We’ve struggled with it, argued about it, got defensive about it, and even screamed in frustration about it. For some of us, it’s been almost all-consuming, and it has forced us to challenge our long held assumptions.

How do we reconcile our image of the world, our place in it as Jews, and our idealized perception of our homeland with the messy, dark, and divisive narrative we see and hear all around us? With the pictures of devastation and suffering? With the demonstrations in the streets? With a seesawing experience of division, unity, then even sharper divides?

I wish that there was a simple, convenient answer to share with you. It would make us all more at peace and feeling better about ourselves to point at one thing and smile proudly, and frown at another with a tsk-tsk and a brief discomfort before going back to our lives and parochial concerns.

Our identity as Jews has never been about comfort. Even in our earliest commonwealth we still had to contend with temptations and divisions within and adversaries without. Our experience of exile honed in us the qualities we needed to survive - the value of education, overcoming the challenges of the unsettled and temporary life of the diaspora, and the critical ability to depend upon one another. Yet somehow, here we are, grappling - sometimes unsuccessfully - with the experience of insecurity and incomprehension that must have been at least somewhat familiar to our ancestors.

So, while I do not offer a solution or a panacea, I would like to share a few thoughts that may be helpful.

1. Expecting a performative display of western liberal Jewish values from an (at most) mixed eastern/western Jewish population under constant threat and having experienced both generational and personal trauma is a recipe for disappointment. Expecting operative perfection and error-free decision making while under fire from those charged with defending a bereaved and wounded nation, even a strong one, is an exercise in futility. Demanding that conduct in aid of that defense meet standards not expected of a single other country under any circumstances even approaching the current ones in Gaza is reductive, obtuse, and frankly lazy moralization. It also won’t save a single Palestinian from the authors and beneficiaries of their suffering, namely Hamas and its confederates.
    
2. Israel’s responsibility is to set and meet standards of morality commensurate with the ethics and policies it established for itself, and conduct itself in a manner appropriate to the circumstances and adversaries it encounters in real time in the unique environment purposefully fashioned by Yahya Sinwar and his cadres. It must hold itself to those standards and it must find new leadership through an electoral process if its government consistently does not meet them. It must do so within the framework of democracy and law that has served it for 77 years. It owes NOTHING to hypocritical international leaders who’ve pillaged, ravaged or colonized places like Algeria, or Congo, or India, where they had NO ancestral, aboriginal connection or rights, only interests of power and exploitation.
    
3. If there is a way to safely assist non combatant Palestinians including children (not 17 year old seasoned snipers and RPG grenadiers, but actual children) while not providing more resources to Hamas, Israel should continue to pursue it as vigorously as it can. Not because in the opinion of a Hamas-aligned NGO-sphere there is hunger, or because the discredited UN agencies demand it, but because Jewish values do so.
    
4. The release of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas will always compete as priorities. The heart prioritizes one and the brain prioritizes the other. There is no solution to this conundrum without dire and steep costs. I only suggest that those with opposing views on this recognize each other's pain and anxiety.
    
5. A massive security failure such as October 7th has an author, an address, or several of them. Some of those who were in positions of responsibility have taken that responsibility seriously and have resigned those positions. Others have yet to do so, even at the highest levels. The IDF has been doing its own reckoning for more than a year now, with a high degree of transparency. Some kind of binding inquiry beyond the military’s professional assessment is possibly the only way for Israeli society and indeed Zionists around the world like us to get some kind of closure, and be able to move forward with rebuilding both physically and emotionally.
    
6. Sooner or later the rifts that have widened in Israeli society and in our own Jewish communities will need to be healed, or we will destroy ourselves.The haves and have-nots; the secular and the religious; the rural and urban; the reservists and those who will not serve; the Mizrachi/Sefardi and Ashkenazi; the Arab Israelis and the Jewish majority…We have enough divisions, and we have had enough of division. I say this to every Jewish leader of every stripe who I meet: If after 10/7 you are not prioritizing unity, common sense, and common cause among Jews despite our differences, get out of the way and let someone else do so.
    
7. As I’ve written as recently as a few weeks ago, there is an existential battle going on encompassing the entire Jewish people. One front of this battle is in Israel. Another is on campus, and others in our town halls, on social media, in our streets. You and I may not agree on tactics, or on operational considerations. I may make mistakes, you may be in error, and our comrades in Israel may miscalculate with significant consequences. But if our adversaries’ goal is the eradication of Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral homeland (and it is), or the arrogant, evil redefinition of Jewish identity to suit a far right, far left, or Islamist ideology (and it is), our objective, our overwhelming priority, is and must be the physical survival of the Jewish people wherever they are (especially in our homeland), living proud Jewish lives and fostering goodness in the world based on Jewish values. If ‘as a jew’ that’s not your priority, I humbly ask you to get out of the way too.
    
8. The mission of the Jewish people in this world isn’t to be a sacrificial lamb, or a perpetual victim. It isn’t to be a fig leaf for the reactionary politics of one side or a genuflector to the anti-colonialist narrative groupthink of the other. And although it is absolutely vital to be strong enough to dissuade any adversary or defeat them if not dissuaded, it also isn’t our mission to live solely by the sword. It is to live the values we brought to the world through our Torah and create spaces where we and those we live among can learn and grow and thrive; where we can help those in need and bring Hillel’s and Rabbi Akiva’s adages about loving our neighbor to life every day. But to do that we need to know who we are. We need to know we are safe and secure. We need to know where we came from, and we need to be prepared to protect our heritage, our homeland, and each other. If we don’t do this, we’ll have no home to plant those values, and no communities within which we can watch our children build their own Jewish lives.

We will simply disappear.

I’m not prepared to accept that. I never will be. And so I look into the eye of this particular hurricane and reach for the calmness within, the place of silence where I can picture an ideal Jewish life here and in Israel, peaceful, unified, accepting of difference, full of love and promise, and strong enough - in every way - to sustain itself. And I get back to work.

Im Tirzu, Ein Zo Agada. If you will it, it is no dream.