Shall the Judge of all the Earth Not Do Justice?
SBM: I think I hold very liberal, humanitarian ideas of the world. I think I was naive about Hamas and the people of Gaza, who, in many ways, I relate to and am an advocate for, in their justifiable call for freedom.
But I couldn’t imagine that any human being, as hateful as they are, could do the things that they did. It’s a really shocking revelation for me to understand that some people, and not some—a lot—because of the two to three thousand terrorists that entered Israel that morning, they were not all Hamas. A lot of them were also just citizens of Gaza who hate us.
The thought that people can be so hateful that they will shoot a baby in its head while she’s in her mother’s arms. . . and these are things I witnessed and heard happening in my kibbutz. Or kidnapping children. I feel so naive.
You see the world through the lens of who you are.
I saw the world through the lens of who I am, and I always believed that every person, as bad as they may be, there’s a sense of humanity that you can appeal to, that you can talk to. I think I was wrong. I think there is this force that some strain of humans possess, that to call them human is a disgrace. It is a disgrace for humankind to have people who can do those things walk amongst us and share our world. And that is something that has really changed in me—although I still want to believe that in Gaza, there are women like me, mothers like me, children like my children, who wish for peace. And I can’t believe that two million people are like that.
But maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know.
-Sofie Berzon MacKie interviewed in ‘I Understood My Life Was Going to End’: A Mother Describes 20 Hours in a Safe Room
For years I have had the following signature on my work email. It’s still the signature on my work email.
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again." - Anne Frank, 'The Diary of a Young Girl'
As a Jew, I am grieving. But I am not only mourning the murdered, the kidnapped, the lost and the missing.
I want to believe every person is good. Every person is human. Every person is created in the image of God. I think of a baby. Every person began as that innocent, gurgling baby. They were sweet and full of smiles. Hopefully, someone loved them. Someone laughed with them. Someone picked them up when they reached out, arms outstretched. Someone cared and someone delighted in them.
I know it’s more complicated than that. I know there are childhoods filled with abuse, neglect, cruelty and horror. There are children who are taught to hate. Children who are filled with self-loathing. Children who experience trauma. I know every person is the product of nature and nurture.
I can imagine feeling disenfranchised, angry, disempowered and filled with rage. I can imagine hating a type of person, like a Jew, or hating a government, like Israel. I can see what would lead someone to kill. But there is a level of cruelty in what happened on October 7, on Simchat Torah, that goes far beyond that. Members of Hamas shot babies. Tortured parents and children. Burned people alive.
What happened here? How does a person go from being a ruddy cheeked baby to someone who gouges out a person’s eye? Rapes a woman in front of her boyfriend, who is tied up? Shoots children just so they stop crying in terror?
How does a person choose- because it is a choice- to slough off their humanity?
I can’t understand. I don’t understand. But I know that for me, the part that is most troubling about this situation is this piece. How people can murder, rape and torture others in such barbaric ways. How students at elite universities can justify it.
Where is our shared humanity? Where are our souls? How can people rationalize away the fact that a Hamas terrorist chopped off an eight year old girl’s arm, leaving her to bleed out slowly alone, and ultimately die? Or mutilated bodies, violating and beheading them? How can people see these actions as part of a resistance movement?
I think we have fallen through to a mirror world. People are being presented with counterfeit good, counterfeit morality, and they believe it to be the real thing. Hence the virtue signaling of belonging to a progressive social justice movement that opposes settler colonialists, the Zionist project, and the existence of Israel. We are living in a moment where the Sitra Achra is dominant. People are being taken in. They see gold where I see pyrite.
So what to do?
Some people are misinformed. There is a slight possibility they will change their minds with exposure to more information, to truth.
But some people have abandoned all reason. We can pray for them to repent and to change. But sometimes people are beyond repentance. And that is why the Judge of all the earth performed justice with Sodom and Gomorrah- by overturning them and bringing hail and brimstone upon them. Some societies, some ideologies, are so corrupt that the only solution is to destroy them.
וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהֹוָ֔ה זַעֲקַ֛ת סְדֹ֥ם וַעֲמֹרָ֖ה כִּי־רָ֑בָּה וְחַ֨טָּאתָ֔ם כִּ֥י כָבְדָ֖ה מְאֹֽד׃
And the Lord said, "Since the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah has become great, and since their sin has become very grave,
אֵֽרְדָה־נָּ֣א וְאֶרְאֶ֔ה הַכְּצַעֲקָתָ֛הּ הַבָּ֥אָה אֵלַ֖י עָשׂ֣וּ ׀ כָּלָ֑ה וְאִם־לֹ֖א אֵדָֽעָה׃
I will descend now and see, whether according to her cry, which has come to Me, they have done; [I will wreak] destruction [upon them]; and if not, I will know."
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorah occurs in this week’s parsha, Vayera. Sodom was a society that was sick and twisted. It was a society our rabbis describe as turning evil into virtue, and virtues into evil. Hamas is the same as this society, harming what is pure- like children- and upholding what is evil- barbaric torture and indiscriminate death.
The angels warn Lot, who lives within Sodom, to flee.
17And it came to pass, when they took them outside, that he said, "Flee for your life, do not look behind you, and do not stand in the entire plain. Flee to the mountain, lest you perish." יזוַיְהִי֩ כְהֽוֹצִיאָ֨ם אֹתָ֜ם הַח֗וּצָה וַיֹּ֨אמֶר֙ הִמָּלֵ֣ט עַל־נַפְשֶׁ֔ךָ אַל־תַּבִּ֣יט אַֽחֲרֶ֔יךָ וְאַל־תַּֽעֲמֹ֖ד בְּכָל־הַכִּכָּ֑ר הָהָ֥רָה הִמָּלֵ֖ט פֶּן־תִּסָּפֶֽה:
I’m put in mind of the many IDF warnings begging Gazans to flee to save their own lives.
Perhaps when Lot is told to flee, he’s not only being told to physically flee. Perhaps, on a deeper level, he is asked to flee this ideology. The kind of city that can justify violent, brutal rape of male guests. When Lot’s wife turns back and turns into salt, maybe her “turning back” indicates a longing for that way of life, that ideology. She is not ready to walk away.
But those who do not walk away from nihilistic viewpoints cannot live in civilized society. And so she becomes salt - that which prevents the earth from producing growth, vegetation, life. Because that is what her ideology causes.
וַיַּשְׁקֵ֗ף עַל־פְּנֵ֤י סְדֹם֙ וַעֲמֹרָ֔ה וְעַֽל־כׇּל־פְּנֵ֖י אֶ֣רֶץ הַכִּכָּ֑ר וַיַּ֗רְא וְהִנֵּ֤ה עָלָה֙ קִיטֹ֣ר הָאָ֔רֶץ כְּקִיטֹ֖ר הַכִּבְשָֽׁן׃
and, looking down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and all the land of the Plain, he saw the smoke of the land rising like the smoke of a kiln.
וַיְהִ֗י בְּשַׁחֵ֤ת אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־עָרֵ֣י הַכִּכָּ֔ר וַיִּזְכֹּ֥ר אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶת־אַבְרָהָ֑ם וַיְשַׁלַּ֤ח אֶת־לוֹט֙ מִתּ֣וֹךְ הַהֲפֵכָ֔ה בַּהֲפֹךְ֙ אֶת־הֶ֣עָרִ֔ים אֲשֶׁר־יָשַׁ֥ב בָּהֵ֖ן לֽוֹט׃
Thus it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the Plain and annihilated the cities where Lot dwelt, God was mindful of Abraham and removed Lot from the midst of the upheaval.
-Genesis 19: 28-29
How prescient is this parsha?
Let us pray that just as God destroyed evil in the time of Avraham, He will destroy it now, in our time. May He eradicate Hamas and their horror.
Just as God saved Lot from the midst of that evil, may He save those who are deserving. May He save the Palestinians who do not subscribe to, or are willing to lean away from, Hamas’s ideology.
And, looking towards the end of the parshaa, just as Isaac was rescued from his fate, and was not offered as a sacrifice but instead came back- changed, having experienced something life altering, but still returned- may the hostages be rescued from their fate as well. As God accepted a ram in lieu of Isaac, may He accept our prayers, our wrenching cries, our mitzvot, in lieu of those human lives.
This is the parsha that demonstrates God’s justice. And we need God’s justice now. Evil cannot be allowed to fill the earth. It must be stopped. Only God can stop it.
So please, God, eradicate this evil from our midst. Bring back the hostages. Let the outcry of those who are bereft, horrified and broken reach your ears, and may You do as their outcry demands.
הֲשֹׁפֵט֙ כָּל־הָאָ֔רֶץ לֹ֥א יַֽעֲשֶׂ֖ה מִשְׁפָּֽט?
(To me, this image represents God’s sword of justice. See Genesis 3:24.)