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Harley "Griff" Lofton's avatar

Thank you, Rabbi for this thoughtful and "forward looking" sermon. And thank you Bernie for publishing it here.

Nevertheless I remain pessimistic about the entire situation. It is not my place to tell either community what to do.

I don't know how a nation can handle the traumatic anxiety that drives them to extreme and even irrational security measures.

I don't know how a community handles the inter-generational traumatic grief and self harm to which they seem addicted. The "Masada Myth" vs. the Nakba.

The healing of trauma and the shame that powerlessness can cause is difficult to accomplish in individuals--- impossible for nations and communities. Overweening pride and self harm are both strategies to cope with shame.

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Yeetus's avatar
1dEdited

Rabbi Holzman, thank you for your essay. That said, I was struck—and frankly dismayed—by a glaring absence in your sermon: a clear and direct acknowledgment of the massive Palestinian suffering caused by this war. You speak movingly about Israeli soldiers and their bravery, about Birthright camp trips being cancelled and rescheduled, and even about “the ingenuity and courage of the soldiers in the Jewish state.” But where is the recognition of the horror imposed upon Palestinians by these soldiers?

Tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them children, have been killed, entire neighborhoods erased, families decimated. That this goes unnamed in a religious reflection about a never ending war that is approaching two years is troubling. As someone who writes from a moral and spiritual position, surely you must see the dissonance in writing thousands of words without directly acknowledging the wilful, large-scale killing of civilians by a state you ask God to bless “in every moment, in every hour.”

What deepens this moral gap is the celebratory tone in parts of your reflection: the pride in the IDF, the sense of victory and resilience, the readiness to move towards “the future” while the ashes of Gaza still smolder. It comes across as a victory lap for a war well-fought.

Importantly, the plight of the Palestinians is framed as a pragmatic dilemma, not a spiritual imperative. That framing stands in stark contrast to how the rest of the world is increasingly seeing this war: not as a complex tragedy with “both sides” at fault, but as a one-sided campaign of destruction.

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