One of the kindest people I know recently said to me: “I know how to treat others with respect. But what do we do when someone is intentionally causing harm? What do we do when people make claims about us that are untrue?”
Those questions have stayed with me as I reflect on the recent New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof concerning allegations of abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners. This is an extraordinarily serious subject. There is never a circumstance in which rape, sexual assault, or abuse of prisoners is acceptable — not in Israel, not in the United States, not anywhere. Jewish tradition is unequivocal about the dignity of every human being, created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.
At the same time, I found the article deeply troubling in both timing and framing. It appeared just as a 300-page report documenting Hamas’s sexual violence against Israelis on October 7 was being released, and it risked creating the impression not of moral clarity, but of moral equivalency or score-settling. Some of the claims presented were extraordinary and insufficiently substantiated, including accusations that demanded far greater scrutiny before publication. It is blasphemous that Kristof’s outlandish claims that Israelis trained dogs to rape people could have sidestepped the New York Times fact-checking team.
This leaves many Jews and supporters of Israel in a painful and familiar place: trying to hold two truths at once. We must be willing to confront wrongdoing wherever it occurs, including within Israeli society or institutions, because accountability is part of what it means to care about Israel and its moral future. But we also know there are voices for whom criticism is not about accountability at all, but about delegitimization, treating Israel not as a nation capable of moral failure, but as uniquely monstrous or beyond redemption.
The Torah commands, “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof” — “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” The rabbis ask why the word justice is repeated. One answer is that both the ends and the means matter. Justice pursued through distortion, selective outrage, or dehumanization ceases to be justice. At the same time, love of one’s own people cannot become an excuse to avert our eyes from suffering or abuse.
And so I return to the original question: what do we do when we feel attacked? When people speak about us, our community, or Israel in ways that are distorted or even malicious?
Our tradition does not ask us to be passive in the face of falsehood. We are allowed to defend ourselves. We are allowed to challenge bias, name distortion, and insist on context and truth. But Judaism also warns us against becoming consumed by outrage or allowing anger alone to shape our response.
Pirkei Avot teaches: “Who is strong? One who conquers their impulse.” Not one who never feels anger, but one who does not let anger wholly define them. And Proverbs reminds us: “A gentle answer turns away wrath.” Not because gentleness always changes minds, but because we remain responsible for the character of our own speech, even when others fail in theirs.
Perhaps the deeper challenge is this: how do we remain open-hearted without becoming naïve, and clear-eyed without becoming hardened? How do we defend ourselves and our people without surrendering the very values we are trying to protect?
I do not have easy answers. The task is not to choose between loyalty and honesty, or between moral clarity and compassion. The task is to hold fast to all of them at once: to defend truth without abandoning humility, to pursue justice without losing our humanity, and to refuse to let a world of outrage strip us of the dignity, nuance, and moral seriousness our tradition calls us to uphold.
Rabbi Cassi Kail 