One more. One more hostage remains in Gaza.
For over two years, Israel has waged a campaign with two objectives: First, to destroy Hamas, the terror organization that attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing over 1200 Israeli citizens; and second, to secure the return of the hostages, the living and the slain.
Two hundred and fifty-one people were ripped from their homes that day. One hundred and sixty-eight have since been released through negotiated ceasefires, prisoner exchanges, and in a few cases, military rescue operations. The others, those murdered – their remains have been repatriated to their loved ones in Israel or in their respective countries of origin. With this week’s identification and return of Thai national Sudthisak Rinthalak, there remains one final hostage, Ron Givli, killed and abducted on October 7. His family, his country, and his people have had nearly eight hundred days of anguish, uncertainty, and heartache.
Now is not the time to take our eye off the ball. This ceasefire is tenuous at best. Israel must muster the combination of determination and restraint to see this moment through – to ensure that Givli is laid to rest in the embrace of his people. The toll of this war has been devastating – for our Israeli brothers and sisters, yes, but also for Gaza’s civilian population. Tens of thousands killed. Nearly two million internally displaced, hospitals and homes reduced to rubble. An already shattered region, now literally and figuratively flattened. The page must turn, and one of the surest ways to turn it is to close this long and bitter hostage chapter once and for all.
But it is not just for Givli or Rinthalak that I speak of the hostages this morning. I do so because despite this fragile ceasefire, another battle yet rages – not with Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis, but in hearts and minds in the west, the global community, the media, campuses, and right here in our own New York community. We know of the chants of genocide outside a neighboring synagogue. You read of the violent security breach this past week in the Jewish community of my hometown of Los Angeles. Just the other night I attended a fundraiser for a do-gooding Jewish organization devoted to alleviating hunger and food instability across New York, and anti-Israel genocide-chanting protestors stood at the entrance at the ready.
We are still waiting for Givli’s return, but the revisionist history of this conflict is well on its way. It is a rewriting dangerous not just for its distortions of the past but for how it seeks to shape the future – a disingenuous tool for policy and persuasion. Opinion pieces in major outlets, penned by otherwise respected voices, lay the sufferings of Gaza entirely at Israel’s feet, and on that basis, call for strategic realignments, seeming to forget how this war began in the first place, and why it continued, with glancing mention, if any, to the undeniable and unbearable plight of the hostages. As every Hebrew School student knows: “Whoever saves a single life, it is as if they have saved an entire universe” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5). As Maimonides taught: “There is no greater mitzvah than the redeeming of captives,” be it two hundred and fifty-one or just one. In this Orwellian moment unmoored from its moral bearings, when wrong is recast as right, victim as aggressor – when Israel was called on to fight a war it did not start, under constraints its enemy never respected, all the while trying to rescue those taken from their homes and then accused of war crimes and genocide for doing so – we must hold the line.
Against those who stand outside our tent, we must hold the line. And for all who seek to dwell within our tent, we must widen it. Because convinced as I am of the justness of Israel’s cause, I also believe that there exists a range of voices, both within Israel and among committed American Jews, worthy of being heard. We need to see this war from every vantage point, finding language capacious enough to hold multiple views at once: the desperate and just cause of securing the release of the hostages, and an empathy-filled response to the horrific sufferings of Gaza. To know that if every hostage’s life is of infinite worth, so too is the life of every Palestinian child. To respect Israel’s sovereign right to secure the safety of its citizenry, and to recognize that Israel’s choices do not remain confined to its borders. To understand that while we champion the hostage-freeing mission of the IDF, that support does not come with a moral blank check, and that support need not extend to policies of the Israeli government before, during, or since October 7th. I have long since given up on the expectation of receiving a Christmas card from the Israeli Prime Minister. Freeing the hostages – that part is not complicated. How we went about and go about doing so and where we go from here – that is a conversation we can and must have. Reasonable people, equally devoted to the safety of the people and State of Israel, can and will disagree. What we need is language rooted in Jewish tradition – an ethical precedent to study – on how far one may go, and how far one must not go, to save a life and bring a hostage home.
As good a place as any to begin, not surprisingly, is this week’s Torah reading. Genesis 34, the harrowing story of the rape, abduction, and liberation of Jacob’s only daughter, Dina. It is not a pleasant tale, hardly the stuff of Hebrew school curricula or bnei mitzvah speeches. A trigger warning would not be out of place.
The tale begins with Dina, who, growing up in a household of all boys, goes out to see the women of the land. By the second verse, through a rapid succession of verbs, Dina is taken, raped, and disgraced by Shechem, son of Hamor. And while much ink, medieval and modern, has been spilled on the nature of their relationship, the biblical text, to be clear, never signals her consent, nor for that matter, grants her a single word. Dina never speaks; she essentially disappears after the third verse, held within the confines of her assailant’s house.
Her father Jacob hears of his daughter’s violation and abduction, and with his sons away in the field, he does nothing, awaiting their return. Jacob’s passivity is chilling. The entire family dynamic mirrors and foreshadows what will soon unfold with the degradation of Joseph in next week’s Torah reading. When the brothers do return home and hear the news, they are seized with fury: An outrage has been committed in Israel, a thing not to be done. Was it Dina’s lack of consent that enraged them? Their own lack of consultation? Or the blow to the family honor? The text leaves it open to interpretation. What we do know is that their fury runs hot and is ready to boil over.
Negotiations begin. Shechem’s father, Hamor, makes an offer: “Let us dwell together; our daughters will marry your sons, and your daughters our sons. Name your bride price, and it shall be paid.” We never learn how Jacob would have responded to the offer, for before he can speak, the brothers act – with deceit. They demand that every male of Shechem’s town be circumcised.
The townsmen agree, and the story darkens even further. On the third day, as the men are recovering in pain, two of Jacob’s sons, Shimon and Levi, take to their swords. They not only kill Shechem and Hamor, but slaughter all the men and plunder the town whose chieftain’s son had defiled their sister. Dina is brought back home. Not only the guilty are punished, but an entire community is destroyed, a rage-filled full-scale punitive war that could not be avenged.
And while our violent tale ends there, it is here that the moral reckoning begins. When the brothers return home, Dina in hand, they are met not with gratitude but with rebuke. Jacob reproaches his sons: “You have made me hated among the inhabitants of the land. I am but few in number and should the tribes unite against me and attack, I will be destroyed” (Genesis 34:30). Jacob’s concern, as ever, is reputational and pragmatic. In this story as in those before it, he has always preferred to maneuver, negotiate, and accommodate.
All of which is why it is so important to note that it is not Jacob, but the brothers who have the final word in the story, or more precisely, the final question. The chapter closes with the brother’s searing retort to their father: “Shall our sister be treated like a whore?” For the brothers, only retributive justice will do: an eye for an eye, a life for a life. Shechem’s crime must be avenged tenfold. And while at first it seems that their fierce action, rather than Jacob’s inaction, commands our sympathy, the moral judgements do not end here. Their echoes will reverberate forward. Shimon, the same brother who wielded the sword to free his sister, is later imprisoned in Egypt by his brother Joseph, a touch, if you will, of biblical karma. And in the twilight of Jacob’s life, when he gathers his sons for blessing, Shimon and Levi receive not blessing but rebuke, condemned as “tools of violence” (Genesis 49:5). Yet paradoxically, Levi’s line is elevated as the tribe of priests, from whom Moses, our greatest leader, will emerge.
I could continue the back and forth, and I think that is precisely the point. The back and forth is the point. As my late teacher Tikva Frymer-Kensky taught, Jacob and his sons represent two competing strategies of survival: accommodation and deterrence. Jacob counsels prudence and compromise. Israel is small, few in number, surrounded by those who seek to destroy her, and world opinion matters. The brothers see things differently. Moral outrage leaves no room for restraint; the only language understood by those who would do us harm is to do them harm. The life of our own kin takes precedence over all other considerations, and it is not a close call. Neither choice is without peril. If too militant, Israel courts moral compromise and isolation. If too accommodating – Israel courts vulnerability and destruction. The back and forth of the Bible – Jacob and his sons – these are the biblical boundaries of the conversation. As to the question of who is right and who is wrong, the Bible never says; it is left to every reader to decide.
And as with Israel of old, so too with Israel of today. Again, setting aside those who seek our harm, there are – within our own camp – those who mistakenly see everything in black and white. Either, as some would argue, in the spirit of Jacob’s sons, that Israel can do no wrong, that in the face of the plight of the hostages and the hatreds of Hamas, every action is justified; there are no innocents, and civilian casualties are the unfortunate, and necessary, cost of war. And then there are those who deny Israel’s right to defend itself – to wage war against its enemies, liberate its hostages, secure its borders, and preserve its legitimacy – thus rewarding an enemy that hides behind civilians, hospitals, and dense urban terrain. As urban warfare expert John Spencer has noted, any democratic nation, including our own, would have responded to an assault like October 7th with immediate and overwhelming military force to achieve its aims as swiftly as possible. To hold Israel to a different standard, to label every act of defense a war crime or worse, says far more about the critic than about Israel itself. It is a double standard that reveals less about Israel’s conduct than about the moral blind spots of those who would condemn her.
So, which it? Israel always right, or Israel always wrong? As with the biblical text, my job is not to tell you how to think, only to counsel you how to have the conversation. To recognize the continuum, to engage in the debate and to resist the urge to paint those with whom you disagree as traitorous to either our people or some ethical standard that is unachievable anytime. All the more so in times of war, under conditions when snap decisions must be made by young men and women fighting for their lives, to save lives, in circumstances unimaginable to us in the comfort of our lives.
All of which brings me to my final point and, really, my main point. It seems to me, that when we are having these community conversations, we need to keep two things in mind. We must, of course, have the suffering of Gaza ever-present. And we should also always speak as if an IDF soldier were present. We should do so to disabuse ourselves of the illusion that the Middle East and the Upper East Side play by the same rules. No statement, to channel Fackenheim, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of an IDF soldier who has risked life and limb fighting a merciless enemy, defending his own life and that of his fellow soldiers, all in in the pursuit of liberating his captive kin.
And while this is a mental moral exercise we should undertake every day in the abstract, today we can do it in real time, in the presence of one such young man who has lived through it.
Yonatan, my dear nephew, you have served in the IDF with distinction these past two years as a platoon tank commander in Gaza. I want you to know, and I think I speak for so many in this community, how deeply proud, how deeply grateful, and how deeply moved, we are by you. You have been thrust into unimaginable circumstances, you have fought for the Jewish people and the Jewish state, and you and your comrades have prevailed. You stand tall, we have your back, and we couldn’t be prouder. Not only are you alive, which we are all pretty happy about, but your soul is intact – changed by what you’ve lived through, yet unmistakably, beautifully, you.
So, as you travel the world in a well-earned, globe-trotting post-army backpacking trip, as the haters will surely hate, carry with you the confidence that your moral core is solid, and that your family, both biological and global Jewish, loves you.
This is, as our Torah reading teaches, what it means to be Israel. To wrestle and to prevail. Yonatan, that is what you have done. You have lived up to the highest calling of our people’s name. And may we, the children of Israel, rise to the calling of ours.