A Sin I Will Not Atone For

Not crying for the other side

I don’t believe any conflict occurring thousands of miles away has ever consumed me as much as the one that began on October 7th, 2023. To say I’ve shed my share of tears over the last year is a major understatement. During this year’s Day of Atonement, a holiday of intense mourning, no doubt we will all pray collectively for those who lost their lives in the massacres on the Black Sabbath. We will also pray for a speedy end to the Israel-Hamas War and the release of all hostages who still remain in captivity. But there is one thing I refuse to atone for, something that I now see some Jewish clergy adding to their list of sins because they feel they ought to.

I’m a huge fan of Angela Buchdahl and her congregation, the Central Synagogue in NYC. She’s a very unique clergyperson, being both a rabbi and a cantor. I also find Central’s way of engaging with their audience both in-person and virtually extremely innovative. Perhaps most telling of all, Central appears to be one of the few liberal synagogues in the U.S. where every seat in their large sanctuary is filled weekly. That speaks incredibly highly of them.

This past Rosh Hashana, Central’s junior Rabbi Hilly Haber, the congregation’s ‘Social Justice Director,’ gave the following sermon:

TLDW: focusing on the Jewish/Israeli deaths from the Israel-Hamas War is understandable, but we also should mourn the innocent Palestinians who died too. This game requires the player to engage in a long mental game of “both sides-ism.” For example, she talks about seeing the Bibas babies, who remain in captivity, in her own young kids. In the same breath, she vows that she will atone for not including Palestinian children in her grief. She then closes by quoting a Gazan poet, I’m guessing because she thinks that poetry represents our shared humanity and thus the path to peace (if only that were actually true).

I really, really wish I could find this sermon insightful instead of upsetting.

It isn’t controversial to state that the situation in Gaza is bad. It’s a war, and war is hell for anyone involved. Among the liberal Jewish diaspora community, saying that you dislike Bibi and his policies is not exactly original material. The following admission might be slightly more controversial: I can’t really support the continuation of a war with no end goal and no clear plan to bring back the ~100 hostages who still remain in Gaza. On this point, Rabbi Haber and I agree.

But the fact remains that this war started because of what Hamas did on October 7th, and because of Israel’s inability to prevent it. Indeed, there was a ceasefire—the last day of that was on October 6th, 2023. The overall strategy on Israel’s part has been awful, but the war wouldn’t be occurring at all had Hamas not opened the gates of hell. It doesn’t mean that innocent people in Gaza—and certainly, there are many— deserve to die. It’s just the sober reality we are dealing with.

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Yael from the Book of Judges.

One of the more interesting parts of Rabbi Haber’s sermon is when she brings up Yael, the heroine of the Book of Judges for whom I was named. As a minor biblical character, she hardly ever gets a shoutout, so I perked up when I heard her mentioned. Yael bravely murdered Sisera, a Canaanite army commander, by ramming a nail into his head after seducing him. When Rabbi Haber first mentioned her in this sermon, I thought to myself, finally my girl Yael will get some recognition, and on a major holiday no less!

But that was not the reason she brought her up. Instead, Rabbi Haber wanted to draw our attention to the grief of Sisera’s mother. This was an attempt to get us to empathize with someone the rabbi believes would be deserving of our compassion in such a situation.

I know that the clergy engaging in this behavior are doing it out of a genuine desire to empathize with “the other.” But it also smacks of a smug sense of superiority. I can sympathize with the other side and you can’t. Ergo, I’m the better person. After awhile it just starts to feel like a tiresome performance. Unless the speaker is planning some unique intervention to help actual Palestinians (and I have yet to hear a convincing one), they’re just words. Words without action are nothing more than virtue signaling.

All of it brings me back to the war in Iraq, which the U.S. military fought for a decade. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died in that conflict, for reasons far more tenuous than Israel’s for invading Gaza. The liberal public had plenty of disdain for Bush and Cheney (they were considered the “worst administration ever” at the time), and lots of the outspoken dissenters of the war included various clergy. But I do not remember, not once, being told that we needed to empathize with Iraqi civilians who lost their lives in that war. Why didn’t our clergy quote any Iraqi poets or mention the grief of Iraqi mothers in their High Holiday sermons? I will repeat: it was our own military on the front lines of that conflict.

I do not have the bandwidth to do what Rabbi Haber is proposing because I am still in a state of profound grief. I am grieving the international community’s refusal to condemn the gender violence that occurred on October 7th. I am grieving the fact that over 100 hostages still remain in Gaza after more than a year. I am grieving the profound betrayal that I have witnessed from fellow liberals who I once believed were my allies. The Hamas PR team has worked tirelessly to ensure that Israel and Jews remain the central target for global outrage as long as the war goes on, and I can’t help but think that sermons like this one actually play into that entire scheme.

That is the grief that I will grapple with over Yom Kippur. Like all other Jews observing the Day of Atonement, I will also reflect on the sins that I committed during the last year—and there were many, believe me. Not crying for those on the other side of the Israel-Hamas War just was not one of them.

Back to my namesake Yael: the woman is a hero for taking out a high-ranking militant from “the other side” whose actions threatened her people’s livelihood. It doesn’t speak less of her that she did it with violence. Indeed, there are certain circumstances, both then and now, that must be responded to with violence because one simply has no other choice. Would Sisera have responded better if Yael had read him some verses by a Canaanite poet instead? I doubt it.

I will end with this excerpt from the Song of Deborah, which recounts her heroism:

Most blessed among women is Yael,
Blessed is she among tent-dwelling women.
He asked for water, she gave milk;
She brought out curds in a magnificent bowl.
She stretched her hand to the tent peg,
Her right hand to the workmen’s hammer;
She pounded Sisera, she pierced his head,
She split and struck through his temple.
- Judges 5