I was here in Israel for about a month after October 7, and returned at the beginning of February.

I find Israel is very different than when I left three months ago.

In the weeks immediately after October 7, normal life in Israel had come to a complete halt. The shock, and spirit of unity, in the country was very powerful. “Everyone” agreed Hamas could not be allowed to retain the ability to hurt us in this way. The outpouring of volunteers to help IDF soldiers and evacuees from both the south and north was unreal. Everyone I know was volunteering in one way or another.

Three months later, life in Israel is somewhat back to normal. Classes have resumed at universities. People are back to their usual daily activities. There’s still volunteer stuff going on, but now it’s more people volunteering to help farms that need workers to harvest crops since the foreign workers left.

The big difference is the spirit of unity is gone. Criticism of the government’s handling of the war in Gaza is becoming increasingly vocal, in many cases being led by families of people being held hostage in Gaza. Many Israelis believe the human suffering in Gaza is excessive, and the IDF is not doing enough to alleviate it, and is not doing enough to protect civilians. The fact that three Israeli hostages, with their shirts off, waving a white flag, and calling out for help in Hebrew were shot and killed by IDF troops is pointed to as evidence violations of the rules of engagement. Other Israelis believe Israel is not hitting Hamas hard enough.

There are signs all over Israel that say (in Hebrew, of course), “Return them home, now!” There are demonstrations and protests regarding the hostages, but I have not gone to any of them. I don’t know what I would be protesting. Everyone agrees we want the hostages home, and quickly, but there is no agreement on how to accomplish that. For some people, “bring them home now” basically means “surrender to Hamas.” Have a complete ceasefire, and release however many thousands of terrorists we have to release to get the hostages back. For others, “bring them home now” means do not allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza at all. Starve not only Hamas but 2 million presumably innocent people until they give up.

I do not endorse either of those two extreme solutions.

The war dragging on is taking a toll on people. At Shabbat dinner I was talking with a soldier who leads a unit of tank mechanics in Gaza. He’s been in Gaza for three months. He finally got a five day pass to come home, only his wife and baby are out of the country visiting her parents in Europe. It’s very tough. The government is extending the tours of duty for draftees and are raising the age at which people are still required to serve in the reserves from 40 to 45. This is also causing friction and resentment, as the secular population is being asked to make more sacrifices to serve the country, while the ultra-Orthodox continue to be exempt from serving in the IDF.

Antisemitism in some other countries is getting so bad that some Diaspora Jews are considering moving to Israel. At the same time, I know Israelis who have had enough of the stress of living in this place and who are leaving the country for greener pastures.

I’m not a fan of Richard Nixon, but he wrote an excellent book titled “Leaders.” He said real leaders don’t worry about the opinion polls: they figure out what’s the right thing to do, and then they convince people that they are right. Netanyahu, on the other hand, seems to consult opinion polls of his base before opening his mouth, so that he can tell them exactly what they want to hear.

When the war broke out, he tried to dodge blame, and blamed the IDF for the failures that left us vulnerable to the Hamas attack. When that proved to be overly unpopular, even among those on the right, he tacked, and now he promises the war will continue until Israel achieves “complete victory,” even though everyone, including his generals, knows that complete victory is an illusion. There is no way the IDF will be able to destroy all the tunnels and kill or capture every Hamas fighter. The war will end with a negotiated agreement, not with the complete annihilation of Hamas.

We will get past these horrible times. There will be peace. We will eventually have a new government, and God willing the Palestinians will as well, and we’ll both get leaders who can negotiate a true peace, a lasting peace.

   

A book on religious doubt might seem an odd reading choice for a rabbi, a person almost by definition who is interested in faith.

But if your faith can’t stand up to intellectual challenges, it’s a pretty shallow faith. In the days of the rabbis 2,000 years ago, philosophy – and not just philosophy, but all “external writings” – was considered dangerous, and people were told it was forbidden to study them. There was good reason for their fear. We have the story of Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya, a.k.a. “Acher,” or “Other,” who started studying Greek philosophy and became a heretic, the only rabbi of the Sanhedrin, the “Jewish Supreme Court” of the day, known to do so. He famously said, “there is no justice and there is no judge.” In some ultra-Orthodox circles, studying such things is still considered forbidden, along with accessing the internet and exposing one’s self to anything that could challenge the beliefs of the community.

“Doubt: a history” is a brilliant introduction to the great doubters of history and includes figures both famous and obscure. The book opens with a “scale of doubt” questionnaire that invites readers to answer a series of questions to ascertain whether they are a believer, an atheist, or an agnostic. It was an interesting exercise to answer, although I do not think it is actually very useful or accurate. I consider myself a believer, although based on the “test results” I’m an agnostic. The theology Hecht uses to define believer is not the theology that I use to define believer.

But that small quibble aside, the book opens with the earliest Greek philosophers. Xenophanes of Colophon (570-475 BCE) is cited as the first known doubter, although there were no doubt many before. He doubted the Greek gods, feeling that the whole idea was “silly,” as not only did they act childishly, but they were very Greek. Xenophanes was known for “famously claiming that if oxen and horses and lions could paint, they would depict the gods in their own image.”

Xenophanes recognized that people create god in their own image. People believe the faith of the family and the community into which they are born. One of the Greeks pointed out that if he’d been born in India, he’d believe what the other Hindus believe. Does that make it right? Thinking you had the good luck to be born into the one true religion does not really make much sense.

A story from Diagoras brings another of my favorite challenges to faith:

…a friend pointed to an expensive display of votive gifts and said, “You think the gods have no care for man? Why, you can see from all these votive pictures here how many people have escaped the fury of storms at sea by praying to the gods who have brought them safe to harbor.” To which Diagoras replied, “Yes, indeed, but where are the pictures of all those who suffered shipwrecks and perished in the sea?”

Diagoras was pushing against what has been called the “God as Santa Claus model.” Just because you pray for something doesn’t mean God will give it to you.

Hecht walks us through the major approaches of the Greek philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, etc.

The book is organized roughly chronologically and by major region/faith. From the Greeks to the Jews. She sees Ecclesiastes and Job as the premier works of Jewish doubt. In the case of Job, God tells Job I’m beyond your comprehension, so shut up. In Ecclesiastes the author also says “we can’t know all these things,” it’s all vapor, so you might as well enjoy a good meal with a woman you love. Very Epicurean of the author.

The exhaustive book goes through Buddhist doubt, Roman doubt, Christian doubt, medieval doubt, the Inquisition, doubt in the White House, modern doubt. It really is quite an education. The author is both a respected historian and an award-winning poet, and it shows. The book has the depth you’d expect from a historian, with the attention to words and graceful writing you would expect of a poet.

Ecclesiastes and Epicurus are held as models of what she calls “graceful life philosophies.” Enjoying life does not mean neglecting family or community. You can be an atheist and still be a moral person.

In her concluding chapter she quotes Hume on the age-old question of theodicy:

Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered. Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is He impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then is He malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

People of faith – which I think of as people belonging to a faith community, not necessarily people who blindly believe something – are able to adapt their beliefs as wisdom grows.

In his day, Spinoza was excommunicated as a heretic. Today there is a whole branch of Judaism, Reconstructionism, whose theology is very compatible with Spinoza’s ideas. Yesterday’s heretical idea is a foundation for today’s faith.

For doubters, Hecht’s book offers the consolation that “you are not alone.” You may not be part of a faith community, but you are part of a long tradition of doubters. She says, “to be a doubter is a great old allegiance, deserving quiet respect and open pride.”

The book also has value for “believers.” I suspect virtually every person of faith has had, at some point, a crisis of faith. Many religions, Judaism among them, celebrate doubt and encourage questioning. There’s a reason both Job and Ecclesiastes are in the canon. This book provides believers with many good questions to ponder.

   

Despair. That’s what I’m feeling right now, and I hate it. I’m normally an optimistic person.

There has been so much death, destruction, pain, suffering. We still have hostages in Gaza. The death toll and human suffering in Gaza is horrific. And we seem no closer to long term security.

In the immediate aftermath of October 7 practically every Israeli felt “Hamas must be destroyed.” Now that a few months have passed, it seems pretty obvious that is an unattainable goal. Hamas’s ability to harm us in the way it did on October 7 can be reduced, but there is no way we will destroy the organization. As abhorrent an idea as it is to Israelis, Hamas’s popularity in the wake of October 7 has only increased, at least in the West Bank. The people there are overjoyed that some of their prisoners have been released, and that someone has stuck it in the eye of the occupier. Never mind that it predictably unleashed a hell storm of destruction on the poor people of Gaza.

I have said in previous rounds of fighting with Gaza that you can’t use F-16s to bomb terrorism out of existence. You’ll just breed more terrorists. The only thing that will lead to real security for both Israelis and Palestinians is peace, a negotiated, agreed upon peace, whether that’s two states, one state, or a confederation, but it needs to be something that both sides agree on. And sadly I see the vision of peace receding ever further away.

A senior Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad, has vowed that Hamas will launch “a second, a third, a fourth attack, until the country is annihilated.” He said, “Israel has no place on our land. We must remove the country because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe.”

He’s delusional. Hamas killed 1200 Israelis, and another 100+ Israeli soldiers have died in the war since October 7. But something approaching 20,000 Palestinians (according to Haaretz, estimated 60% women, children, or elderly) have been killed since the war started, approaching 1% of the population of Gaza. Who’s the one likely to be annihilated if Hamas launches more attacks?

And the Israeli political leadership is also delusional. They continue to be obsessed with destroying Hamas, with little regard to the civilian death toll in Gaza or the humanitarian crisis there, and with no regard to what happens on the day after the war.

American support for Israel’s actions in Gaza is waning. Netanyahu has recently vowed to keep fighting even without international support (a popular message for his right-wing supporters) but without American support Israel will eventually run out of ammunition, and it needs to keep a good stockpile on hand lest the northern front with Hezbollah flares up.

Too many Palestinians celebrate the barbaric attack on October 7. I heard interviews NPR did with people in Ramallah, and they do not believe the reports on what Hamas did. One person actually said, “Hamas would not kill women and children, it’s forbidden by Islam.” Never mind that Hamas themselves posted videos of them killing women and children.

Too many Israelis don’t care about the death toll in Gaza. “Hamas uses human shields, what do you expect,” they say, with a shrug.

Hamas is growing in popularity in the West Bank, and meanwhile Jewish extremist settler violence, a disgusting phenomenon, is on the rise, with Ben Gvir the enabler turning a blind eye, if not actually providing encouragement. And even leftist Israelis are saying things like, “Jabotinksy was right. They will always hate us. We have no choice but to build an iron wall and live by the sword.”

Where things are heading seems like more misery for everyone. There is no international force that is going to magically appear and rule and rebuild Gaza. Netanyahu has always wanted to keep the PA weak (that’s why he allowed Qatar to fund Hamas), so he’s not going to empower the PA to really create an effective government in Gaza. Netanyahu, no doubt, hopes to keep this war going as long as possible as he is very likely going to be out on his ass the day after the war is over.

My prediction is eventually Israel will cave to international pressure, there will be a ceasefire, and Israel will keep troops in Gaza for security purposes, to continue to prevent Hamas from building a military capability. They will have no interest in rebuilding Gaza, so two million people will live in miserable conditions for years. And Gazan civilians and Israeli soldiers will continue to die, just in smaller numbers.

The only hope would be fresh, visionary leadership on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, leadership committed to finding a solution that gives the Palestinians dignity and the Israelis security. That leadership is not coming from Abbas and Netanyahu.

I really hope and pray that I’m wrong. I really hope and pray that the trauma both peoples have experienced in the last two months will stimulate change for the better. But I’m not holding my breath.

Tonight starts the last day of Chanukah. We need light now more than ever.

   

It’s 3:45am and I’m at Ben Gurion airport with plenty of time to write something because I have lots of extra time. The airport is weirdly empty. Not surprising. All the tourists are gone, not many people are going on vacation. I’m flying to Athens on El Al and then switching to United for the rest of the journey back to the US.

I’m normally a cheerful, optimistic person. I find myself feeling sad a much higher percentage of the time than I am used to. It’s like being in mourning, even though I didn’t personally lose anyone. It is being in mourning. Mourning not only for the over 1,400 of our people who were murdered and butchered. Mourning too for children in Gaza who are dying because of Hamas’s callousness, mourning for our lost sense of security, mourning for fear we do not have a long term answer. We cannot simply bomb our way to peace. Yes, we can stop Hamas’s ability to harm us. For now. Which we need to do. But without some political solution to the conflict, we’ll have quiet for maybe a decade and then we’ll be fighting Hamas 2. Desperation and extremism don’t get extinguished by bombs. The opposite.

Something I read reinforces that. There is (or was – I can’t find it now) a Facebook page called “Across the Wall” that brought stories of people living in Gaza to Israelis (translated into Hebrew). It was a joint initiative between an Israeli journalist and a Palestinian journalist in Gaza. For most Israelis Gaza is as unknown as the bottom of the ocean. Someone asked the Palestinian co-founder of the site, Ahmed Alnaouq, why he doesn’t condemn Hamas. His reply:

When I refuse to say a word about Hamas, it’s because I refuse to be dehumanized and to be considered collateral damage, like all the others who didn’t deserve to be killed but were killed.

Think about it. Calling people “collateral damage” does dehumanize them. Makes them sound disposable somehow. I can understand why someone would not to be considered that way. There’s greater dignity in being a martyr, in dying for a cause, than there is simply being caught in a crossfire. 23 members of that journalists family were killed in an Israeli air strike.

Several things and stories that have disturbed me in the last few days.

I’ve been reading about witch hunts against Israeli Arabs. Some people have been interrogated, detained, suspended from their jobs or even fired for posting relatively mild things to social media that express concern for people in Gaza. Nothing supporting Hamas explicitly, God forbid, just stuff about how terrible the suffering of the children in Gaza is. I could have posted some of those kind of comments. It’s crazy. We don’t need to make all of the Israeli Arabs into our enemies. But there is tension; I felt a little nervous getting into a cab with an Arab driver this morning, and I never felt that way before.

There is so much pain and trauma right now. One of my daughters has a friend whose job has been collecting bodies and body parts from people murdered by Hamas so the remains can be identified. A 22-year-old girl seeing things no one should ever have to see. A friend of my son-in-law was in Gaza when an officer standing next to him was shot in the head and killed by a sniper. How do you get over things like that?

By the end of today I’ll be back in America, and can’t help but think how weird that’s going to be for me, with my head and heart still here in Israel, while for everyone else around me it’s just life as usual, there’s another war on the other side of the planet, but for the average non-Jewish American I’m sure it doesn’t impact their life much.

   

The Torah readings this week and last are exceedingly difficult ones for us to read at this time of calamity in Israel.

In last week’s Torah reading, Lech Lecha, God told Abraham lech lecha, Go! Go forth from your land, from your birthplace, from your father’s home, to the land I will show you.”

And that land, of course, is Israel.

It feels like Abraham barely gets to the land of Israel when his nephew Lot is taken captive, and Abraham frees his nephew with a small army of 318 armed and trained men.

And then in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera, God asks Abraham to make the ultimate sacrifice: to sacrifice his son. In the end, an angel stays Abraham’s hand, and the son is spared.

Unfortunately, in real life, here in the land of Israel, too many people have been asked to sacrifice their sons, and their sons have been sacrificed, on the battlefield, in an effort to free captives and destroy Hamas’s ability to harm us.

Is a willingness to sacrifice our sons (and daughters) the price of admission to the land that God promised our ancestors in last week’s Torah reading? Is a patch of dirt worth such a high price?

Israel, of course, is much more than a patch of dirt. It’s home. There are 26 countries around the world that have a form of Islam designated in their constitution as a state religion. There are fifteen nations around the world that still have a form of Christianity as the official state religion. There is only one country that has Judaism as an official religion: Israel.

Israel is the easiest place in the world to live as a religiously observant Jew. The national holidays are our religious holidays. It’s so much easier to keep kosher and observe the Sabbath in a place where those practices are normal. One reason I made aliyah is in Israel it feels like we are living a more organic, natural, real form of Judaism than in the Diaspora. Just living here feels like being a part of something historic and important.

In a time of crisis such as this one, Israel really does feel like one big mishpacha, like family. I moved to a new place in Jerusalem about two weeks before the war broke out. I met my neighbors in the building’s bomb shelter. All of the political divisions we may have had before October 7 have, for the moment, melted away as everyone pitches in to help those more directly affected by the terrible events, whether soldiers, people who have been evacuated from their homes near Gaza or Lebanon, and those who lost family or who have family among the captives.

But we’re not like Abraham at all, not really. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son because God told him to. No one I know is willing to sacrifice their children willingly. We are willing to put them in harm’s way, not to fulfill a command from God, but to protect our home. And it’s our home whether you’re religious or not, whether you believe in God or not.

Back in 1973 then Senator Joseph Biden visited Israel, and apparently when he was briefed on the security situation his worry became apparent. Golda Meir famously told him, “Senator, don’t look so worried…We Israelis have a secret weapon.” Biden of course asked, “What is Israel’s secret weapon?” Golda replied, “We have nowhere else to go.”

For those of us who do have somewhere else to go – those of us with two passports – being here for this war makes that decision very real in a way nothing else I’ve ever experienced. Twenty-three young women who did the same exact job my youngest daughter did in the army were either killed or captured in the attack of October 7. But for timing and assignment, that could have been her. I can’t even begin to imagine the guilt I would have felt if anything had happened to her. My then wife and I brought our children here when we could have had an easy life in America.

It’s one thing to talk about stuff theoretically. “If you’ve got nothing worth dying for, you’ve got nothing worth living for,” said Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s one thing to put yourself on the line for a cause. It’s a whole ‘nother level when you realize, for real, you’re putting your children on the line. It’s terrifying.

But most Israelis – Jewish or not – are not blessed with two passports. Most Israelis truly have nowhere else to go. After the Holocaust, the countries of the West didn’t want them. When they were kicked out of the Arab countries after the founding of the state of Israel, other countries didn’t want them. They truly have nowhere else to go.

But my fellow Jews and Israelis, we need to remember that’s also true for the Palestinians.

The story of Abraham (Ibrahim) being willing to sacrifice his son for God is not only in the Torah, it’s also in the Koran. Sadly for them and for us, the Palestinians seem all too ready to sacrifice their sons for an ideological cause. They are all too eager to become martyrs.

And the Palestinians have the same secret weapon. They have nowhere else to go. The rest of the Arab world has made it very clear the Palestinians are not welcome. How else do you explain that fact that more than 75 years after the War of Independence there are still Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, in addition to Gaza and the West Bank?

Palestinian writer Raymonda Tawil once told a Jewish audience, “We Palestinians are the Jews of the Arab world.” Just as Jews were homeless for a long time, the Palestinians are homeless now. More than that, I think in many ways Palestinians have been sometimes admired, often disliked, and difficult to absorb in the Arab world.

Hamas will not drive us into the sea, and Israel will not be able to expel the Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan. One way or another we are going to have to figure out how to live together, how to share this troubled land. There is no other answer.

I fervently pray that when the dust settles, and we move on to whatever comes after this war, that both sides will realize we need to sit with each other and figure out how to live together. Let us stop sacrificing our sons and daughters. Let both peoples be blessed with leaders that have the will, the courage, and the wisdom to bring lasting peace to these two peoples who have nowhere else to go. Let us turn the Promised Land into a Paradise and may our two peoples live side by side in peace.

Amen

Note: As I wrote these words, a siren went off here in South Jerusalem and I ran for my building’s bomb shelter, and shortly afterwards heard the booms of Iron Dome intercepts.