A Note of Gratitude to Those Who Kept Me Sane

I observed the war as an outsider, an impassioned, obsessed outsider, but an outsider nonetheless. I read, I debated, I advocated, and I wrote. I visited Israel three times during the war: once on a tour with fellow Reform rabbis, and twice to visit my daughter in Tel Aviv. My wife left Israel as scheduled, on an early morning flight on October 8, 2023, a harrowing experience, as Ben Gurion Airport might well have been vulnerable, and there was at least one siren on her way, when her cab driver took refuge inside a tunnel.

One of my visits, last June, coincided with the war with Iran. I spent, in the aggregate, several hours in four different shelters. And just this past week, my wife was again in Israel and witnessed the return of the living hostages.

The war held me in its thrall. Each morning, and several times a day, I checked the news to see what had happened while I slept or was off eating lunch. The most dramatic instance occurred in Israel that June, when I woke and checked the news and learned that Israel had launched its attack on Iran. Later my daughter told me there had been a siren coupled with the alert on the app every Israeli keeps on their phone. I had slept through it. It did not happen again.

Now that it is over, or as over as a war in the Middle East can be, I feel a deep gratitude to the many voices whose insight and integrity kept my head above water. The journalists and podcasters whose words became my constant companions over these two years not only informed me but steadied me. Perhaps they made me a little crazy too, but it was war, a long, bad one, and facts, even when clear, are frequently contested. In war, ambiguity is the air we breathed.

So I want to thank these folks. They helped me more than they can know. Their work not only satisfied my own need for information and analysis, it helped me form the words I shared with congregants and friends. Podcasts in particular became a lifeline. I grew familiar with the cadences of their hosts’ voices, their inflections, tones, the logic of their speech, until they felt like companions in my living room, over morning coffee, my car, or at the gym. They do not know me, but I know them so well I imagine that if I were to meet any of them, they’d recognize me.

Here are some of those voices. I name them in no particular order, and for those I omit, I beg forgiveness.

• Noah Efron and the Promised Podcast. Week after week, he and his rotating guests tackled the moment’s urgent questions. His weekly essays were so finely written that he held me like a childhood friend.
  • John Podhoretz and the Commentary Magazine gang. Their daily podcast took an unapologetically pro Israel stance. As the war concluded, Podhoretz waxed nearly messianic, not in the Ben Gvir sense, but in celebration and awe of Israel’s military and diplomatic achievements. Seth Mandel and Abe Greenwald, also voices on the podcast, also posted near daily commentaries, their clarity matched by occasional guest Jonathan Schanzer’s analytical precision.
  • Bret Stephens’ New York Times columns stood against much of the naivete surrounding him on the pages of his newspaper, offering moral and strategic clarity amid confusion that to my mind approached misinformation.
  • Bari Weiss and her podcast, Honestly. She hosted insiders and thinkers who illuminated the war’s realities. A recent episode with Michael Oren, Michah Goodman, and Haviv Rettig Gur attempted the first draft of the war’s history. Goodman’s rapid fire synthesis, brimming with ideas, always left me richer.
  • Haviv Rettig Gur deserves his own mention. A ubiquitous presence, his right of center analyses of the Netanyahu government and of the Arab world proved remarkably insightful. He understands the inner logic of jihadism, the Muslim Brotherhood, and therefore Hamas better than most.
  • Yossi Klein Halevy and Donniel Hartman. Their weekly dialogue brought a living dialectic to the war, two minds contending in faith and doubt, reason and compassion. Something about their conversation seems to embody a powerful ethos within Israeli society.
  • Dan Senor’s Call Me Back. Once broadly political, it became almost entirely devoted to Israel once the war began. Like Weiss, Senor drew top tier guests, among them Amit Segal and Nadav Eyal, who became regulars in the last months, whose clarity during breaking events was invaluable.
  • Rabbi Dr. Ron Kronish. A dear friend and colleague whose Times of Israel blog posts, and frequent conversations radiated passion, angst, and love for his country.

Many more voices poured information over my head like fresh oil, providing grist for the great mill of thought and worry that shot into the stratosphere like Jack’s beanstalk over these two years. Among them: David Horovitz, Amanda Borschel-Dan, Amotz Asa-El, Thomas Friedman, Ken Stein, Lazar Berman, Jonathan Spyer, Herb Keinon, and Amir Ben-David. I am sure I have left out many others, but this list is enough to demonstrate my undying obsessiveness, and I hope expresses my enormous gratitude.

These men and women became my Israel oriented family, a metaphorical minyan who prayed with me day and night and shone a sliver of light through extraordinarily dark times. I cannot know for certain, but I imagine that the service they rendered their various publics helped them, too, to navigate the same frightening, bewildering waters that began on the awful morning of October 7. The Jewish tradition teaches that we can never be too grateful, so let this closing sentence stand as one more expression of thanks for the good these people did for me and, I think, for the world.

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Next week, I will turn to another chorus, the amazing crew of liars and snakes who filled the digital world with vicious, slanderous accusations against Israel, helping to create the poisonous anti Israel and antisemitic atmosphere that will, I fear, long be with us as a legacy of the curse Hamas placed before us on October 7.

Stay tuned.