Dedicated to the memory of my beloved teacher and Chevruta, Prof. Avi Sagi z”l, who passed away on July 16, 2026. You taught me how to think about ethics and about the uniqueness of every human being. Now it is my duty, and the duty of my friends, to dare and to fight for the future of Jewish ethics.
I am going to ask you an uncomfortable question, and I need you to stay with me as I do: Why does America send ton-heavy bombs to the State of Israel to be dropped in densely populated civilian areas in Gaza? Perhaps there are alternatives; perhaps we should only approve quarter-ton bombs that are more precise. More importantly, why does this happen without any serious, meaningful discussion from American Jews? After all, these are American weapons, and the responsibility is ours if we are American.
If raising this question makes you as an American feel a tightening in your chest, please, take a breath. Do not look away. We need to understand why this reaction is so visceral, and why we have spent so long avoiding the conversation entirely.
In Israel, I have these exact conversations with IDF officers as part of an ongoing, internal military and moral debate, yet here in America, I have never heard such a discussion among Jewish leaders. When an American Jew dares to ask these questions, we do not invite them into a shared study partnership—a chevruta. Instead, we label them as the “wicked son” of our Passover Seder, or call them a “progressive antisemite” or “anti-Zionist.” We have replaced critical, soul-searching dialogue with a gut-reaction defense mechanism, choosing to silence the questioner rather than face the question.
I believe that this stems from a deeper, more painful truth: We, as American liberal Jews, have refused to write our own Jewish ethics of military force. At the heart of our silence is one raw, terrifying question: When, as a Jew, do I use my power to kill? While an emerging Israeli Judaism has been forced to grapple with this question and build a complex Jewish ethic around it—simply because it has no other choice—American liberal Judaism has remained comfortably, and safely, silent.
In America, we live in the strongest military empire in human history. This empire is involved in countless global conflicts and leads the world in weapon sales—exporting the very bombs, fighter jets, and small arms that enrich the American economy and, by extension, secure our own prosperity as American citizens. Yet, American liberal Jews refuse to acknowledge that our hands are on the trigger. We benefit from the safety and wealth of the empire, but we wash our hands of its violence, pretending that the weapons we produce and fund have nothing to do with our Jewish souls.
American Judaism has lost the collective capacity to think about the physical act of violence. Individual American soldiers who are Jewish might know how to pull a trigger, but as a community, we have no theology for putting a human being—born in the image of God—in our crosshairs and shooting. In Israel, this agonizing reality is built into the fabric of life. Every child grows up knowing she will serve. The necessity of force is inhaled with the culture, taught in schools, and accepted as an inevitable reality of turning eighteen. It is not by chance that Israeli society coined the tragic phrase “shooting and crying” (yorim ve-bochim). It is a concept that captures the desperate, fragile attempt to remain a sensitive, moral human being while simultaneously carrying out the brutal demands of state survival.
I have worked with US military rabbis for eight years now in a variety of settings, and I have watched this avoidance play out in real time. Rarely, if ever, do they ask what our collective Jewish responsibility is in the machinery of American power. Systematically, our Jewish day schools and Jewish community centers do not educate our youth to serve in the American military. I meet educators who spend sleepless nights worrying about which elite university our Jewish youth will attend, but who never give a single thought to which military unit they might join. I hear our leaders speak passionately about the urgent need for domestic gun control, yet we remain utterly silent about America’s role as the primary arms dealer of a global empire. We are deeply concerned with the weapons in our streets, but blind to the weapons we ship across the world.
Naturally, there are realities that we, as American Jews embedded in a Western empire, desperately want to ignore. To admit that we are part of an empire feels deeply uncomfortable; it carries the heavy scent of privilege. In liberal circles, “privilege” and “empire” are dirty words—things to run from, to critique, or to actively resist. It is far easier to pretend we are permanent outsiders looking in, rather than insiders benefiting from the system. We want to distance ourselves from this power, to wash our hands of it completely. Unless, of course, we are willing to rethink what power actually is.
Unless we begin to view privilege not as a sin to expiate, but as a gift that life, or God, has handed us. It is a power we did not choose to possess, but one we were born into—and therefore, a power we are obligated to use to do good in the world. As Mordechai famously challenged Esther in the palace: “Perhaps you have come to royal position for such a time as this.” (Book of Esther, 4:14) To hold privilege is to hold power. And if we hold power, we have a religious and moral duty to deploy it, actively, to bring healing to a broken world.
We are a strong and influential community within an empire, yet we refuse to engage with this question about how to deploy our privilege. And because we aren’t shaping a deep discourse on this subject, a critical distortion occurs: Any internal American criticism of sending weapons to Israel is immediately perceived only as criticism of Israel. It bypasses what it actually should be—a deep and necessary discussion about America’s own military policy in the Middle East.
What is the concrete result of this silence? It means that this morning, another American bomb—provided to Israel by America, by you and me, weighing a full ton—was dropped in Gaza. My beloved Israeli military colleagues argue that there was no other option. Yet, as I stand here, I do not have an American Jewish study partner—a chevruta—to carry this weight with me: the heavy moral responsibility of deciding whether or not to support supplying these specific weapons of mass destruction. Because a meaningful discourse about power does not exist in American Jewish life, I cannot find leaders who are willing to hold the full physical and spiritual implications of this political complicity in their own bodies and souls.
And what does Jewish tradition have to say about this? Moses, our teacher, killed one Egyptian. Even then, the Torah tells us, “He looked this way and that way” (Exodus 2:12) before acting. Commenting on this, the sages in the Midrash (Shmot Raba, 1:29) suggest that Moses only struck the Egyptian after looking into the future and seeing that none of his descendants would ever be righteous. This Midrash is a beautiful inspiration, but it is utterly disconnected from the reality of an Israeli soldier. If we followed this standard, no Israeli would ever fire a shot. It is easy to be a prophet-warrior like Moses, possessing the divine foresight to predict the future. But that was not my reality during my decade of service in the IDF’s body identification unit, where I had to handle far too many bodies from both sides—needing to remain completely blind to what the future children of those dead Palestinians might have looked like.
Our beloved Jewish tradition must serve as an inspiration for both Israeli and American Judaism. We find ourselves at an unprecedented, historic crossroads that has never existed before: We simultaneously possess a sovereign Jewish state and a powerful Jewish diaspora embedded at the very heart of the world’s most powerful empire. Therefore, the moral and religious responses of Israeli and American Judaism must exist in deep, continuous dialogue. Our answers to these agonizing questions will often differ, because our responsibilities are fundamentally different. But if we commit to an honest exchange, we can help one another confront the very questions we otherwise refuse to face—and we can do so out of a place of deep love and mutual sensitivity.
My purpose here is not to lay out a systematic theory or theology of Jewish power or to dictate how a state should deploy violence. Rather, my claim is simple: we can no longer afford this asymmetry. It is intolerable that Israeli Judaism must constantly grapple with the agonizing weight of physical force while liberal American Judaism remains comfortably disengaged. The fact that American Jews do not historically or culturally view military service as a community ideal does not exempt us from forming a coherent ethics of power. As citizens of a global empire, America, we are co-signers to the use of its weapons and the projection of its might. We cannot share in the empire’s privilege while washing our hands of its force.
A Hasid once approached his rebbe with a question: “Why do I even need a rabbi? I can study our sacred ethics in so many Jewish books on my own, without anyone’s help.” The Rebbe smiled and replied, “You can read as many books as you want. But the rabbi’s true job is not to teach you what you can learn yourself; it is to force you to take a deep, unflinching look at the exact page in the book that you do not want to read.”