Photograph by Carlos Zurita via Unsplash

It’s hard to know where to begin in a war that seems to have no end. At the beginning of this month, after 11 months of war and hundreds of thousands of casualties, Hamas killed six of the Israeli hostages being held in Gaza. For many American Jews, caring for the hostages has taken on a near religious significance. This is largely the result of a framing that put the violence of October 7 in conversation with the Shoah and presented the war against Hamas as the only way to prevent a second Holocaust. In doing that, this narrative tried to put a simple call at the heart of this story: reassert Jewish power and bring the hostages home.

One would think that these deaths would challenge this story and for many, it has. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to demand a hostage deal to end the war. Yet many of the usual apologists abroad have adjusted the goalposts. After a year of using the hostages to justify their war of elimination, many pundits in the United States are now backtracking and doubling down on “crushing Hamas,” with or without the hostages. A hostage deal is a “poison pill for Israel,” wrote one columnist for the New York Times. “‘Bring them home’ is bringing us to the brink,” said another from Tablet.

There’s something horrific about shrugging off the death of the hostages to continue a war that itself is collective punishment against millions of civilians. But what’s most baffling to me is that as individuals living outside of Israel/Palestine, these writers are not even experiencing the war directly. Like me, they may experience it through their loved ones, on their campuses, and with their families, but they don’t live there. And one would think that distance would bring a push for empathy and truth-telling instead of its opposite: an unrelenting call to continue the violence.

But there are alternative ways to use our distance from the conflict while learning from the lessons of the Holocaust. One way I’m thinking about this is through the post-Holocaust theology of the late Orthodox rabbi Eliezer Berkovits. In his book, “Faith after the Holocaust,” Berkovits suggests that the Holocaust presents two fundamental challenges to Jewish faith. On the one hand, the devastation of the Shoah makes it impossible to maintain a traditional belief in God’s covenant that’s defined by reward and punishment. This covenantal framework would imply that the victims did something to deserve their suffering, and he pushes back on that idea completely.

Yet on the other hand, Berkovits rejects how scholars were using the Holocaust to entirely redefine Jewish thought, in particular through Richard Rubenstein’s book “After Auschwitz” which pioneered Jewish “death of God” theology that promoted Jewish rituals and institutions without an underlying theological justification.

Berkovits suggests a new framing to make sense of these competing challenges: Jews who did not experience the Holocaust are like Job’s brother. In the wisdom literature, God afflicts Job with countless sufferings to test his faith, leading to a profound series of dialogues between Job and his companions. Rather than cursing God, Job refuses to abandon his faith even as he challenges his previous way of making sense of the world. For Berkovits, Jews who did not experience the Holocaust are like Job’s brother, one step removed from the violence but nonetheless bound up with this suffering and the theological challenges it presents. They must learn from Job’s dedication and refuse to allow his suffering to undermine their faith.

For many diaspora Jews who oppose the continuous harm being inflicted on Palestinians, it’s hard to know what to still do with our voice and how we should respond. This frustration is shared by other people of faith in the United States, including many Muslims and Christians. We’re not experiencing the trauma of war and therefore cannot throw ourselves off into despair. Yet at the same time, we cannot witness this horror without being changed. To use Berkovits’s gendered language, we are Job’s brother, not the sufferers ourselves but linked inextricably to the suffering itself, as both related to people experiencing violence and as citizens of the United States, a country funding and enforcing it.

But when I look at the response on my Facebook feed, I see old friends, religious leaders, and family members expressing their legitimate outrage about the hostages’ deaths with a desire to double down on sectarianism by calling for revenge, collapsing the responsibility of this distance and abdicating the duty to speak truth to power to end this bloodshed.

Where will revenge lead us? What has the Israeli government done to Gaza that isn’t sufficiently vicious to make up for this crime? How much longer must we insist that something other than violence begets violence begets violence?

What the metaphor of Job’s brother offers us is the responsibility to use our position to recognize that all human life is sacred. Our distance from Job’s pain comes with an obligation to continue to hold our communities to account while working separately in broader movements to end the war and achieve justice in Israel/Palestine. It’s in these moments that we need to reject the idea that some lives are worth more than others and push back on a world where Palestinian and Israeli lives are celebrated and mourned in profoundly unequal ways.

Because Berkovits adds something else: those who didn’t experience the Shoah directly don’t have a right to give up. Now, more than ever, people of conscience must continue to organize for a ceasefire and a just resolution to the conflict. If there are people and movements in Palestine/Israel continuing to work against the genocide and for peace, we need to organize alongside them and we cannot give up.

May the death of these six hostages be a further wake-up call to end the war, may it awaken us to the sacredness of all human life, and may we never give in to violence, vengeance, or despair.