Welcome!

Note from our Rabbi: For These Things I Weep
July/August 2025 
from the Congregation Newsletter

My family and I have plans to visit Israel for a few weeks in July and August. It’s not clear that the trip will wind up happening—Israeli airspace is closed at the time of my writing, and two sets of our tickets to Israel have been canceled.

I still hope to be able to go. It’s been almost 13 years since I’ve been to Israel or the West Bank in person. As many of you know, I have strong and vocal critiques of Israel’s government—its policies within Israel proper and its ongoing assault on the civilians of Gaza as well as the much less internationally publicized but equally indefensible (in my mind) pogroms in the West Bank. I am horrified by the trends I read about in the news that describe a hardening of Israeli attitudes towards the possibility of coexistence with its Palestinian population.

That’s one reason it feels so important for me to be there. I want to be there to share the burden and to bear intimate witness with my Jewish siblings and Palestinians cousins. Because I also love Israel—the Jewish people, and the land. I love it viscerally, from my own experiences and sensory memories of my time
there. I love it from spiritual practice: the daily Jewish prayers that explicitly describe our ancient yearning for the land. If my trip does go forward, I’ll be there during the holiday of Tisha B’Av, when we commemorate the onset of our exile from the land.

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As Jews in America, we are often presented with an untenable choice: love Israel (and shut up) or disavow it and critique it from afar. But centuries of Jewish text and experience illustrate that love does not preclude critique, rather the opposite. A core mitzvah of Judaism is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). The full context is: “You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Surely, reprove your kin and incur no guilt on their account. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against members of your people. Love your fellow as yourself: I am Hashem.” In the Talmud, in Avodah Zarah 5a, it teaches that at the time of exile, the first to be destroyed were those who lived completely virtuously but did not speak out to protest or attempt to shift society.

We recite Lamentations on Tisha B’Av. Lamentations 1:16 says, “For these things I weep.” Love sometimes involves grief, rage, self-critique. We get to love imperfect things, broken things. And then love involves showing up and trying to do our small part to make them right.