My father was able to examine his most deeply held beliefs. Are you?

The 30^th of Nissan is my father’s yahrzeit, and a story I have told before about his ability to act when his most deeply held beliefs turned out to be wrong is particularly relevant today.

My father was a Republican, a great believer in the free market economy and totally convinced that the private sector could do a better job of meeting social needs than big government. He was, therefore, a big fan of Ronald Reagan and trickle-down economics. With his whole heart and soul, he was certain that when President Reagan cut taxes and government spending, the private sector with more money in its pockets would step up to the plate.

He had the shock of his life when that didn’t happen, and he realized that in our hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, the impact of the government spending cuts was that people were actually going hungry.

While many others might have ignored reality or found excuses to defend his or her beliefs, my father had the courage to admit that something was deeply wrong and that something had to be done. What he had believed would happen was not happening. He was very involved in United Way. The way my father put it was that when people were going hungry, it was no longer tenable that the major donors determined allocations for things like “swimming lessons for middle-class children.” He believed that community social workers who knew the real needs of the community must be brought into the allocation process.

My father got the second shock of his life when it turned out that the big donors were not interested. The thing was, my parents were the biggest donors. While it was another example of money talks, it worked. He was able to push through the change in how priorities were set, and the Erie, PA model was adopted by many other United Ways around the US.

My father did not become a Democrat or a socialist. I don’t even remember whether he voted for Reagan the second time around, although I recall him voting for Barack Obama when John McCain made Sarah Palin his vice presidential running partner. There is no way he would have voted for Donald Trump, and were he alive today, he would again be dedicating his energies to meet the needs of those left behind in MAGA America. He resigned from the Republican Jewish Coalition when he realized they had no interest in his proposal to talk about the relationship between Jewish values and policy choices. My parents established the Ascherman Chair in the Harvard economics department, dedicated to exploring ways to meet social needs in free-market economies.

My father faced the deficiencies in the things he continued to believe in head-on.

Can those of us who have loved and supported Israel with every fiber of our beings (as well as those of us who haven’t) act with my father’s courage? Or will we sweep under the rug or explain away uncomfortable truths about what is terribly wrong in the country we love? Among the people we love and believe in? Can we act with determination to correct what is really wrong without saying we no longer want any connection with the country that has so deeply disappointed and disturbed those of us who, like my father, do not turn away from reality?

As horrified as we are about the October 7^th massacre and determined as we must be to defend ourselves, can we recognize that flattening entire neighborhoods, leaving thousands of children buried in the rubble, is unacceptable? That starving people crosses a big red line? Do we face the facts or find comfort in those who tell us that there is no real starvation in Gaza, or that Gazans deserve it, or that it is them or us? As we are taught in Tractate Sanhedrin, when somebody is coming to kill you, you are to rise up earlier and kill him/her first. But the same passage teaches us that if we kill when we could have stopped a potential murderer in other ways, we ourselves are murderers. We are told that we must not kill innocents, even to save our own lives.

Do we have the ability to face how the settler movement in the West Bank has cynically exploited the anger and pain all Israelis share post-October 7th to expel shepherding community after shepherding community, and do something concrete to bring them home?

There is literally almost never a day when my colleagues and I are not confronting settler shepherds trespassing on Palestinian lands, their flocks devouring what is growing. They frequently parade their flocks between homes, and all too often burn those homes. In the village of Jaba, the new residents of the many outposts that Israel has allowed to spring up mercilessly beat the Bedouin, pulling a 4-year-old child out of the home they were torching.

Even more recently, an older man already violently expelled from Wadi A Seeq had his skull cracked, his home burnt and his flock stolen by settlers in an outpost set up the day before. He was uprooted yet again. In Ras El Eyn and Dir Dibwan, there were recently massive thefts of some 1,000 sheep from each community. In Dir Dibwan the families were told at gunpoint they had two minutes to flee and to leave their flocks behind. Even when the government removes outposts, they are back the same day to rebuild with support from public crowdfunding campaigns.T

Rather than say kaddish in a minyan today on my father’s yahrzeit, I was called to Mukhmas. A settler and a flock from the Sadeh Yonatan illegal even according to Israel outpost was next to a home.  I managed to move them away until the army arrived, at the cost of the settler’s dogs ripping my pants and needing to say kaddish without a minyan.

Most of this occurs below the public radar screen, certainly the “minor” daily incidents of intimidation. And it then becomes all too easy to believe what we want to believe when the police, who almost never show up, tell us that settler violence is a myth. I am sorry. I see it every day. And the up to 70 uprooted communities, depending on how one counts, didn’t just decide one day to pick up and leave for no reason. Many more are currently in the gunsights. The legal work we and others are doing to return communities is being fought tooth and nail by the government.

I am proud that HaMa’abarah legal clinic, sponsored by Torat Tzedek, recently obtained a public housing apartment for an Israeli single mother after four years of struggle. But can we recognize that there are many more like her? At this year’s Public Housing Day, which we sponsored in the Knesset, perhaps the most powerful testimonies came from those who, up until now, have been part of the ruling coalition’s voter base.

I know that these questions are tearing families and communities apart. I meet progressive parents abroad who are at a loss for what to do when their children participate in encampments and protest against Israel. Yet, we must find our internal resources to unflinchingly confront Israel’s moral failures and do what we can to correct them.

Although my father and I continued to disagree about many things, his ability to take action to correct the failures in what he believed in, and his ability to listen and learn from me brought us closer together. I realized how many values we shared and was able to continue to learn from him. He understood that I was carrying out what he and my mother had taught me, be it fighting apartheid as a university student or championing human rights in Israel.

Fighting for what we always believed Israel should be is not a betrayal of our beliefs and values. Not having the courage and determination to fight for them is.