“You are the man!”

When I was in Hebrew school, I learned about King David, Bathsheba, and the famous rebuke by the Prophet Nathan, “You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7) This reminds us it doesn’t matter how good, devout, or successful you are, when you abuse your power, you deserve the consequences for your actions. The story also reminds us it’s our responsibility to speak truth to power as the Prophet Nathan did.

This brings us to the situation with Israel and Palestine today.

At the beginning of the current crisis, I declared I side with humanity. This position isn’t good enough for social media, where anyone who doesn’t adopt the most extreme, absolute, and purest position gets cancelled. But if you refuse to see the humanity of those who are different from you, you don’t see humanity at all. You also become the type of person who can commit or excuse the most horrible of atrocities. This led to Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 and Israel’s disproportionate and brutal response to it.

Numbers don’t adequately describe the devastation the IDF inflected on the people of Gaza. We know the death toll will be much higher once the fighting stops and the recovery begins. Worse is the trauma it caused to families who lost their homes, children who lost their parents, and parents who lost their children. If the goal was to stop terrorism, this invasion only created the grounds for…