Many of us awoke to a day that, while long feared by many, still feels difficult to comprehend: reports of a major joint U.S.–Israel strike on Iran, followed by Iranian retaliation aimed at Israel, U.S. assets, and neighboring countries across the region.
We may be entering an era whose consequences we cannot yet see.
If you are feeling dread, anger, grief, pride, relief, or a numb kind of shock, you are not alone. When history accelerates, our bodies and hearts scramble to catch up.
I want to begin where Judaism begins: with the sanctity of life.
We hold in our hearts Israeli and American service members now placed in harm’s way, and the families who will not breathe easily until they know their loved ones are safe. We hold civilians in Israel, Iran, and throughout the region: children terrified by sirens, parents trying to find a safety they cannot control, ordinary people who did not choose the calculations of power and are now living inside their consequences.
Many of us also carry heartfelt intensity. Iran’s leadership has for decades fueled terror and destabilization abroad and brutal repression at home. Those truths have names, faces, funerals, scars. And at the same time, war is the realm where the clearest slogans can conceal the most complicated realities. “Why this, why now? What was attempted? What was exhausted? What comes next?” These questions are heavy, and the human cost is never theoretical.
One conviction I do hold is this: when any of us can look at a moment like this with clarity and ease, it is often a sign that something human is being missed. In war, moral ease is a temptation. The first casualty is not only on the battlefield; it is in the human heart.
A lesser-known teaching from Maimonides has been echoing in my mind. Rambam rules that before war, we are commanded to “call out for peace,” to actively seek an opening that spares life. He frames this as a discipline that applies even when war is seen as necessary, precisely because the soul is tempted to harden once force is unleashed.
It would be irresponsible for us to turn that teaching into a verdict on decisions made behind closed doors. As civilians, we almost never possess the full picture: not the intelligence, not the private diplomatic efforts, not the timeline of threats, not the calculus of what leaders believed was imminent. We can know real dangers exist, and still not know, in real time, which doors were open, which were slammed shut, and which tragedies were judged unavoidable.
War is sometimes necessary. It is also never simple. Even when leaders believe they are acting to prevent a greater catastrophe, war entangles the righteous with the tragic, the strategic with the uncontrollable, and the intended with the unforeseen. What begins as a targeted act can become a widening fire. What is meant to avert danger can also unleash it in new forms. Most often, we do not receive enough knowledge in real time to know, with confidence, whether a given moment was the last resort or a terrible choice among terrible options. Judaism does not ask us to pretend we know what we do not. It asks something harder: that we remain human even when the world is trying to make us less so.
So how do we apply Rambam’s teaching tonight?
We apply it as a spiritual and ethical discipline for our community, especially when we do not have the luxury of certainty.
- We keep an off-ramp in view. “Calling out for peace” means we refuse to let escalation become fate. We insist that leaders pursue de-escalation with urgency and creativity as a devotion to life.
- We refuse triumphalism. If we feel relief that a grave threat is being confronted, we do not need to apologize for that feeling. But Judaism asks us not to celebrate when human beings will die and when civilians, especially children, will be pulled into terror.
- We center the innocent as our first moral category. Before we debate strategy, we name what is sacred: every life caught in the blast radius, Israeli, Iranian, American, Arab, each a whole universe.
- And we demand ethical accounting without pretending omniscience. It is possible to hold together the demand for security and the obligation of restraint, protection of civilian life, and the preservation of human dignity, while also acknowledging what we do not know.
Many are also asking about the reports regarding Iran’s Supreme Leader. Multiple credible reports now indicate that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed. Some will feel relief: relief that the end has come to one of the greatest funders and architects of terror and repression in our world. Others will feel dread: dread about the possibility of wider escalation, about the chaos of succession and retaliation, about what new forms of danger may yet be unleashed. Many of us will feel all this and more. Judaism allows the complexity, and it demands restraint: we do not sanctify death, even when we believe a grave threat must be confronted. We sanctify life, and we pray for the protection of those now in immediate danger.
With Purim approaching, I keep thinking about how the Megillah trains the Jewish heart. It is a story of real threat and real power, and also of hiddenness. Esther moves within uncertainty. Decisions are made under existential pressure. Consequences echo outward. Purim is not a children’s tale about villains getting what they deserve. It is a sacred text that warns us how quickly fear can become cruelty, how quickly relief can become intoxication, and how easily survival can be mistaken for permission. The Megillah does not let us off the hook from ethical complexity; it insists that Jewish life is lived inside it.
Our tradition knows how quickly the world can turn, and how fiercely we must choose what kind of people we will be when it does.
That is the narrow bridge we walk tonight. We are not a community of one politics, one analysis, or one emotional posture. Rodeph Sholom contains deep and diverse convictions about power, vulnerability, and what security requires. Our task now is not to flatten those differences. Our task is to hold them together with dignity: refusing speech that dehumanizes, refusing mockery of suffering, refusing the addictive satisfactions of certainty when we lack the information to justify it.
May the Holy One guard the innocent who are in danger, and all who have been placed in harm’s way.
May those who serve be protected, and may their return be swift.
May the leaders who hold power be granted wisdom and restraint, and may they never confuse force with righteousness.
May we be spared the hardening of heart that war invites, and may we find the courage to see suffering clearly without being consumed by it.
May our people and all peoples be held in life.
And may the day come soon when the work of human hands is no longer to destroy, but to heal, to build, and to make peace.
Rabbi Ben Spratt is the senior rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Sholom.
