Hear Our Voice

Dear CSK,

I am in Israel. I am writing to you from Tel Aviv-Jaffa, from the Ruth Daniel Residence, which is a hotel/hostile owned and run by Beit Daniel, the largest Reform synagogue in Israel (more about Beit Daniel and its similarities to CSK – and our similarities to them – in the next blogpost). For this entry, I want to offer you the beginning of some answers. In my most recent blog, I let you know that I was on my way here and that I hoped to begin to find some answers or at least some clarity to offer you. One of the participants in this small fellowship of Reform Rabbis studying together in Israel, is my first boss, Rabbi Jonathan Miller. Jonathan was my boss in Birmingham, Alabama, where for 12 years, I worked as the Director of Adult Jewish Outreach, Education, and as Associate Rabbi. For years, Jonathan has been toiling in the vineyards of translating Israel for American liberal Jews and his blog, “Backwards and Forwards,” is an excellent resource for meditating and marinating on American Judaism. His most recent post, “Ripples in a Pond,” is an excellent elucidation of what in Israel, is known as the matzav, the “Situation.” Here’s a small taste, the full blogpost is below:

Who is responsible? That is an important question.

Israel bears responsibility for the suffering, but not alone. Looking back, it was foolish to cut off supplies to the strip. The goal was to weaken the Hamas’ hold on the population. A laudable goal to be sure. Unfortunately, their plans backfired. The plan to distribute the aid failed. Now we know it would have been more effective to have set up Costcos in Gaza City than these food distribution centers. Live and learn. I don’t say that glibly. Should the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have been more effective? That would have been good. Were the goals of the foundation, to deliver food and bypass Hamas and Hamas-dependent agencies a laudable goal? Of course it was. Unfortunately, we now know that this plan failed in its conception and execution. Now that the failures are understood, solutions will be found. And we all have to be sorry for the program's shortcomings and the pain it brought to hungry people.

Egypt borders Gaza to the south. One does not see trucks lined up in El Arish waiting to deliver food and fuel from the Arab world to their Muslim brothers and sisters. That could help some.

Hamas bears the ultimate responsibility. It started the war. It continues with the war even after it has been defeated. Its terrorists are willing to fight to the last hungry Gazan child. I wouldn’t call their resistance bravery or justice. They could alleviate the hunger in a moment were they to decide to release the hostages. But they don’t. They prefer Israel’s opprobrium to feeding their children.

The Israeli public’s anger and rage towards their government, expressed in the public square, newspapers, and by Israeli talking heads, is palpable. The devastation of feeling abandoned, forgotten, and disregarded started before October 7, and they have earned this resentment that has, as of yet, failed to bring in new leadership. Allow me to underline one point made in Rabbi Miller’s post. Halavi (it should only be so) that Israel could pick up its personnel and weapons and infrastructure like America has done in places like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving far behind the successes and the failures of American action abroad. But that isn’t possible when Gaza is 50 miles away from where I am sitting. (50 miles is the distance between Houston and Brenham).

I encourage you to dive in and read the entire blogpost. It won’t necessarily make you feel better, but I do hope it will help you keep everything in context. And if you are impressed, I encourage you to sign up to receive his blog. The information is at the bottom of the newsletter. You won’t be sorry (and it’s free, so no loss if you are!)

Ripples in a Pond by Rabbi Jonathan Miller

August 2, 2025

My time is squeezed, and I don’t know if I can send out my thoughts with the polish I like to give my readers. I also don’t know when I might have time to write some more, so bear with me with a little charity to boot.

From the current moment to the historical sweep. Picture tossing a rock into the center of a pond and watch the ripples spread out.

The current moment. The epicenter today. Hunger in Gaza. Let’s posit that there is hunger on an unacceptable scale. It’s not genocide. These are not the Tutsis at the hands of the Hutus. This is not Srebenicia with the UN observing passively while 8,000 Muslim men are rounded up and murdered in two days. But the hunger is unacceptable and needs to be fixed. Is it fixable? Of course it is. Will it be fixed? Of course it will. Let’s pray that it is fixed soon and effectively. Let’s also get out of the way the foolish remarks by some in the government in Jerusalem and Washington that two million Gazans will line up to leave for promised garden communities in South Sudan or Chad. That is not going to happen. Let's get out of the way that Israelis themselves do not want to live in Gaza when the war is finished. Don’t cast your eyes on the shiny objects. People have been crying “hunger hunger” when there was no hunger. If hunger is a tool of war, it is also a tool of propaganda. Now there is hunger. How much?
Who knows? Too much, that’s a pity. When the hunger problem is fixed, something else will take its place. The critics of the Jewish state will find something.

Who is responsible? That is an important question.

Israel bears responsibility for the suffering, but not alone. Looking back, it was foolish to cut off supplies to the strip. The goal was to weaken the Hamas’ hold on the population. A laudable goal to be sure.

Unfortunately, their plans backfired. The plan to distribute the aid failed. Now we know it would have been more effective to have set up Costcos in Gaza City than these food distribution centers. Live and learn. I don’t say that glibly. Should the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have been more effective? That would have been good. Were the goals of the foundation, to deliver food and bypass Hamas and Hamas-dependent agencies a laudable goal? Of course it was. Unfortunately, we now know
that this plan failed in its conception and execution. Now that the failures are understood, solutions will be found. And we all have to be sorry for the program's shortcomings and the pain it brought to hungry people.

Egypt borders Gaza to the south. One does not see trucks lined up in El Arish waiting to deliver food and fuel from the Arab world to their Muslim brothers and sisters. That could help some.

Hamas bears the ultimate responsibility. It started the war. It continues with the war even after it has been defeated. Its terrorists are willing to fight to the last hungry Gazan child. I wouldn’t call their resistance bravery or justice. They could alleviate the hunger in a moment were they to decide to release the hostages. But they don’t. They prefer Israel’s opprobrium to feeding their children.

Now let the ripples expand.

Rabbi Scott Hausman Weiss joined me last night in hostage square. The square was mobbed with tens of thousands of people protesting this war (70% of the population want to end the war now and bring home the hostages.)

Oh, the hostages. I cannot even begin to describe the trauma that these poor prisoners in cruel captivity have inflicted on this society at large. Everywhere you go in Tel Aviv (I mean everywhere) are yellow signs to remember the hostages and bring them home now. It is as though these tortured souls become part of your family proper. Everyone here has adopted these hostages. Signs appear on the sides of skyscrapers, plastered on overpasses, hung on the backs of cars. Everywhere. “Bring the hostages home. Now.”

I was last here sixteen months ago. The signs then were calling Bibi Netanyahu into account for the failures of October 7. Not that he is off the hook, but I haven’t seen these signs on the Tel Aviv streets. Instead it is the hostages. The hostages. The hostages.

Yesterday, the Daveed family released a video of their 21 year old son, Evyatar, held in captivity in a tunnel for 667 days. The young man is emaciated. His arms are like sticks and you can see every bone in his body seeming to protrude from his skin. He circles his mattress in his tunnel like a dog getting ready to lie down on his bed. The video made me cry for Evyatar. And the tv stations showed it over and over again. If you ask Israelis about hunger in Gaza, their first thought would be about
their own children who are suffering.

I don’t blame the Israelis for having compassion first for their own children before they have compassion for their enemies. Critical readers of mine, permit the Israelis to be human beings too. They love their children and weep when they feel them suffering. Understand them before you blame them. Sure, looking back they should have done some things differently. This is a war. And a difficult one at that. A war without uniforms, fought underground with civilians as human shields and the whole world watching in judgment, and most rooting for the bad guys.

I have asked people at the table and in the taxi how they feel about the Gaza situation. They are sending their children there. They remember the horrors (I don’t need to recount them for you) inflicted on them by the terrorists. They know that their children serve in the military. They know about the tunnels and booby trapped subterranean cities. They know that every week some of their kids are returned dead or wounded. Understand if they do not exude the compassion you want them to show.

But they are not hateful either. They want a way out. They hate this war. And they are at a loss as to how to end it. The TV commentators call it a bog, mud, a swamp, quicksand.

Americans left Vietnam in 1975. We just said “enough with this” and we packed up our helicopters and flew away. And the Vietnamese never laid a finger on us again.

This is Gaza. This is next door. It is terrible to stay in Gaza. Nobody wants this. And it would be terrible to leave Gaza too. With Hamas still in place, it’s not as though leaving would end this terrible saga. What to do? I wish I could advise. If you got the solution, don’t keep it to yourself.

Let me spread the ripples out even further.

Today I took a taxi to the Yitzhak Rabin Center Museum in north Tel Aviv. It focused on Prime Minister Rabin’s life and work over the decades, even before the State was born in 1948. It was an honest portrayal of a true patriot, his life with its accomplishments and failures and his tragic assassination at the hands of a Jewish terrorist in 1995, thirty years ago.

I couldn’t believe how this visit affected me. I watched scenes of the June 1967 Six Day War. I was almost thirteen. I remember these moments like it was a week ago. I watched scenes of the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, ancient history but still fresh for me. In its aftermath, I left college to work on a kibbutz. I watched footage of President Sadat land in Israel, the peace treaties between Egypt and then Jordan to follow, and the war in Lebanon and the first intifada (do you really want to globalize this?), and the evacuation from Jewish settlements in Yamit, and Sabra and Shatilla and the signing of the
agreement between Rabin and Arafat with President Clinton on the White House lawn, and these were all as though they happened a week ago.

I watched as we battled the Arab enemies and emerged victorious from each battle and still there was no peace to follow. I watched as we lost some, and in losing there was no peace to follow. I watched on the screens how Rabin and the Israeli government were determined to give up territory and make painful concessions to achieve their goals of
coexistence and still there was no peace to follow. And I thought to myself. “Short of dismantling the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv
and putting eight million Jews on transports to garden communities in South Sudan or Chad, just what do the critics of Israel have in mind for Israel to achieve peace? Victory doesn’t seem to work. Losses don’t seem to work. Concessions don’t seem to work. Just what all do you have in mind?”

Here is the final ripple in my pond.

Jews flatten time. Events that happened yesterday or a long time ago don’t disappear. Jews lose historical perspective. Maybe it's in our genes. Maybe it's in our character. Maybe it's a fault. Maybe it's a strength. Regardless, Jews feel what happened to us then as though it is happening to us today. 

Stop and consider. Our most observed holiday is the holiday of Passover. We were slaves in Egypt. God liberated us. We stood at
Sinai. We arrived to the Promised Land. That story is our story. What happened then, we feel it now. We feel the destruction of the Temples. We feel the cruelties of the middle ages. We feel the persecution and the pogroms and the expulsions. These horrible moments happened then. We can still feel them now.

We feel the joy of our return to Israel after Egypt and in the twentieth century. We feel the hand of God bringing us home then and bringing us home later and guiding us today. We feel the pride of our pioneers. We feel the hope of our dreamers. What happened then, we feel it now.

I believe that we will find a way out of this bog and life will be better for the Israelis and the Palestinians. We don’t know the future. But the Jewish people have persevered through difficult times. We have emerged stronger and gone on to build a future. This ugly war will end.

And the Jews will be alright. We are hopeful about the future. Otherwise, we would have faded away a long time ago.

Maybe that is the final ripple in the pond.