Not Only Victims

We are aching. A woman, on her way to bring a new child life into the world, murdered.
Two Israeli embassy staffers in D.C., murdered.
And across the globe, Jews are being shouted down, scapegoated, vilified.

It’s not just frightening — it’s exhausting.
It’s heartbreaking.
And it’s totally understandable that we want to scream.
We want to cry out, to list all the ways this moment is unbearable and wrong. To demand that the world see us. That it hear our justified pain.
Because we are victims right now.

And we need to be able to say that.
But at the same time—something in me resists staying only there.
Because that’s not the full story of who we are.
We are a people who were given a calling.
To be a light unto the nations.
To carry moral courage into places where the world has lost its way.
And if we let ourselves become only the victims—only the ones wounded, hunted, hated—we lose the clarity and strength that calling demands.

The prophet Isaiah gives us the image of the lion and the lamb lying down together.
We know the lamb.
We’ve lived the lamb.
We have been the world’s sacrificial offering again and again—burned in pogroms, expelled from countries, slaughtered in gas chambers. History has made us the lamb so often that the symbol itself is burned into our identity. Even in Christianity, the “lamb who was slain” is a Jewish man, whose death is framed as redemptive—for the world. That story echoes our own in a haunting way: the Jewish people suffering on behalf of something larger than ourselves.

But we are also the Lion of Judah.
We are no longer scattered and powerless. We are rooted. Returned. We have a voice, and a homeland, and the strength to protect what matters.
And the challenge now—the spiritual work—is to hold both.
To integrate the lamb and the lion inside ourselves.
The gentleness and the grief.
The strength and the sovereignty.
The part of us that still aches.
And the part of us that knows we are strong.
We are not either/or. We are both.

And maybe it’s in that tension—between pain and power, heartbreak and responsibility—that we remember who we really are.
Not just a people who suffer.
But a people who lead.
Not just a people who endure.
But a people who illuminate.