Genocide and the Burden of History

On moral horror and the ethics of truth-telling

All of us Jews alive today after the Holocaust live under a cloud – and not just the one that burdens us with the memory of what we’ve lost and the trauma of our victimhood. We live under a cloud of multiple fears best summarized by the Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, speaking to the Bundestag in 1998:

I come from a people who gave the ten commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shalt not be a perpetrator; thou shalt not be a victim; and thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.¹

I find this framing so powerful in how Bauer juxtaposes these three commandments as moral obligations that are not linear or conditional on one another: they are simultaneous commitments that our people has to learn from the formative blackness of our recent history. There is so much moral simplicity out there about the Holocaust, and Bauer asks us to resist it, and to notice especially since the rise of Zionism that the risk of the Jewish people abusing the power at our disposal is now as equally available, if not more so, than the risk of being victimized again for our lack of power.

I think there are folks around the world who have been waiting – maybe with some glee – for the Jews to finally be able to be accused of being perpetrators, like they got tired of Jewish victimhood and all the guilt it imposed on others, like it is time for some turnabout. I have no patience for that, of course, but the existence of that narrative does not undermine the moral truth of Bauer’s instructions. The fact that we were a people that suffered requires us to remember that suffering – how it felt to us, so that we might never experience it again; how it felt to us, that others should never experience it by our hand.

But to hold to these commitments simultaneously is easier said than done. You see so many people taking the easy exit ramp, becoming fixated on Jewish victimhood as a get out of jail free card for Jews to do whatever they want, and others becoming fixated on Jews as perpetrators – or the risk of Jews becoming perpetrators – that they seem to have lost the plot on the complexity of these commitments. And where I have real compassion for our people as we struggle with this impossible moral burden – this burden we bear that we did not seek, that the Nazis imposed on us as an eternal penalty atop our persecution – is that we have just so little to work with in our storied history to use to figure out how to strike the right balance.

I think that one of the reasons this particular moment in Jewish history feels so hard – especially for those of us who think about our place in Jewish history, even in the present – is that this phase of Israel’s war in Gaza, this recentering of the victim narrative on the Palestinians rather than the Jews, this sense of horror of what is happening, and who is doing it, and what is preventable – this is a new bad thing of Jewish history. 22 months ago, during the week of October 7, I was convinced that I was living in the worst Jewish era of my lifetime; but there was something epigenetically and historically familiar about it. Remember that moment, when narratives about pogroms where everywhere, the language of the worst day of Jewish suffering since the Holocaust was widespread, when we sought refuge and respite in traditional liturgies composed in periods of previous persecution, and in texts and practices that evoked the muscle memory of mourning? That was the memory of old bad things in Jewish history. And we know, as we knew then, that the analogies to the past were fraught – the Jews attacked by Hamas on October 7 were not the Jews of Kishinev or of Baghdad from the Farhud. We knew that those analogies could be weaponized to become dangerous, to make us so fixated on our victimhood that we would forget our agency. And still: it is one thing for a Jew to experience a crisis and feel that they have some recourse to the wisdom of the past, some retrievable lessons from the recesses of the past to help us think through it and live through it. It feels like another thing entirely to feel that we are experiencing today – the consequences and implications of being quite possibly the most powerful Jews in all Jewish history – is new. Where do we look to understand ourselves now?

---

I’ve cared about this idea of living as a human being in a timeline for a long time. So I went to graduate school 25 years ago to learn how to become a scholar of it, a historian of ancient Judaism and early Christianity. I was riveted by the story of the transformation of Judaism in the first few centuries of the common era and by the emergence of the literatures that would come to shape the Judaism that we inherited. I was fascinated by the politics of ancient Judaism, slowly becoming self-aware that this was in part because I saw parallels between then and now; or maybe, because I was so interested in now that I imagined some parallels with this formative period in our people’s history. I already loved Jewish texts, and I wanted to know and understand them better. I wanted the disposition of a scholar, the critical faculties, the respect it engendered, maybe eventually the career path and the tweed jacket. I loved the past, and I wanted more time with it.

The experience of graduate school itself was humbling, and it was very hard. It was not what I expected; I naively assumed I would feel a basic sense of continuity between my undergraduate and graduate seminars, but just that I wouldn’t have to also waste my time taking math classes. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Like many graduate students, I questioned throughout whether I would make it through. This started on literally my first day, when I had what I later understood to be a panic attack in one of my professor’s offices, as I felt the walls – lined floor to ceiling with books – closing in on me. It turns out that being a student of a discipline has almost no relationship to being a scholar in the discipline, much like enjoying a piece of music tells you nothing about what it takes to become expert enough to perform the piece – much less to write it.

You learn quickly how little you know, much less than you think, even though you met the qualifications to get accepted into the program; and you start to understand that the more intimacy you start to feel with the material that you hoped to master, the vaster that corpus becomes. You set out day after day, often alone in a library, to read a few important articles or to fight your way through a densely written academic book; you realize that there’s important data in a footnote, directing you to a different important article or five; by the end of the day, you’ve not finished the original article, but the list of things to read has gotten longer.

But most of all you learn the discipline involved in trying to say something real – and new – in the face of this mountain of knowledge, and after a history of scholarship you’ll never be able to fully cover, a novice trying to be a professional alongside your teachers. And therefore you recognize that that sense of humility and overwhelm is not meant to disincentivize you from trying; it is meant to inculcate in you the heavy responsibility of trying to “get it right.”

Consider all the following methodological considerations that a good historian will use in approaching the evidence of the past and trying to draw clear conclusions:

• We want to try to understand events and people and texts in their own contexts, bracketing our own assumptions.

• As modern scholars with the benefit of critical methodologies, we want to go further – naming and questioning our own biases and assumptions to interrogate how they influence the way we understand what we see. This means we both want to basically trust what we encounter in historical sources, reading the materials of the past in good faith – that they are not trying to deceive us – and we also want to use Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutic of suspicion,” which assumes there are underlying meanings or counterfactuals that contradict their surface appearance.

• We want to try to enter in the minds and experience of people from the past, from the inside out; and we also want to pay attention to the ways that what has survived from history can only represent a single strand of a complex narrative, that “the truth” of the past – if that can ever be discovered – requires imagining beyond what we have and what we know, elevating voices that have been suppressed, and listening for tensions and contradictions in the periods that we study.

We find ourselves both asserting and hedging on our assertions all the time.

All of this is supposed to make you humble in the presence of the evidence before you; and it works. Graduate students often must overcome major psychological obstacles in this process so that they can emerge as peers to their advisors who have been in the work for far longer, who have accumulated the expertise in the right balance between caution and certainty to be able to speak in more positivist terms about their material. One of the greatest compliments you can give a historian is to describe them as “careful.” It is a paradox of success in this line of work – the better you are at reading the evidence, the more careful you are about what you are seeing.

I really struggled with this. I was far more interested in theorizing what I was seeing, in new ideas and ways of thinking, than I was in the slow work of dotting every i and crossing every t, in verifying every assumption and cross-checking every manuscript variant. My advisor, a brilliant – and it turns out, surprisingly patient – historian, kept coaching me that the key work in a dissertation is below the line in the footnotes, far more than what is supposed to be the economical prose of the text itself. Showing your work in the sandbox is a better testimonial for an emerging scholar, more than the paltry sandcastle that they wind up building. Its funny: if I told you what I argued in my dissertation – a subtle argument about the emergence of rabbinic culture over several centuries in the Roman empire and not just in the rabbinic centers in the land of Israel and Babylonia – you might be amused to hear this described as too ambitious and too unproven a thesis for a doctorate in ancient Judaism. It is…pretty subtle. But I knew throughout that I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, do the kind of work that I so admired and appreciated in my advisor’s scholarship. I got my doctorate – I think what I did was good enough, and I guess my committee agreed – and within a few years I began my move away from formal historical scholarship and into this different discipline where I live now of public-facing scholarship and thought-leadership.

I want to go back to the central paradox in this line of work: the better you are at the actual careful work of historical scholarship, the more cautious and tentative your conclusions are supposed to be. This echoes with an argument that Barry Wimpfheimer, a Talmud professor at Northwestern, made in the pages of Sources last year: the more conversant you are in academic theory – for him, Foucault and Derrida – the more inclined you should be to resist any reductive thinking about the past or present, the more inclined you should be towards seeing complexity and operating with epistemological humility. He writes of his peers: “Many academics in the humanities who do very subtle and nuanced work in their own research areas eschew complexity when it comes to Israel.” I recommend reading the whole essay.

Now here’s a more powerful wrinkle: all this hesitation, caution, and care that we ancient historians use before making definitive pronouncements about the past are practices of a discipline in which all the available evidence is laid out before us. Except for the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls – a discovery that rightly changed a lot of what we knew about the past – and a periodic archaeological finding, by and large historians of ancient Judaism or of Jewish intellectual history have at their disposal everything that it is available from the past. The field moves and changes because we move and change; we develop new methodologies, new self-awarenesses, new competencies; we look at old texts with new eyes; we look to parallel sources of knowledge, learn languages of adjacent civilizations, and we go back to our source material, and we can tentatively draw new conclusions. And not only is all the material available – for my doctorate, virtually every piece of data – whether inscriptions, letters, archaeological discoveries, or texts – was digitized – but it is meant to be available equally to everyone. There was a period after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered when they were unfairly apportioned out to certain scholars who had exclusive control over the material and the privilege of publishing their findings first. No credible scholar, though, would uncritically accept those findings until they had a chance to examine the materials themselves. Scholarship and critical inquiry cannot work otherwise, with equal access to the evidence.

Scholarship, in other words, is a business of access, caution, and the wise economy of language. We work hard for our conclusions to be rock solid, subject to the scrutiny of others, and expressed in constant reference to the evidence itself. We apply rigorous disciplinary methodologies to become conscious of our own biases. And we risk our reputations whenever we put our ideas out into the world. And all of this, in turn, grants scholarship its power. It builds the bridge between scholarship and the knowledge that is meant to shape the world’s understanding of itself; and then, the bridge to wisdom itself.

---

This is not an essay about my time in graduate school. This essay is a work of criticism that I want to offer about the discourse – talking about talking – as relates to the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza and this tragic, unending war. I will share more as we go on as to why sometimes talking about talking is not an avoidance strategy; sometimes it is part and parcel of shaping our moral present and our moral future, especially when we get very clear, each of us, what our role is in the world and what we are meant to contribute; what is in our control to change, and what is not.

I offer this with trepidation as Gaza burns; as many of its people – and Israelis hostages among them – are starving; as the situation feels hopeless; and as many of us feel hopeless in the face of this catastrophe with nothing but our voices to raise in cries of anguish, anger, sadness, and despair. Hopeless, and helpless.

And I’ll share with you where I stand right now about all this, so that I am not misunderstood:

I believe, based on what I can see and verify – which is limited – and based on what I understand about this conflict and about Israel and Hamas and Gaza – which is obscured – that the situation in Gaza is extremely bad, a humanitarian catastrophe.

I believe that the food crisis is manmade, as are nearly all global food shortages. I am no apologist for Hamas, which began this awful war, which is starving the hostages, and which controls the economy of Gaza, and bears responsibility for a lot of what we see; but I believe Israel is at least partially and possibly primarily responsible for causing this crisis; and as the gatekeeper for provisions, primarily responsible for alleviating it. I am persuaded both by those who argue that feeding the Gazans is a moral obligation as well as those who see it as a strategic interest of Israel in, paradoxically, putting pressure on Hamas, who benefits every day both from the suffering of the Palestinian people as well as the mounting assault against Israel’s legitimacy around the world.

I believed at the outset of this iteration of the conflict, on October 7, 2023, that this was a just war against Hamas. I still believe that that framing is correct. But it has become harder and harder to sustain that argument over time as more military officials and security officials in Israel make the case that Israel achieved its achievable military goals as early as May 2024, and as the once-marginal, now mainstream drumbeat in Israeli society and among some top officials makes the case for permanent occupation and possibly even Jewish settlement in Gaza. The absence of achievable military goals that can be in balance with the expected loss of civilian life, and the emergence of non-military goals, threatens the just war claim; and I think we have passed the threshold.

I am angry about the dehumanizing language that some Israeli officials use about the Palestinians, about the toleration for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and about the daily threats to the civil rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel – all of which threaten what I believe is an essential claim that helps justify Israel’s war against Hamas, which is that it is not directed at the Palestinian people.

And I am haunted by the images of the few remaining living hostages, with the deep awareness that returning them alive has never been the priority of this Israeli government; but believe now that to do so would be the last salvageable good to come from this awful war, as part of a comprehensive effort to end it, bring them home, feed the Gazans, and begin the complicated work of the day after.

This is where I am now, and I’ve tried to say all of this without resorting to cheap sloganizing. I argued in an essay near the beginning of the war that we needed a moral map to make sense of the overwhelm we were facing with this multifront war. That map included attention to the questions of solidarity as Israel confronted immense danger and uncertainty; a concern for the civil rights of Palestinians in Israel, for the lives and rights of Palestinians in the West Bank, and concern for Palestinian civilians in Gaza caught in the crossfire but deserving of protection; and the responsibility to stay attuned to the responsibilities of sustaining democratic norms amidst the war.

I wrote then, and I’m sorry for insufferably quoting myself:

A moral map is a case for slower and more serious deliberation because it is a heuristic for moral thinking. It does not offer reflexive responses for all situations. Such partisanship, and the mapping of moral language directly onto clear policy positions, is not credible in this moment.

All of us are experiencing this crisis in real time. We cannot be certain whether what we are seeing from either media or from Israeli government and Hamas channels is fully accurate. We cannot be certain about the deliberations behind Israel’s impossible choices and actions. Rather, we Diaspora Jews are going to have to approach all of this tentatively.

One moral frame is not enough for a war like this; the gift of a complex, multivocal tradition, and of minds and hearts capable of holding multiple commitments at the same time, is rewarded in the promise of some coherence, and perhaps a community of fellow interpreters, as we muddle through the impossible.

And now zooming back to the present: our job is to continue to watch, to scan what is visible to us, to learn what is happening; our responsibility is to formulate the best understandings of what we see, knowing the limitations of what we can possibly now; and then to take on moral commitments, knowing and respecting that those commitments sometimes pull against each other. That, I think, is a way of living in a world where there are clear and visible injustices – both the plight of the remaining hostages, and the starving and dispossession of nearly 2 million people – within a larger climate of the fog of war.

---

That approach is not widespread. I am astonished that instead of measured morality and epistemic humility, a growing cascade of scholars – and I am particularly scandalized that it is scholars, and especially the historians – who have decided to categorize what is taking place in Gaza as “genocide,” a definitive and conversation-ending classification about this latest episode in a generations-long conflict. I am surprised by it, and I fear its long-term implications for the credibility of scholarship itself, which we desperately need in our increasingly truth-averse world.

I want you to pause for a second to ask the methodological question. How, facing a crisis like this, should a scholar evaluate what they are seeing? What would they need to know to come to such a definitive conclusion? First, they would need a pre-existing, agreed-upon definition of the term, and more importantly, a seeable, knowable, and verified body of evidence – this would include, in the case of Gaza, all the following: the death counts, the differentiation between civilians and combatants, the military calculations going into the choices to attack military targets that also result in the killing of civilians, the obstacles to the distribution of aid on both the Israeli side and in Gaza, a fuller accounting of the war aims that goes well beyond the most inflammatory statements made by Israel’s worst political actors. You would need, for all of these, objective information, or at least enough information from multiple sources to be able to scrutinize the biases in your source material and hold conflicting data sources against each other to make sense of the differences and draw reasonable conclusions.

You would need, as good scholars always need, time.

None of these conditions are in place right now; and as a result, none of the commitments to the work of scholarship are visible in this conversation either. We all know it, but it has not seemed to temper the boldest and most definitive claims about what is taking place in Gaza. There are no foreign journalists in Gaza – and you can blame Israel for that if you want, as I pushed David Horovitz when he came as a guest on Identity/Crisis – but the absence of evidence does not grant permission for the free use of bad data – or no data! – to draw conclusions. What comes out of Gaza is under the thumb of Hamas. Now, we know from previous conflicts that Israel does not generally contest the overall casualty numbers that Hamas reports; but at the same time, no one can agree on the differentiation between civilians and combatants, which means Israel could be seen either as killing people disproportionately and indiscriminately, at historically significant rates; or the data could suggest that Israel is breaking new ground in limiting civilian death in modern urban warfare. Or maybe somewhere in the middle? We certainly know that Hamas engages in a propaganda and disinformation campaign; we also know, as John Spencer has argued, that Hamas has pioneered a new and unprecedented approach in exploiting the death and endangerment of civilians on its own side of the conflict as an asset in its nihilistic information war; we know that there are serious problems in the objectivity of the human rights organizations that have been operating in Gaza since Hamas took over and controlled all the information coming out of Gaza back in 2005.

All of these are variables clouding the possibility of getting a clear story of what is taking place, beyond our collective impression that what is taking place is—to use very technical terminology—very bad.

And then there’s the issue of intent, which is often understood as the most important variable in assessing whether something is a genocide or not. Those who believe it is a genocide point to inflammatory statements by some Israeli leaders about what they hope to do in Gaza, and the dangerous rhetoric alive in parts of Israeli society; those who argue against this claim will point to parts of the genocide statute which insist that it can only be a genocide if there is no plausible military claim for what is taking place. After October 7, and with a constant flurry of tactical decisions – you can agree with them or not – can anyone say with certainty, “Aha – I can now understand this whole campaign to be a lie?” Or perhaps, does the choice to emphasize this statement over that, this action over another, betray an interpretive choice – one that takes far greater caution, with the benefit of wisdom and time, than is betrayed by the daily onslaught of blogs by academics offering us their definitive conclusions?

I think back to what I was talking about earlier, about how tentative we are with our conclusions when we all have access to the same data and information preserved from the past; and how wildly confident these scholars seem to be in the face of literally no agreed-upon information. And for the life of me, I do not know what is going on.

---

Actually, I do have a few theories. My most generous theory is that what motivates this kind of irresponsible scholarship is well-intentioned desperation. We are laden, since the Holocaust, with the recognition that our societies have never and will never do enough, or act quickly enough, in face of man’s inhumanity to man. We have these terminologies like genocide which are laden with so much power that they force us to act. No serious moral person can say “yes, it’s a genocide, BUT.” Genocide is the ultimate intolerable deviance, to use Donniel Hartman’s language. The appeal to the language of certainty intends to be a conversation-ender, to put any defender of the status quo on the defensive. And people are helpless, and they want to do something. Giving a definition to something is akin to doing something, at least for scholars; it changes the facts of the present and establishes precedent for the future. It is a way of putting a stake in the ground – in this case, either inviting opprobrium against Israel, or at least signaling for future scholars how to interpret the evidence of this awful reality in which we are living

All of this – as well as the memefication of this complexity - make sense as strategies for activists. I do not begrudge activists their rhetorical tools that they need to move and mobilize people. I personally have limited appetite for such activism – I cannot abide the reduction of complex moral realities, which most moral realities are, into the blacks and whites that get people’s attention and onto the street; I choose the few times when I go onto the street carefully. The ultimate expression of this is that the campaigner – at least the non-populists one – will start with outlandish and simplistic policy positions that get people’s attention; as momentum builds, they are less “defund the police” and more “work to rethink the relationship between the police and the community.” That’s where the language of activism meets the necessities of reality. But the fact that this kind of activism is not my cup of tea does not mean I do not respect the necessity of these forms of activism for moving societies, for raising the temperature, for signaling the stakes of contentious issues, for changing hearts and mind. There is a place for some amount of polarization in a healthy democracy; and activists often give us helpful goal posts on either ends that make movement possible in the center.

But activism, my friends, is not responsible scholarship. Its not. You have to decide at a certain point as a scholar to be the person standing on the side saying, “well, actually,” even if it sometimes makes you insufferable, and sometimes makes you irrelevant. Doing so keeps you careful, and it keeps you honest.

Some years ago, I was sitting with a friend and colleague who had gone to graduate school after years of being an activist. He conceded that after his extensive study, he had come to embrace the truth that even on the issues that he was most passionate, from the scholar’s vantage point those issues were more complicated than his activist’s placard had betrayed. I thought this was great; he did not. After I nodded approvingly, he sputtered: “But I’ve done less for this issue in the last six years than I did in two weeks when I was on the job!” Not surprisingly, he went back to that line of work, and I felt sad about it for two reasons – both because I think he has embraced narratives that he knows are imperfect and maybe even wrong because they stir the passions more effectively; but also because he has concluded – and here I think the activists take too much for themselves – that that work of nuance and complexity, the realm of the scholar, has nothing to give this world, especially in the face of injustice. How tragic that is for the business of wisdom that has helped evolve our species for so long.

By the way I also don’t begrudge Palestinians themselves, in Gaza or elsewhere, as they grasp for terminology that helps them hold together a narrative of their continuous displacement and the violence against them – and in their name – and especially as new possibilities are on the horizon for further, possibly permanent displacement, and in the face of so much death. I do not begrudge the desperation they must hold to capture the world’s attention to their plight. I am fundamentally sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people, and nothing in my Zionism requires of me to deny its legitimacy. I feel desperate as well to see a world in which Zionism – with its dreams and its tragedies – can co-exist with Palestinian nationalism, in which we take seriously the inextricability of these stories and these people, in which we stop thinking of Israel-Palestine in zero-sum terms. I do fear that the use of the terminology will not work to solve the conflict; Jews experience it is a seizure of a piece of Jewish historical experience that is now being flipped on the Jews, a recasting of the Jew from victim to perpetrator. I fear this terminological tug-of-war does not bring us together, but rather sustains the very conflict itself beyond repair.

So maybe it is desperation and helplessness, and maybe it is activism, or maybe its something else. The origin story for the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was a short opinion piece published by an ex-pat Israeli scholar, Raz Segal, called “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” It was published on October 13, 2023. I want you to pause and consider that date for a second. This was almost immediately after the genocidal rampage by Hamas in southern Israel; in fact, it was the same week. The IDF had just completed re-securing the kibbutzim, army bases, and villages that had been overrun, and had just begun air assaults into Gaza. It was, indeed, a dangerous time; tempers were running high, and the rhetoric was out of control. On October 13, Segal declared that Israel was committing a genocide, and by doing so – and publishing in a Jewish publication – created the permission structure for other scholars to make the same argument.

To make such a claim on October 13 requires us to understand that this argument lives within a school of thought that believes, counter to most of the norms around how we define genocide, that Israel has been committing a slow-moving genocide against the Palestinian people for decades beforehand, going back to the Nakba and continuing to the present. It is a narrative of history that was looking to assemble further data to “prove” a pre-existing belief. It was incoherent to make the claim of genocide in Gaza back in October of 2023 if the claim pertained particularly to Israel’s actions in Gaza; it was only coherent if it stemmed from an existing worldview that was seeking affirmation. It is a textbook example of what we call confirmation bias.

Virtually every article since alleging a genocide in Gaza now quotes Segal’s article directly or indirectly; much of the infrastructure of this scholarly campaign, which is what it is, is built on one of the worst transgressions a scholar can commit. Confirmation bias represents the unwillingness to examine new data on its face, to ask hard questions; it instead assimilates information as a means of reinforcing an existing belief. And then it becomes unfalsifiable! Was it possible – does it remain possible – that such a scholar will eventually confront the confusing mountain of evidence that will one day replace our current vacuum of reliable evidence, and say “Whoops? I was wrong?” More likely, scholars who have come to this conclusion will simply continue to assemble their proof of the crime based on their theory. Jewish historians look back at Yigael Yadin excavating Masada with Josephus’ historical narrative in hand, “finding” the truth of the narrative here and there to confirm the accuracy of an account that did not deserve to be treated as scripture. We don’t do that in this business, and the appeal by some of these scholars to say now that they were issuing warnings using their language of certainty about unfolding realities that they now say came to pass should not mitigate our suspicions about the illegitimacy of this way of doing this work. Once you start working this way, there is no way out.

And not surprisingly, as with any activist campaign, it is becoming harder and harder for any scholars in the same field to contest this orthodoxy. Orthodoxy on any non-empirical argument in social science fields usually is an indicator of a problem. Everyone still has the same body of evidence; there’s just also peer pressure, and political pressure, and a sense of urgency, and a desire not to be – as the saying goes – on the wrong side of history. We have a problem.

---

Now, you ask, maybe the most important question, a question that is lingering for me too, as I wonder about what it means to talk about this piece of the drama right now and not others: does this matter? In the presence of this level of human suffering, why focus on this issue? It seems semantic, or pedantic. It seems to suggest that the bigger issue is the words that we use about a crisis, rather than the crisis itself.

And I would say no: my principal grief these days is for the human suffering itself, for the culture of failed leadership, and for my general sense of powerlessness in the face of this world that will not heal itself. I feel helpless and hopeless too, and I have more agency in my line of work as relates to Israel from my desk in New York than most, and I feel hopeless and helpless watching this story unfold, imprisoned as well by the feeling that there is very little that Jewish history and tradition has by way of precedent to genuinely help us work through this.

But I am also watching what I perceive to be a long-term tragedy here that sits alongside the short-term one; and I am a scholar, and maybe more importantly an educator, and my work is for the long-term more than it is for the short-term. Many of you are educators too, and you have responsibilities as well for the stories we tell, and a great more agency and power to do something when it comes to storytelling than you may when it comes to intervening in Israel or Hamas’ actions in Gaza.

What I’m asking of us is very hard: it is to confront a horror and to feel it deeply, and maybe even be willing to believe that what we are seeing is fully true, despite the problems with being able to prove that it is; but to stop short of giving it a name.

One of the deepest Talmudic texts I know is the story of the four rabbis who enter “the orchard” (pardes, in Hebrew) — an extended parable of all that can go wrong with mystical speculation by the untrained and the unready. Four go in; only one, the teacher, emerges intact. At a key moment in the story, the teacher and guide – Rabbi Akiva – instructs his disciples that when they reached the pure marble stones, they should not say “water, water” – for it they do, they will be as liars about God in God’s presence. I understand this esoteric text to mean that the human impulse to name things – it is a way for us to create order in the unknown, to make sense of things that are hard to see – that that same strategy of reducing the complex into the intelligible can be damaging to what it is you are seeing. You become a liar in the service of your own self-interest. What does it feel like to just see and bear witness, and refuse – maybe even against our instincts – to name the terrible thing as something that it might not be? To do so represents a willingness to try to respect both our gnawing emotions, and our commitments to truth.

We have voices, and how we use those voices matters. Sometimes, some of us need to be activists – raising our voice about what we think the Israeli government should do, raising our voices for the hostages lest they be forgotten, signing one – but maybe not all – of the open letters and petitions going around. Sometimes, we need to just be humans, and Jews – raising our voices in prayer, and in lament; using our hushed voices to whisper comfort to our children seeing a world they wish they wouldn’t, speaking to our loved ones in Israel to express our love and care for them from afar.

And sometimes, including now, we have to use our voices to educate about the present using language that will not permanently and inaccurately discredit the work of scholarship so that it does not continue to lose the public trust, and to preserve its impossible responsibilities to caution and humility so that it can properly inhabit its place in the world as the anchor of knowledge and as the font of wisdom. We, too, bear responsibility not just for trying to fix the present but also to set pathways forward in the future, pathways that need to be paved with truth as well as justice, with wisdom more than with certainty. To make trade-offs now, to listen to our helplessness and satiate it with the empty calories of rhetorical performance is a disservice to the business of knowledge that we will always desperately need.

Let’s try, all of us – especially those of us who are the farthest away – let’s try to be the kinds of people who can use our voices in all these ways: to weep with sadness for the innocent; to advocate for just outcomes; to scream when necessary; and still, throughout, to insist in the necessity of truth and the responsibility of scholarship to remain accountable to it. Let’s be the people who kept our heads intact even as our hearts were torn from our chests. This is how we live in the present; this is how we fight for the future.

1. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00000799