Tag: war

sermon · torah

Yet it moves.

levtaylor

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was brought before the Roman Inquisition and instructed to recount his heretical views. Galileo had said, contradictory to the views of the established Church, that the earth rotates around the sun. He had to retract this claim or face death.

So, to protect himself, Galileo assured the Church that he was wrong. The earth remained still.

As he left the courthouse where he had been tried, Galileo raised his eyes to the sky, then back down to the earth. He stamped on the ground beneath his feet and muttered: Eppur si muove: yet it moves.

Yet it moves.

For we who stand on this rock in the solar system, it does not feel like the earth is spinning. We can understand how people once thought the sun moved around them.

We, educated in our modern world, understand that the globe is rotating, and that this rotation is responsible for times and seasons.

But if you don’t know the laws of the earth’s orbit, every winter feels like a divine abandonment.

The earth feels static. And yet, the earth moves.

Hundreds of miles beneath the ground where we stand, plates are shifting in the earth’s mantle. For millennia, continental landmasses have drifted apart and pushed back together. Their pace is imperceptible from where we stand, so we cannot know what a profound impact they are having on the structure of our planet.

We, educated in our modern world, know that migration in the oceanic lithosphere explains mountains, lakes, and volcanoes.

But if you don’t know the laws of tectonic shift, every earthquake will feel like an act of God.

The ground beneath us feels static. And yet, the tectonic plates move.

Right now, the forces of history are at work.

Since the dawn of civilisation, people have arranged themselves into complex societies with varying levels of specialisation and hierarchy.

Within those systems, they have developed new technologies, made laws, and created cultures. They have struggled over resources, sometimes to the point of complete social overhaul, and sometimes to the point of common ruin.

We, educated in our modern world, know that the science of sociology explains how civilisations operate. We have learnt to recognise economic trends, like that spikes in oil prices result in increased interest rates. We have also learnt grand trajectories, like what causes empires to collapse.

But if you don’t know the laws of history, every rupture to the social order feels like a curse.

The social order feels like it will never change. Our world feels stuck on the same trajectory. And yet, the people move.

To everyone in ancient Egypt, the rule of Pharaohs felt like an unshakable fact. By the time the Israelites were enslaved in Goshen, the Egyptian empire had already existed for 2,000 years. The pyramids had already stood for a millennium.

Every Pharaoh was called Ramses and every Pharaoh declared himself a god. He claimed that he controlled the flooding of the Nile and the rising of the sun. He could not be moved.

When Moses killed a slave driver, he did not only have to fear Egyptian retribution. The Hebrews themselves were ready to mete out punishment.

Moses’s own people, turned on him and demanded: “who made you ruler and judge over us?”

Moses had rattled the social order, and this terrified even his kin. He could not be the ruler and judge over them. Their ruler was supposed to be the slave master and their judge was supposed to be Pharaoh. They could not even imagine moving.

In the Torah story, we only hear what happened forty years later, when Moses returned from his years as a goatherd for Jethro.

Yet, on his return, tens of thousands of Hebrews, and many others, were ready to leave the only land they had ever known for a barren wilderness.

In fact, even the ordinary Egyptians were in a revolutionary mood. They handed the Hebrews wealth and resources for their journey. They were co-conspirators in sedition against Egypt.

Hebrews and Egyptians alike were willing to bring down a structure that had lasted for twenty centuries, and risk existence itself.

We might attribute this sudden change of mentality to acts of god: those Ten Plagues the Eternal One wrought upon Egypt to bring down the might of Pharaoh.

But I wonder what else happened in those forty years. What were Aaron and Miriam, Moses’s siblings, doing in the four decades when their brother was absent? What did Shifrah and Puah, the rebel midwives, do in the time when all seemed lost?

I can think of no other explanation: they organised.

With Moses gone, the dissidents were preparing the Hebrews for the great exodus to come. They had faith. They knew that the slave system could be defeated. They knew that people would move.

I imagine they were knocking doors, spreading the word in the marketplace, gathering slaves for secret meetings, building alliances across the divides of race.  I imagine they were keeping hope alive; sowing seeds of possibility; encouraging people to imagine a future without domination and toil.

To those who do not know their history, the Hebrews’ decision to leave would have felt like a greater miracle than the plague of locusts.

But we know that people can shift the way tectonic plates do: so imperceptibly that anyone higher up might not even notice.

The more they move, the more they realise they have been kept captive. And then they realise they can move some more.

Then what was impossible suddenly seems inevitable.

What was unalterable becomes intolerable.

Then, it is a law of history that they will come crashing against the structures that bind them, like an earthquake.

Yes, the downfall of Egypt at the hands of rebel slaves was a seismic rupture of earth-shattering proportions.

It showed the immutable Pharaoh that everything moves.

Everything, even whole social systems, move. But today, it is easy to feel stuck.

I look at the world around me and feel afraid. It seems that, in every country, our leaders are set on a course to global war. Everywhere, antisemitism is rising and hatred is spurting out on the streets. Everywhere, governments are determined to pursue authoritarian policies.

All of this can be explained by the laws of history. When people do not have enough to live, they turn on each other. In our own history, we know that they often turn on Jews.

When people feel like the world is ending and there is no hope, they become apathetic enough to let cruel demagogues take control.

And when governments fear that their power is threatened, they can quell all dissent with a war.

Fascism and chaos both drink from the same pool of despair.

Some nights I go to sleep despairing, too.

And then I remember that is what the Pharaohs of our own time want. They want us to think that nothing can change: that racism and war are the only way.

They want to keep us heading in one direction.

But we move too.

We are the people too, and we will move where we decide to go. We do not have to follow the shift towards tyranny and hate. Like tectonic plates, we can push the other way.

We can point steadfastly towards a world of equality and peace, and insist that we will go nowhere else. If we start pushing, we can lock arms with others, and build a coalition that can defeat every despot.

Yes, we move. And when we move, God moves too.

God, the great hand of history, is always directing humanity towards justice. God’s hand may be the hardest to perceive of all the forces in the universe, but the Power of Moral Truth is always trying to push us forward.

The Eternal One, revealed through history, is most visible in eras when we decide to do God’s will.

There may be days when it feels like nothing can change.

But, everywhere, at all times, the earth spins, the tectonic plates shift, the people move, and God guides us.

We will not fall into despair. We will not stand still.

We are going to get our way out of Egypt.

We will move.

protest · social justice

We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.

levtaylor

We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.

We must build a wall. You cannot trust the Moabites.

The Moabites are on the other side of the salty Dead Sea and the Jordan River. A river is not big enough to keep the Moabites away from our land. They will take everything we have if they get the chance.

The Moabites are dangerous and brutal. They will destroy you if they get the chance. 

We must destroy the Moabites before they can destroy us. We must kill their kings. Their king Eglon is a murderous tyrant. You will never be safe as long as he reigns. You must kill him.

You must kill every Moabite that stands in your way. You must capture the Moabite city of Heshbon. We need it to keep the Moabites away from us. 

We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.

They must never come near you. 

You must never meet them. 

Because, if you met the Moabites, you might see that they are not monsters. You might see that they are like you.

And then you would not be able to kill them.

And then you would ask why we are building walls.

And then you would ask who was building these walls.

So you must always abhor the Moabites. You must fear them and revile them.

We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.

It must be high enough to protect you from them. It must be high enough to protect you from yourselves. It must be high enough to protect you from peace.

You may not immediately notice it, but nestled in this week’s Torah portion is an early example of war propaganda. In the vulgar and violent story of Lot is an origin myth for the Israelites’ greatest enemy: the Moabites.

The scene begins as God destroys Sodom and Gamorrah, two cities so wicked and licentious that they have to be wiped out and turned into the Dead Sea.

Only Lot and his daughters escape from that awful place. They retreat into the mountains on the east of the Jordan. There, the two daughters get Lot drunk, seduce him, and use him to sire their children.

The oldest is called Moab. And to really drive the point home, the Torah adds explicitly: the father of the Moabites.

The women in this story are not even given names. They are just grotesque plot devices to tell us how awful the Moabites are. 

Those people, Israel’s nearest neighbours to the east, are so wicked that they came from Sodom. Their ancestors are so twisted that they were born of incest, drunkenness, and assault. It is a story to inspire revulsion in its Israelite listeners.

This is part of a general campaign of literary warfare against the Moabites, continued throughout the Torah. 

Isaiah promises that the Moabites will be trampled like straw in a dung pit. Ezekiel vows endless aggression and possession. Amos says the whole of Moab must be burned down. Zephaniah swears that Moab will end up just like Sodom, a place of weeds and salt pits, a wasteland forever.

The war propaganda reflects real wars. The ancient Israelites did repeatedly wage war, conquer, and capture Moabites. They did kill their kings, and they did turn Moab into a vassal state. 

Based on the Moabites’ texts, we can see that it also went the other way, and that Moab also captured, conquered and slaughtered Israel.

We do not know how many Israelites or Moabites died in these wars. We do not know how many people grieved their families and homes. All that remains is the propaganda of the competing tribes.

Today, it is hard to imagine why anyone would have hated the Moabites so much, or even that we would believe the hyped-up stories of how vulgar they were. With centuries of hindsight, we can see that they were probably very similar to the Israelites, but dragged into wars for the glory and material wealth of their kings.

Of course, there were dissenting voices at the time. The Book of Ruth can be read as a polemic about love between Israelites and Moabites. It is a beautifully humanising story where the central character, Ruth, is portrayed as a Moabite who is kind, loving, devoted to her family, and committed to Israelites.

As long as there has been war propaganda, there has been anti-war propaganda, and our Torah contains it all.

This Shabbat, we honour Remembrance Day. We think of all of those who died in wars past, and those who served their countries in military operations. This feels so close to our hearts, as we reflect on the great toll wars took on military personnel and their families, including many in our communities. 

We remember the pain of those who have lived through and died in the awful wars that have passed.

This solemn day dates back to the armistice of the First World War, on November 11th 1918. The following year, England hosted France for a shared banquet as they recalled the ceasefire. From then on, it became an annual day of reflection on the horrors and sacrifices of war.

During the First World War itself, even as the conflict was ongoing, many challenged the war. The great British-Jewish soldier-poet, Siegfried Sassoon, charged that the war had been whipped up by jingoistic propaganda.

In July 1917, Sassoon published “A Soldier’s Declaration,” which denounced the politicians who were waging and prolonging the war with no regard for its human impact. 

Sassoon lambasted “the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.”

It is true that people like me, who enjoy peace, cannot even contemplate the pain that people went through in fighting wars and enduring bombing. 

Today, we honour them.

Honouring them does not mean parroting propaganda and whipping up war. 

Quite on the contrary. It is the duty of every civilian to ensure as few people as possible ever have to fight in wars. It is our responsibility to minimise the number of people who suffer and die in armed conflicts.  It is our task to pursue peace.

We, who will never know the sacrifices of the front line, must heed Sassoon’s call, and resist the drive to war.

So instead:

We must tear down every wall with the Moabites. 

Yes, with the Moabites, and, yes, with the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Koreans and the Iranians.

We must find commonalities and engage in shared struggles.

We must learn to trust our fellow human beings and distrust the propaganda of war.

We must cease all killing. The machinery of war has destroyed too much and taken too many lives. We must endeavour to put an end to violence and destruction.

We must learn to understand the people we are told are our enemies.

We must tear down every wall.

Shabbat shalom.

diary · israel

The maddening well of war

levtaylor

There is a story – I cannot remember where I heard it – about a village where the well was cursed by an angry magician. Anyone who drank from its water immediately became mad. They became violent and hostile. They were certain of things that could not possibly be true – but when anyone challenged them on their delusions – they flew into a furious rage.

The royals of this town had their own water source. When they tried to talk to their subjects, they were the ones who were deemed mad. They could not govern, because all the villagers, having drunk from the well, saw their leaders as insane. So, the king and his family went down to the cursed well and drank from it themselves, so that they, too, would be afflicted with insanity, but at least able to retain their power.

In the immediate weeks after October 7th, this story repeated in my mind relentlessly.

When Jews met each other, they immediately scoped each other out. We asked: how are you feeling? Where are you on this?

But the question we were really asking was: have you drunk from the well?

Have you thrown yourself into the grip of the madness that demands war?

At a friend’s house, another Jewish religious leader, having made sure everyone in the room had not swallowed the poisoned water, said: “don’t worry, this happens sometimes. People get angry and frightened and turn to violence, but… it passes. They will calm down.”

So we hunkered down and waited. Waited for the effects of the maddening well of war to wear off.

A ceasefire and a hostage deal. Those were the words coming from everyone who had not drunk from the well.

“One day,” we said, “everyone will say they always opposed this.”

“And, when they do, we will not begrudge them for it. We will just be happy to have the killing over.”

I wondered when the day would come. When people would finally come to their senses and say that enough was enough.

Within days, the death toll in Gaza exceeded any number of any previous war. Then, in weeks, it reached into the thousands. Then tens of thousands. It seemed that the numbers dead only made the mad more ravenous.

And we, who said it should stop, were ever more out of sync with our society; ever more criminally insane.

A ceasefire and a hostage deal. It was a basic humanitarian position that guaranteed everyone got to live. It would bring the captives home and stop the massacre of Gaza.

There were moments, even, when they demonstrated what could be. Temporary ceasefires with limited hostage releases. But, even then, the drive to war was insatiable.

I have asked myself many searching questions over the last eighteen months. Increasingly, the one that pains me is: what happens the day after this all ends, when my people finally awaken from their stupor? What will Jews and Judaism have become when the effects of the well wear off and everyone finally sees what happened?

There have been so many needless deaths. So much unfathomable destruction. So many dreams have been killed.

Now, I think that people are finally shaking the madness. I feel I can talk more openly, and I see others doing the same.

I feel ashamed. I feel like I did not do enough to prevent this. I wish I had been louder and bolder from the start. I wish I had been prepared for this, so I wouldn’t be shocked by it. I regret having turned away from watching at times, unable to bear the pain.

And you? How are you feeling now? Where are you on this?

I have a feeling that, after a year and a half, something is finally changing. Now it seems like the ripple of peace may become an anti-war wave. Maybe now the cleansing waters of truth will finally come and dilute all the curses of the well.

If you are one of the people who feels like your heart is beginning to turn, you are not alone.

I do not begrudge you. Trauma does that. Anger and fear can break you, and you don’t know how and when it will happen.

I am just happy that the killing may finally come to an end.

Now there is even more trauma to heal. Now there is even more peace to pursue.

We have been waiting for you. We are still waiting for you.

But the well is still there.

The war machine is still waiting for you, too.

israel · sermon

Remember in order not to forget

levtaylor

There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.

There are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.

So, says the Torah, remember in order not to forget.

This week is Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of remembrance. Just before Purim, we are called to read three additional lines of Scripture. Deuteronomy instructs:

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey out of Egypt [… ] You shall erase the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget.

Remember… erase the memory… do not forget.

Is the demand to remember not contradicted by the insistence on erasing the memory?

Is the commandment to remember not exactly the same as the one not to forget?

Perhaps not. There are ways of remembering that encourage forgetting, and ways of forgetting that make you remember.

Alan Bennett’s play, The History Boys, is an exploration of what it means to teach history, and what we can learn from it.

In a powerful scene, the newest teacher, Tom Irwin, takes his sixth-form grammar school students on a tour of a war cemetery.

As they walk, he tells them:

The truth was, in 1914, Germany doesn’t want war. Yeah, there’s an arms race, but it’s Britain who’s leading it. So, why does no one admit this?

That’s why. The dead. The body count. We don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault cos so many of our people died. And all the mourning’s veiled the truth. It’s not “lest we forget”, it’s “lest we remember”. That’s what all this is about -the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes’ silence-. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

The truth to these words is palpable. In every village square throughout Britain there is a stone column, inscribed with names. The Cenotaph is so finite. Its concrete defies questions. You cannot ask it: what did they die for?

As we lay wreaths, the liturgy intones that the war dead “made the ultimate sacrifice.” These words carry such gravity that you forget it was a conscript army. You dare not ponder: who sacrificed them, and for what cause?

Then, there is silence. So much silence that you cannot hear the echo: was it worth it?

Real memories are not fixed. They are fluid and living, constantly opening up new interpretations and interrogations. When you really remember, you pore over the details with others, seeking perspectives you missed, guided by a quest for greater understanding. You always want to know what you can learn from it, since the memory teaches something new to each moment.

But, as Alan Bennett’s character teaches us, that is not what happens with certain war memorials.

They are ways of remembering in order to make you forget.

There are, too, ways of forgetting to make you remember.

In 1988, the Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Elkana, wrote an article for HaAretz called The Need to Forget. Not long after its publication, this article entered the new Jewish canon as one of the most challenging and profound commentaries on Shoah memorialisation.

In it, he warns against the danger that Holocaust consciousness poses to Israeli society.

He writes:

I see no greater threat to the future of the State of Israel than the fact that the Holocaust has systematically and forcefully penetrated the consciousness of the Israeli public.

Reflecting on the school trips to Yad Vashem, Elkana comments:

What did we want those tender youths to do with the experience? We declaimed, insensitively and harshly, and without explanation: “Remember!” “Zechor!” To what purpose? What is the child supposed to do with these memories? Many of the pictures of those horrors are apt to be interpreted as a call to hate. “Zechor!” can easily be understood as a call for continuing and blind hatred.

So, says Elkana, while the rest of the world may need to remember the Holocaust, the Israelis needed to learn to forget it. They needed to uproot the injunction to remember “to displace the Holocaust from being the central axis of our national experience.”

Elkana’s invocation of forgetting is also an invitation to remember. Forget the past in order to remember that we have a future. Forget the cruelties inflicted on our people in order to remember that we are greater than our misery. Forget the wars in order to remember the possibility of peace.

Elkana is not talking about an alternate reality where everyone wakes up tomorrow with amnesia about the last hundred years of history. He is talking about an active process of forgetting: forgetting by asking new questions and building new memories.

These are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.

There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.

But, the Torah tells us: remember in order not to forget.

What type of remembering would this be?

A full remembering, the type repeated twice by our parashah, the kind that forces you not to forget.

This remembering, then, must be one that always asks questions and returns to itself. A history that invites constant revision and ever wants to teach new lessons.

For the last sixteen months, Israel has been gripped by war. It has been unavoidable as its details have filled our news feeds and lives.

I know it is too soon to start the painstaking soul-searching involved in real remembering.

But it is plenty early enough to forget.

Already there are those who would like us to forget, so that they can eschew their own accountability.

How easily we can be made complicit in their acts of wilful forgetting.

So I have been considering how to fulfil the Torah’s commandment to remember.

I want to remember in fullness and complexity, always returning to new questions.

I want to remember all the suffering, for there has been so much suffering.

I want to remember all the dead. Every name. There are so many names.

I want to remember all those responsible. Every name. There are so many names.

I want to remember all the alternatives, because there have always been so many options, and there are still so many other ways.

I want to remember completely who I have been, who we have been, at best and at worst throughout this whole time.

It is too soon to remember.

It is too much to remember.

It is too painful to remember.

But, if we do not remember, we will forget.

israel · sermon · theology · torah

Why does God not just stop the war?

levtaylor

“How many more signs do you need that God is not there?”

This was the question one congregant asked last week when I went round for a cup of tea. In fact, a few of you have asked similar things recently.

None of you was asking out of arrogance or triviality, but expressing a real despair at the state of the world.  The ongoing war, which has claimed far too many lives, is enough to incite a crisis of faith in even the most devout believers.

Why will God not just stop the war? It is a serious question, and one that deserves a serious answer.

How desperate are we all to see a ceasefire, to see Gaza rebuilt, to see the hostages returned home, to know that the Israelis will no longer hide in bomb shelters, to know that no more people will be rushed to hospitals, to see an end to all the violence and bloodshed?

And it goes deeper than that. How much do we all wish that none of this had ever happened; that there was no war for us to wish to end?

In our anguish at the cruelty, we cry out to the Heavens. There is no answer from On High, so we wonder if there is Anyone there listening at all.

I will not be so presumptuous as to imagine I have the answers. I do not know the nature of God and can give no convincing proof of how our Creator lives in this world. In fact, if I found anyone who thought they did, I would consider them a charlatan.

The great 15th Century Sephardi rabbi, Yosef Albo, said: “If I knew God, I would be God.” We are, all of us, animals scrambling in the dark, as we try to make sense of the mystery.

But we come to synagogue so that we can scramble in the dark together, feeling that if we unpick the mystery in community, we will get further, and develop better ideas. Allow me, then, to share some of my own thinking, so that we can be in that conversation together.

How many more signs do you need that God is not there?

In our Torah, there were times when God did indeed show signs of presence. In the early chapters of Genesis, God walks through the Garden of Eden in the cool of day. At the exodus from Egypt, God came with signs and wonders and an outstretched arm. As the Israelites wandered in the desert, God appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

This is the kind of sign that we might want from God now, then.

At a hostel in Jerusalem, I met an evangelical Christian who was absolutely convinced that everything happening in the Middle East was already foretold by the Bible and that God was about to rain down hell on the Palestinians and then all the Jews would finally accept Jesus.

Suffice to say I do not think such a God would be worthy of worship.

And I highly doubt this is the kind of divine intervention any of us would embrace.

Is there an alternative way we could wish for a sign?

Some great indication that Someone greater than us is involved in the story and cares about human suffering. Perhaps just a gentle hand to reassure us everything will be OK.

Deep down, most of us know that no such sign will come.

God did, however, send another sign in the Torah. A sign, perhaps, not to look for signs. A sign that God was not going to get involved, no matter how desperate it all seemed.

The rainbow.

At the start of the story of Noah, the world was filled with violence. Everyone had turned to war – nation against nation – all against all. The entire planet was rife with destruction.

God slammed down on the reset button. God sent a flood so catastrophic that it killed everyone bar one family. The flood was like a thorough system cleanse, designed to strip the earth back to its original state and allow Noah to rebuild.

Then, as soon as the rains had stopped and the land had returned, God looked at the devastation, and swore: “never again.”

God promised Noah: “I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

God hung a rainbow in the sky, and told Noah it was a symbol that there would be no more divine interventions:

“When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”


The rainbow, then, is a sign that God is there, and a sign that God will not get involved. Even if humanity goes back to being as violent as it was in the Generation of the Flood, God is not going to step in and destroy as at the start.

If the rainbow is a sign that God will not come and strike people down when the world is in crisis, it is also a sign of the other half of the covenant. Human beings must now be God’s hands on earth. We have to be the ones to do what we wish God would.

For Jews in the rabbinic period, every rainbow was a reminder to them that God would not act, so they had to take the initiative. They would look up at the sky and say “blessed is God, who remembers the covenant.”

According to the Jerusalem Talmud, no rainbow was seen during the entire lifetime of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yochai. He was so righteous and brought so many others to do good deeds that there was no need to be reminded any more of the covenant. Bar Yochai was one who acted so much like he was God’s actor on earth that even God did not need to send reminders.

The idea that human beings had to be God’s hands became even more important in the post-Holocaust world. Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits escaped from Germany in 1939 and went on to become one of the leading Orthodox rabbis of the 20th Century. For him, a traditional religious Jew, grappling with the enormity of the Shoah, he had to find a way to deal with God’s seeming absence at Auschwitz.

So, Rabbi Berkovits said, the problem lay not with God’s inaction, but with humanity’s. In his book, Faith After the Holocaust, Berkovits wrote:


“Since history is man’s responsibility, one would, in fact, expect [God] to hide, to be silent, while man is going about his God-given task. Responsibility requires freedom, but God’s convincing presence would undermine the freedom of human decision. God hides in human responsibility and human freedom.”

What Berkovits is saying is that it might be in God’s nature to prevent catastrophe, but it would undermine human nature if God did. In order that people can realise our freedom and our full potential, God has to stand back.

It seems that, in almost every generation, Jews are asking why God does not intervene to stop violence.

In each generation, we find an answer: God does not intervene, because that’s our job.

It’s not that any of these classical sources doubt God’s existence or question God’s presence. They just don’t think it is God’s responsibility to act. It is ours.

There is no flood coming to wipe out war or lightning bolt coming from the sky to strike down the wrongdoers.

We began with a question.

How many more signs do you need that God is not there?

Perhaps we can now reframe it positively.

How many more signs do you need that you must act?

God is not going to stop war. So we have to do our bit to bring it to an end.

Even in our small corner of the world, we have to do all we can to push for peace and justice.

So, on the days when you find yourself looking for the sign, you be the sign.

You need to be the sign to somebody else that there is hope in this world.

You need to be the sign that peace is possible.

You need to be the rainbow.

Shabbat shalom.

high holy days · israel · sermon

The point was not to sacrifice your children

levtaylor

In 1922, archaeologists dug up a site in modern-day southern Iraq. There, they found incredible spans of gold and sophisticated armour, and Iron Age Sumerian artefacts, encased within stone walls. They dubbed this place “the Royal Cemetery of Ur,” an ancient Babylonian mausoleum. 

On that site, they also discovered evidence of hundreds of human sacrifices. Among the human sacrifices, a considerable number were children.

Nearly all of the skeletons were killed to accompany an aristocrat or member of the royal family into the afterlife. Some had drunk poison. Some had been bashed over the head with blunt objects. After their death, many were exposed to mercury vapour, so that they would not decompose, but would remain in a lifelike posture, available for public display.

Excavations from the Royal Cemetery at Ur

This site dates to sometime around 2,500 BCE in the ancient city of Ur. According to our legends, another figure came from the  ancient city of Ur sometime around 2,500 BCE. 

His name was Abraham. 

In the biblical narrative, Abraham wandered from Ur to ancient Canaan, where he began to worship the One God, and founded Judaism.

The world in which Abraham purportedly lived was rife with child sacrifice. Across the Ancient Near East, archaeologists have uncovered remains of children on slaughtering altars. They have found steles describing when and why they sacrificed children. They have found stories of child sacrifice from the Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, and Assyrian civilisations.

So problematic was child sacrifice in the ancient world that our Scripture repeatedly condemns it. The book of Leviticus warns: “Do not permit any of your children to be offered as a sacrifice to Molech, for you must not bring shame on the name of your God.” The prophet Jeremiah describes disparagingly how the Pagans “have built the high places to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal.” In the Book of Kings, King Josiah tears down the altars where people are sacrificing their children.

Abraham put a stop to the practice of child sacrifice. It seems to happen suddenly, and without warning, and with even less explanation. No reason is given why he abruptly ended all the cultural deference that had gone before and opposed an entrenched religious practice. 

The question we now must ask is: why?

One reason that comes to mind is that it is so obviously immoral. Surely it should be self-evident that you don’t kill kids! But that wasn’t obvious to all the people around Abraham. And that wasn’t obvious to traditional commentators, either. In their world, the morally right thing was always to obey God.

Fresco of the Binding of Isaac at the 3rd Century Duro Europos Synagogue, Syria

A traditional reading says that Abraham stopped child sacrifice in obedience to God. In the story we read today, Abraham is called upon by God to go up on Mount Moriah and slay his son. Only at the summit, when he holds up his arm to murder Isaac, does God stop him, telling Abraham that he has proved his devotion to God by not withholding his son, and that he does not have to kill Isaac. 

Yet there are several problems with this story. If we adhere to the traditional reading, God still wanted child sacrifice, and felt that doing so would prove Abraham’s devotion. In fact, nearly all traditionalist readers interpret it this way,saying that obedience before God should be a sacred virtue. A conservative reader of the Bible says that the moral of the story is that we should be subservient to God, and do what we are told.

God said not to perform child sacrifices, so we no longer do. That would mean, then, that if God had said child sacrifice was permitted, we would still be doing it.

In 2007, the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm offered a radical reinterpretation of the story of the binding of Isaac. The story, Dr Boehm argues, is not about Abraham’s fealty to God, but his disobedience. Dr Boehm shows how, reading against the grain of traditional interpretation, this is not a story where God changes tact and decides not to ask for child sacrifices anymore, but where Abraham rebels against authority and refuses to commit murder.

For Boehm, what was truly radical about the Binding of Isaac was that it set out a new set of values, completely at odds with those of the Ancient Near East. Where other cultures practised child sacrifice because it was part of their established culture, Abraham resisted and put life above law. Where others encouraged obedience to authority, so much that poor people could be killed in the palaces of Ur to serve their masters in the afterlife, Abraham made a virtue of rebellion. For our ancestor Abraham, refusing to follow orders, even God’s, was the true measure of faith. By not killing, even if God seemingly tells you to, you show where your values really lie.

This is not a story about obedience, but rebellion. And that message – of resistance against authority in defence of human life – has much to teach us today.

Boehm reconstructs what the archetypal story of child sacrifice was in the Ancient Near East. Across many cultures and time periods, there was a familiar refrain to how the story went. The community is faced with a crisis: some kind of famine, natural disaster, or war. The community realises that its gods are angry. To placate the gods, the community leader brings his most treasured child and sacrifices him on an altar following the traditional rites. Then, the gods are pleased and the disaster is averted.

We can see that the biblical narrative clearly subverts the storytelling tradition that was around it. In other cultures, the community leader really did sacrifice his special child, and that really did please their Pagan god. In our story, the community leader does not sacrifice his special child, and the national God proclaims no longer to desire human sacrifice. This is already then, a bold message to the rest of the world: you might sacrifice children, but we will not.

Boehm takes this a step further and looks at source criticism for the text. Most scholars of Scripture accept that Torah is the work of human hands over several centuries. One of the ways we try to work out who wrote which bits is by looking at what names for God they use. Whenever we see the name “Elohim” used for God, we tend to think this source is earlier. Whenever we see the name “YHVH” used for God, we tend to assume the source is a later edit by Temple priests.

The story of the binding of Isaac is odd because it uses the name “Elohim” almost the entire way through, until the very end, when the angel of God appears and tells Abraham not to kill Isaac. That means that most of the text is from the early tradition and only the very end part, where the angel of God tells Abraham not to kill Isaac, comes from the later priests.

So, Boehm asks, what was the earlier version of the text? If you take out the verses where God is YHVH and have only the version where God is Elohim, what story remains?

Well, in the version that we know, where both stories are combined, an angel of God calls out and tells Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac. That’s the bit where God is YHVH. If you take that out, and have only God as Elohim, Abraham makes the decision himself. No angel comes to tell him what to do. Next, if we cut out the parts where God is YHVH, there is no praise from the angel, telling Abraham he made the right choice. Instead, you get a story where Abraham deliberately disobeys his God because he loves the life of his son more.

Adi Nes, ‘Abraham and Isaac’, 2004

The earliest version of the text, before the Torah was edited and a later gloss was added, is one in which Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice Isaac, goes all the way up Mount Moriah, and then refuses. Without prompt or praise from God, Abraham decides to sacrifice a ram instead of his son. In the earliest version of the biblical narrative, when source critics have stripped away priestly edits, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son and Abraham rebels.

The earliest version, then, is an even more radical counter-narrative to the other stories of the Ancient Near East. Not only do we not sacrifice children. We also recognise that sometimes you have to say no to your god. In this version, rebellion is more important than obedience, especially when it comes to human life.

This isn’t just a modern Bible scholar being provocative and trying to sell books. In fact, Boehm shows, this was also the view of respected Torah scholars like Maimonides and ibn Caspi. These great mediaeval thinkers didn’t think of the Torah as having multiple authors, but they could see that multiple stories were going on in one narrative. One, they thought, was the simple tale of obedience, intended for the masses. But hiding between the lines was another one, for the truly enlightened, that tells the story of Abraham’s refusal.

Boehm terms this “a religious model of disobedience.” By the end of the book, you go away with the unshakable impression that Boehm is right. True faith, he says, is not always doing what you think God is telling you. Sometimes it is reaching deep within your own soul to find moral truth. Sometimes you really show your values by how you defy orders.

In his conclusion, Boehm takes aim at Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, an American religious leader, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat. Rabbi Riskin had said, in his analysis of the binding of Isaac, that Abraham was a model of faith by his willingness to kill his son. Riskin insisted that he was willing to sacrifice his own children in service of the state of Israel.

This, says Boehm, is precisely the opposite of the message of the binding of Isaac. The point was not to let your children die. The point was to bring a final end to child sacrifice. The point was not to submit to unjust authority, but to rebel in defence of life. 

Rabbi Riskin does not realise it, but by offering child sacrifice, he is really advocating for the Pagan god. He is describing the explicitly forbidden ritual of allowing your children to die. 

Abraham thoroughly opposed these false gods who demanded ritual murder. They were idols; and child sacrifice a monstrous practice that we were supposed to banish to the past. The very essence and origin of Jewish monotheism is its thorough rejection of killing children.

Boehm could not have known how pertinent his words would become. This year has been one of the worst that those of us connected to Israel can remember. Beginning on October 7th, with Hamas’s horrendous massacres and kidnappings, the last Jewish year has seen us rapt in a horrific and seemingly never-ending war.

This year, thousands of Israelis were killed. This is the first time in a generation that more Israeli youth have died in war than in car crashes. Reading through the list of names, it is remarkable how many of the soldiers were teenagers. 

That is not to even mention the 40,000 Palestinians whom the IDF have killed. According to Netanyahu’s own statements, well over half were civilians. Around a third were children. As famine and food insecurity rises, the risk of deaths will only accelerate. It has been agonising to witness, and I cannot imagine how painful it has been to live through.

Yet, during my month in Jerusalem, I saw that the voice of Abraham has not been extinguished. There are few groups I hold in higher esteem than the Israeli peace movement. Against untold threats and coercion, in a society that can be intensely hostile to their message, they uphold Abraham’s injunction against killing.

One of the leaders of the cause against war was Rachel Goldberg-Polin. On October 7th, her 19-year-old son, Hersh, was kidnapped by Hamas. His arm was blown off and he was taken hostage in Gaza. From the very outset, Mrs. Golderg-Polin argued fervently for a ceasefire and a hostage deal that would bring her son home. She warned that the only way her son would come home alive would be as part of political negotiations. 

At the end of August, as Israeli forces neared to capture Hersh as part of a military operation, Hamas shot her son, Hersh, in the head. 

Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s refusal to give up hope, refusal to sacrifice her son, and steadfast insistence on peaceful alternatives is a true model of Abraham’s faith.

Israeli peace protestors

And it involves serious rebellion too. When I met with hostage families in Jerusalem, I was shocked to hear how, for protesting against the war to bring their families home, they had been beaten up by Ben Gvir’s police. I saw this with my own eyes when I marched alongside them. People shouted and jeered at them, and the police came at them with truncheons.

In July, when I went with Rabbis for Human Rights to defend a village in the West Bank against settler violence, we were joined in our car full of nerdy Talmud scholars by a surprising first-timer. A strapping 18-year-old got in to volunteer in supporting the Palestinian village. What was most remarkable was that he himself lived in a West Bank settlement. 

He explained that he had refused to serve in the military. He did not know that others had done it before, or that there were organisations to support Israeli military refusers. Instead, he said, he thought to himself: “if I don’t go, they won’t kill me; if I do go, I might kill someone.” What could be a truer expression of Abraham’s message: no to death! No to death, no matter the cost.

He really had to rebel. For refusing to serve in the war, the conscientious objector I met spent seven months in jail. Still now, there are dozens of Israeli teenagers in prison because they would not support the war.

Throughout my time in Jerusalem, I attended every protest against the war and for hostage release that I could. One of the most profound groups I witnessed was the Women in White, a feminist anti-war group going back decades. One of these women, with grey hair and the look of a veteran campaigner, held a placard that read in Hebrew: “we do not have spare children for pointless wars.”

Is this not exactly what Abraham would say? We will not sacrifice our children on the altar of war!

Theirs is truly the voice of Abraham, the true voice of Judaism. It is the voice that opposes child sacrifice. Theirs is the voice that upholds the God who chooses life. 

Talmud tells us that, when we blast the shofar one hundred times on Rosh Hashanah, we are repeating the one hundred wails of Sisera’s mother when she heard her son had died. Sisera was, in fact, an enemy of the Israelites, who waged war on Deborah’s armies, and was killed by the Jewish heroine, Yael. Still, at this holy time of year, we place the grief of Sisera’s mother at the forefront of our prayers. 

We take the cry of every mother who has lost a child and we make it our cry.

Thousands of years after the Sumerian Empire had ceased existing, archaeologists dug up its remains, and saw a society that practised child sacrifice. From the very fact of how they carried out murder and permitted death, the excavators could tell a great deal about what kind of society this was. One that killed people to serve their wealthy and their gods.

One day, thousands of years from now, historians may look upon us too, and ask questions about what our society was like, and what we valued. May we take upon ourselves the mantle of Abraham. 

May they look back and say that we chose to value life. May they look back and see that our people despised death and war. May they look back on us and see a society that practised faithful disobedience.

Amen.

diary · israel

The dawn will come

levtaylor

My soul looks to God as a nightguard watches for the morning. – Psalm 130:6

I used to think the night guard was watching for the dawn with eagerness, excitement, and trepidation.

I just did a night shift watching out for army vans and settlers in the village of Umm al-Khair.

Now I know that the night guard simply greets the dawn with a weary sigh.

The last time I was here, we came to see the ruins of their destroyed homes. After we left, settlers and military shot at them.

In the short time since, the settlers have ramped up their aggression. They come in large, fanatical groups to terrorise the neighbourhood.

Night is a time when they feel most at risk. They also now have the added fear that the army, which is now entirely comprised of military reservists from the Hebron settlements, will come and carry out late night arrests.

So the locals stay awake, watching. They say they cannot sleep anyway. If they shut their eyes, fear is waiting in the dark.

The Talmud teaches that there is a state that is neither asleep nor awake. A rabbinic colleague once compared this to breastfeeding a newborn in the night. Now I know another version of this non-sleep. Fear.

I could not sleep either. We were supposed to sleep in shifts of a few hours. I lay down for about four hours.

A local boy stayed up with us to practise his English through the night. He wants to go to university. He hopes he will have passed his exams, but he’s worried, because he was distracted during the maths test, as his house had just been bulldozed.

We watched for every vehicle, every sign of activity, praying that the night would be “boring.”

When dawn broke, the children flooded into the playground where we had been camping out. I spun them round on the merry-go-round and pushed them on the swings.

A five-year-old came up with a cheeky grin and wanted to tell one of the international activists something. She took out an app on her phone that translated for hi.: “Gaza is my family, they are being bombed by Israel.”

In the light of day, I could see the human impact of the occupation. Kids – normal, sweet kids – who already know they are under siege.

Destroyed homes. Murals on walls professing the village’s resilience. Women cooking breakfast and men pouring cups of tea for activists who stayed the night.

Dawn will come to this sacred scrubland.

I know that morning will one day come, after decades upon decades of occupation and war.

But daybreak will not be the moment when all is set right. It will simply be when we take stock of what happened in the night.

In the daylight, we will see all the bodies of repeated catastrophes and finally be able to mourn them.

When dawn comes, we will see all that has been destroyed, and we will realise how much work has to be done to heal and repair.

I will wait for morning to come to Palestine-Israel just like the night guard waits for the first rays of daylight: restlessly, anxiously, hoping there will be enough remaining to begin the processes of reconciliation and rebuilding.

Dawn will surely come, but that will only be the beginning.

Wait, O Israel, for God, for God holds love and redemption. It is God who will redeem Israel from all their sins. – Psalm 130:7-8

diary · israel

Bring them home now

levtaylor

In the morning, at Shabbat services, a young woman got up at the end to announce that last week was the birthday of a girl she had taught as a youth leader. Her friends all met up in Tel Aviv to celebrate it. She wasn’t there.

Her name is Naama Levy. She was taken hostage on October 7th. The images of her capture are burned into my brain. If you have not seen them, please exercise extreme caution before you look them up.

After Shabbat services, I went down to see friends in Rechavya. There, all the posters are displayed for a guy called Hersh Goldberg-Polin. He is an ultra for the local football team, HaPoel Yerushalayim.

Hersh was abducted on October 7th after his arm was blown off by a grenade. His mother has been campaigning tirelessly for diplomatic measures to get her son home safe.

At my friend’s house, she asks: “my mum says that back home in America “bring them home” is a pro-war slogan? Can that be true?”

“Yes, it is in Britain too. It’s been quite the adjustment seeing it here.”

“But who is it directed at?”

“I don’t know, I guess they’re petitioning Hamas.”

“I don’t understand though: how can people want the hostages home and be pro-war?”

“The hostages are the pretext for all the attacks on Gaza.”

“But they are not in Gaza for the hostages!” her husband insists.

I know. They know. Everyone here knows. I wish people in Britain knew too.

When Shabbat ended and the first stars appeared in the sky, I joined the protests to bring the hostages home.

Everyone had banners calling for an end to war and an end to occupation. Supporters of Hersh’s mum handed out stickers with the number of days he has been held captive.

At the end, legendary Israeli peacenik David Grossman gave a speech as police charged at demonstrators.

Where is their support from Diaspora Jews? I wish I could hear my own community’s voices raised like these in Jerusalem- against war.

diary · israel

The jackals braying in the mountains

levtaylor

I woke up this morning in a friend’s home on a moshav in Israel-Palestine. I am here for a month to learn and to volunteer with Rabbis for Human Rights.

The setting is beautiful. As the sun set last night over the mountains, the shrublands lit up in shades of orange and brown. Then jackals began to bray, calling out in the echoing valley. As we went to sleep, we even heard a hyena.

Overlooking us is a massive military compound for Israeli surveillance. On the walk to my friend’s home, I could see the separation wall.

We are on land that was taken during the Nakba of 1948. The people who lived here were dispersed, and their farmland taken. We can now see the native fig vines still, but alongside European pine trees planted by the JNF. The village opposite us is comprised of people who were forcefully evicted from a neighbouring town. They are Palestinian citizens of Israel within the “Green Line.”

It is all here. The beauty and the architecture of war. The reality of cruelty and the possibility of what might be.

“If anything, I am more convinced I want to stay now,” my friend says.

Since the start of the war, they have been protesting for peace several times a week. They have been involved in grassroots solidarity actions and getting aid to the people who need it most. At the very beginning, they were part of underground efforts to get people to safety. (And now you understand why I have to write so vaguely.)

The work looks exhausting. They and their friends have been beaten, imprisoned, shot at, and surveyed, only for trying to bring about peace.

“I have to stay now because I can see what it could be.”

Amidst all the rubble, they can see even more clearly the possibilities of a shared peaceful future with the Palestinians. And feel even more that is worth fighting for.

Once our rabbis were ascending to Jerusalem.  When they reached Mount Scopus, they tore their garments.  When they reached the Temple Mount, they saw a jackal leaving from the site of the inner sanctum of the Temple ruins. They began weeping, but Rabbi Akiva laughed.

The sages said to him, “Why do you laugh?”  He said to them, “Why do you weep?”

They said to him, “Jackals now tread on the site regarding which it is written, ‘And the stranger who approaches shall die’ (Bamdibar 1:51) – shall we not weep?”

He said to them, “For this very reason I laugh… In the context of the prophecy of Uriya it is written, ‘Therefore, because of you, Zion shall be plowed like a field’ (Yirmiyahu 26:18), and in the prophecy of Zekharya it is written, ‘Elderly men and women shall once again sit along the streets of Jerusalem’ (Zekharya 8:5). 

Until Uriya’s prophecy was realized, I feared that perhaps Zekharya’s prophecy would not be realized; but now that Uriya’s prophecy has been realized, it is certain that Zekharya’s prophecy will be realized.”

There are jackals braying in the mountains here. There is occupation and division and war.

And there are also the people building solidarity. Because of them, the prophecies of peace may be fulfilled.

israel · sermon

The nation is (not) at war

levtaylor


Fifteen years ago, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a powerful speech, in which she warned about “the danger of the single story.” This, she says, is how you create a single story: “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

Because of the single story told about Africa, Westerners knew it only as backwards, poor, and disease-ridden. They did not know how diverse, interesting and resilient Africans were. They did not know that Africans were not, in fact, one people with one story, but billions of people with billions of stories.

She warns her listeners: “The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar.”

In the book of Joshua, we are presented with a single story about the Israelites and their enemies. In our haftarah, Joshua gathers the tribes of Israel at Shchem and presents his account of the conquest of Canaan. He declares:



You crossed the Jordan and came to Jericho. The citizens of Jericho fought against you, as did also the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites and Jebusites, but I gave them into your hands. I sent the hornet ahead of you, which drove them out before you—also the two Amorite kings. You did not do it with your own sword and bow. So I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build; and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.

In Joshua’s single story, the Israelites are a nation united at war. They all came over at once and went to conquer the land of Canaan. Their enemies were diverse in name but unified in mission. In the list of warring tribes that came up against the Israelites, there is no distinction. Every one of them fought the Israelites. Every one of them lost. By God’s miraculous deeds, the Israelites took over the entire country, and now they have a whole land, ready-made, for them to inhabit.

But wait. There is a flaw with this single story. Just as Joshua decrees that the entirety of these foreign nations has been wiped out, he also warns the Israelites not to mix with them.

All of these other tribes have been completely driven out of the land of Israel; all of them have been vanquished; now the only people left are the Israelites.

But even though the Israelites are the only people remaining, you must not marry the others; or get involved in their cultural practices; or go to their shrines with them and worship their gods.

The Jewish bible scholar, Rachel Havrelock, has written a book looking at why this contradiction is so stark. She suggests that, while the Book of Joshua would love to tell a single story of unanimous military victory, it cannot get away from what the people see with their own eyes.

In reality, all the nations that the Israelites “drove out” are still there. The Israelites are still meeting them, marrying them, striking deals with them, and fraternising with them.

Joshua is putting together the war story as a national myth to bring the people together. In his story, the Israelites must be one people and so must all their enemies. Victory must be total and war must be the only way.

In fact, Havrelock finds that there are lots of contradictions in the book of Joshua. It says that the nation was united in war, while also describing all the internal tribal disagreements and all the rebellions against Joshua.

It says that they took over the whole land, but when it lists places, you can clearly see that plenty of the space is contested, and that the borders are shifting all the time. It says they took over Jerusalem, and also says that it remains a divided city to this day.

So what is the reality? Archaeological digs suggest it is very unlikely that the conquest of Canaan ever happened in the way the Book of Joshua describes. The land was not vanquished in one lifetime by a united army. Instead, more likely, the Israelites gradually merged with, struck deals with, and collaborated with, lots of disparate tribes.

They were never really an ethnically homogenous group. They were never really a disciplined military. They were a group of people who gathered together other groups of people over many centuries to unite around a story. Ancient Israel was the product of cooperation and collaboration.

Our Torah takes all the different stories of lots of different tribes and combines them into a single narrative. That is why the Torah reads more like a library of hundreds of folktales than a single spiel.

But a government at war needs a single story. It needs to tell the story that there is only one nation, which has no internal division. It needs to tell the story that there is only one enemy, and that the whole of the enemy is a murderous, barbarous bloc. It needs to insist that the enemy must be destroyed in its entirety. It needs to tell the story that war is the only way.

Reality, however, rarely lives up to the single story that war propaganda would like us to believe.

Over the last few months, we have been bombarded with a single story of war. We are all at war. Not only Israel, but the whole Jewish people. We are all at war until every hostage is freed from Gaza. We are all at war until Hamas is destroyed. We are all at war and there is no other way.

But hidden underneath that story are other stories. Suppressed stories. Stories that suggest Israel may not be united in war.

There is the single story that Gaza must be bombed to release the remaining hostages.

There is another story. Avihai Brodutch was with his family on Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7th. He survived. His wife, Hagar, was taken hostage, along with their three children, aged 10, 8 and 4. His whole family and his neighbours were taken hostage.

Only a week later, at 3am, Avihai took a plastic chair and his family dog, and went to launch a one-man protest outside the Israeli military offices. He insisted that blood was on Bibi’s hands for refusing to negotiate. He said that Netanyahu was treating his family as collateral damage in his war. He initiated a rallying cry: “prisoner exchange.”

This has become a demand of Israeli civil society. They will swap Palestinian prisoners for the Israeli hostages. This was achieved, when 240 Palestinian prisoners were swapped in return for 80 Israelis and 30 non-Israelis captive in Gaza.

There are still over 100 hostages in Gaza. There are still around 4,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. Around 1,000 are detained indefinitely without charge. Around 160 are children.

It is simply the right thing that Hamas should release the hostages. It is also simply the right thing that Netanyahu should release the Palestinian prisoners. If they did agree, everyone would be able to return safely to their families. Doesn’t that sound more worth fighting for than war?

There is a single story, promoted by Netanyahu, that Israel must fight until it has destroyed Hamas.

There is another story. Maoz Inon’s parents were both murdered by Hamas on October 7th. As soon as he had finished sitting shiva, he took up his call for peace. All he wanted was an end to the war.

Speaking to American news this week, he said: “A military invasion into Gaza will just make things worse, will just keep this cycle of blood, the cycle of death, the cycle of violence that’s been going for a century.”

His call for peace is echoed by other families of those who lost loved ones on October 7th. They have lobbied, produced videos, and sent letters to Netanyahu, begging to be heard.

Some are desperate for the government to recognise that further death is not what they want. Now, as Netanyahu has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians, their call has still not been heard.

And after all those dead, is Hamas any closer to being destroyed? Of course not. All this bombing does is ensure that a new generation of Palestinians trapped in Gaza will grow up to hate Israel.

This war is how you get more terrorists. It’s how you ensure that war never ends. Wouldn’t it be better to fight for a ceasefire than to fight for a war?

There is a single story that the nation is united in war.

There is another story. This week, 18-year-old Tal Mitnik was sent to military prison in Israel for refusing to fight in the war. Although this news has barely made it into English-language media, many Israelis have expressed their support.

Writing to Haaretz, one refusenik wrote: “I was inside. We were so brainwashed there. I refused and I’m not the only one. I have a family and this is not a war with a clear purpose. […] My children will have a father and I hope yours will too.” Another parent wrote: “My son is also refusing. I will not sacrifice him for Bibi.”

There is another story: that this is Netanyahu’s war, not ours.

There is another story: that war is not the answer.

There is another story: that every captive must go free.

There is another story: that all bombs and rockets must end.

There is another story: that we will not give licence to any more bloodshed.

There is a story that the nation is at war. In times of war, the government must tell that as the only story, to blot out alternative stories, to ensure that war is the only way.

But there are other stories. And, if we tell those other stories, there will be other ways.

Shabbat shalom.