At what cost? Healing from internal fissures and failure

Should the Allies have bombed the train lines to Auschwitz? Some argue they feigned ignorance, but the US military was always clear in its intent: targeting the rail lines would have diverted resources from the larger war effort, and defeating the Nazis had to take priority. The Allies ultimately won the war and liberated the death camps.

And yet, the failure to halt the machinery of death lingers as a moral reckoning, a possible stain on the conscience of Western democracies.

The widely held belief is that had Israel existed, it would have bombed the train lines. Would it have been militarily prudent? Maybe not. But Zionism is built on the promise of bringing Jews home and saving them from the atrocities we endured for centuries without the protection of a sovereign state.

The Holocaust was — and remains — a singular, unprecedented event that defies comparison. And yet, before dismissing my brazen comparison between 1943 and 2025 regarding the train lines, consider that it speaks to a deep-seated Jewish belief: the world is indifferent to our suffering, leaving us no choice but to be our own saviors, even at the cost of short-term military setbacks.

I fully acknowledge that this far from a perfect comparison. The hostage crisis is deeply complex, entangled in a web of political calculations and military strategy. But when human life becomes politicized, that itself a travesty. Politics takes sides; human life must not.

I spent seven years writing and researching Holocaust theology. A challenging and painful subject matter, but doing so in the independent Jewish state in the 21st century somehow softened the horror. Time, distance, and the presence of a strong Jewish people with an army of their own dulled the edges of those searing images — the ones of burning Jewish children, the ones of the weak and vulnerable Jews.

And then, October 7th.

Like millions of others, I was thrust into visceral, unrelenting shock. It wasn’t just the tangible fear of terrorists breaking down my door; it was the collapse of my entire self-narrative. My ideology, my choices, the very framework through which I made sense of the world — all of it shattered overnight. I felt alienated, estranged from myself, as if a part of me no longer belonged, as if something fundamental no longer fit. I felt betrayed by my own naïve convictions.

I kept thinking about Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s description of dialectical faith after the Holocaust-the oscillation between two irreconcilable images: burning children and the Israeli flag over the Knesset. Theologically and psychologically, it is almost impossible to hold both together — destruction and redemption, despair and hope — without being torn apart. We cannot fully integrate them into a single whole, so we oscillate between them, moving back and forth in an unresolvable dialectic. That is the nature of faith after Auschwitz.

Since October 7th, we have all been living in that nauseating oscillation. Moments of hope, only to be rudely thrust back into despair and disillusionment.

The images of Or Levy, Eli Sharabi, and Ohad Ben Ami — modern-day Muselmanns — cruelly stripped away whatever fragile veneer we had crafted for ourselves in the spirit of resilience. And again, I am thrown into existential questions I cannot answer.

No matter what side of the hostage deal debate you are on, the images from this past weekend should elicit a nauseating and disquieting response. I came to Israel believing that if train-lines ever needed to be bombed, the Jewish state would prioritize that over anything else. But now, after 20 years of living in this miraculous country, I find myself questioning the very premise of its founding.

I know, I know — this is not the first time. I know that throughout the centuries, our self-narrative has been marked by countless fractures. I know our people have endured rupture before — we just read about it this week — slavery, the destruction of our Temples, the exile, the radical reconstruction of Judaism from a priestly to a rabbinic religion. We rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, reviving an ancient people in their ancient land, speaking their ancient language. 

And somewhere, deep down in the recesses of my fractured heart, I believe we will be okay. I know we will rebuild, reimagine, and retell our story. I know that, one day, we will integrate this nightmare into one of the greatest narratives of resilience and redemption. But I am not sure how we are going to get there. Because, this time, the fissure is not only from an external enemy, but also from our internal narrative. And I wonder whether we can heal from this.

The process begins with accepting loss. Acceptance isn’t endorsement, but denying that rupture only prevents us from reckoning with what has been lost. We must make our way toward understanding what has broken so we can begin to rebuild.

But to truly confront loss, we must allow our assumptions, our conditioned truths, to drift away, leaving us exposed to a new reality. We must bear witness in the most visceral way to our pain and the pain of our people. To burn with fury at the failure — so many failures — we witnessed on Simchat Torah. To embrace the families whose loved ones will never return. To suffer with the heroes whose physical and mental scars will never fully heal. To look into the eyes of the hostage families who have endured a fracturing and uncertainty that no ordinary person can grasp. To keep our brothers and sisters who have sat in dungeons tied to chains, starving for nearly 500 days constantly in the forefront in our minds. To accept that nothing will ever be the same again. There is a rent in the fabric of our national narrative that no amount of patching will repair. We need to acknowledge the losses, and not rush to mend them. We have no choice but to face the unbearable truth of what has changed.

So today, I sit among the remnants of my shattered ideology and the ruins of my naïve dreams. Today, I allow myself to be broken. Today, I cry. Today, I mourn. Today, I refuse to let go of the images of the burning children and emaciated hostages. Today I reflect on our moral imperatives so that history will not return to haunt us in the future.

Tomorrow, we begin again. Tomorrow, we will rise from today’s broken spirit and rise once more. Tomorrow, we will start the painful work of mending our broken but beautiful and enduring 3,000 year old story.