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Why God Is Offering Us an Olive Branch Today
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
In “Anthem,” a song from his 1992 album The Future, Leonard Cohen sang: “There is a crack, a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in.” Beautiful words, if somewhat haunting.
They echo the words uttered decades earlier by another Cohen — the first Chief Rabbi of modern Eretz Yisrael, Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook: “Out of the wreckage of destruction, the light of redemption will shine forth.” Never in recent history has this sentiment felt more piercingly true.
Rom Breslavski, who was on duty as a security guard at the Nova music festival on October 7th and was kidnapped into Gaza by terrorists, spent two years in solitary confinement under Islamic Jihad. He never saw daylight. He was starved, beaten, and terrorized. The guards forced him to sleep beside the bodies of murdered hostages. They tried to force him to convert to Islam. They taunted him with lies — that Israel had been destroyed, that his family was dead, that the war with Iran had wiped out everything he loved.
They tried to break him, body and soul, and came close to succeeding. Now Rom is home. He stands for hours every day by the window, just looking at the sky. His sad eyes betray the broken spirit of someone who has been to hell and back. He doesn’t say much.
His freedom is real, yes – but it doesn’t yet feel like freedom. For now, there is a crack — and we can only hope that through it, the light is beginning to get in. That out of this wreckage of destruction, the light of redemption will, at last, shine forth.
The look in Rom’s eyes is the same exact look you see in those haunting photographs of Holocaust survivors taken in early 1945 – men and women stepping through the gates of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, technically free but hollow-eyed and gaunt, their spirits shattered.
They are alive, but not yet living. One nightmare has ended, but another is only beginning – the long, slow struggle to feel human again.
Liberation is never a single moment. It’s a process – slow, uneven, and often painfully drawn out. The first breath of freedom is always jagged and uncertain. Trauma doesn’t evaporate when the door opens – it lingers in the air for a long time after, and truthfully, it never entirely disappears. As Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, later wrote, liberation was not the euphoric experience he and his fellow prisoners imagined it would be.
When the camp gates finally opened, many felt strangely numb, unable to rejoice. They walked out, Frankl said, “like sleepwalkers,” their souls lagging behind their bodies.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes how the sudden transition from horror to safety left survivors bewildered, and even depressed. Their horrific experiences under the Nazis had stripped them of their ability to feel. They were conditioned to expect pain or betrayal at every turn. Which meant that freedom was not the end of their suffering — it was the beginning of their healing.
And it’s in exactly this fragile space — the uneasy aftermath of catastrophe — that the Torah offers one of its most poignant symbols. Towards the end of the story of Noah’s flood, after months sealed inside the ark while the world drowned beneath torrential waters, the storms finally subsided. Hoping their ordeal was over, Noah sent out a dove to see whether the earth had begun to dry. The bird returned with something small and unexpected — “an olive leaf torn off in her mouth” (Gen. 8:11).
It was the first sign that the world outside the ark was beginning to heal, that life after the flood might once again be possible. But, as the commentaries note, the olive leaf was hardly a symbol of complete restoration.
The Ramban sees the olive leaf as proof that the world was only beginning to heal, but was not yet fully ready. Some land had reemerged, and hardy trees like the olive had started to sprout leaves – but the earth was still soggy and unstable, not yet ready for cultivation. The message was not “It’s over,” but rather, “It’s time to begin again.”
The Kli Yakar makes a striking observation: Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves after their sin – symbols of shame. But the dove brought Noah an olive leaf, a symbol of light and atonement; olive oil would one day fuel the pure flame of the sacred Menorah. Here was the light shining through the crack – a hopeful beginning, even if the world wasn’t quite ready to be whole.
The Zohar, sourcebook of Jewish mysticism, adds another layer: an olive yields its oil only when it is crushed. So it is with humanity, which often produces its greatest illumination only after being broken. The olive leaf was not meant to be a token of comfort or triumph, but a reminder that most often, it is from brokenness that light will emerge.
Noah’s emergence from the ark wasn’t the end of the story — it was the start of a long, difficult climb. The flood may have symbolically washed the world clean, but it hadn’t cured the human heart. Within the next few chapters, we encounter the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, jealousies and betrayals within families, and eventually Egypt’s enslavement of Jacob’s descendants. The story of humanity after the flood was a catalogue of all kinds of failure and failings, one generation after another.
The olive leaf that the dove carried to Noah as the trauma of the flood drew to a close was not a declaration of victory. It was a divine whisper: the worst of the nightmare is over, but don’t celebrate just yet — there’s still a long way to go. It reminded Noah, and every generation after him, that rebuilding the world is never a single act of survival, but a lifelong process of reconstruction. Every step along the way must be seen for what it is — a platform for growth, a chance to reach higher, and an opportunity to shape a better future.
Rom Breslavski, like those Holocaust survivors before him, knows this truth instinctively. Freedom isn’t a doorway you walk through into sunshine — it’s a staircase you ascend, one painful, uncertain step at a time. The dove’s olive leaf wasn’t telling Noah that the storm was over — Noah already knew that. It was reminding him that the healing had only just begun.
That’s how God redeems the world: not in an instant, but through slow, deliberate rebirth. The cracks remain, but through them — as Leonard Cohen says it — the light gets in.
That’s what the dove offered Noah. It’s what God offered the survivors of the Shoah. And it’s what He is offering us today, after two years of trauma following October 7th — a tiny olive leaf, a call to rebuild, and the promise that even through the cracks, His light still finds a way in.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements
(JTA) — The European Union could be leaning toward banning trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Foreign ministers debated various tactics to respond to the settlements on Monday at their monthly council meeting in Brussels, against the backdrop of rising violence by settlers and efforts by the Israeli government to expand settlements in Palestinian territories.
In a press conference following the meeting, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said one possibility had stood out.
“The option that got the most support was banning the trade with illegal settlements,” she said. All 27 member states consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank to violate international law.
Kallas added, “We tasked the ambassadors to take this work forward, and probably will also have an extraordinary meeting on this.”
No decisions have yet been made, and the path forward is uncertain. Some EU member nations favor aggressive action against the settlements, while others are unlikely to back any measures that take aim at Israel. A number are in the middle and have not decided whether they support trade bans.
The level of agreement between European governments needed to enact a partial or full trade ban on Israeli settlements remains an open question. Kallas said it was the European Council’s legal opinion that voting on trade issues called for a qualified majority, meaning that 15 out of 27 states would have to vote in favor, representing at least 65% of the EU population.
But she also acknowledged that legal experts disagreed about how much backing was needed for a trade ban. “You can always find different lawyers who come up with different ideas,” she said.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Kallas of an “obsessive campaign against Israel” in a post on X. “There was no consensus. There was no qualified majority. In fact, there was no majority at all,” he wrote, adding, “Tricks like this do nothing to advance our shared interests.”
The EU has hotly debated measures against Israel as settlements in the West Bank have expanded and settler violence has sharply intensified over recent years. The Israeli NGOs Peace Now and Kerem Navot said in a report last week that “the current Israeli government has advanced de facto annexation of the West Bank at an unprecedented pace.”
The ministers considered measures including a stricter export licensing system, higher tariffs and a partial or outright ban on goods produced over the pre-1967 lines. The options were first presented in a paper last week by the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, as pressure mounted from European governments.
Kallas said these potential moves were not “options against Israel,” but “options against the illegal settlements that undermined the two-state solution.” She told reporters before the meeting that member states had been pressing for a trade ban on Israeli settlements, saying, “Everyone agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable.”
In May, the EU sanctioned Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians after Hungary’s new government, led by Peter Magyar, gave its approval and allowed the states to reach a consensus.
To protest the Gaza war, the commission last year proposed suspending the EU’s free trade agreement with Israel as set out under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the cornerstone of economic and political cooperation between Europe and Israel. The proposal was not advanced because it lacked the majority support of 15 member states.
The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 33.1% of its imports and 29.4% of its exports in 2025, according to a summary on the European Commission website, which did not provide data on settler goods. The free trade agreement does not apply to goods originating from Israeli businesses located over the pre-1967 lines.
Revoking the association agreement requires unanimous approval from the EU’s 27 member states, while a partial suspension, such as freezing the free trade agreement, calls for a qualified majority. Germany, Italy, Hungary and Czechia have consistently opposed such suspensions.
Israel’s most vocal critics in Europe, including Ireland and Spain, have pushed for suspending the association agreement along with proposing their own import bans at the national level. Ireland now holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, a six-month term that ends in December 2026.
The legal basis of trade restrictions on Israel lies at the heart of debates in the EU. Support from a qualified majority is sufficient to enact a commercial policy, while changes in the common foreign and security policy — such as sanctions — require unanimity.
Some legal scholars have argued that an EU ban on imports from Israeli settlements should be imposed as a trade measure rather than a sanction, making it easier to pass.
A group of 40 scholars said in an open letter last month to Kallas, trade chief Maroš Šefčovič and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen that a blanket ban on settlement imports had a legal basis under the EU’s common commercial policy. Claims that unanimity was needed for the prohibition were “grounded in political rather than legal considerations,” they said.
The scholars also referenced an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in 2024, which said that Israel’s military control of Palestinian territories in the West Bank constituted an illegal occupation.
“In that regard, it should be noted that the EU Court of Justice has ruled that, in its acts, the EU is ‘bound to observe international law in its entirety,’” they said.
Daniel Mariaschin, Honorary CEO of the pro-Israel Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith International, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that reducing trade “would only weaken one of Europe’s most important partnerships in the region.”
“There are those within the EU who are looking for any way to undercut Israel’s international standing, and this is yet another example,” Mariaschin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements appeared first on The Forward.
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PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
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Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
The post Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide appeared first on The Forward.
