Avraham’s Moral Standards, and Ours
Adapted from a sermon originally delivered at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York City on October 24, 2026
Avraham Avinu was the man who discovered that there is one God. What is the meaning of the fact that there is one God, other than a historical point about how the world was created?
The true meaning is that Avraham recognized that there is a moral order to the world, established by God, which human beings are obligated to follow. There is truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and those standards don’t change according to what we want, or what serves our interests. This is the significance of Avraham’s rejection of idolatry. Avraham recognized one supreme authority, whose demands apply to every aspect of our lives.
Later, in Parashat Vayera, God tells us explicitly what he chose Avraham for: “For I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of Hashem,
וְשָׁמְרוּ דֶּרֶךְ ה׳ לַעֲשׂוֹת צְדָקָה וּמִשְׁפָּט , by doing what is just and right.” God chose Avraham to establish a family, and eventually a nation, committed to tzedakah u’mishpat, to justice and righteousness.
This also helps us understand that first commandment, Lech lecha. The Torah does not explain why Avraham needed to leave his homeland. Why couldn’t he remain in Charan? My answer is that Avraham needed to establish a new society built around the values he had discovered, one in which justice and righteousness would be the foundation of communal life. Doing so in a place with a society already built around a warped set of values would have been impossible. The whole project of Judaism is to build a society that lives based on right and wrong.
For a long time, we have witnessed a profound confusion about right and wrong all around the world. Yeshayahu warned about it thousands of years ago: הוֹי הָאֹמְרִים לָרַע טוֹב “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who present darkness as light and light as darkness.”
We have watched people excuse atrocities, justify the murder of innocents, and describe the deliberate targeting of civilian Israelis as legitimate resistance. We have rightly insisted that atrocities committed cannot be justified by sympathies for any political cause. Terrorism is terrorism. Murder is murder. Who did it and why does not determine whether the act is right or wrong.
But if we insist that the world apply a consistent moral standard when judging Israel, we have to apply that same standard when judging ourselves. And that can prove very difficult. We naturally defend our own people and sympathize with their motivations. Our loyalties can interfere with our moral judgment. How, then, do we know what is right?
Rav Kook taught that derech eretz kadma laTorah means that there is a natural morality that comes before Torah, which is exactly Avraham’s story. Rav Kook also believed that, as long as we are not corrupted, we have a gut instinct for what is right and wrong. Our conscience can be distorted by self-interest, but deep down we have that gut instinct. We need to step back and judge our actions objectively, and that is one of the functions of Torah and Halakha.
A situation unfolding right now demands us to take that step back. In general, we like to draw attention only to positive things in Israel. And although in reality it only involves a very small group of people, because of the media attention this situation has received, it requires us to articulate clearly what the Jewish moral stance is.
October and November are olive harvest season in Israel. Throughout Yehudah and Shomron, there are olive groves that have been cultivated by local Arab farmers for many years. In the last weeks, there have been reports of Jewish extremists entering these groves, taking olives, damaging trees, and attacking farmers. In some areas, the IDF has restricted Palestinian access to olive groves because of serious security considerations. But some Jews have entered those groves and harvested the olives for themselves. From trees that did not belong to them. Some argued that because the Arab owners cannot reach their groves, they have given up hope of recovering the fruit. In halakha, this is called ye’ush, and under certain circumstances it can affect the ownership of property. Based on this, they felt they were halakhically justified in taking the olives.
On October 13, the official rabbis of six communities in Gush Etzion, together with Rabbi Rafi Ostroff, chairman of the Gush Etzion Regional Religious Council, issued a halachic ruling about it. These rabbis rejected the argument about ye’ush. The owners have not despaired of their olives. They are simply unable to reach them because the IDF has restricted access to the area for legitimate security reasons. And even if they had despaired, olives still attached to trees on their land do not simply become ownerless. Their conclusion was unequivocal: Taking those olives is gezel, theft, and when committed by Torah-observant Jews, it is also a great chilul Hashem. This was from the official rabbis of Gush Etzion towns.
Three days later, Rav Dov Lior, a significant figure in the Religious Zionist community, made the opposite case. The land, he argued, never left Jewish ownership, since the Arab farmers never acquired it from the Jewish people. And as for the olives, he said the farmers who cannot reach their groves have despaired of the fruit. He concluded that harvesting the olives is permitted, even a virtue, as an expression of Jewish ownership of the Land.
The rabbinic organization Tzohar responded directly to Rav Lior that theft is forbidden regardless of who the victim is—this is the Rambam’s ruling in his laws of theft: אפילו עכו”ם אסור לגזלו, “One may not steal even from an idolater.” Furthermore, private individuals have no authority to declare someone else’s property their own.
The argument of the Gush Etzion rabbis and Tzohar is far more convincing than Rav Lior’s. A family has tended its olive trees for years. Now they are kept from their land, as the security situation requires–I am not disputing Tzahal’s decisions–but someone else comes along and takes the fruit. When people are deprived of the fruit of their own labor, we should feel it in our gut, in Rav Kook’s words. And if a halachic argument leads to a conclusion that violates basic fairness and decency, we must examine that argument very carefully.
I am very much a Religious Zionist, and believe deeply in the Jewish people’s right to Eretz Yisrael and in the mitzvah of yishuv ha-aretz. But I cannot see how those commitments justify taking another family’s harvest or committing any act of violence against people who have not themselves initiated any violence. The land that God promised to Avraham is the very land in which He expects Avraham’s descendants to practice tzedakah u’mishpat. It is not easy to publicly disagree with a figure like Rav Lior. These rabbis, who live in Yehudah and Shomron and are responsible for the religious lives of those communities, stepped forward anyway, with a clear halachic and moral argument. They deserve our admiration. And they are not alone. The mainstream society of Gush Etzion supports their position, and a group of families from Neve Daniel even raised funds to repay for the olives that were taken.
Some will object: they steal from us too. And it is true; there are repeated reports of theft from Jewish farms in Yehudah and Shomron. But that changes nothing about our own obligation. The standard we demand of the world cannot depend on how others treat us. As the chosen people, we hold ourselves to a higher standard that no one else’s behavior can lower.
We love Israel. We talk all the time about how moral we are and what a moral military we have. And it is because we love Israel that we must articulate a clear stance on something like this. Taking another family’s harvest is wrong in itself, and it also undermines the moral standards we proclaim in the eyes of others. We rightly condemn Palestinian violence; we must be just as clear in condemning violence committed by Jews. Pirkei Avot describes the right path as “תפארת לעושה ותפארת לו מן האדם,” one that brings honor to the person himself, and also honor from others. We have to care about both what we do and what our conduct communicates.
At the end of our parsha, Avraham had just fought a war to rescue his nephew Lot. He defeated powerful kings, and the king of Sodom offers him the spoils. Avraham refused: אִם מִחוּט וְעַד שְׂרוֹךְ נַעַל, “I will not take so much as a thread or a shoelace of what is yours, so that you cannot say, ‘I made Avram rich.’” Avraham had won the war and may well have been entitled to those spoils. But he was concerned about what accepting them would communicate. He cared about his integrity and about how his conduct reflected on the God he represented.
We, too, have legitimate interests, important loyalties, and causes we believe in deeply. But we must pursue them according to God’s standards, even when doing so requires us to challenge our own people or sacrifice something valuable. That is Avraham’s legacy. Our love of Eretz Yisrael, our commitment to the Jewish people, and our devotion to Torah must be expressed through conduct that brings honor to God, La’asot tzedakah u’mishpat.
