This week’s Torah portion, Bamidbar, begins with an instruction to take a census (Numbers 1:2) for the purpose of knowing how many soldiers could be called-upon to bear arms. There’s a long list of numbers: from this tribe came this many people; from that tribe, that many. In years past, these verses felt dry and kind of irrelevant. This year they’re landing differently against the backdrop of current news. We’ll come back to them.

In 2008 I spent some time learning in Jerusalem. Some neighborhoods in west Jerusalem are full of rabbinic students in the summer, and mine was one of them. I sublet an apartment on רחוב לינקלן / Lincoln street from a fellow rabbinic student named Marisa James. Marisa and I both became rabbis, and we’re still friends. She lives in the States now. This week, she posted on Facebook about Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, a mother of 10 and pediatric specialist in Gaza.

Specifically, R. Marisa posted the names of Dr. Al-Najjar’s nine children killed this week when an Israeli missile struck her house. Her one surviving child, Adam, has undergone surgery with more to come. Her husband, Dr. Hamdi Al-Najjar, is in intensive care with a severe head injury. About this, R. Marisa wrote, “Every single day, an impossible, unnecessary new grief,” noting with sorrow that the killing of Palestinian children makes it easy for Hamas to recruit.

Every single day, an impossible, unnecessary new grief: that’s how I feel every time I read the news out of Israel and Palestine.

Peter Beinart, a professor of journalism and a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said recently that Gaza has become the Jewish people’s greatest spiritual crisis since the Shoah. In the course of that podcast he acknowledges how many of us are activated by use of the word “genocide.” I know I am. When I hear that word, my heart recoils. I still remember the reaction I had the first time someone accused me of supporting genocide because I would not denounce Israel’s existence. I felt defensive and angry and sick and full of grief and fear.

The fear had a lot to do with my family’s Holocaust history, which I spent a long time processing anew after October 7. The grief hasn’t gone away. How can any of us not grieve what the last few years have brought? I still don’t like that g-word. I don’t like how it is used as a cudgel to delegitimize Israel and Israelis. I don’t like the way that word is used by people who already hated Jews and were just looking for a reason to hate us more.

And. In recent months the Netanyahu administration has repeatedly proclaimed its intention to wipe out or forcibly remove the population of Gaza, and to claim that land as part of “Greater Israel.” As Rabbi Jay Michaelson notes, this is a new phase in the conflict in which “the stated goal is to exile or eliminate the Palestinian population of Gaza.” What should we call determination to exile or eliminate a population? What would we call it if it were aimed at us?

And – does it matter what we call it?

I think what really matters is how we respond.

So much of what’s unfolding feels unbearable to my soul. As of this writing, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, including, this week, nine of the ten Al-Najjar children. The BBC reports that Gaza’s entire population is at risk of famine. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, is on the record pleading with Israel not to use famine as a weapon of war. Meanwhile Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Minister of Finance, brags that they are leaving Gaza “as piles of rubble, with total destruction.”

Also unbearable to my soul are recent maps of rocket fire all over Israel, so many incoming projectiles that it’s just a sea of red. And Israeli hostages still in captivity after more than 600 days (and their families, living on tenterhooks). And the murder of two young Israeli embassy employees in DC last week – and all the people online saying they “got what they deserved,” either for being too pro-peace or for working for Israel at all.

I’m not trying to draw equivalences or compare suffering. I just want to say: if your soul aches, you’re not alone.

I know that as a Diaspora Jew I need to approach Israel and Palestine with humility. I know I don’t know what it’s like to live there. I try to listen to as many voices on the ground as I can. This week I’ve been reading the words of Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, who says soberly and with grief that Israel is now committing war crimes. And I’m reading Israeli-American Dr. Elana Stzokman, one of many Jewish Israelis now using that g-word, who writes:

Oct 7 does not justify what we are doing in Gaza. Even the hostage situation doesn’t justify it – all that bombardment and starvation has done nothing to bring back the hostages. Nothing.

So please stop saying things like, well, the world just hates Jews. It’s not that. The world just hates what the Jewish State is doing to 2.2 million Gazans. And the world is right.

Her words drew me up short in their clarity and their grief.

Of course, some of the world does just hate Jews. We’ve been a convenient scapegoat for the world’s ire for centuries. They blamed us for the Black Plague. They blamed us for the downturn of Germany’s economy after WWI. They blame us today for anything and everything from California wildfires to the hollowing-out of the American working class to the presence of immigrants and refugees in America. Antisemitism is real and it is pernicious.

And. A lot of people are angry about what they see the Israeli government and military doing in Gaza, and that can be true without antisemitism. (Of course it can also be true with antisemitism.) What’s unfolding in Gaza breaks my heart in part because I love the dream of what Israel could yet be. So do the other Jews whose voices I’ve brought to the table here. Our critique is rooted in love. That, too, is a mitzvah I learned from Torah. (Lev. 19:17)

There are 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians living in that land. Neither people is going anywhere, and anyone who says otherwise is “unserious.” Yes, I know that extremists among each people seek to wipe the other out. But in the words of Awni Al-Mashni of 2 States / 1 Homeland, “What happened on 10/7, and what has happened since – neither negates the fact that there are two peoples on this land, and that both peoples cannot continue on this path.”

I turn and re-turn to Jewish values. Torah calls us to “seek peace and pursue it” – not just to look for it, but to run after it. The Shulchan Aruch says (Yoreh Deah 250:1) “when there is a hungry person, you must feed them,” and Torah says (Deut. 19:20) that starvation must never be used as a tool of war. (Teachings such as these are the impetus behind Jews for Food Aid for Gaza.) Beyond that, I know that peace between enemies always seems impossible, until it isn’t.

All of this has been swirling in me as I’ve studied this week’s Torah portion and commentaries. I think about that ancient census. Each of those tens of thousands of people – 46,000 from the tribe of Reuven, 59,000 from the tribe of Shim’on, and so on – was a human being. Each one had parents, maybe children, maybe siblings, maybe friends. This week’s parsha comes to remind us that every one of those souls “counted” – each was an integral part of the whole.

The death of any human being is the destruction of an entire world. Every human life is irreplaceable. Every death is unbearable – and it should be. The answer is not to numb ourselves; it’s to work toward safety, justice, and peace for everyone.

Jewish values call us to seek peace. Feed the hungry. Work toward justice. Uplift human dignity. And I think they also call us to stand against the use of famine as a weapon of war, and against exiling or eliminating a population from a land, whatever words we use for it.

What can we do from here? We can help feed the hungry – I recommend New Israel Fund’s partnership with World Central Kitchen in Gaza, and my rabbinic colleagues on the ground affirm that all donated funds are going directly to food aid. We can support organizations like the Alliance for Middle East Peace, Hand in Hand, Women Wage Peace, and Standing Together.

And – just as we support Palestinians and Israelis who are working toward a relationship of mutual care, we can do the same here in our community. We can care for each other, and continue our community learning together, even when we may be grieving different sources of pain in Israel and Palestine. If they can reach across their differences, I believe that we can, too.

I pray with all my might for an end to the conflict and the release of every hostage. I pray for negotiations and diplomacy, for peace and coexistence, for a world in which we count living souls with wonder and rejoicing instead of numbering anyone’s irreplaceable dead.