This radical empathy is not simply a matter of emotion; it is necessary for the Jewish people’s survival. A week after the massacre, I expressed to a dear friend in Israel, Tanya White, a Torah teacher, how inadequate I felt were my actions to support Israel. Compared with the sharp and constant pain in my heart, the amount I was able to do here felt staggeringly small. I felt as if I was in a shiva house, with my clothes torn. I felt that there was too much distance between the two heads for one of them to realize how much the other was suffering and needed help. But Tanya reminded me of a powerful episode in the Torah that helped me channel my grief.Exodus 17:8–16 records the story of Amalek’s cruel attack on the Jewish people wandering in the desert, as well as the Jewish solidarity that the attack inspired. The ragged group of hundreds of thousands of still-traumatized former slaves meets the most base human cruelty as the Amalekites descend upon them, attacking the weakest of the people — children, women, the elderly. The Israelites, with no battle experience, have no choice but to fight. Joshua leads the former slaves, who now pick up arms, and Moses, in his eighties,  rises up to a mountain and lifts his hands to give the people strength and courage, to remind them of their heavenly Father. The Torah tells us that whenever Moses’s hands were high, the people overcame, and whenever his hands dropped, the people would lose strength. But the elderly Moses couldn’t hold up his arms alone — he needed help. So Aaron and Hur held up Moses’s arms to keep them upright throughout the entire battle.

Va-yehi yadav emunah ad bo ha-shemesh: Moses’ hands remained steady — steadfast, committed (emunah) — until the sun set. That day, these Jews who had just escaped their chains were able to triumph against a malevolent enemy. They did so because they were united, because they were one body. Some took up arms in battle. Moses held up his actual arms, and others held up Moses’s arms. Their pain was shared, but each had a unique role to play.

We are called now to find our own role in this battle.

Even as time distances us from the horrors of October 7, and new horrors rise up in our own backyards, we must insist on fighting the “compassion fatigue” that threatens to creep in. We must keep the pain of peoplehood fresh to breed a sense of solidarity with Israel as it fights to defend itself and its borders. Our job is not simply to mourn or worry. Instead, our pain must lead us to act for the sake of our Israeli brothers and sisters suffering under rocket fire and in captivity, grieving the dead and treating the wounded. Our pain must show us that there is no war against one part of us that isn’t a war on all of us. Our pain must lead us to hold up our arms, supporting Jewish lives and security, and to hold up the arms of anyone undertaking this battle.

And we must prepare for knowing that the job of standing with our people in the United States will become more difficult as Israel ensures it is once again feared in the Middle East. As Micah Goodman explained with tremendous clarity in the early days of the war, “[Israelis] want love and we want fear. We want love from the West. We want fear from the Middle East.” For Goodman, one of Israel’s main challenges is that the actions it must undertake to ensure deterrence in a volatile and tribalistic Middle East will cause it to lose support in the West. Especially in America, we Jews have our role to play: to help support Israel’s battle to eradicate Hamas by shoring up support from its most important ally.

We are living in difficult and dark times. I can’t seem to shake off the sense that we have returned to Jewish history, to saying “b’chol dor vador” — from generation to generation — they rise up against us. And I can’t keep from crying out in frustration and horror at this phrase’s taste of truth. We are facing multiple battles in Israel, in America, and around the world. The most important weapon at our disposal, the one we have to nourish and insist upon, is peoplehood — feeling and behaving as one being.

For indeed, Hamas’s war is not a war against Israel or against the “Zionists” denigrated by so many American college students and activists today. It is a war against the Jewish people. It is a war against our history, our memory, our dignity. It is a war against our calendar, the sanctity of Shabbat, the jubilant joy of Simhat Torah. It is a war against innocence; on those who care for our people, who work our fields, who tend our livestock. It is a war against laughing Jewish children and against Jewish parents’ blessings for peace. It is a war against all of us, and we all have our role to play.

This is not the first time such a thing has happened to our people, of course. Nor is it the first time that war in Israel has engendered new feelings of peoplehood. My late teacher, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, wrote beautifully in A Letter in the Scroll about his feelings, and those of many Diaspora Jews, in the days after the Six-Day War:

It was then [in 1967] that I knew that being Jewish was not something private and personal but something collective and historical. It meant being part of an extended family, many of whose members I did not know, but to whom I nonetheless felt connected by bonds of kinship and responsibility.

This is our task: to understand that the pain we are feeling is what Jewish peoplehood feels like, and then to hold on to this pain tightly and fiercely, even from afar. Our task is to channel this pain into unwavering and committed action, to either join the battle in our own way or to hold up the hands of those who are fighting.

This article was published on November 2, 2023.