Israel’s soul reckoning, cheshbon nefesh, this Elul
In the month of Elul that leads up to the High Holy Days, we undertake cheshbon nefesh, “reckoning of the soul.” Like the English word “reckoning,” cheshbon literally refers to accounting; we are to look closely at our deeds like a balance sheet. We undertake t’shuvah, literally, “return,” and figuratively, “repentance.” When we say that repentance is a form of return, we affirm that each of us is fundamentally good. As we say in the morning liturgy, “My God, the soul you have placed in me is pure,” “Elohai, n’shamah [another word for “soul” in Hebrew, from the root “to breathe,” meaning “all that breathes within us”] sh’-natata bi, t’horah hi [pure is it].” We also have the power to make choices. When we stray from our inherent goodness, our task is to return to it. We seek out our pure soul, our n’shamah t’horah, at our core; we look at where we have gone off-course with unflinching cheshbon nefesh, reckoning of the soul; and we chart the way back.
The framework of cheshbon nefesh and t’shuvah can guide us in understanding the Israel-Gaza conflict. Amid our time’s chaos, we might find clarity through these steps: identifying the pure soul, n’shamah t’horah, at the heart of Israel’s identity; engaging in cheshbon nefesh, reckoning with the choices that Israel’s current government is making; and asking what it might look like for Israel to chart a course of return, t’shuvah, to its core values and ideals once again. Inevitably we will not all have the same opinions about how to translate these values into policy, and so we must share in this dialogue with a sense of honoring dispute for the sake of Heaven, machloket l’shem Shamayim, in the words of the Talmudic rabbis, with bonds of mutual respect and love.
All countries and societies ought to undertake cheshbon nefesh and t’shuvah: America amid our own national turmoil; Britain in the age of Brexit; Russia as it wages war on Ukraine; China amid its persecution of the Tibetans and the Uyghurs; the Palestinians, and especially Hamas, the perpetrators of October 7. As Tom Friedman wrote during the Second Intifada, “Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium… — out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East — is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.” At the same time, it is important to us for our Jewish homeland to reflect Judaism’s highest values. We can simultaneously call out those who criticize Israel with antisemitic double-standards, demonization, or delegitimization and engage in thoughtful critique of Israel’s policies because we care about Israel. We can ask hard questions about Israel’s leadership and care passionately about Israel’s right to exist — as Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Brooklyn said recently, “[M]any countries on earth have committed heinous sins. But we do not conclude that therefore they should not exist. Not even Germany faced such a campaign after World War II.” We can support Israel’s “inherent right” to defend its people, like all nations, under Article 51 of the U.N. charter, and identify where we may see Israel’s government exceeding the scope of this right. Yitzchak Rabin wisely encapsulated this ethos of both/and, not either/or, when he said, “We will fight terror as if there is no peace and make peace as if there is no terror.” When it comes to our self-defense and our values, we can, and must, undertake both.
Let’s begin with identifying the n’shamah t’horah, the pure soul, at the heart of Israel, to which we can return through t’shuvah. The most classic expression of Israel’s core values is in the Israeli Declaration of Independence (officially "The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel," here in Hebrew on the Knesset's Web site and here in English on the Foreign Ministry's Web site; translation drawn from the latter with my modifications):
“THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration [aliyah Y’hudit] and for the Ingathering of the Exiles [Kibbutz Galuyot]; … it will be based on the foundations of freedom, justice, and peace [ha-cheirut, ha-tzedek, v’-ha-shalom] according to the vision of the prophets of Israel [chazonam shel n’vi’ei Yisrael]...”
Israel’s Declaration of Independence upholds both the importance of a safe homeland for the Jewish people and the Jewish values of freedom, justice, and peace, using Hebrew words imbued with meaning like cheirut, freedom, as we sing in kiddush on Pesach, Passover, calling the holiday zman cheiruteinu, the season of our freedom; tzedek, justice, from the same root as tzedakah, charity; and shalom.
With this vision of Israel’s pure soul, let us together engage in cheshbon nefesh about how Israel’s administration is wielding power. The current war in Gaza began when Hamas inflicted the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, on October 7, 2023. Hamas killed about 1200 people and took 251 hostages, targeting civilians simply for living in the modern Jewish homeland. Since October 7, the war has had several different phases. When we reflect on recent months, we can trace five developments that mark this current phase of the war as distinctly, profoundly troubling.
The first of these disturbing developments is the famine in Gaza.
On March 2, during a temporary cease-fire, Israel blocked all aid into the Gaza Strip. On March 18, Israel ended the temporary cease-fire, launching airstrikes. These decisions by Israel’s government do not represent the views of its people, both at the time and since then: about 70% of Israelis support a cease-fire and hostage-release deal, including a majority of those who voted for Netanyahu’s administration. The Israeli government accused Hamas of pillaging U.N. aid, though two senior Israeli military officials told The New York Times that Israel never found evidence that Hamas systematically did so. On May 18, Prime Minister Netanyahu allowed only what he called “minimal” aid into Gaza. Israel and the U.S. established the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation or GHF, an aid organization outside the U.N. The GHF has only four aid sites. Israeli soldiers have shot at Palestinians as they come for aid. On June 3, The New York Times reported, “thousands of desperate and hungry Palestinians have been coming early each day in hopes of securing food. … The Israeli military… said its forces had fired near ‘a few’ people who had strayed from the designated route… [and] did not respond to warning shots… and said they had ‘posed a threat’ to soldiers. A military spokeswoman declined to explain the nature of the perceived threat.” This past Friday, the U.N. human rights office said that as of August 13, “at least 1,760 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid; 994 in the vicinity of GHF… sites and 766 along the routes of supply convoys. Most of these killings were committed by the Israeli military.”
These measures causing the famine in Gaza are devastating. The U.N. World Food Program said recently that “a third of Gaza's population is going without food for multiple days in a row.” Aid workers have seen children too frail to pick through trash for food or even cry. The World Health Organization said, “Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths [in Gaza] in 2025, 63 occurred in July – including 24 children under five.”
On August 6, after U.S. pressure, Israel agreed to devote 3 billion shekels, around $875 million, to aid in Gaza. Israel is also pausing fighting daily in some areas to allow aid convoys to move, and letting aid be airdropped. Aid officials say Israel’s new gestures are, as The New York Times sums it up, “far too little, far too late… Nothing less than a cease-fire will allow the necessary avalanche of aid to flow safely into Gaza.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, from the moderate center-left, has described Israel’s policy as “starving out Gaza” and has identified it as a war crime. Olmert is echoing the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which includes, in its list of war crimes (Article 8(2)(b)(xxv)), “Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies.”
Second: Israel has been destroying parts of Gaza on an enormous scale and designating areas as forbidden for Palestinians to enter.
Yaakov Garb, a professor at Ben-Gurion University, analyzed the IDF’s maps and announcements and concluded that as of April 7, Palestinians are prohibited from entering about half the Gaza Strip. He told NPR, “We've shifted to a regime in which you have very extensive areas that are functioning more as large moats around shrinking enclaves of the remaining Gazan population.” Israel now controls three-quarters of the Gaza Strip, and nearly all Gaza’s 2 million residents are in the remaining quarter. As of July 15, “Nearly 70 percent of civilian infrastructure across the Gaza Strip has been damaged or destroyed,” according to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.
One key reason for this destruction is Hamas’ longstanding illegal, immoral war strategy of storing and firing rockets aimed at Israeli civilians from and near civilian buildings in Gaza, like schools, playgrounds, mosques, hospitals, and U.N. facilities, using the people in these buildings as human shields. These actions represent, as is often said, a "double war crime," for which Hamas must be held accountable. The ICC Statute includes, in its list of war crimes, "Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities" (Article 8(2)(b)(i)), and "Utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations" (Article 8(2)(b)(xxiii)). The NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence explains how this strategy puts Israel in an excruciating position: “Hamas employs a win-win scenario: if… the IDF uses [force]... and the number of civilian causalities [sic] surges, Hamas can use that [for a PR victory] … [But] if the IDF limits its use of military power… to avoid collateral damage, Hamas will be less vulnerable to Israeli attacks.” Hamas’ system of tunnels, stretching hundreds of miles under nearly all of the Gaza Strip, also presents a threat to Israelis’ safety and is near-impossible to destroy without collateral damage to civilian lives and buildings.
However, not all the IDF’s destruction can be attributed to Hamas’ strategy. For one large-scale example: Israel has created a military buffer zone within Gaza roughly 0.6 miles in depth, spanning the entire border between Gaza and Israel, by destroying homes, factories, and farmland. This area is about one-sixth of Gaza and held about 35% of Gaza’s agricultural land. The destruction can be seen from an aerial view, as a CNN report recently demonstrated using before and after photos from Google Earth. The law of war does not permit destroying civilian property "unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of the conflict" (ICC Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(xiii)), meaning, “There needs to be a legitimate military objective… – and the only way to achieve it would be to destroy the civilian property,” as Janina Dill, co-director of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, said to CNN. “[A]t that scale, that’s simply not quite plausible,” she said. Note the words “at that scale”: Israel, like any country, has the right to carry out some actions like these in defense of its security; the argument is that the sheer scale of destruction goes beyond what military objectives would plausibly require. By contrast, Israel’s security barrier with the West Bank, which has been extremely successful at keeping out terrorists, with sections of fence and wall as well as ditches, has a width of about 54 yards, 77 yards, and in some places 110 yards, making it 10 to 20 times thinner than Israel’s new buffer zone with Gaza (these numbers are recorded in the International Court of Justice's 2004 advisory opinion about the West Bank security barrier, in paragraph 82).
In April, the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence published a report with soldiers’ testimonies from the Gaza buffer zone. The report’s summary is hard to read yet is worth quoting at length:
…Soldiers were given orders to… annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods… educational institutions, mosques... [i]ndustrial zones and agricultural areas…, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting. …
Many buildings were destroyed after being "incriminated" — meaning… in use by the enemy's warfare apparatus. However, many of the buildings within the perimeter were demolished without being incriminated. … Some soldiers even testified that certain commanders viewed the destruction as a way of exacting revenge and punishment for the atrocities of October 7th.
… [T]he basic order was to prevent Palestinians from entering the perimeter by shooting at them — sometimes in order to drive them away, but mostly in order to kill. … [But] there was no clear marking indicating its boundaries, putting the life of any Palestinian who crossed this imaginary line at risk.
Third: Multiple Israeli officials have stated that a goal of the war is to ensure all Palestinians leave Gaza, and to replace them with Jewish settlers.
This movement has been steadily growing. For example, in January 2024, cabinet minister Shlomo Karhi called for “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza and clarified, “‘Voluntary’ is at times a situation you impose [on people] until they give their consent.” President Trump endorsed and magnified this idea last February by saying, “we should go to other countries… and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the… Palestinians living in Gaza… The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip… the world’s people [will live there]... [it’ll be] the Riviera of the Middle East.” Netanyahu has now said it is a “condition” of ending the war that “we carry out the Trump plan.”
This movement’s most influential figures are the heads of Israel’s two far-right parties, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Speaking about Gush Katif, Israel’s main bloc of settlements in Gaza before Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, Smotrich said he does “not want to go back to Gush Katif — [because] it’s too small, it needs to be much bigger, much more expansive.” In May, Smotrich said that in a matter of "months," "Gaza will be totally destroyed," and Palestinians "will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places." Ben-Gvir is a disciple of the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, who wrote a book about the Palestinians called They Must Go, and whose political party was banned from the Knesset under Israeli law for incitement to racism in 1988. Ben-Gvir posted on X on July 26, “The only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is to completely stop the ‘humanitarian’ aid, conquer the entire Gaza Strip, and encourage voluntary migration.”
On the ground, Israel has indeed severely restricted humanitarian aid for months. A large majority of Gaza's civilian infrastructure is indeed "damaged or destroyed." Netanyahu recently said his goal is to conquer the entire Gaza Strip. Israel already controls three-quarters of it, and the security cabinet has approved Netanyahu’s proposal to take over Gaza City, which lies within the remaining quarter of the Gaza Strip where almost all of Gaza’s 2 million residents live.
It is important to be precise about what these policies are and what they are not. As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote, Israel’s policies do not “amount to a Wannsee conference,” the meeting at which the Nazis began to carry out the Final Solution, a plan to intentionally wipe off the face of the earth a people — Jews — with no way to escape. This distinction matters immeasurably.
At the same time, if Israel controls all of Gaza, and creates conditions in which people cannot plausibly survive, then Gazans’ only feasible option is to leave. To this end, Defense Minister Yisrael Katz recently proposed, with Netanyahu’s backing, what he called a “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza near Egypt’s border — in practice forcing 600,000 Palestinians there initially, and eventually Gaza’s whole population. Katz said the Palestinians there will not be allowed to leave except to emigrate to other countries. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “If … [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city,’ then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing.” Moshe Ya’alon went further. Ya’alon, Netanyahu’s former defense minister and a former IDF Chief of Staff, described Israel’s policy as: “Conquering, annexing, ethnic cleansing – look at northern Gaza … There’s no [more city of] Beit Lahia. There’s no [more city of] Beit Hanoun. … [T]hey’re cleaning the area of Arabs. … I’m talking about soldiers moving populations, thinking it’s for operational purposes [like evacuating civilians from combat zones]. But the intention of [far-right leaders like] Smotrich, [and] Ben Gvir… is an open and declared one.”
Israel has expressed that it is aiming to pressure Hamas to lay down its arms and release the hostages. This strategy is not working, as evidenced by the fact that at this late date in the war, Hamas has not done so. In any case, causing famine and large-scale destruction, and attempting to replace an area’s population with one’s own settlers, is impermissible under the law of war and inconsistent with the Jewish values of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
Fourth: Israel’s decision to continue the war has led to continuing death on both sides.
Even a war that began justly can only stay just if there is still a goal that is legitimate, is achievable, and cannot be achieved by any means other than war. Increasingly, Israelis doubt that this war is still just. As The New York Times Magazine reported, “at key stages in the war, Netanyahu’s decisions extended the fighting in Gaza longer than even Israel’s senior military leadership deemed necessary.” By July’s end, Palestinian deaths exceeded 60,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Because the Health Ministry is run by Hamas, its numbers cannot be independently verified and do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. How do we make sense of these imperfect numbers? Two Australian academics examined Hamas’ claim in March that women and children — a proxy for civilians — made up about 70% of deaths, roughly comparable to America’s record in the war in Iraq. These academics analyzed the data from Hamas’ own Health Ministry and found that, in fact, women and children accounted for just under 51% of deaths, some of whom were male teenage combatants — a much better record than America's in Iraq. This record testifies to the IDF’s many efforts to avoid killing civilians, amid urban warfare and Hamas’ utterly cynical strategy of using their own civilians as human shields. At the same time, once there is no more justification to continue the war, further civilian deaths can and must be avoided through a plan to reach a cease-fire.
A turning point came in the middle of last year. In May, Benny Gantz, a former IDF Chief of Staff turned centrist politician and member of the emergency war cabinet, called on Netanyahu to make a plan for “the day after” the war, for a civilian government in Gaza that would include Palestinians outside of Hamas and Arab, European, and American partners — in other words, to acknowledge that an indefinite Israeli presence in Gaza is not tenable — or Gantz would pull his party from the government. Gantz said, “within the holy of holies of Israeli security, personal and political considerations have begun to penetrate.” Gantz meant that Netanyahu is perpetuating the war because if he agrees to leave Gaza, his far-right coalition partners will leave the government and, as Smotrich once told Netanyahu at a cabinet meeting, "You [will] no longer have a government," leading to new elections that Netanyahu is forecasted to lose, and, given his criminal trials, he might go to jail. Netanyahu rejected Gantz’s plea. In June, Gantz’s party left the government. Then, in July, during negotiations toward a cease-fire and hostage-release deal, Netanyahu made a demand that was against IDF officials’ advice and that Hamas had already rejected — thus blocking negotiations. At one meeting in August discussing this issue, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant responded, “The prime minister can indeed make all the decisions, and he can also decide to have all the hostages killed.” Netanyahu later fired Gallant.
What Gantz and Gallant really meant last year was: The war has reached a point of diminishing returns, and devastating risk for the remaining hostages. What can be accomplished militarily largely has been accomplished. Now, we must move forward. Otherwise, both sides will be trapped in endless violence, and the hostages will die in captivity.
This brings us to the final piece of Israel's cheshbon nefesh this Elul: The remaining Israeli hostages are not yet free. 50 Israeli hostages remain in captivity in Gaza, of whom Israel believes only about 20 are still alive. The families of 20 Israelis cannot embrace their loved ones. The families of 30 more Israelis are deprived of even the modicum of closure of being able to bury their loved ones.
Consider the heartbreaking words that former hostage Eli Sharabi said on Israeli TV last June: “We didn’t have a doubt, even when we were in a tunnel 50 meters underground — and the four of us [hostages] discussed this point exactly — that if there was a different political makeup [of the Israeli government], we would’ve been freed a long time ago. … It was clear to us [then], and it has been more clear to us since our release.”
Where do we go from here? How do we go forward, or, in the process of national cheshbon nefesh and t'shuvah, return, how do we go back to the n’shamah t’horah, the pure soul, of Israel?
We find an example of steps of return in the recent joint statements from the Union for Reform Judaism, to which my congregation, Beth Shalom of Bloomington, IN, belongs; the Central Conference of American Rabbis, to which I belong; and the American Conference of Cantors. These statements call for Israel to usher in more food, water, and aid, and work toward a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement, and not to take over more of Gaza, push Palestinians out of Gaza, or replace them with Jewish settlers. The statements say: “Hamas bears the responsibility for this war... for failing to put down its arms, [and] for its refusal to release the hostages. However, Israel has the ability and responsibility to prioritize its own people and values.” “Let us not allow our grief to harden into indifference, nor our love for Israel to [block us from attending to] the cries of the vulnerable.” We find an example of steps of return in the donation by the United Jewish Appeal-Jewish Federation of New York of $1 million for aid to civilians in Gaza, via the Israeli disaster relief organization IsraAID. These steps point us toward the path of return to the Israeli Declaration of Independence’s values: freedom, justice, and peace, ha-cheirut, ha-tzedek, v’-ha-shalom, according to the vision of the prophets of Israel, chazonam shel n’vi’ei Yisrael.
For North American Jews, how do Israel’s choices impact our Jewish identity? Many of us grew up with a sense of pride in Israel’s actions. But there is another way, indeed a deeper way, to connect with Israel. We find a hint of it in the Declaration of Independence. When it cites “the prophets of Israel,” the text reminds us that the heroes of ancient Israel were not the kings, but the prophets. When kings like Ahab or even David did wrong, the prophets of Israel challenged them to fulfill the values of the Torah, the values to which the Divine Voice calls us, according to what this means for each of us. We feel connected to ancient Israel not because its kings were always right, but because it was our people’s home, our ancestors’ home, and within it, the prophets led our ancestors in fighting for the values that our home must live out. So too: What bonds us to modern Israel is not that its government is always right – no government in the world would pass that test. What bonds us to Israel is that it is the homeland of our people, the only Jewish-majority society, the home of our kin in the Jewish family — and the struggle for the values that we believe Judaism teaches is a struggle we undertake in the homeland we love, as other peoples do in theirs, and as we all do in the struggle for a better world.
Part of the path ahead for North American Jewry will be to build and deepen this kind of connection to Israel. The first step is to articulate where the government’s choices fall short of these values, and to affirm that this is not in our name, not in the name of Judaism, not in the name of Israel’s highest ideals, and must end — out of love in our hearts for the best of what Israel is and can be. Again, we can critique Israel’s government at the same time as we call out those who wrongfully accuse Israel with antisemitic bias, following Yitzchak Rabin’s vision that our self-defense and our values are not an either/or but a both/and proposition.
When we do so, we join the many Israelis who are doing the same. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former Defense Ministers and IDF Chiefs of Staff like Moshe Ya’alon, Yoav Gallant, and Benny Gantz — they are just as Israeli as Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir, and their critique resonates deeply with the principles of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Israelis who regularly protest in the streets, in numbers of 10,000, 100,000, and even 200,000, extraordinary numbers for a small nation, calling for a cease-fire and hostage-release deal — recurringly, hauntingly, invoking the ancient mitzvah of pidyon sh’vuyim, redemption of captives (examples include photos here, here, and here, as well as Instagram posts here, here, and here) — they represent Israel as part of a large majority that supports their cause, including even a majority of Netanyahu coalition voters. Netanyahu and his allies formed their government in the first place with only 48.4% of the vote, due to a quirk of Israel’s electoral system not unlike America’s Electoral College; a majority of Israelis actually voted against the Netanyahu bloc. This month The New Yorker published a piece entitled, “Israelis Are Starting to Talk About Famine in Gaza,” quoting journalists like Oren Persico, who said, “You build a dam around your consciousness, but holes and cracks start to appear, and the water eventually seeps through.” These Israelis need us. They need our solidarity in this struggle across the Jewish people. We must stand with them. And we can take solace from knowing that we are all in this together.
In the month of introspection of Elul, we sing the Penitential Psalm, Psalm 27, which says (from the Robert Alter translation with my modifications):
Though a camp is marshaled against me,
my heart shall not fear.
Though battle is roused against me,
nonetheless do I trust.
One thing do I ask of the Eternal One [Adonai],
it is this that I seek—
that I may dwell in the house of the Eternal One
all the days of my life,
to sense the sweetness of the Eternal One
and to come within God’s temple.
The military imagery is a metaphor for the battle within, because cheshbon nefesh and t’shuvah are profoundly hard, indeed vulnerable, and we need heroic bravery to carry them out. In this case, our task is t’shuvah precisely not to continue down the path of war. We need just as much bravery for, as Yitzchak Rabin also said, “the war for peace,” ha-milchamah al ha-shalom. Psalm 27 prompts us that when our hearts fear, we can acknowledge our fear, and remind ourselves that we deserve not to fear — so that we may find the courage to work for cheshbon nefesh and t’shuvah for Israel as in our personal lives. When we do, we will find, not tomorrow, but in time, that again, in our homeland’s values, we can sense the sweetness of the Eternal One.
What a moving, cogent, and inspirational assessment. Kol hakavod
Israel has made mistake’s during this war, no doubt. But what exactly should Israel have done differently, overall? What would have been an “appropriate” response? Would you be OK with Hamas remaining in power in Gaza?