If I am only for myself
Yesterday, I insisted that there is an urgent need for clarity about our own interests, and for unflinching determination to put them first. But our tradition makes no bones about the fact that doing only this must lead us to question our very humanity. “If I am only for myself, what am I?” The phrasing is biting. Being concerned only with our own needs makes us something less than human, and even worse, something less than what Jews are supposed to be.
Allow me to explain. Many years ago, I saw an interview with a convicted Palestinian terrorist, involved in a massacre of school children. He was asked point blank if he had any qualms about taking the lives of innocent kids. His response was chilling. “What difference does it make? They’ll grow up to be soldiers.” And I thought to myself at the time: this is not a human being. He has lost his human soul. And I also thought at the time, “Thank G-d we don’t have Jews who think like that.”
Enter Eliyahu Yossian, well-known Israeli talking head:
Interviewed in Oct. of 2023, he said: “There are no innocents. There is no [civilian] population in Gaza, there are 2.5 million terrorists… All of them are terrorists… we should have killed 50,000 Gazans… Hamas is not the enemy, all of Gaza is the enemy.”
A few months later, he said, “Israel should level the ground in Gaza, kill as many as possible & spare no one.” “The woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy, and the first grader is an enemy, the Hamas militant is an enemy… the pregnant woman is an enemy. We see a boy carrying chocolate in his hand yet this same boy will learn how to use a Kalashnikov in the first grade. He is not a boy. He is a terrorist even though he is a boy.”
The soulless Palestinian terrorist has finally met his Israeli partner. What are we? And how can we not be ashamed?
In what world could it be okay for members of the leadership class in Israel, Jews, to make similar kinds of statements? And there are indeed more, although for reasons of time and sanity I will not quote them all here.
As I mentioned yesterday, most of what we hear about Israel’s supposed crimes are lies. But the fact that most statements are lies does not allow us to ignore horrible things that are true. And calling for the death of babies is horrible.
As always, we have to thread the needle while walking on a tightrope. As my Alex said, accepting a horrible truth does not mandate accepting all the mendacious spin around that horrible truth. In this case, it is often bandied about that there is a data base of 500 statements by Israeli officials, similar to the one I just read, that are purported to demonstrate genocidal intent. After reviewing several hundred of them, I can say unequivocally that not a single one of them demonstrates anything of the kind. For the Israeli Prime Minister to declare, for example, that we are fighting a war of light against darkness reflects a profoundly elementary and utterly obvious insight about post Oct. 7 reality. Nothing else. It’s the equivalent of saying, “Nazis are bad.” And typical jingoistic statements–”Let’s bomb ‘em back to the stone age” do not a Final Solution make.
Eliyahu Yossian is a mere talking head. He is not Prime Minister, or an Army Chief of Staff, and in fact his vicious suggestions directly contradict official Israeli policy. So we must not succumb to the media frenzy about genocide. But statements like his, that are sadly and painfully authentic, are disgusting and shameful, far beneath our dignity as Jews. And so I ask, “What are we?”
In similar fashion, we must grapple with the reality of hunger in Gaza. Let us first take note: as the world debates the extent to which Israel is or is not fulfilling its responsibility to provide sustenance to the Gazan population—a topic that is being written about literally in every magazine and newspaper in the world, there seems to be no one who has noted that never, in the history of warfare, has any nation at war been deemed responsible for providing for the nutritional needs of the civilian enemy population. Never. When Patton crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, in March of 1945, I can assure you he wasn’t transporting care packages for the starving Germans.
So in other words when we argue about how much more or less Israel should do for the Gazan population, we are participating in a debate based entirely on a double standard, the expectation that Jews simply must do something that no one else in the world has ever done.
But this is the point: the world is not wrong—not because they say so—I couldn’t care less what they have to say—but because we say so. We cannot bear the images of hungry Gazan civilians. Indifference for us is not an option. And it doesn’t matter whether we talk about starvation, famine, malnutrition, or simply hunger—I can say without fear of contradiction that not one person in this room would trade places with a Palestinian trapped in Gaza. And I must point out, and am ashamed to point out, that when the Prime Minister of Israel makes the statement that there is no starvation in Gaza, he is, it pains me to say, simply lying. He is acting in bad faith, and as Jews we must call him out for that, just as we must call out the Israeli government officials that, for nearly 3 months in the spring of 2025, actually promoted starving the Gazan population as a matter of policy.
For G-d’s sake, what are we?
And so we must help the people of Gaza—not because the UN says so, but because we say so. We have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to make the world aware of it’s double standard, but we should wear that double standard as a badge of honor.
If I am only for myself, what am I?
We Jews, our tradition tells us, are rachmanim bnei rachmanim—merciful people, the children of merciful people. To succumb to the most brutal and coarse aspects of our nature, and to mimic our barbaric enemies—to suggest, as Defense Minister Smotrich has, that “ it may be just and moral to starve 2 million Gaza residents until Israeli hostages are returned” —is to betray ourselves and our ancestors. Feeding the hungry of Gaza is not just a comfort to hungry Palestinian children. It is a comfort to our Jewish soul, and it is something that we, as Jews, should strive for. We can recognize the truth of hunger in Gaza without accepting the ugly and anti-Semitic narrative spun about it. Recognize it and do something about it.
We do not, at this moment, know where all this is leading. We do not even know where it should lead. I will be speaking more about this on Kol Nidrey, but let me say here and now that our choices are not between success and failure, but rather between one kind of failure vs. another kind of failure. We may be forced to choose between the fate of the hostages and the fate of the nation. It is a horrible, “Sophie’s Choice.” But this I do know. As long as we are caught in the horrible moral and social and spiritual swamp that is the Gaza conflict, we have to fight the firehose of lies that blasts anti-Semitic filth all about us, while at the same time having the courage and integrity to recognize and grapple with the ugly truths that are nearly too painful to hear. We have to fight Hamas as the barbaric sadistic scum they truly are, while at the same time maintaining, indeed championing, the rights and dignity of innocent civilians (regardless of their ideologies and attitudes, much less the ideologies and attitudes of their parents).
In the end, when the shooting stops, and the dust settles—and it will, may it only happen quickly and in our time—the echoes of the world’s kneejerk condemnation of Israel will die out. College kids will focus their superficial understanding on some other conflict,, in a place they can’t find on a map, the media will find someplace else to lie about. And politicians will find some other issue to grandstand about. But we will be left that one question, that one question which we ourselves must answer, that one question which we, the perennially powerless, rarely have had to answer but which in our era is a moral necessity: what are we? Our sacred purpose today is to ensure that by the use of the mental and moral facilities that Hashem has granted our people, the Jewish people, since time immemorial, and the sacred and spiritual traditions that we have studied for centuries, we will be able to live with our answer to that question.
Long after Hamas is a mere unpleasant memory, that question will remain. It is the great Jewish test of our time. May we show courage, wisdom, and determination as we seek to find an answer.
And then there is Ezra Yachin, Israeli Army reservist. Speaking to soldiers, immediately after Oct. 7, He said, “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live. …Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbour, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him…. We want to invade, not like before, we want to enter and destroy what’s in front of us, and destroy houses, then destroy the ones after it. With all of our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy.”
Consider: Major General Giora Eiland: Who are the “poor” women of Gaza? They are all
the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers.On the one hand, they are part of the infrastructure that supports the organization, and on the other hand, if they experience a humanitarian disaster, then it can be assumed that some of the Hamas
fighters and the more junior commanders will begin to understand that the war is futile … The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe
epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer …It is precisely its civil collapse that will bring the end of the war closer. When senior Israeli figures say in the media “It’s either us or them” we should clarify the question of who is “them”. “They” are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the “civilian” officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population who enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered on its atrocities on October 7th.”
Now it is worth noting that Major General Eiland has been retired from the army for over 20 years. Ezra Yachin is 95 years old, and commands no one. Eliyahu Yossian is a talking head6 on TV. None of them are even vaguely close to legitimate leadership positions in Israel. Their comments are as irrelevant as they are ugly and bigoted.
But they are a schande for us, and even as we reject the blood libel directed against us, we must recognize and grapple with the fact that in our midst there are now Jews who morally are just as guilty and just as inhumane as the Palestinian terrorists