The Moral Majority Isn’t Always Right: A Response to a Thousand Rabbis

Aa letter from over 1000 rabbis

The statement issued by a group of rabbis and Jewish leaders in protest of Israel’s conduct in Gaza is heartfelt and well-intentioned, but ultimately flawed. Cloaked in prophetic urgency and Jewish ethical language, it risks collapsing moral complexity into an oversimplified narrative of Israeli guilt and Palestinian victimhood. While invoking the legacy of Israel’s prophets, the signatories misapply the prophetic voice. The prophets of Israel did not float above history as moral arbiters of universal human rights; they spoke from within the covenant, holding their own people accountable precisely because they were part of that people. Their rebuke was rooted in responsibility, not detachment. To call upon the prophets is not merely to denounce injustice, but to understand the spiritual weight of Jewish sovereignty and the reality of Jewish vulnerability.

Moreover, the letter’s ethical calculus suffers from a troubling lack of proportion. The condemnation of civilian casualties and suffering in Gaza is understandable and should be part of any serious moral conversation. But to suggest that Israel is deliberately starving civilians, without addressing the context of Hamas’s strategy—its embedding of weapons in civilian infrastructure, its refusal to release hostages, and its use of its own people as human shields—is to obscure agency and flatten the moral terrain. Judaism has never been pacifist. The Talmud teaches, “If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first” (Sanhedrin 72a). That principle is not a moral retreat; it is a moral boundary: self-defense is not only permitted but required. To ignore the genocidal intentions and brutal tactics of Hamas while scrutinizing every Israeli military move is not prophetic righteousness—it is ethical asymmetry.

This imbalance continues in the treatment of settler violence. The statement rightly condemns criminal acts committed by Jews in the West Bank and demands accountability. But the moral weight of these acts—however serious—cannot be placed on the same scale as the systematic, premeditated, and publicly celebrated atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Nor can we pretend that Israel’s war effort is divorced from that trauma. A Judaism that fails to distinguish between defense against genocidal terror and the morally tragic consequences of that defense risks losing the very moral clarity it seeks to uphold.

The invocation of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks at the end of the letter is rhetorically powerful but intellectually misleading. Sacks, while deeply committed to ethics and compassion, was also a Zionist who understood the necessity—and sanctity—of Jewish power when wielded with restraint. To quote Sacks in a statement that equates Israel’s actions with a betrayal of Judaism is to sever his words from the larger body of his thought. Sacks did not believe Judaism’s moral vision required political suicide. He believed it demanded moral courage, historical consciousness, and above all, responsibility.

A better Jewish moral statement would begin with love for the Jewish people and grief for all innocent life lost. It would affirm Israel’s right to self-defense against a genocidal enemy while challenging it to minimize harm, protect the vulnerable, and hold its own accountable. But it would also demand of world Jewry the strength to resist the seductions of moral theater—of sounding righteous while standing apart from the burdens of sovereignty. It would remind us that the Jewish ethical tradition is not reducible to human rights language or international law; it is a covenantal ethic forged in exile and tested in power.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that the prophet speaks “a scream in the night” against the intoxications of the present. But he also warned that moral sensitivity without solidarity becomes sentimentality. The Jewish people do not need moral panic or performative outrage. We need moral clarity, rooted in history, faithful to Torah, and responsive to the agonizing realities of Jewish power and Jewish pain. We need leaders who do not merely echo the world’s condemnation but who wrestle with what it means to be a people entrusted with both survival and justice. That is the true prophetic voice our moment demands.