Category: Israel

Parashat Pinchas: Who Told You That Was God?

The most dangerous sentence in religious life is not “God is dead.” It is “God told me to.”

Grant everything. God rewarded Pinchas. The plague stopped. The covenant was real. Let’s sit with that fully, without deflecting into questions of fallacy or anthropomorphism.

Then what?

Parashat Pinchas forces us to ask the question we would rather avoid: how do we distinguish between someone who genuinely heard a divine command and someone who dressed their own violent, irrational certainty in holy language?

Pinchas did not announce a prophecy. He did not consult Moses. He did not wait for the cloud to move. He felt something burning within him, seized a spear, and acted. The text calls it kana’ut, zealotry. And zealotry, by definition, does not pause to ask whether the voice it hears is God’s or its own.

This is not a theoretical problem. Yigal Amir was certain that God wanted Yitzhak Rabin dead and pulled the trigger on Israel’s Prime Minister. The settlers who burn Palestinian villages invoke divine command. The men who flew planes into buildings on September 11th believed, with everything in them, that they were doing God’s bidding. Every act of religious extremism in our lifetime has been committed by someone who felt what Pinchas felt: a burning, urgent, absolute conviction that the holy cause could not wait for process, permission, or the slower work of community discernment.

Pinchas heard God. We have stipulated that. But that settled question raises an unsettled one: what did the rest of us receive when God rewarded him? A record of a single grace, given to a single person in an unrepeatable moment? Or a template, permission for anyone who burns with enough certainty to act without constraint?

The tradition answers this with unusual clarity: it is not a template. The rabbis ruled explicitly that kana’ut cannot be taught, authorized, or legislated. What Pinchas did cannot be commanded because the moment you command it, you hand a weapon to anyone who has ever mistaken their own rage for the voice of God.

But this only sharpens the question. If we cannot rule it out, cannot authorize it, cannot teach it, then how does anyone know, in the burning moment, whether what they feel is revelation or self-deception?

Two traditions offer guardrails. The American tradition answers with the rule of law: no private conviction, however burning, overrides the collective agreement. The Jewish tradition answers with machloket l’shem shamayim, an argument for the sake of heaven. Hillel and Shammai disagreed about nearly everything, passionately, for decades. What made their argument holy was not that one of them was right. It was that neither of them picked up a spear. The argument itself was the faithfulness.

Korach, by contrast, was certain. He even had a point: all Israel is holy; why does Moses alone lead? But his argument was for himself, not for heaven. Certainty in service of the self, dressed in the language of principle, is exactly what kana’ut looks like from the inside. The difference between Hillel and Shammai and Korach is not the passion. It is whether you can stay in the room when you don’t prevail.

Both guardrails say the same thing in different languages: subordinate private certainty to collective process. Neither is sufficient on its own, and neither holds forever.

The law is corrupted. The argument for heaven devolves into paralysis. The judges weep at the entrance to the tent as the plague spreads. This is precisely the condition that makes Pinchas feel righteous, as he confronts a genuine emergency and a genuinely failed institution.

What does the tradition say, then? Not: pick up the spear. But also not: keep weeping. Stay in the argument, even when the argument is failing. Bear witness. Refuse both the violence and the paralysis. What we surrender is the clean story, the one where we acted, the plague stopped, and we knew we were right. What we keep is harder: the argument, the relationship, the refusal to let our certainty become someone else’s catastrophe.

Right now, both are under assault. The rule of law is openly contested by people certain their cause overrides it. The capacity for machloket l’shem shamayim, good-faith disagreement within a shared relationship, is nearly impossible to sustain in a world that rewards the spear and punishes the pause.

That means Pinchas is not an ancient problem we have learned to contain. He stands at the center of this moment, spear in hand, absolutely certain.

The question is not whether we recognize him. It is whether we recognize him in ourselves.

“The most dangerous sentence in religious life is not ‘God is dead.’ It is ‘God told me to.’”

You Knew What You Were Getting Into with Mamdani

Years ago, a friend came to me frustrated that his child’s Quaker school wasn’t fully observing Jewish holidays. He wanted to vent — and then wanted to know what we could do about it.

My answer was simple: you knew what you were getting into. The Quaker school system serves many communities, cultures, and traditions. Its mission isn’t to support any one of them; it’s to instill the values it considers foundational. That’s not a failure. That’s what you signed up for.

We are having a Quaker School moment with New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

A portion of the Jewish community is outraged that Mamdani has declined to participate in the Israel Day Parade. But Mamdani was never unclear about where he stood. He is a self-described democratic socialist, and his views on Israel were not hidden — they were part of his appeal. To have seen him marching as a parade marshal would have looked exactly like what it would have been: a cheap attempt to curry favor.

This is who New Yorkers elected.

Elections have consequences. Whether or not I agree with Mamdani, the ballot box was where I could register my view. That moment has passed. Expressing outrage now is a day late and a dollar short. New York got what it voted for.

If the outcome feels wrong, the answer isn’t to spit into the wind. It’s to find better candidates — people who reflect the critical values at stake. The machinery of Democratic politics in New York needs a serious post-mortem: how did this happen, what forces converged, and what will it take to do things differently next time?

Don’t complain that the person elected isn’t delivering what you wanted when what he’s delivering is exactly what he promised.

From Grief to Geulah-Holding mourning and miracle in the same breath

No other nation on earth asks its people to do what Israel asks each spring: to sit in the ashes of devastating loss on one day, and dance in the streets the next. Yom Hazikaron — Israel’s Day of Remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror — flows directly, by design, into Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day. The transition is not an accident of the calendar. It is a theological statement.

In Israel, when the siren sounds, an entire country stops — on highways, in markets, mid-sentence. Over 24,000 soldiers and thousands of civilians are remembered not as statistics but as names and faces, beloved. Then, within hours, fireworks rise over the same sky. The whiplash is intentional. Joy built on forgotten grief is shallow. And grief without the horizon of hope becomes a tomb.

During my year as a rabbinical student in Jerusalem, I had the privilege of standing on Har Herzl, Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery, for the ceremony that bridges these two days. There, among the graves of soldiers and statesmen, surrounded by thousands of Israelis, young and old, grief transformed in real time. The final notes of the memorial prayers gave way to the lighting of the torches, and the air itself seemed to shift. It was not that the sadness lifted; rather, hope rose to stand alongside it. I experienced more than a transition. This is a theology. In that moment, the narrative of the Jewish state and the narrative of my own Jewish heart were woven together into a whole cloth; each thread distinct yet inseparable from the other.

That sequence — lived in the body, not merely studied in a book — is the pedagogy. You cannot fully understand Yom Ha’atzmaut without first standing in the silence of Yom Hazikaron. The independence feels different when you know what it cost.

We are not asked to choose between memory and celebration. We are asked to hold both and to let the weight of one lend depth to the other.

As American Jews, we stand at a particular intersection in these days. We did not lose children in those wars. We were not present for 1948’s desperate birth, 1967’s breathtaking turn, or October 7th’s shattering grief. And yet, we are not strangers. Israel is not a foreign country to the Jewish soul. It is the address of our deepest longings, the landscape of our prayers, and at the core of our peoplehood.

These two days invite us into belonging, not as spectators but as members of an ancient family. To observe Yom Hazikaron is to say: their loss is part of our story. To celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut is to say: their miracle is part of our story, too. The spiritual architecture of this sequence teaches us that meaning is forged at the intersection of sorrow and hope. This is the Jewish way. This has always been the Jewish way.

May we honor those who fell, celebrate what they made possible, and carry both truths — as one people, from wherever in the world we stand.

 

The Empty Chair at the Chessboard: Why the Influence Narrative Fails

 

The persistent claim that American foreign policy is being dictated by Israeli pressure regarding the Iranian regime is as common as it is misguided. However, my frustration with this narrative isn’t rooted in a defense of the special relationship of the United States and Israel. Rather, it stems from a refusal to acknowledge a much more uncomfortable truth: the current chaos in the Middle East is not the result of a Jewish conspiracy, but a symptom of Donald Trump’s reckless, superficial, and dangerously transactional leadership.

To suggest that an ally can force the United States into a conflict against its own will is a profound admission of American weakness. It paints a picture of a superpower without a rudder. If the administration is being led into a fight, it isn’t because of the strength of the lobby in Washington; it is because of a vacuum of leadership in the Oval Office.

There are legitimate reasons to debate the extent of U.S. involvement in this region. Many of us remain deeply ambivalent—caught between a sincere desire for peace and a cold-eyed recognition of the threat the Iranian regime poses to Western stability. How imminent that threat is remains a valid question for debate. Israel, facing an existential threat on its doorstep, has its own compelling reasons to seek regime change—a position Benjamin Netanyahu has held for three decades. He is a leader seizing a strategic opportunity for his nation’s survival.

While the United States and Israel may share the broad goal of a neutralized Iran, their specific national interests are not identical. A strong American president would recognize these overlapping interests while maintaining a firm grip on the U.S. strategic compass. Instead, we see a Commander-in-Chief who has consistently approached a high-stakes geopolitical chess match with the mindset of a checkers player.

The tragedy here isn’t that we’re being bullied into a fight we didn’t choose. The real tragedy is that we have a leader who is fundamentally unqualified to operate in a world where the U.S. has historically been the stabilizing superpower. By acting on impulse and self-interest instead of broad strategy, the administration has created havoc that our allies must endure and our enemies can exploit.

If we believe another country can truly force the United States to do its bidding, it confirms our worst fears: that the most powerful man in the world is also the most impulsive and easily swayed. We deserve more than a presidency that acts as a series of erratic transactions. We deserve leadership that understands the weight of its authority and the complexities of the world it aims to lead.

NB. I do not normally write about politics, however, given the current conspiracy claims regarding Israel and the war, I thought this was necessary. ~ Rabbi David Levin

 

What’s in a name?

Genocide is a highly charged word.

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet asks, ‘What’s in a name?’ Names are simply labels we use to identify things, but the true nature of those things exists regardless of what we call them. Genocide is a highly charged word. We get so caught up in the word and all of the intense emotional baggage it carries that we forget the underlying tragedy: it is an attempt to understand what is happening in Gaza.

One side calls it a genocide; the other disputes that term, accusing the accusers of deliberately misusing the word, targeting the victims of such an experience as if they were the perpetrators of that very same horror. We get caught up in definitions, a kind of territorialism, claiming ownership of that word, and in doing so, we completely miss the point.

The people suffering in the war in Gaza are truly experiencing pain. It’s not just about numbers—whether it’s one person or many—innocent victims of the Hamas-Israel conflict have died. They go hungry. They are homeless. They are victims. Although I do not trust the statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry, there’s no way to measure the full extent of the carnage accurately, and Hamas’s role in this is dehumanizing Palestinians, echoing what the Nazis did to Jews.

We must navigate this challenging space and find ways to offer humanity and hope that we were denied, and, sadly, to the Palestinians as well. From the ashes of Auschwitz, we proclaimed Never Again. Was this declaration meant only for us? Our Jewish duty to be a light to the nations requires that it not be. We must uphold our tradition’s promise by maintaining our humanity and embracing the virtues of Pirkei Avot (2:5); in a world that has no worthy men, strive to be a man.

Whatever you call it, the war and anguish must end.

 

 

A Prayer for Peace for Shabbat

May the Almighty grant the leadership of all communities the wisdom to navigate the complex and challenging space they inhabit. Threats of annihilation and destruction must yield to peace for all who inhabit the region.

We pray for the safety of the people who have suffered at the hands of hatred and violence. And hope that a new day will dawn when all will live in peace.

Cain Yehi Ratzon.

Difficult and loving conversations about Israel

I had the honor of moderating a conversation for the New Israel Fund (NIF) at Beth Am Israel, located on the Main Line in suburban Philadelphia.

Our speakers, Rabbi Noa Sattath and Libby Linkenski are dedicated to fostering a shared society that upholds our Jewish values. Our values endure, even in challenging times like these, when they are stressed and tested as rarely before in our history. Indeed, our values are more important than ever for maintaining perspective. Libby shared three points to remember as we navigate these difficult times:

  1. People are not their governments. 

Palestinians are not Hamas. Israelis are not Benjamin Netanyahu. Americans are not Donald Trump. We are more than the actions of our extremist leaders and are not directly complicit in their worst acts.

  1. Don’t defend the indefensible. 

The conflict didn’t begin on October 7, and October 7 itself was indefensible. So is the ongoing assault on the people of Gaza. We can’t lose our moral clarity, regardless of politics.

  1. Two peoples, one land. 

Two peoples have always existed between the river and the sea, and both will continue to exist. Any vision that erases one side is a vision of unimaginable violence. The question is not whether we coexist but how. That’s where the conversation begins—and where it must end.

We must continue working to lay the foundation for a future where both people can live with dignity and security.