Seeing the Eyes of God

Sep 24

Written By Z3

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights

A young rabbi steps onto a train traveling through Poland. It’s the middle of World War I, and soldiers pack every car. He squeezes down the length of the train, searching for a seat, terrified by the obviousness of his Jewishness. Finally, another passenger guides him to a car that is nearly empty--save for a single dying soldier slumped on a bench, bleeding profusely. The soldier’s moans grow louder and louder, and the rabbi can’t take it anymore. He flees from the car, back into the throngs of presumably hostile soldiers, and spends the rest of the ride nearly suspended mid-air in the overcrowded train.

Decades later, Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel had become the Chief Rabbi of pre-state Tel Aviv. He reflected on this story about himself while searching for answers to a perplexing theological question: Why does Jonah, the prophet who runs away from God, merit a book of his own? [1] And, we might add, why is this book, in its entirety, read on Yom Kippur afternoon, as we prepare to re-enter the world following an intense day of soul searching?

Amiel recognized that his escape from the unbearable face of the dying soldier mirrored Jonah’s flight from God. “I should have sat by his side, and maybe I could have eased his pain,” he writes. “It is clear that it was not from the eyes of this unfortunate soldier that I fled. Rather, it was from the eyes of God.”

Jonah was unique, Amiel continues, in that he fled from God only once. “For him,” Amiel explains, “this fleeing is considered a great ‘innovation’ such that he found it appropriate to write it in a book for the ages.”

In contrast, though, “all people who are not prophets are constantly fleeing from God. They are engaged in fleeing from the day of their birth until the day of their death... for behold, I myself, who do not consider myself to be such a terrible person, behold I am surrendering myself by standing among these rowdy soldiers, who at every moment are ready to tear my beard and threaten my life, as long as I do not see the dying soldier who reminds and awakens the God within me, and my duty to the world.”

Amiel’s fear of the soldier is not due only to squeamishness about blood. He describes this man—and the other soldiers on the train—as having “the hands of Esau” and “the feet of Esau.” Esau, of course, is the biblical character who who threatens to kill his brother Jacob after being tricked out of his birthright. But in Jewish thought, Esau also represents Christianity, the Roman Empire, and even warfare in general.[2] Amiel recoils from the soldier in part because he understands that if it weren’t for his compromised state, this man could easily harm him. And yet, Amiel is able to look at this soldier and see in his fading eyes the eyes of God imploring him to stay.

For the past year—and for decades before that—much of the Jewish community has chosen to look away from the suffering of Palestinians, whether the civilians killed by Israeli bombings in Gaza, those driven from their villages by violent settlers in the West Bank, or those tortured at the Sde Teman military prison. In the course of the current war, major Jewish organizations and leaders have often simply ignored the overwhelming casualties among Palestinians, or disparaged these numbers as Hamas propaganda.

For much of the Jewish community, it is still October 7. We are still reeling from our shock and grief, sometimes failing to recognize that our own tragedy has led to yet more tragedy for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Some of us had friends and family members murdered or taken hostage. Many of us continue to fear for the safety of loved ones serving in the IDF, displaced from their homes in northern or southern Israel, or living under rocket fire from Gaza and Lebanon. Many Diaspora Jews feel surprised and threatened by the rise in overt, even violent, expressions of antisemitism.

I understand the impulse to flee from the images of dead Palestinian children, to insist that the majority of those killed are Hamas terrorists, and to lay full blame for any suffering at the hands of Hamas. Some Jews worry that any acknowledgment of Israel’s massive use of force in urban areas, or of the overwhelming suffering of Palestinians, may somehow detract from attention to the atrocities of October 7, the continued plight of the hostages, or the cruelty of Hamas. For some members of the Jewish community, acknowledging the brutal death toll in Gaza requires letting go of platitudes about “the most moral army in the world” and coming face-to-face with the realities of more than half a century of Israeli control over a stateless people.

Indeed, the political climate of the past year has made many people feel compelled to take one side or the other—Israelis or Palestinians. It has been shocking to see some pro-Palestinian protesters align themselves with Hamas and Hezbollah, justify violence against Israeli Jews as “decolonization,” or cheer for Houthi attacks on U.S. ships. And it has been similarly shocking to watch some members of the Jewish community calling to flatten Gaza, excusing violence by settlers, or claiming that all Palestinians should be considered terrorists.

But those of us who care about Israel and Israelis need not fall into this either/or trap. We must not allow our fear and trauma to block out the fear and trauma of Palestinians. There is no contradiction in crying over the deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians, condemning war crimes by either side, or in calling for an end to the war to protect both. Indeed, this is what seeing the “eyes of God” in every single person demands.

The same totalizing either/or thinking also characterizes the discourse around Zionism today. Many pro-Palestine activists have promoted the message that Zionism is inherently anti-Palestinian—that to be a Zionist is to support atrocities in Gaza, to promote settlement growth and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, and to advocate for genocide. And some supposedly pro-Israel voices, both in the American Jewish community and in the Israeli government, act and speak in such a way as to confirm these beliefs.

But I refuse to allow extremists on either side to define Zionism. I think often about Vivian Silver, the peace activist murdered on October 7, who described herself as a “conditional Zionist”—that is, her own commitment to the national liberation of Jews required the national liberation of Palestinians as well. Since her death, her sons have recommitted to fulfilling that condition, to furthering her commitment “to build a world where we are not invested in distrust and dehumanizing of the other, but where peace is a reality,” as her son Yonatan Zeigen has written.

When Jonah finally arrives in Nineveh, he delivers his prophecy. And then, the unexpected happens—the people of Nineveh repent, and God forgives them. But Jonah is distraught, angrily telling God “this is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish!”

God responds by providing Jonah with a kikayon, a plant that provides him shelter from the scorching sun. And then God sends a worm to destroy the plant. Jonah is again furious. God reprimands him, “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow. . . and should I not care about Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons. . . “ (Jonah 4:10-11)

The young Rabbi Amiel, too, disembarking from his train, ends up in a large city. As he makes his way through the crowds there, he watches people “running and fleeing, as if hidden forces were chasing them,” and pretending not to see “men and women of all kinds, elderly men and women, those in labor and nursing babies wrapped in rags, shivering from the intense cold, their hands outstretched for help, and their mouths asking for bread from all the passers-by.”

Newly enlightened by his revelation on the train, he reflects, “we always treat with respect the attacker, and not the attacked; the strong and not the weak; the pursuer and not the pursued. All of this is because we are busy morning, evening, and afternoon fleeing from God. Everything that reminds us of God and the image of God, is hateful to us, we distance ourselves from it a bowshot's distance, and even beyond this, because "God seeks the persecuted." (Ecclesiastes 3:15), and in the case of everyone who is persecuted, God is persecuted with them.

God is again demanding that we look in the eyes of the people of great cities, of small villages, and of refugee camps, in the eyes of both Israelis and Palestinians, and see them all as creations of God. The question for us, as for Rav Amiel and the prophet Jonah before us, is: will we recognize God’s eyes looking back out at us, or will we yet again flee?

[1] R’ Moshe Avigdor Amiel, Le-Nevukhei HaTekufah, 1:14 (1943), cf. Drashot el Ami Yamim Nora’im 34 (1936). Translations mine

[2] See, for example, Talmud Gittin 57b