This past week, I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion with Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder and chair of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children. Dr. Elkayam-Levy was one of the principal authors of the Commission’s report. You may have seen coverage of the report when it was released earlier this year. Nearly three hundred pages in length, it is the product of a two-year independent investigation into the sexual and gender-based violence committed on October 7th and against hostages in captivity. Drawing on extensive factual documentation, including survivor and witness testimony, interviews, photographs, video footage, official records, and other primary source material, the commission concluded – and here I draw from the language of the report itself – that sexual and gender-based violence was not incidental to the attacks, it was widespread, systematic, and integral to them. The investigation further documents how perpetrators digitally disseminated images of sexual violence, transforming acts of brutality into instruments of psychological warfare directed not only against the victims themselves, but against their families and society at large.
When Dr. Elkayam-Levy finished speaking, I made a point of shaking her hand. I felt myself to be in the presence of a person marked by the rarest combination of moral fortitude, intellectual rigor, and personal resilience, the likes of which I have never encountered and may never encounter again. But whether or not you ever have the opportunity to meet Dr. Elkayam-Levy or hear her speak, you can do what I did: download the report and read it. The opening section on methodology and the concluding section on recommendations are rigorous, careful, and scholarly, as one would expect from a commission composed of human-rights researchers, legal scholars, and jurists. But it is the middle section – no less meticulous, no less disciplined in its presentation – that will rip your heart out. Testimony after testimony. Women, children, and men assaulted, attacked, and violated in ways so vicious that the limitations of this pulpit and the sanctity of the Sabbath itself preclude my sharing the particulars. Dr. Elkayam-Levy explained that the depravity of what occurred at times exceeded the bounds of our existing vocabulary, demanding new language to describe it: terms such as “kinocide,” atrocities deliberately perpetrated in the presence of family members, weaponizing not only the suffering of the victims but the horror of those forced to witness it. At the Nova festival. In the kibbutzim. Along the roads and communities of the Gaza envelope. On October 7th itself and then through hundreds of days of captivity. Paradoxically, it is the report’s dispassionate character that is also its power. No rhetorical embellishment. Page after page, testimony corroborated, evidence catalogued, patterns identified, conclusions carefully drawn. The language is forensic, evidentiary, almost clinical, set against traumas and atrocities that defy human comprehension. The unspeakable given language, the unimaginable entered into evidence.
As I read through the report, I found myself asking a question that at first felt almost inappropriate to ask. What precisely is the purpose of the document? Not morally, that much is clear; but juridically, practically. What is all this evidence meant to accomplish? This month marks eighty years since the judgments of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. October 16, 1946 was the execution date of those sentenced to death. Nuremberg had defendants. There were war criminals in the dock, charges brought, verdicts rendered, sentences imposed. Here, the perpetrators of October 7th and its aftermath will likely never stand trial. Some are dead. Others will be soon enough, and others will never be identified. There will be no defendant in a courtroom. There will be no eye-for-an-eye judgment commensurate with what was done. There is no sentence that can restore those who were murdered. No retribution will undo what survivors endured or erase the searing memories carried by those who remain. So why this attention to testimony, corroboration, patterns, photographs, records, dates, locations, legal categories? Why produce a document on what will in all likelihood never be prosecuted? These are the questions that I have been pondering.
Given the grandeur of Genesis and the glory of God’s creation, one could easily forget just how fraught – and violent – these opening chapters of the Hebrew Bible are. We are barely out of the gates when Adam and Eve, having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, are exiled from Eden and consigned to mortality, toil, pain, and all the frailties of the human condition. Within a few chapters, human corruption has become so pervasive – the earth so filled with violence – that God comes to regret having created humanity at all. Then comes the Flood, swallowing up all of humanity and creation save Noah, his family, and the animal couples aboard the ark. And then there is the hubris of those who would build a Tower of Babel reaching to the heavens, followed by their punishment of dispersion across the earth. “Every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart,” God observes, is “only evil” (Genesis 6:5).
And the epicenter of it all – the foundational biblical account of violence, of one human violating another – is this morning’s story of Cain and Abel. Over the holidays, I spoke about the details of the story: Cain, unable to master his anger and frustration, rises up against his brother and kills him. But it is the scene that follows that I want to focus on this morning. Cain’s crime exposed, God confronts him. “Meh asita? What have you done?” And then, “Kol d’mei ahikha tzo’akim eilai min ha-adamah. The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground” ( 4:10). Familiar as we may be with the verse, it is worth pausing to note two interrelated curiosities in its language. The first, and perhaps more obvious, is the “voice” of the blood of the slain crying out. Blood has many properties. It is red, wet, and sticky, but having a voice is not one of them. What does it mean for blood to cry out? The second point, a little more in the grammatical weeds, is no less important. As anyone who has ever sat at a Passover seder knows, the Hebrew word for blood – the first plague – is dam. And yet that is not the word the Torah uses here. It says d’mei ahikha, literally, “the bloods,” plural, of your brother.” Why plural? Why not simply dam ahikha, “the blood of your brother”? Two questions. Simply put: First, how does blood have a voice? And second, why does the Torah call it “bloods”?
The rabbis, not surprisingly, provide a variety of answers to the second question. One explanation in the Talmud suggests that that the plural is used because it was not just Abel whom Cain killed, but also Abel’s potential descendants. Another explanation is more graphic: d’mei ahikha is plural because Abel’s blood was not found in one place but was splattered and scattered upon the trees and stones, all the many places where the blood was spilt. Rashi, the eleventh-century French commentator, offers yet another interpretation: Cain did not know how to kill, and so he struck Abel again and again, inflicting many wounds until he died. The plural “bloods” refers to the multiple wounds on the victim’s body.
Each of these explanations finds ready application to the atrocities of October 7th. But having heard Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy and having read the commission’s report, it seems to me that there is yet another way to understand the plural d'mei, bloods, in God's accusation to Cain. When blood is shed, as it was on October 7, there are, in a sense, two cries.
The first cry is the cry of the blood spilled in the act of violence itself: the cries of the murdered, the wounded, the bereaved, and the concentric circles of grief. In the days following October 7th, we heard the anguished cry Hashem damam yikom, May God avenge their blood. Real, raw, immediate. Blood crying out from the ground. In the words of Shakespeare's Macbeth, “Blood will have blood.”
And then there is a second cry, a second blood, if you will. Three years later, we confront the question of how the memory of that day, those lives, and those atrocities will be preserved, protected, taught, and transmitted to generations yet unborn. We confront not only the horror of what happened, but the struggle over how what happened will be remembered. A struggle against denial, distortion, revisionism, and the insidious attempts to explain away the inexplicable, to contextualize or justify the unjustifiable.
The first cry is the cry of the victims, demanding justice for the blood that was shed. The second is the cry of history, demanding fidelity to the truth, emet, of what occurred. The first asks whether we will hold the perpetrators accountable. The second asks whether we, the living, will bear witness, safeguard the evidence, tell the stories, preserve the names, and ensure that those who were murdered are not victimized a second time by the erasure or distortion of their suffering. How does blood cry out and why is blood in the plural? Because the moral claim of innocent blood does not end when the violence ends. It continues to cry out, long after the ground has absorbed it, long after the world has moved on, long after the eyewitnesses are gone.
It is three years since October 7th. As much as we might wish it to be otherwise, we cannot turn back the clock, and there is little likelihood that the crimes committed that day and in the days that follow will ever be prosecuted. But the need to document, to bear witness, to tell the story has never been more urgent. I spoke with another legal scholar who worked on the commission, Michelle Greenberg-Kobrin. She explained that the crimes of October 7th were distinctive not only in their horror, but in the perverse inversion of how gender-based violence is ordinarily understood and received. The first principle of responding to such crimes, after all, is compassion: to believe the victim, to listen to survivors, to take their testimony seriously. But here, the moral order has been turned on its head. Ordinarily, perpetrators seek to conceal their crimes, while human rights organizations seek to expose them and stand with the victims. In the case of October 7th, the perpetrators themselves recorded, livestreamed, and broadcast their atrocities, not to conceal their deeds, but to display them, celebrate them, and glorify them. And yet, in the face of that evidence, some of the very institutions dedicated to defending victims of sexual violence responded not with solidarity, but with skepticism, silence, equivocation, and, in some cases, outright denial. So deeply entrenched is the hostility toward Israel, so corrosive the epistemic antisemitism, so routine the refusal to credit Jewish testimony or acknowledge Jewish suffering, that organizations established to defend the vulnerable are unwilling to defend these particular victims. Rather than uphold their own professed principles, they qualified, contextualized, relativized, or dismissed the very atrocities that they exist to condemn. In abandoning the victims, they betrayed not only Israelis and Jews, but their own raison d'être.
And let me be clear: Nothing about naming the crimes of October 7th requires us to minimize Palestinian suffering or excuse the wrongs committed by Israel in its prosecution of the war. We can – we must – hold more than one truth at a time. The suffering of one people does not negate the suffering of another, and the wrongdoing of one side does not excuse the wrongdoing of the other.
We see it in human rights organizations. We see it in the choices made by those who award the Nobel Peace Prize. We see it in the moral perversity, the flat-out sheker, the falsehood of our mayor's October 7th social media post, which devoted but a brief acknowledgment to the crimes of Hamas before turning to a far longer denunciation of Israel's alleged war crimes and “ongoing genocide in Gaza.” We see it in the selective amnesia of university campuses, where the history of October 7th is being contested even as it is being written. We see it on social media, where lies travel faster than facts, and the documented atrocities of Hamas are subjected to denial, distortion, and revisionism. Make no mistake. In our post-truth, AI era of fleeting attention spans, the battlefield is not only over territory or sovereignty. It is over memory itself: Over who gets to tell the story, whose testimony is believed, whose suffering is acknowledged, over what future generations will know and what they will not know. How history books, search engines, and AI platforms will recall October 7th will depend on the institutions we build, the archives we preserve, the education we provide, the technology we harness and the testimony we safeguard today. The perpetrators sought to destroy Jewish lives. We dare not allow their crimes to be followed by the destruction of Jewish memory. We cannot turn back the clock to recover the blood spilled on October 7, 2023. The blood continues to cry out from the ground, the battle still rages, and it is a battle we must win.
There is one more midrash from this week's Torah reading that I found myself returning to this week. The rabbis teach that when God was about to create humanity, the ministering angels began to argue. The angel of kindness said, “Let humanity be created, for human beings will perform acts of kindness.” The angel of justice agreed; the angel of peace objected, knowing that human beings would fight. Truth objected as well, declaring that humanity would be filled with falsehood. What did God do? According to the midrash, God took Truth and cast it down to the earth. The angels protested against God, “Master of the Universe, how can You cast Truth aside?” The midrash concludes with the words of the psalmist: Emet mei-eretz titzmach. Truth shall spring forth from the earth.
On October 7, 2023, and in its aftermath, innocent blood was spilled upon the earth. The blood of our brothers and sisters continues to cry out from the ground. And from that very same ground, truth must arise. That is our responsibility. To hear the cry. To preserve the testimony. To give voice to those whose voices were silenced. To ensure that their stories are told, their suffering acknowledged, and their truth transmitted l'dorei dorot, throughout the generations. We cannot undo the horrors. We cannot restore the lives that were taken. But we can, and we must, ensure that the truth of what happened is not buried alongside the victims. Emet mei-eretz titzmach. May truth spring forth from the earth. May the blood of our brothers and sisters never cease to call us to account. And may we prove worthy of answering its cry.