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Seeking justice for Israel’s slain and missing without losing our moral compass
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on Oct. 21, 2023. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
In the Genesis story, wicked violence pushes God over the edge to wipe out humanity. In my mind, that became the violence that Hamas inflicted upon Israelis in the towns near the Gaza border this month. Noah’s ark became a metaphor for the safe rooms that allowed a few of those targeted Israelis to escape the massacre. This season, we are reading the Torah thinking about life, death — and reckoning.
After the flood, God makes a promise: “Never again will I doom the earth because of humankind, since the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth.” (Genesis 8:21) The narrative assumes that humans will still act wickedly. But instead of God judging and punishing evil behavior, that responsibility will now fall on humans.
We get some specific instruction on the human responsibility to deal with violence in the very next chapter, where we learn that when someone takes another human life, a “reckoning” is required: “Whosoever sheds human blood, by human [hands] shall that one’s blood be shed; for in the image of God was humankind made.” While some rules in the Torah come with no rationale, this one is justified by a teaching: Humans are made in the image of God.
The context of the verse is important too. At the beginning of chapter 9, God instructs Noah and his sons to “be fertile and increase, and fill the earth.” To sustain themselves, humans are given plants and (most) animals to eat, provided they do not eat the “life-blood” in animal flesh. The Torah permits taking animal life to sustain human life, but killing a person is different because humans are made in the image of God. So when a human is killed, a reckoning must take place. If the taking of a single human life requires a reckoning, how much more so does the murder of 1,200?
There are tough questions now facing Israelis and the Jewish people. What constitutes a reckoning? How do we act morally, rooted in our values, as we carry that out? And can Jewish tradition guide us as we do?
Alongside the value of human beings created in the image of God, Jewish tradition offers other models of how our ancestors understood God’s instruction to reckon with wickedness. There’s the story of Jacob’s sons, Shimon and Levi, who massacred a whole town in response to their sister’s defilement. And there’s the Purim story, in which the Jews kill not only Haman and his sons, but 75,000 others. Yet these stories don’t feel up to the task of this moment because they don’t struggle with the moral challenges of being sovereign, of wielding power over others.
But there is a story from our texts that comes close, about a moment when the Israelites did wield power in the land. In the books of Joshua and 2 Samuel we find the story of the Gibeonites, a Canaanite people who lived alongside the Israelites for generations but were slaughtered by King Saul. Years later, when David was king, the Israelites faced an extended famine, and when David inquired of God, he was told that it was a result of the injustice inflicted upon the Gibeonites. David is then faced with the daunting task of making restitution with the few surviving Gibeonites in order to save his people.
This is a story worthy of our present moment. While the text doesn’t tell us what precipitated Saul’s slaughter of the Gibeonites, the killing was evidently so unjust that it became a moral blot on the Israelites that spanned a generation. An act of injustice now can trigger another crisis later.
The challenge of this moment is to hold on to our values and moral commitments as we fight those who would destroy us — and only those who would destroy us. As my colleague and teacher Yossi Klein Halevi recently wrote, “Fighting evil does not mean a suspension of moral ground rules; the opposite is true. One must be careful not to become tainted by the evil you are fighting, for both practical and spiritual reasons.”
Wielding power is, by definition, morally fraught. The lesson of the Gibeonites is that if we lose our moral compass during this reckoning, we will pay the price — by the hand of the next generation of our enemies, by the international community, or by our own spiritual decay. And yet, a reckoning is still required. It may not be possible to be morally pure in war time, but it is possible to be morally grounded. This is the challenge for Israelis, and for the Jewish people who love them and support them, in this moment.
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The post Seeking justice for Israel’s slain and missing without losing our moral compass appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Germany’s Halt to Arms Exports to Israel Is Response to Gaza Expansion Plans, Chancellor Says
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz attends a cabinet meeting at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Liesa Johannssen
Germany’s decision to curb arms exports to Israel comes in response to Israel’s plan to expand its operations in the Gaza Strip, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Sunday in an interview with public broadcaster ARD.
“We cannot deliver weapons into a conflict that is now being pursued exclusively by military means,” Merz said. “We want to help diplomatically, and we are doing so.”
The worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Israel’s plans to expand military control over the enclave have pushed Germany to take this historically fraught step.
The chancellor said in the interview that the expansion of Israel’s operations in Gaza could claim hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and would require the evacuation of the entire city of Gaza.
“Where are these people supposed to go?” Merz said. “We can’t do that, we won’t do that, and I will not do that.”
Nevertheless, the principles of Germany’s Israel policy remain unchanged, the chancellor said.
“Germany has stood firmly by Israel’s side for 80 years. That will not change,” Merz said.
Germany is Israel’s second-biggest weapons supplier after the US and has long been one of its staunchest supporters, principally because of its historical guilt for the Nazi Holocaust – a policy known as the “Staatsraison.”
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Newsom Calls Trump’s $1 Billion UCLA Settlement Offer Extortion, Says California Won’t Bow
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a press conference, accompanied by members of the Texas Democratic legislators, at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, California, U.S., August 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
California Governor Gavin Newsom said on Saturday that a $1 billion settlement offer by President Donald Trump’s administration for UCLA amounted to political extortion to which the state will not bow.
The University of California says it is reviewing a $1 billion settlement offer by the Trump administration for UCLA after the government froze hundreds of millions of dollars in funding over pro-Palestinian protests.
UCLA, which is part of the University of California system, said this week the government froze $584 million in funding. Trump has threatened to cut federal funds for universities over anti-Israel student protests.
“Donald Trump has weaponized the DOJ (Department of Justice) to kneecap America’s #1 public university system — freezing medical & science funding until @UCLA pays his $1 billion ransom,” the office of Newsom, a Democrat, said in a post.
“California won’t bow to Trump’s disgusting political extortion,” it added.
“This isn’t about protecting Jewish students – it’s a billion-dollar political shakedown from the pay-to-play president.”
The government alleges universities, including UCLA, allowed antisemitism during the protests and in doing so violated Jewish and Israeli students’ civil rights. The White House had no immediate comment beyond the offer.
Experts have raised free speech and academic freedom concerns over the Republican president’s threats. The University of California says paying such a large settlement would “completely devastate” the institution.
Large demonstrations took place at UCLA last year. Last week, UCLA agreed to pay over $6 million to settle a lawsuit by some students and a professor who alleged antisemitism. It was also sued this year over a 2024 violent mob attack on pro-Palestinian protesters.
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Trump Nominates State Dept Spokeswoman Bruce as US Deputy Representative to UN
FILE PHOTO: U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce speaks during her first press briefing at the State Department in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
President Donald Trump said on Saturday he was nominating State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce as the next US deputy representative to the United Nations.
Bruce has been the State Department spokesperson since Trump took office in January.
In a post on social media in which Trump announced her nomination, the president said she did a “fantastic job” as State Department spokesperson. Bruce will need to be confirmed for the role by the US Senate, where Trump’s Republican Party holds a majority.
During press briefings, she has defended the Trump administration’s foreign policy decisions ranging from an immigration crackdown and visa revocations to US responses to Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza, including a widely condemned armed private aid operation in the Palestinian territory.
Bruce was previously a political contributor and commentator on Fox News for over 20 years.
She has also authored books like “Fear Itself: Exposing the Left’s Mind-Killing Agenda” that criticized liberals and left-leaning viewpoints.
In a post after Trump’s announcement, Bruce thanked him and suggested that the role was a “few weeks” away. Neither Trump nor Bruce mentioned an exact timeline in their online posts.
“Now I’m blessed that in the next few weeks my commitment to advancing America First leadership and values continues on the global stage in this new post,” Bruce wrote on X.
Trump has picked former White House national security adviser Mike Waltz to be his U.N. envoy. Waltz’s Senate confirmation for that role, wherein he will be Bruce’s boss, is still due.
Waltz was Trump’s national security adviser until he was ousted on May 1 after he was caught up in a March scandal involving a Signal chat among top Trump national security aides on military strikes in Yemen. Trump then nominated Waltz as his U.N. ambassador.