Three Years After October 7: Finding Moral Clarity Through Compassion

On that horrific October 7 three years ago, I felt a moral vertigo set in. And I’ll admit that I have yet to fully emerge from its grip. As a rabbi, I am one of many Jews around the world who were a degree or two separated from a victim of the horrendous attack on civilians in Israel. I felt the pain that countless others have felt when their people have been targeted – even from half a world away. It is a pain that feels uniquely lonely. But it shouldn’t – because it is a pain known to countless peoples throughout history who have been displaced by violence. It is a pain that is amplified when public discourse on all sides embraces justifications and rationalizations for human suffering and death. And it is a pain known deeply by Palestinians in the region and around the world—especially especially as people in the Gaza strip continue to be displaced, to suffer, and to be killed despite the declared ceasefire.    

I cannot begin to speak adequately to the traumas of October 7 and its aftermath for people in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and across the region. Their wounds are open and raw and unhealed.  But I know that healing feels even further out of reach when the discourse only dehumanizes the victims more.  

In the world today, a selective application of empathy has become normalized. Our collective ability to extend our compassion and care over mass trauma and death seems to be filtered through the lens of whether those who suffer align with our camp, whatever we understand that camp to be. I once operated with the value of universal human dignity as a self-evident truth.  I still believe it to be true.  But I am chastened from the assumption that it is self-evident. And so, this moral disorientation that set in three years ago still lingers.

But I am not without hope. For all the disorienting toxicity in the world, I have found myself steadied by what HIAS continually projects back out into that brokenness. It was not the purpose of HIAS in Israel to rebuild my moral faith when it helped displaced asylum seeker communities get the critical support they needed as society was in complete disarray. But it did. Our organizational advocacy for unobstructed humanitarian aid and the protection of aid workers and civilians in Gaza was not done for the purpose of strengthening my moral resolve. But it did.

Never have I been more grateful to work at an organization that understands human dignity as the prerequisite for helping those who have endured unimaginable trauma. We refuse to operate from a place of limited compassion. And at times, it feels as though I exist in an oasis where someone’s humanity, not their tribe, is what determines whether they deserve to live without fear for their safety.

When I stepped into my role at HIAS four years ago, I knew I was stepping into a legacy organization with a storied history. I also understood that the organization’s approach was never flashy or radical. It was the behind-the-scenes, detailed, logistical work that makes the lives of those who have been through the worst a little less hard. That has never changed. I did not anticipate that such consistent moral focus, values, and commitment would prove to be so life-affirming for me. Who knew what was once normative and frankly mundane, could feel so radical?

Holocaust survivor Vasily Grossman wrote that “human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is the battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush the small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

As we face this tragic anniversary that has unleashed untold suffering, it is my fervent prayer that those of us who hold dear to that small kernel of human kindness double down on our commitment. That we do so in spite of the world’s refusal to embrace it and in the face of our own disorientation. That we share and hear all stories of suffering and loss and grief without the need to diminish or contextualize. That we hold the pain for all who have been victims of terrorism and war. That we bear witness to the humanity others seek to question.

And in so doing, we are part of what lays the foundation for a vision of a morally-steadied world that is kinder and more hopeful to emerge.