There’s Been a Shift in How Many Jews Are Thinking About Gaza

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Last week, more than a thousand rabbis and Jewish leaders across the world signed a letter. While not directly addressed to the Israeli government, it calls for the country to end “the use and threat of starvation as a weapon of war.”

One of the people who signed the letter is Sarah Reines, a rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan.

“We’re sensing a shift in so many different areas of society and around the world in terms of response to what’s happening in Gaza,” she said. “And I wanted to be part of this strong statement by so many rabbis and clergy around the world that what is happening is utterly unacceptable and needs to stop.”

On a recent episode of What Next, guest host Rob Gunther spoke to Reines about her relationship with Israel and how she has started to address the conflict. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rob Gunther: Over the course of your life, what has your relationship been like with Israel?

Sarah Reines: It’s always been a part of my Judaism and felt like a part of my identity. It has felt both distant and close. I grew up never expecting that my family would be able to travel there. It was not a place that we would vacation to. I didn’t visit it until I was a graduate student. But at the same time, I knew Israeli songs and Israeli foods, and I always felt as if I had a connection to Israel.

Growing up at Temple Emanu-El, in about third or fourth grade, I was given this book by the principal of the religious school. It was a collection of poetry written by Arab and Jewish children living in Israel, all about their desires for peace. These poems and their pictures, which they drew and painted, reflected an Israel that I didn’t hear much about. That was how I learned about the conflict there.

Do you remember when you started to question Israel’s actions as a state? Were there any specific incidents that made you second-guess the government? 

I was in middle school—I remember it was at the dinner table. My father was very upset with Israel’s role in the Lebanon war. My dad was a person of many passions, and he was very passionate about his Judaism. He taught at the religious school, and he loved Judaism and felt tied to Israel and really had deep regrets that he was never able to go there. But I heard him be critical about Israel in a way that I didn’t understand, and regrettably didn’t pursue. But that made an impression on me because I knew how much he loved Israel and the Jewish people and humanity. And when he was criticizing the government, it stood out to me because I hadn’t heard that kind of response to Israel. It was very impactful for me, even though at the time I didn’t understand the full politics and what it all meant.

I went through a bunch of your sermons, and one that stuck out took place about six months before the Oct. 7 attacks. It’s titled, “We Need to Talk About Israel.” You note that for 25 years as a rabbi, you had never given a sermon about Israel before then. Why had you not talked about Israel, and what did you hope to accomplish during that sermon?

Let me start with what I hoped to accomplish: making up for lost time. I’m going to rattle off a bunch of reasons why I hadn’t given a sermon, and none of them are a good excuse: “It’s not my place,” “I don’t have the emotional bandwidth,” “Why would people want to hear from me?”
There were so many reasons why I didn’t. It’s a very profound honor to stand up on any bimah, or pulpit. You’re speaking and people are listening, and I take that responsibility very seriously. And I always do so out of a love for Israel. I always do so out of love and a sense of commitment.

So you started using your voice to speak about Israel about six months before the attacks. Then Oct. 7 happened. What was it like immediately following that day? How did you talk to your congregation about what had happened? What did people need in that moment? 

It was just utter grief, devastation, horror. It was an enormous shiva. In the Jewish tradition, after someone dies, you sit shiva for a week. You spend a week at home, and you isolate yourself from the rest of the world in your daily life, and you are just given the space to be in that place of deep grief. And in some ways, we are still in shiva now, but not so intensively. I don’t think it was till January or February that I started to wake up in the morning and not feel a huge heaviness in my heart that made it actually hard to get out of bed.

There’s definitely a palpable sense of fear when you talk to any Jewish person. Does your community feel safe? Are they experiencing antisemitism in their lives in a way that’s different from what it was like before Oct. 7? 

It’s hard for me to say what my community feels. My community is made up of thousands of households, so I don’t want to speak for them.

But it would be fair to say, yes, people are more scared. I hear about people’s fear, and I sense what you are sensing from the people around me. But people are experiencing their fear differently.

I think fear is a funny thing. We’re all scared of different things. There’s different triggers and traumas that set that off. I am trying really hard these days to separate emotion from fact. Emotion matters, and that’s why, when people are grieving, I want to speak to their hearts.
But also, there are forces around, and they gain power by inflaming people’s fear to distort reality. And that terrifies me.

Often when there’s criticism of Israeli politics, you hear leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling it a type of antisemitism. And this is difficult because antisemitism—it’s documented—is on the rise in the United States and around the world. How do you balance legitimate criticism while trying to be mindful of the fact that antisemitism is a real thing? 

I believe that people in a relationship sometimes criticize each other when they see each other headed toward danger, and they do it out of love. And so my criticism and critique and questions about Israel are always done with that in mind. I have been accused of antisemitism by colleagues, by family, by strangers.

We’re always going to debate what antisemitism is. I’m really careful to distinguish between what is hateful and what is loving in terms of the words I use and the actions I take. Antisemitism is a real issue and an important issue, and it’s also being used as a weapon. And what has made me nervous in the past months and years is how Jews are weaponizing it against each other.

There’s been so much horror over the past nearly two years of conflict. It does feel as if the past several weeks seem to have marked a kind of turning point. You have countries like France and the U.K., who are planning to recognize the state of Palestine. You have conservative rabbis like Charles Feinberg co-signing this letter that you also signed. I’m wondering if you have thoughts on why this moment in particular appears to be breaking through in a way that other moments have not?

There’s been a shift in what the media is saying in small ways in terms of how people are protesting. There’s been change. It didn’t all happen this week, but that is a shift. And that is happening alongside these people also protesting to bring the hostages home. You don’t have to make a choice. It’s all happening. And I think that more and more people are able to say, “We are not making choices about disasters and injustices and suffering. We have to respond to it all.” I don’t know why it’s happening now, but I’m grateful it is.

It’s notable to me that the language of the letter you and so many other rabbis signed calls for more humanitarian aid, but it stops short of calling for an end to the conflict. Can you talk me through how that language was crafted? Was it done so in a way to welcome maybe more voices who were reluctant to sign on previously?

I wasn’t involved in the writing of it, but I imagine that if you want to get more people to sign, you have to say less. It was responding in particular to the lack of aid and food in Gaza. That doesn’t mean I don’t have other feelings, and it doesn’t mean other people who signed it don’t have other feelings and desires and wishes. But even though there were things that it didn’t say, the fact that so many people could get behind that and say that means something in the larger context of what’s happening.

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