week handing out shabbat candles and asking Jews to put on tefillin. I’d underwrite the cost of Pittsburgh’s Intro to Judaism class to make it more affordable and larger.

In other words, instead of painting an ‘oh woe is me’ narrative of the Jewish community, the Jewish community should invest the bulk of its time and energy not on combatting antisemitism, but instead on three key words: promoting Jewish Joy. Promoting Jewish Joy. The best way to change the narrative about the Jewish people is for us to focus and invest heavily on doing what we do best, which is living meaningful, joyful, rich Jewish lives. Invest in community! Promote how much fun we’re having flipping latkes and baking challah! Talk about how calming and inspiring and refreshing going to synagogue and recharging and recentering our selves on shabbat after a busy chaotic week engaged in the clatter of the marketplace and the stress of our working lives! My PR branding narrative for the world is to redouble our efforts to convince everybody on earth ‘hey, these are nice people that like singing and dancing and praying, and every december we make candy canes and they make very oil hash browns, and that’s ok with me’.

Why did we need a blue square pin when a little mogen david necklace was there all along? In other words, you can’t change the perception of who we are in the gentile world by telling everybody ‘no, no, you’ve got the wrong idea about us.’ You have to change the narrative - and you do that by showing who we are, day after day, every day, with joy.
By the way, this is on some level about as preaching to the choir a dvar torah as I could give. I know you all here agree with me, because you’re here! You are the shock troops in the war for Jewish joy. You are all combatting antisemitism the right way. You think this place matters, and our prayer and song and community and family matters. And everyone you interact with every day sees that about you and thinks ‘huh, David or Shoshanna or Rich or Aviva is a really nice person, and they make really good Jewish hash browns. Why would anyone hate them?’ I am convinced that if we have more Jews we have, living with more joy and purpose, and if the rest of the world sees that as our dominant virtue in the world, in addition to being generous and believing in helping our neighbors and making the world a better place through mitzvot, we could eliminate antisemitism in my lifetime. Is that hyperbolic? Maybe. I don’t think so though.

It’s not like we haven’t already seen expensive campaigns from the Jewish community to fix what ails us before. In the 90s there was something of a panic over Jewish intermarriage rates, and a survey revealed that the three greatest determinants of raising a Jewish family were three things - attending a Jewish summer camp, attending a Jewish day school, and going on a trip to Israel. So billionaire Michael Steinhardt and the North American Jewish Federations and the Israeli government funded a program to bring Jewish young people to Israel, which they called Birthright. Maybe it was effective? Maybe not? I would surmise that for some people it was effective and for others it wasn’t, partially it was built off of a two-week moonshot idea - go to Israel for two weeks, and you’ll decide to spend the rest of your life being more Jewish.

The concept of cultivating Jewish Joy - by the way, not my idea, it’s in the zeitgeist right now among Jewish millennials and non profits around reinventing our PR and our mission - the concept of Jewish joy is taking the kernel of the idea from Birthright and saying ‘ok, that was a good start, but it needs to be sustained and habituated in zillion different ways and different events.’ Birthright was almost a revolutionary idea in Jewish history. But maybe it becomes the spark that begins a permanent revolution in Jewish Joy that really does change things for the better.

Four weeks ago, we met Joseph, a brash, obnoxious, narcissistic young man who thought he was smarter than his brothers. His father gave him a coat of many colors and he showed it off to everyone - me-me-me . His brothers hated him for being so self-absorbed, and I think for most of us when we read that narrative back in Vayeshev, we are torn, as we think ‘Joseph’s brothers were wrong for what they did, but Joseph is also an annoying little twerp.’ And thus, we feel conflicted. We just don’t love this guy.

In this week’s parsha, Joseph’s big reveal to his brothers of who he is begins with these words ‘I am your brother Joseph. Is my father well?’ We see Joseph has matured. It’s not all about him - his first act is to ask after the welfare of someone else, his father. He reconciles with his brothers. He cares for them generously. He recommits to family. And that term he uses - is my father well? The hebrew is od avi chai. We borrow that phrase and tweak it a little when we sing perhaps the central song in the modern era sung as an expression of Jewish Joy - Am Yisrael Chai - for which the second part is ‘od avinu chai’ - we the Jewish people go on with life - we are busy with the business of living joyfully as our central act of resistance against those who wished for our downfall. We’re still here, lighting our candles and making our hashbrowns and living with joy. And this for me is the secret for Jewish surviving and thriving - that we lived with Jewish joy for 4000 years, and we need to lean into Jewish Joy for the next 4000 years. Shabbat shalom.

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Dvar Torah Chayei Sarah 5786 - The Kingdom of God is inconsistent with a state of social misery

10/25/2025

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Our parsha opens with the slightly strange statement that quote “The life of Sarah was 100 years and 20 years and 7 years.” Which the French 12th c commentator Rashi explains as ‘all the years were equally good,’ an interesting comment because either it means that Sarah lived a good life and every year was a good year, or, more tragically, that she lived 7 years which added up to the same quantity of goodness of her 20 years, and 20 years that collectively added up to 100 years of good - meaning, Sarah had 100 pretty lean years.

For those of us who have had our eyes on the news recently, I think the idea of recently lean years has been incredibly relatable. Americans have been subjected to the longest government shutdown in US history, clocking in at 43 days. The reason for the shutdown was that the majority in congress wanted to remove $1 billion dollars in federal subsidies to lower and middle income families for health care, leaving them to pay a much higher rate for heath care. Estimates say this is likely to lead to about 2 million people losing their health insurance. But the majority was just 53 senators, so the Democrats filibustered. 43 days later, the resolution to the shutdown, of course, was 8 Democrats caving to end the filibuster and passing a federal budget without the Obamacare subsidies.

During the shutdown, Federal employees missed two paychecks. Most of them were furloughed at some point, since it’s not very nice to show up to work day after day if they aren’t actually going to pay you. And air traffic controllers began to call out, leading to a temporary reduction in flights that was an inconvenience to some. But the most significant story that took place during the shutdown was the pause in federal SNAP benefits, the Federal governments Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was halted. That meant that most of the 42 million Americans that depended on funds to put food on the table received no payments at all for 43 days. In Pennsylvania, where 2 million people rely on SNAP every month, the governor chose to draw $5 million from the state’s disaster fund and use it on aid to food pantries, who bore the brunt of demand from hungry people when their benefits were cut off.

It is a great relief that the government is open again and that SNAP has been restored. But as I mentioned, the reason the food benefits will be restored is that congress cut a deal to strip some Americans of financial support for medical care. This is the same country that spends $883 billion on its military every year, which is 3 times as much as the next largest country in the world spends. So if the question is ‘can we afford to help people with $1 billion in subsidies for health insurance’ the answer is ‘yes, we can probably afford to spend $300 billion in health care subsidies without batting an eye.’

There’s a root problem here, though, and one that I slightly discussed a few years ago when I gave a dvar torah about the medical devices gemach that I started here. And that is that food pantries and medical device lending libraries exist in the richest nation on earth, and what a crying shame that is.

There are two reasons for this problem.

1) We as a country are about as close as any civilization has ever come to being able to eradicate hunger and poverty and provide health care. We have the collective wealth to solve the problems. We just don’t want to.

And 2) wealth in this country is unevenly distributed, radically so, and the problem is getting worse. In other words - lots of working people aren’t earning enough in this economy to get by. Our government has the immense regulatory power and the ability to decide on a whim that washing machines from Belgium will receive a 50% tariff, but at the same time it doesn’t have the moral or political will to even raise the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.

On that second point, the current US economy is actually in a very odd state right now, and one that economists are now developing new terms around. The odd state is that wealthy people, the top 10% of earners, are doing just fine in this economy. They’re spending more than they used to, they’re earning more than ever. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of wage earners in the economy are seeing their earning power reduced through inflation and stagnant wages. The new term going around about this state of affairs is that we are in a quote ‘k shaped economy’. It’s k-shaped because if you look at the left most upright line in the letter k, that’s your vertical axis line for the graph. The wealthy in this economy are the upper limb of the letter k - their income and affluence extends upward as time goes on. The lower limb of the letter k, the one that is directed downwards as time goes forward and the one that started lower to begin with, that’s the low and middle income in this economy. To paraphrase Robert Frost, two paths diverged in the woods, and the rich are on one, and the poor are on the other, and economists do not think we as a society are making enough of a difference to resolve that or make the one that points in the wrong direction less travelled by.

The state of the poor in America, and the state of the economy in America are deeply Torahitic concerns. Deuteronomy 15:4 famously tells us “There shall be no needy among you—since your God Adonai will bless you in the land that your God Adonai is giving you as a hereditary portion.” And by this the Torah means that the Jew is called to eliminate poverty and want both in the land of Israel amongst citizen and foreigner alike, and in their own communities outside the land of Israel. The moral goal, challenging and illusive as it may be, is that the Jew is tasked with ending hunger and poverty. The Sefer HaHinuch, the 13th century Spanish legalist who made a count of all 613 mitzvot, declares this to be mitzvah number 439, and that the mitzvah is to provide for the poor according to what they need quote bsimcha ubatov lev - “happily and with a joyous heart.” He also explains according to the rabbis in a very matter of fact way that it is an almost natural Jewish tendency to rebalance the scales of an economically unjust society when he writes “Never have I seen or heard of a city where there were wealthy Jewish individuals and they did not create a fund for tzedakah.”

Part of the problem of this k shaped economy is a modern problem of our virtually untaxed super rich - the oft mentioned triumvirate of Mark Zuckerbergs, Jeffrey Bezos, and Elon Musk, who seem far more committed to sending three people to Mars or building a robot that can drive a taxi than they are committed to eradicating child hunger in the United States. In an earlier era in America, our superrich - the Carnegies and the Rothschilds and Rockefellers were known as prolific philanthropists. Today, we do indeed have Bill Gates out there doing amazing things, but we also have those other three guys I mentioned and several hundred other billionaires standing idly by.

Jewish law is not typically interested in American tax policy, since a non-Jewish country can do what it pleases. Judaism was, however, adjacent to great and immoral civilizations throughout time, and could not help but notice that the choices that society or that government made were sometimes morally inadequate, if not outright morally corrupt. In the magnum opus of the great Conservative rabbi Solomon Schechter entitled ‘Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology’, Rabbi Schechter examines how the Talmudic rabbis lived amidst a Roman culture and government, and were often called to write critiques of it as amoral and wicked. The rabbis wanted to construct a Kingdom of God, but it was the antithesis of the Kingdom of Rome. They often referred to these two ideals by using the allusion of Rebecca’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob, the learned one, was Israel, and Esau, the violent one, was Rome.

Schechter writes “The antagonism between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Rome, which is brought about by the connection of the former with that of Israel, suggests also a most important truth: Bad government is incompatible with the kingdom of God.” He continues on to say quote “there can be little doubt that the rabbi looked with dismay upon a government which derived its authority from the deification of might. The rabbis held the Roman government to be thoroughly corrupt in its administration; Esau preaches justice and practices violence.”

One of the rabbinic ways to attack Rome was through biblical commentary. In last weeks parsha of Vayera, we get the story of Abraham and God arguing over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which if it isn’t my favorite story in the Torah, it might at least be the one I’ve written about more than any other. One of the challenges of the story is that the Torah never explicitly tells us what the sin of Sodom was, choosing instead to say
כִּי־רָבָּה וְחַטָּאתָם כִּי כָבְדָה מְאֹד
“Great is their sin, and very severe.” Right, but what was it?

The Torah and its commentators are left to extrapolate the sin from context. So when Abraham and two companions who may or may not be angels go to Sodom to rescue Lot, and the townspeople pound on the door demanding Lot give up the travellers to an angry mob for some manner of perversion, the rabbis decide that Sodom’s sin was that it was a manifestly unjust city, and particularly unjust to travellers and foreigners. I’m just going to say that again with mild emphasis, then pause, and keep moving. The sin of Sodom, a wicked society, was injustice and mistreatment of foreigners. (pause)

Anyhow, the rabbis craft a series of stories, called midrash, to elaborate on the many sins of sodom. They tell a story of a society of financial corruption in which there was a bridge toll and a penalty for wading in the water to avoid the bridge toll, and that the society was so unjust that a woman washing her clothes in the river would be charged as if she was a toll dodger. There’s a story of the traveller who was struck with a rock by a resident and bled. The traveller took his assailant to court, and when they pled their case to the judge, the judge would demand the victim pay the assailant, since the rock thrower had provided the victim with a service by giving him a bloodletting, which was occasionally a form of medicine 2000 years ago.

But the story that strikes me as relevant to us is the sodom story of the poor traveller seeking bread. The midrash tells us of a poor traveller who came to town seeking bread. He would knock on a door asking for food, and everyone would give him a silver coin instead. But they refused to give him bread, or even sell it to him. Day after day, he went around asking for bread, and instead, he was given a coin by everyone in the town. Finally, he went to the town square, collapsed, and died. And one by one, everyone in the town came and retrieved their coin they had given him. It’s a powerful story that implies that people pretended to do good only to selfishly reclaim what was theirs in the end. It’s a story of callous indifference that is also pretending to care about others. But mostly for me, it’s about a society that ultimately says ‘I have my own problems. I can’t be bothered to involve myself in yours.’ To the rabbis, to the Torah, to Solomon Schechter, this is the antithesis of a Jewish society, and one that we cannot abide.

It’s an easy sermon to stand up and diagnose the injustices of our current society, and one that, if I wanted to give it, I could give a different version of every week, but that would be pretty depressing, wouldn’t it, and perhaps even a bit condescending, since I think many of you are well aware of all of the problems I’ve just outlined and also the rabbinic attitudes towards them. But every once in a while it’s important to remind ourselves that the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be, and that it’s the people of God who must remind themselves and redouble their efforts to straighten the crooked and lift up the bent and the fallen.

We can’t individually alter the trajectory of the economy, or personally feed all the hungry in this country, or wave a magic wand and grant health care for all. But we should act in the ways that we can, and we can vote for officials with values of justice and equality and Torah and morality. And we can speak with our neighbors about our values - Jewish values - reminding them that economic inequality is a concern of the Torah, and that our tradition envisions nothing less than a society where everyone has enough.

On an immediate micro-scale, your food pantries need you. Every food pantry in this country has just absorbed a massive influx of the hungry, and their shelves are bare, and their bank accounts empty. It is nice to give them the six extra cans of kidney beans on your shelf, but the thing they need most and can convert into food the most is money. So if you can give the Greater Pittsburgh Food Pantry five dollars after shabbat, give em five dollars. If you can can give Squirrel Hill Food pantry $18 dollars, give em 18 dollars. If you can give $100 or $1000, give $100 or a $1000. And if you can give $10,000, give em $10,000 - and then let Robert and Paul know because they’d like to invite you to the synagogue gala thats happening next week.

Because he is such a beautiful and elegant writer, and also because he is one of the founding fathers of Conservative Judaism whose intellect and action defined who we are as Conservative Jews today, and because he ends on a high and hopeful note, I will give the final word to Rabbi Solomon Schechter.

“The kingdom of God is inconsistent with a state of social misery, engendered through poverty and want. It is a graceful world which God has created, and it must not be disfigured by misery and suffering. It must be returned when the visible kingdom is established.” Shabbat Shalom.

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Israel at a Crossroads - Rosh Hashanah 5786 Day One

9/25/2025

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Pull quote -

There is disagreement between Sefardic and Ashkenazi Jews as to the proper mood for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Ashkenazim believe that Jews should rejoice on Rosh Hashanah because it is yom ha’rat olam, the birthday of the world, and be fearful and anxious on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, when God’s judgement is passed. Sefardim, on the other hand, believe that Rosh Hashanah is the serious day because it is when God begins the process of sitting enthroned in judgement, balancing the scales of our deeds to decide who shall live and who shall die, while on Yom Kippur it is a festive and joyous day, since on that day, we are forgiven and the slate is officially wiped clean.

I will be following the Sefardic tradition this year with the tone and tenor of this sermon. It’s serious, and perhaps, dour, and for that I am sorry. However, you all know me to be a pretty honest and transparent guy, which sometimes manifests itself in my propensity to drop a swear word from time to time. High holidays is historically the time when synagogue attendance is high and therefore sermons tend to take on loftier and more important topics than during the rest of the year, when discussing whether an egg that is laid on the first day of passover can be poached for your breakfast on day 2 is a perfectly acceptable subject. For Day 1 RH, we need to go bigger.

Nothing is a bigger elephant in the room in every synagogue on earth right now than the conversation on Israel. It is effectively a wedge issue dividing the folks in row 4 and row 5, that even when they agree on 98% of everything else with regards to Israel, they may refuse to speak to one another at kiddush because they disagree about the war in Gaza.
I was recently in Los Angeles visiting my family over Shabbat, and at one of the mainstream Conservative synagogues, they say the prayer for IDF soldiers and a prayer for peace and a prayer for hostages, and they end the service with Hatikvah. When I asked an old friend about those choices, she said not everybody was happy with those decisions, and folks who identify more left have departed for a more politically left-aligned egalitarian service about a half a mile south. In other synagogues, from New York to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, the choice of what prayers to say over Israel, over soldiers, over Palestinians, and over hostages has created conflict and discord. I myself have been confronted by congregants who specifically entreated me to add a certain prayer or not say another prayer or add Hatikvah.

I understand that folks are passionate about the crisis, and want the shul to express their values. But I also try and remind folks that while synagogues can help project and solidify the communal values of American Judaism, your rabbis do not have a hotline to the Netayahu administration in terms of policy or action. We are almost completely powerless.

I am going to share with you now seven observations about Israel and Gaza right now. My intent in sharing this is not to state an opinion, or to stir up controversy. I believe it is important, as we begin the New Year, to take stock of where we are as a global Jewish community. The simple message I offer you today, the beginning of a New Jewish Year 5786, with these seven points, is this: Israel is at a crossroads. Just as our lives hang in the balance on the scales of justice before God, Israel’s future hangs precariously in the balance too.

Point 1:
1) Israel has never been more unpopular in the world as it is right now.

After World War II, wracked with guilt and seeking some semblance of moral absolution for the inability to stop the Holocaust or for their direct participation in it, the nations of the world voted to create a Jewish state in the land of Israel and supported its growth and development. And until the intifada in 1988, Israel was seen as David compared to the Goliath of the hostile Arab armies surrounding them. Things began to change with the Intifada, as Israel’s contentious relationship with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza rendered them less favorable in the global community.

Two years into Israel’s sixth war in Gaza since 2008, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the IDF has destroyed at least 70% of buildings there. There are approximately 64,000 casualties in Gaza according to the British medical journal the Lancet.

The global reaction has been almost uniformly negative towards Israel. Many European countries have responded with a symbolic diplomatic move of recognizing a state of Palestine. Many have called for a war crimes tribunal at the Hague for Israeli leaders. Momentum has been gathering on college campuses amongst a generation of young people who think of the Holocaust as ancient history for a full a complete dismantling of Israel, and see our people - our cousins, our siblings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, not as refugees from European genocide, but instead as European colonizers themselves. You and I probably grew up calling ourselves Zionists. Today, if I were to announce myself on a college campus as a proud Zionist, I’d probably get hit with an egg.

A lot of these attitudes I’ve just documented are wrongheaded or misguided. A lot of the criticism of Israel conveniently forgets that Hamas struck first, took hostages, and committed unspeakable atrocities on October 7th. But it is still incredibly important to take stock of the fact that Israel has never been as globally unpopular as it is today.

2) The IDF’s code of conduct famously includes a paragraph called ‘purity of arms’ - in Hebrew, Tohar HaNeshek. It reads as follows:

החייל ישתמש בנשקו ובכוחו לביצוע המשימה בלבד, אך ורק במידה הנדרשת לכך, וישמור על צלם אנוש אף בלחימה. החייל לא ישתמש בנשקו ובכוחו כדי לפגוע בבני אדם שאינם לוחמים ובשבויים, ויעשה כל שביכולתו למנוע פגיעה בחייהם, בגופם, בכבודם וברכושם.

The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.

When I was growing up, I was taught about the amazingly moral and righteous nature of the IDF’s purity of arms - the code of conduct of Israeli soldiers. That code has not been discussed much as of late as something the IDF is practicing. And in fact, a significant number of Israelis, as well as Israeli leaders, are even calling to remove that clause from the army code of conduct.

In a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, more than 63% of Jewish respondents agreed with the statement that “a neutralized terrorist should be killed even if they no longer pose a threat” — a position that stands in direct opposition to the law, IDF orders, and its core values.

In the same survey, 60% of Jewish respondents believed that adherence to the principle of “purity of arms” prevents the IDF from fulfilling its missions.
And there are calls from Israeli politicians to remove the purity of arms code from the IDF manual.

This is all to say that Israel’s war in Gaza has not lived up to the ethical standards the IDF used to hold itself to. In war, of course, civilian casualties are unavoidable. Additionally, we will never know what proportion of the casualties in Gaza are civilian and which are military, since Hamas is an insurgent group that uses human shields and operates out of hospitals and schools. Nevertheless, as I mentioned before, there are approximately 64,000 casualties in Gaza. Conservative estimates say at least two-thirds of those are civilians.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Yossi Klein HaLevi, who I would describe as a centrist voice in Israeli politics, wrote this last week:

“But we also know that something has gone very wrong in Gaza. That two years of fighting the most brutal war in Israel’s history has inevitably affected the standards and behavior of parts of the IDF (though we don’t yet know to what extent). That the Netanyahu government, a coalition of the fanatical and the corrupt, is disgracing the Jewish state.”
Israel was forced into a terrible war, and in the fighting of that war, its army has lost its moral direction.
3) Israel has spent 77 years attempting to chart a path between being a Jewish state, a Democratic state, and a state within the community of nations all at the same time. It seems like it is on the verge of abandoning at least two of these core principles, and/or it is struggling to balance these three things.

A big part of this is around Israel’s administration of the West Bank. After the Oslo Accords in 1993, the West Bank was treated as Palestinian autonomous zone - as sort of an incubation stage for the creation of an independent Palestine. But today, Palestinian Terrorism in the 2000s coupled with Israeli settlements and checkpoints have eroded that incubation stage. Now the West Bank is mostly just hanging around in limbo, neither a future state nor a part of Israel. Residents there don’t vote or have Israeli citizenship. If Israeli settlers steal their sheep or vandalize their homes, nothing is done about it.

This is what I mean when I mention that Israel’s attempt to be a Jewish state and a Democratic state are at odds right now. Israel has 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and don’t vote, and they don’t really have a say over their destiny.

With the creation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as occupied territory in 1967, and then semi-autonomous zones in 1993, Israel was attempting to balance being a Jewish country with being a state where all of its residents had the right to vote. Israel is moving in a direction of annexing both Gaza and the West Bank, and ending any talk of a state of Palestine. Which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the residents of those territories are given passports and citizenship and the right to vote and equal protection under the law to the Jewish residents of the state. Those things, of course, are not part of the plan. And one might say ‘well of course not rabbi, if 6 million Arabs and 6 million Jews live in a democracy together, it won’t be a Jewish state, it’ll be a mixed state.’

And that’s my point: the Israel of the near future might only be a democracy in name. This is the crossroads we face.

4) American Jews have been effectively sidelined in the conversation about Israel’s future by both American and Israeli political realities.

Jews in US synagogues and Jews at American universities debate hotly what direction the state of Israel should take post-October 7. However, the American Jewish community is not a factor in the decisionmaking process. The American president and the US Congress have given the Netanyahu government a free hand to pursue whatever policies they want. Past US presidents - in fact, literally nearly every US President going back to Truman, would from time to time cajole either the Israelis, the Arabs, or the Palestinians to restrain themselves, and sometimes it would work. President Carter brokered peace between the Israelis and Egyptians on the White House lawn. President Bush convinced the Israelis not to attack Iraq in the first gulf war despite Saddam Hussein firing scud missiles at Israeli civilians. The current president hasn’t exerted any effort to broker a truce. A recent survey by UC Berkeley of American Jews showed that just 31% support the war of the past two years while 58% oppose it.

Regardless of whether American Jews SHOULD have some effect in how Israel conducts its policies, which is an interesting conversation for another sermon, the simple fact is American Jews oppose the war, and support an immediate end to it, and yet that majority opinion counts for virtually nothing.

5)Israel’s government, two years into the war, maintains that it can militarily eliminate Hamas from Gaza. Many analysts think that is unrealistic.

The US military is roughly ten times the size of the Israeli military, and spent twenty years in Afghanistan trying to eliminate the Taliban, and we all know Afghanistan is run today by the Taliban.

Don’t take it from me, though. Wednesday the news was reporting that as Israel began an invasion of Gaza City that Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the IDF chief of staff, was opposed to the final invasion. He is concerned about the exhaustion and fitness of reservists, and about the military’s becoming responsible for governing millions of Palestinians. Or take it from a former Israeli military special ops soldier and security analyst Michael Milshtein, who told the NYT friday “It’s naïve to believe Israel can put an end to Hamas in short order.It just doesn’t work that way.”

I want to be careful not to speculate about the future, because none of us knows whether Hamas can be fully destroyed and replaced with some kind of functional authority that is willing to co-exist with their neighbors in Israel. I only want to point out that the effort to eradicate pro-palestinian terror groups has been ongoing since the 1960s. Some things that are political in nature cannot be solved militarily, and yet the war goes on.
6) The conversation inside Israel, and to some degree inside the organized Jewish community in the US, is completely different than the conversation in the mainstream media for the rest of the world.

Israelis are telling themselves that either reports of humanitarian suffering in Gaza are exaggerated or that Hamas is responsible for the hardships there. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is reporting that the Israelis are responsible, and some reports actually have exaggerated the nature of the humanitarian suffering. The word ‘genocide’ is thrown out frequently without restraint. And so both sides, rather than address the problem, contend that it isn’t their fault and that someone else should help.

In other words, this conflict and the reporting and perspective around it has been warped beyond recognition by the side you want to hear. Many Israelis see the war through the perspective of the horrific experience of October 7. They see Hamas as a modern day iteration of the Nazis, bent on destroying them all. And therefore, like a modern Dresden, they see collateral damage as lamentable, but necessary. Much of the rest of the world sees the famine and hunger in Gaza and the devastation of buildings as evidence of some malevolent Israeli evil. As I said in my sermon a year ago on this topic, Chalila lecha, far be it for you, God, and far be it for us, humanity, that we have been reduced to such a condition where so much violence and suffering has been wrought, and so much of the world would prefer to choose a side and wave one flag or another, rather than scream ‘enough’. I want to choose only the media outlets that tell the ugly truth about both sides while also reminding us that humans are capable of far better than this. To date, I’m not sure that outlet exists.
7) All of this amounts to something of a split in the road, where the Jewish values that Judaism has been espousing for over 150 years: tolerance, co-existence, loving your neighbor, caring for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, acting as a moral army, standing for justice - those values are at odds with the realities of war in the BEST of circumstances.

And the war in Gaza with the use of hospitals as shelters and the use of airpower to strike targets and the huge death toll for civilians has not been the best of circumstances.
The Conservative movement has been very careful to stay as politically neutral and cautious as possible. But a few months ago the Rabbinical Assembly issued a statement that included these words:

As rabbis of the Conservative/Masorti Movement, we are increasingly concerned about the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. We recognize the need for urgent action to alleviate civilian suffering and ensure aid delivery, as leaders continue to focus on returning the hostages and ending this war. The Israeli government must do everything in its power to ensure humanitarian aid reaches those in need. The Jewish tradition calls upon us to ensure the provision of food, water, and medical supplies as a top priority. We continue to call for the swift release of all hostages being held in Gaza, an end to the violence, and a future rooted in justice, dignity, and safety for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The war in Gaza has been an incredibly destructive war. It is unlike any other war Israel has ever fought. In 1948 and 1967 and 1973, Israel fought standing armies from well-established nations wearing uniforms for the very survival of the state itself. In Lebanon in 2006, and in Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2014, Israel fought in limited combat against a guerilla force. This war in Gaza, in which there is total devastation and the only option left is for Israel to occupy and reconquer the land, and potentially rebuild it, is unprecedented in the history of Israel. Not since the time of Joshua - before the existence of the Talmud and the rabbis, before the diaspora and the expulsion from Spain and the Holocaust - has Israel been in a position like this.

In other words, our religion preaches certain values and moral expectations. And the necessity of exercising Jewish power in order to maintain a Jewish state has bent and even broken some of those values in practice. Two years on in the war, with an ongoing humanitarian crisis, and no clarity as to the intent of the IDF and the Israeli government regarding what happens to the Palestinians in Gaza in the future, we have to ask a very serious question: is the Jewish state a Jewish state if it doesn’t practice Jewish values? Is it just a state of ethnically Jewish people, fulfilling the rituals and mumbling the words while ignoring their meanings?
This is the crossroads of Israel at this moment. Is it a Jewish democracy? Is it Jewish? Is it a democracy? Will the future Israel be something the Jewish people can be proud of as a nation that demonstrates our Torah values in its every deed or action. Or will it be regarded as just another nation with a smattering of moral stains on its historical record? Or will it be seen as even less than that? And what will Jews of good conscience, our children and our grandchildren, how will they view Israel? Our parents and grandparents used to walk door to door with little blue pushkies to raise money for Israel - will future generations of Jews even recognize the country they built?

I want to wrap up by being very honest about the purpose of this sermon. As I said before, I’m not here to convince you of anything, or to argue a point. I attempted to present as objective a statement of where we are right now, without sugar coating or spinning things.
This is not in an attempt to convince you of a perspective or galvanize you to some kind of action. A classic American sermon ends with a resolution or a prescription or a blessing. Because I said X, we should all do Y. This sermon is a little different. I don’t have a prescription for what ails the Jewish people right now. I aimed only to diagnose the condition we are in an honest appraisal.

Two final pieces of Torah to send us on our way - hopeful pieces. First;

The text we read today in our Torah portion is the story of course of Hagar being cast out by Abraham at the request of Sarah. It is a difficult story with many possible meanings. A few years ago I spoke on Rosh Hashanah about how, if we refocused the story to be from Hagar’s perspective, the story becomes about making someone into the Other, capital O, and about absolving ourselves of responsibility for the Others. This year I want to note that this is a story about the estrangement of two peoples, of the progenitor of the Arabs in Ishmael and the progenitor of the Jews which is Isaac. The story of the casting out is about two peoples who are estranged from one another, and the choice is made for them to go separate ways and leave one another alone. However, the story we will read tomorrow in the Torah is of Abraham and Isaac going up to Mt Moriah for a sacrifice.

The Torah tells us in Genesis 22:3 -
“So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac.” And our commentators, who like to fill an informational void where one exists, asks a question - who are these two unnamed servants? And Rashi, the commentator par excellence, says they are Eliezer, Abraham’s trusted servant, and Ishmael, his son. In other words, according to Rashi, Ishmael was cast out, but a little while later, he and Abraham come back together. Their paths, like the paths of Jews and Arabs in the land of Israel, are inextricably linked. And the Torah seems to be implying here also that reconciliation is possible. What has been rent can be mended.

Second: The central symbol and device of Rosh Hashanah, we all know, is the shofar. The shofar carries so much symbolism, much of it you know. It reminds us of the ram, caught in the thicket, in the story of Abraham and Isaac that we read tomorrow. It reminds us of the goat of azalzel that we sacrifice in place of our sins on yom kippur. It reminds us of the sound of the shofar that called out to us at sinai as we received the Torah, our laws and our moral direction. It reminds us of the conquest of Joshua, who used the shofar to destroy the walls of Jericho as he and his armies conquered the land. It reminds us of the call to muster our armies in the book of numbers as we arranged ourselves camp by camp, troop by troop. And it also calls us to wake up to teshuvah, to repentance, to search our deeds and our actions that we might be better in the year to come. This year, the shofar also calls Israel to a decision at the crossroads.

We pray that the direction it takes will be for good, and for life, and for justice. In Psalm 81 we say
תִּקְע֣וּ בַחֹ֣דֶשׁ שׁוֹפָ֑ר בַּ֝כֵּ֗סֶה לְי֣וֹם חַגֵּֽנוּ׃
Blow the horn on the new moon, on the full moon for our feast day.
כִּ֤י חֹ֣ק לְיִשְׂרָאֵ֣ל ה֑וּא מִ֝שְׁפָּ֗ט לֵאלֹהֵ֥י יַעֲקֹֽב׃
For it is a law for Israel, the justice of the God of Jacob;
For 5786, let us read it like this -tiku bchodesh shofar - blow the shofar - ki hok l’yisrael - that Israel find the path of justice - mishpat lelohei yaakov - and that together we follow the law of our God. Shanah Tovah

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Combatting Antisemitism, and why we're doing it all wrong

Dvar Torah Chayei Sarah 5786 - The Kingdom of God is inconsistent with a state of social misery

Israel at a Crossroads - Rosh Hashanah 5786 Day One

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