For just shy of two years, we, the Jewish people, have been engaged in a Joshua-like campaign of destruction and devastation in Gaza, breaking down wall after wall, home after home, life after life. We have failed to open our hearts and minds – our consciences – to the reality and consequences of the thundering sounds of our fighter jets and their pulverizing bombs.
On the high holidays, Jewish communities around the globe will hear the sound of the Shofar, a ram's horn, throughout prayer services.
Maimonides writes (Teshuva 3:4) that "even though the sounding of the shofar on Rosh HaShanah is a decree of the written law, still it has a deep meaning as if saying, awake, awake o sleeper from your sleep; O slumberers, arouse yourselves from your slumbers, examine your deeds, return in repentance and remember your Creator."
Here, Maimonides insists that the address of the tekiot (shofar blasts) is our hearts and minds. The shofar initiates an inner psychological process of self-examination.
In the biblical story of Joshua, however, the shofar plays a very different role. When the shofar is blown at the battle of Jericho, the sound breaks down the external, physical walls of the city, causing the total destruction of the city and its inhabitants, including men, women and children.
This year, the contrast between Joshua's and Maimonides' shofar is especially poignant. One is a shofar of introspection; the other is the shofar of militarism and conquest. While Joshua's shofar crumbles walls, allowing the military to attack, Maimonides' Rosh Hashanah shofar breaks down the inner, spiritual walls of our hearts and minds, calling us to reconsider our actions.
Since the October 7 Hamas attacks, the Jewish people have been blinded by our rage and by our trauma, unable to see what our hands have wrought upon Gaza, unable to hear the cries and desperation of Palestinian innocents, of the children, and unable to feel the pain of the other.
I shudder as I write these words about my people and my country. What has happened to us? Are we the same people with the distinguishing characteristics, identified by the Talmud, of compassion, diffidence and engagement in acts of loving-kindness? In what way is our behavior over the last two years consistent with Jewish tradition? How have we come to slaughter, massacre and starve day after day? Do we now privilege endless war over the biblical commandment to redeem hostages? Doesn't Maimonides teach us that "there is no greater mitzvah than the redemption of captives"?
The shofar's sounds have the ability to pierce our souls, to rouse our spirits and penetrate our consciences. As Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv from 1935-1945 boldly asserted, "the shofar is the human conscience, the conscience of the image of God within each human being."
And so this year we must blow the shofar with a new intentionality: To shatter the walls of disavowal that we have constructed around us, to wake up from our complacency and indifference. We must rouse ourselves from our complicity in a nightmarish narrative to which we have become prisoner. The shofar blasts are our cry, "this is not a just war!"
In fact, if we have learned anything from this war, it is that the very concept of a just war is absurd, mere sophistry. War is sometimes necessary, but it is doubtful that it is ever just or moral. And, in the face of the deafening silence of our rabbis and communal leaders, it is time for us to acknowledge that we have gone astray.
Blowing the shofar at dawn, during the Israeli war of independence, 01/10/1948Credit: לע"מ
Now, we must raise our shofar-emboldened voices to demand a cessation of the violence and the annihilation that is being perpetrated in our name. The shofar summons us to return to our principles and values, to return to our compassionate Jewish selves and to return to a Judaism that has been sullied by our degenerative actions and attitudes.
However, such a return alone is inadequate and incomplete; it is not only or primarily about us. Our return must include a genuine effort to connect meaningfully to our Palestinian neighbors as equals. To recover our humanity we will need to recognize their humanity.
Long ago the Ba'al Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement, taught that evil can become the "throne" of the good. In our situation, the crisis generated by our catastrophic war must become the springboard for a renewed attempt to pursue peace.
We cannot allow ourselves to sink into hopelessness when so many on the ground in the midst of raging conflict are still committed to the struggle for peace and equality. Out of the darkness of the moment we can emit a ray of light, a glimmer of hope. This is vital to any revivified quest for peace. And it is the hope that is in the DNA of both Palestinians and Jews.
Palestinians struggle to get donated food at a community kitchen in Khan Younis, southern Gaza StripCredit: Jehad Alshrafi, AP
As Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, once said: "We Palestinians suffer from an incurable disease called hope." And as Yehuda Amichai wrote in his Ein Yahav, "It is the truth. Hope must be like barbed wire to keep out our despair."
We in the diaspora must join this public effort to transform the reality in Israel and Palestine and move our peoples from the edge of the abyss toward mutual recognition and ultimate reconciliation.
We can begin the process this year by reciting a special prayer that acknowledges our sinful actions, including our inaction, and by demanding an end to this war. We must commit to a Jewish Marshall Plan for Gaza as a healing act of atonement and repair.
May the shofar's call awaken our potential for transformative change and may the hope that is key to both peoples stimulate and inspire a renewed search for peace.
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller is Director Emeritus at UCLA Hillel, where he has served for fifty years. Today he is on the faculty of the Shalom Hartman Institute and a member of Smol Emuni U.S., a community of observant Jews committed to justice, equality and dignity for Jews and Palestinians.