Our Moral Power – Sermon for Rosh Hashanah 5786 (2025)

The turmoil, hunger and utter devastation in Gaza arouse deep emotions at the heart of Jewish community, identity and morality.  

Amidst all the cross currents of confusing information, recriminations and abject suffering, whatever our views and perspectives, we all face common questions.  What does it mean for our hearts and souls?  How can we stand in our moral power, and be #StrongerTogether amidst it all, and not lose ourselves as a people of integrity?

By Rabbi David Evan Markus 
Rosh Hashanah 5786
        
Note: These remarks concern current Mideast events.  New York's Rules Governing Judicial Conduct generally ban me from making public comment that might cause my impartiality reasonably to be questioned, including about the Mideast conflict's root causes.  Instead, I discuss the emotional and spiritual valences of terror, trauma and moral complexity, and the laws of war, which judicial ethics allow pursuant to 2023 ruling.

Shanah tovah.  Thank you for being here to bring in 5786.  We are #StrongerTogether, our theme for these High Holy Days.

As many of you know, I live by two covenants.  One is spiritual, as a rabbi.  The other is legal, for the Judiciary I serve.  Both limit what I say about politics, and both uplift morality, which is today's subject.

I echo the "Prayer of the Mothers" that I just chanted as our Haftarah: "You did not create us to kill each other, or to live in fear, anger or hatred in Your world."  Simple and elegant words – and my words today are not.  My words concern the Mideast, virulent antisemitism and utter devastation, who we are and who we must be.

I know the risk of speaking these words.  We seek comfort, and no words can do the subject justice.  Yet the subject is here anyway, silence does it no good, and the experience of Hagar in the Torah reading for Rosh Hashanah forces our focus (Gen. 21:14-16):

ַויַּשְׁכֵּ֣ם אַבְרָהָ֣ם ׀ בַּבֹּ֡קֶר וַיִּֽקַּֽח־לֶ֩חֶם֩ וְחֵ֨מַת מַ֜יִם וַיִּתֵּ֣ן אֶל־הָ֠גָ֠ר שָׂ֧ם עַל־שִׁכְמָ֛הּ וְאֶת־הַיֶּ֖לֶד וַֽיְשַׁלְּחֶ֑הָ וַתֵּ֣לֶךְ וַתֵּ֔תַע בְּמִדְבַּ֖ר בְּאֵ֥ר שָֽׁבַע׃ וַיִּכְל֥וּ הַמַּ֖יִם מִן־הַחֵ֑מֶת וַתַּשְׁלֵ֣ךְ אֶת־הַיֶּ֔לֶד תַּ֖חַת אַחַ֥ד הַשִּׂיחִֽם׃ תֵּ֩לֶךְ֩ וַתֵּ֨שֶׁב לָ֜הּ מִנֶּ֗גֶד הַרְחֵק֙ כִּמְטַחֲוֵ֣י קֶ֔שֶׁת כִּ֣י אָֽמְרָ֔ה אַל־אֶרְאֶ֖ה בְּמ֣וֹת הַיָּ֑לֶד וַתֵּ֣שֶׁב מִנֶּ֔גֶד וַתִּשָּׂ֥א אֶת־קֹלָ֖הּ וַתֵּֽבְךְּ׃

Avraham woke in the morning, took bread and a skin of water, gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder with [Yishmael], and sent her away.  She went to wander the desert of Beersheva.  When the water was spent from the skin, she cast the child under a bush.  She went and sat opposite him a bowshot away, saying, “Let me not see the boy’s death!”  She lifted her voice and wept.

My words will be imperfect.  I pray that they offer comfort of a sort by airing what is on our collective hearts, and by affirming our moral power.

Among us are four feelings on our subject.  Each came to me directly from one or more of you, speaking to me about identity and morality.  I bet we all feel one of these, or a variant, or more than one.

One told me that you cannot bear to hear about Jewish morality when children are dying in Gaza.  In pain for what is done, ostensibly in our names, you can barely be in shul.  Some attend nowhere today for this reason.  We are #StrongerTogether, but some are missing.

Another told me that you feel more Jewish than ever, but strain with friends and allies challenging you to defend a caricature of Israel because you are Jewish.  We are #StrongerTogether, but don't fit in.

A third told me that you are angry that the world holds Israel to an absurd double standard.  No country would accept terror regimes bent on its destruction, cynically using their own people as pawns to blame Israel for their misery.  We are #StrongerTogether, but indignant.

A fourth told me that the Mideast drama doesn't really affect you.  You respect what others say and feel, but it doesn't much land for you as an American.  We are #StrongerTogether, but don't feel connected.

Each of these is a sadness, a solitude.  All of them break my heart.  

I feel all of them, and I feel all of you.  All of these perspectives are wherever Jews live around the world.  That very fact proves, as Talmud puts it (Sanhedrin 27b), שֶׁכָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל עֲרָבִים זֶה בָּזֶּה / "that all Israel is mixed together."  When half of world Jews live in Israel in constant anxiety; when Judaism's flag also is the State of Israel's flag; when critique of Israel sparks anti-Jewish violence; when academics and artists turn on Jews – not Israel's government, but Jews – in the false name of liberalism, it is painfully clear that we're in it together.

Antisemitism weaponizes this core of our creed.  Antisemitism weaponizes the truth that, in important spiritual ways, we are collectively responsible.  Our moral power stands in this truth, which is our strength and our calling.  When Cain killed Abel and asked God his snide rhetorical question if Cain was his brother's keeper, the correct answer was "yes." 

We must love the downtrodden and defenseless, because we have been downtrodden and defenseless.  We are to love the stranger – ha-ger, Hagar – because we were strangers.  As Shai Held teaches, our command is to love, not to be loved.  As my colleague Mike Moskowitz puts it, justice never is about just us.

And, we must defend ourselves: that, too, is just.  No valid morality I know obliges any person or any group to be sitting ducks or pacifists amidst hateful hell-bent aggression.  Israel as a nation, and Jews as a people, have a moral and legal right to defend against terror and hate-fueled destruction.

Herein lie the two philosophical sources of our conflicted feelings about Jewish life after October 7 – and most of the conflicted feelings percolating among us.  First, who we are morally seems to clash with who we are collectively, which is divided both here and in Israel.  Second, hatred fuels the Mideast's twisted geopolitics, which are the world's most twisted geopolitics by most any fair account and regardless of one's politics or perspectives.  

The Gaza crisis spotlights both, and we must be clear about both if we are to stand in our moral power and truly be #StrongerTogether.

First, Judaism's double identity as a world religion and a people – our universal character and our particularistic one.  Judaism proclaims itself to be highly ethical.  Jewish history, at our best, shows deep and profound self-awareness and self-critique in service of putting morality first.  Moral universalism is our dignity and strength. 

At the same time, whatever our beliefs, we call ourselves "Members of the Tribe" for a reason.  Whoever we are, our creed and identity bind us together in a common fabric of history and ultimately shared interest and shared fate.  Jews around the world are strikingly different in race, ethnicity, belief, practice and culture – historically divided into 12 tribes, today as diverse as just about any group – yet we are Members of the Tribe.  One people small yet global, different but same.

So long as Jews collectively were exiled and weak, moral universalism and tribal particularism could co-exist with only the relatively infrequent philosophical skirmish. 

But no longer are Jews collectively exiled and weak.  Jews in Israel now get to ask: is there a Jewish way to build roads? collect taxes? fight terror?  Can Jews be a "light unto the world" while living under the gun?  Can anyone?  Moral universalism and tribal particularism now more directly clash, and the whole world seems to have a front-row seat.

Recently my colleague Jay Michaelson ran an opinion piece on some of the implications:

Universalist and particularist tendencies have existed in Judaism since the very beginning.  Of course, what’s different now is that Jews... have temporal power.  Israel has the army, guns, bombs, and naval blockade....

Particularist Judaism fails as a spiritual, ethical practice that applies to all human beings.  It always has.  It will always prefer Jews to non-Jews.  It will always inculcate powerful feelings of tribal cohesion, love and separateness that influence how people reach ethical conclusions....

To me, opening the heart means opening the heart to all people and cultivating compassion for everyone, not only Jews or even primarily Jews.  Yes, I have my family and tribal loyalties and loves, but ethical axioms supersede them.  What I love about Judaism is precisely what is ignored in Gaza.

I usually agree with Jay, but not his suggestion that either Judaism or the State of Israel inherently devalues non-Jews.  Israel is dynamically diverse and pluralist – far more than most other Mideast nations – with many of the challenges of dynamic diversity and pluralism that many Western nations share.  That some Israeli leaders would turn away from Israeli pluralism pains me deeply as a rabbi and spiritual leader.

I also disagree that Israel ignores the plight of Gaza.  Moral pain may run especially deep from Israel's heavy hand in it and the extremism of some current Israeli leaders, but Israeli society does not ignore Gazan suffering.  Far from it.  There are reams of evidence of extraordinary effort the State of Israel makes to avoid putting innocents in harm's way, and the rousing of Israel's civil society to help and heal.  Meanwhile the ethics code for Israel's military obliges each soldier "to preserve human dignity.  All humans are to be valued regardless of race, creed, nationality, gender, status or role ... with meticulous planning and proportional action."  U.S. news reports do not capture that Israel does, in fact, rigorously enforce this mandate.

And, even so, Israel has killed tens of thousands in Gaza.  Our creed holds (Sanhedrin 37a) that destroying even one life destroys a whole world.  The scale of tragedy is staggering.  I'll get to that.

While the world debates Israel's role in Gaza, at least two things are clear enough. 

​One is that Israel is far more than her current government.  The other is that Israel the State does not speak for Jews the People.  ​

In one recent poll, 74% of Israelis said that they support ending the war now.  Here is footage of a recent Tel Aviv protest of the war with 400,000 people – fully 10% of Tel Aviv's metro area, the equivalent of two million in Manhattan.  Across the country, fully two million protested at once: that's 20% of the population, like 70 million in the U.S.  By contrast, the largest protest in U.S. history – after the George Floyd killing in Minnesota – was "just" 17 million around the country, 5% of the U.S. population.  And Israelis are at it every week!

As the cliché goes, this is what democracy looks like.  This is moral power: standing up, signs quoting Jewish ethics back at Israel's leadership, massive fundraising for Gaza relief, high-profile draft refusal, sharp dissent within the military.   ​

​It seems that Israel is having our Vietnam.

No, the Vietnam protests did not bring back a single life, but they did stop the war; today there are supportive relations between Vietnam, which had to be rebuilt, and the U.S., which had to learn hard lessons.  We don't yet know where Israel's road will lead, but the notion that Jewish ethics are gone, respectfully, is flat wrong.  They might change the world.  Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apta taught that in a dark room it only takes a small candle to bring light.  "The most broken of times provide an opportunity to create the greatest of times."

Oh, but at such cost! 

Our link to our people everywhere means that we must never ignore suffering anywhere.  We take collective responsibility.  Our bond with Israel runs deep, so we have a duty to use our moral power.  Yakir Eglander, Israeli philosopher and my seminary faculty colleague, writes that in Jewish ethics, Pirkei Avot's אַל תִּפְרוֹשׁ מִן הַצִּיבּוּר / "Do not separate from community" means that "effective critique must come from within a society.  Social reformers, to have any influence on the hearts of their people, must be one of them in their pain and struggle."

​Our pain reveals what we love.  Our peoplehood, our collective identity, our universalist Judaism, all demand that we use our hurt to catalyze and drive our moral power.  We do Judaism justice that way.

At the same time, we also must wield moral power truthfully, because facts matter.  Gaza is beyond tragic – and, did we know that Egypt began blockading Gaza before Israel did? that Egypt allowed tunnels from Sinai into Gaza since the 1980s? that Israel unconditionally left Gaza in 2005 only to be attacked from it? that Hamas stole power in a 2007 Palestinian civil war and tramples just about everyone's civil rights? that by 2023 terror tunnels longer than the New York City subway system infiltrated Gazan society – schools, hospitals, homes and community centers? that Iran backed them?  

Then there are the hostages – 717 days later and counting.  Securing the return of someone who was kidnapped is one of the great mitzvot of Jewish life.

Gaza is starving: let there be no doubt.  Two different things both can be true at the same time.  I hear the haunting cry of Hagar – "Don't let me see the death of the boy!"  How could this be?  Can't you hear it?  How can we not?

This summer, I made a point of trying to find out how these two things – nearly two years of hostage taking, and starvation in Gaza – affected each other, and what the real facts on the ground are.  Of course, reliable and unbiased information is hard to find.  This summer, I listened to literally every briefing available to me – hard right, hard left, everything in between; domestic in the U.S., in Israel, international, whatever I could find. 

I expected starkly different portraits, figuring that shared truth would be elusive. 

To my surprise and sometimes shock, there actually was very little disagreement among the many briefings – despite what we tend to hear on the news, despite what we might imagine.

With only one exception, all agreed that Israel's halt to food aid last spring went tragically wrong.  They also agreed that the U.N. was the original reason for aid bottlenecks – not Israel.

With only one exception, all agreed that food aid is looted, diverted by Hamas, resold at prices the poorest cannot afford, funding profiteers.  Briefings disputed how much is looted.

With no exception, all agreed that Hamas is the first cause of Gazan suffering and must give up power.  In July, the Arab League unanimously agreed: 22 Arab countries spoke as one.

None accused Israel of genocide – not even on the far left.  Even the United Kingdom says it's not genocide; even the U.N. issued two reports disagreeing with each other.  Legally, it is not genocide if Israel has the technical capacity to kill most Gazans, God forbid, but tries to move them away from terror tunnel operations and out of harm's way to destroy the infrastructure of terror that makes no distinction between civilian and military. 

Then again, it barely matters what we call it.  The dire hunger and total destruction in Gaza are unlike anything the world has seen since 1945.  Today in Gaza there are hundreds of thousands of Hagars weeping, "Do not let me see my child die."

So it is little surprise that none of my summer reports spared criticism of Israel – not even on the far right.  Israel must do all it can, and keep trying no matter what, to save life and surge food aid, because Israel is responsible for how she wields power.  Hamas might criminally use Gazan civilians, but it is Israel that drops bombs.  Is there a price too high for a civilized and moral country to exact?

Granted, no nation could face what the State of Israel must face and come out morally unscathed.  Often Israel is held to a double standard.  When diplomats and keyboard warriors do it, we must stand in our moral power by calling it out as antisemitism dressed up in more polite clothing.  

And two things can be true at the same time.  The Israel we love must do all she can to stand in her moral power, to try her absolute best to be her best amidst some of the world's worst.  In this duty, the State of Israel has failed spectacularly.
 
It is not disloyal for us to say so.  It is mandatory that we say so.  Our loyalty to rightness, and to the Israel we love, commands that we pick up Yakir Eglander's message – to call Israel to account precisely as we connect with Israel's tremendous pain that no civilized nation could bear better. 

One of these would be difficult enough.  We must do both.  Either one of these challenges us to our core.  We face both.  Therefore this moment needs us not to be small, but to be big and bold, to stand in our moral power. 

Our pain reveals what we love.  In our pain, we can stand in our moral power by calling Israel to do better, even if the task might be all but impossible.  In our pain, we can stand in our moral power by calling out extremism that is so far out of line with who we must be.  

Our hearts are big enough to love Israel with pride and hope; to cringe at the scale of death; to grieve with the mothers of Gaza and the mothers of October 7; to stand in our moral power whatever our views; and to do as Elie Wiesel said in 1986, when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Yes, that Elie Wiesel – Elie Wiesel the Holocaust survivor.  Elie Wiesel the philosopher.  Elie Wiesel the author of 57 books.   In 1986 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, standing up for Jews and all others at the same time, Wiesel said words that echoed across the decades – and that resonate still.  He said this:

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant....  [T]hat place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

On this Rosh Hashanah, the center of my universe is a strip of land the size of New Jersey far away and so very close to my heart – as each of you is so very close to my heart.  Let this holy day and pivotal moment be not the end of a conversation but the start.

​May our hurt continuously remind us what we love, press us to stand in our moral power and the truth of our creed, rededicate us to living a life of exacting morality, and in that merit truly become #StrongerTogether.