News

I told myself I wouldn’t watch the grotesque scenes from Gaza as the caskets of four innocent Jews–a mother, her two babies, and an elderly great-grandfather–returned home today. But I did, and I am beyond horrified. The joy taken in our suffering and the unimaginable agony of the families waiting for confirmation of their loved ones’ deaths is unbearably painful.  

What are we, as Jews around the world, feeling today? Deep sorrow, profound outrage, and a piercing sense of injustice. A peaceful, civilian Jewish mother and her children were ripped from their home, brutally murdered—and somehow, in a perverse display, their remains are being paraded while their murderers are glorified.

We sometimes joke about Jewish mothers and their helicopter parenting insanity, but ultimately, they are warriors—fiercely protecting their children with every fiber of their being. And that is what breaks me the most: these images of sheer rawness, of Shiri shielding her babies as any Jewish mother would.

My wife and I are raising our girls to protect their children like Shiri did, to truly feel for the suffering of all humanity, while instilling in them a deep, unwavering connection to the soul of the Jewish People and every Jew around the world.

If the sights today’s media reported didn’t shake us to our core, we have to ask ourselves: why not?

At JGO, we constantly instill into our grad students this powerful idea: to be a Jew means to learn how to feel. To feel the pain that other Jews around the world feel, especially over the last year and a half, as though it were our own.