Should Jews Pray For Gaza?

A meditation on discord at shul

My synagogue is a fairly diverse community for its time and place (brownstone Brooklyn). The neighborhood has gotten much wealthier over the past generation, but we still have many families that are solidly middle class. Conservative Judaism in general is both aging and shrinking, but our synagogue, which affiliates with the Conservative movement, is growing rapidly, with a recent influx in particular of young families. Politically speaking, the bulk of the congregation certainly leans in a liberal direction (if not further left), but I can assure you that we’ve got some more right-leaning congregants, and there’s considerable political diversity under the hood among the liberals as well. Finally, in terms of religious knowledge and practice, we have an incredibly strong bench of people who can lead services, read Torah, etc., and a sizable contingent who lead some degree of a halachic lifestyle (having a kosher home, eating only vegetarian out, observing the Sabbath in a meaningful way). Not a majority by a long shot, but a big enough contingent to have a meaningful influence on the practices of the shul.

That diversity is one thing I really like about my shul. But it’s also a challenge for the leadership to manage—particularly where that diversity turns into a divide with strong passions on both sides. Sometimes the question that presents such a divide is only of parochial interest; nobody outside of the congregation probably cares whether we continue to read the full kriyah every week or shift to the triennial cycle. Other questions are potentially of greater interest to an outside observer.

For example: praying for Gaza.

In the standard Conservative prayerbook, on Saturday mornings after the haftarah reading, there are a series of prayers that some congregations read and some omit. There’s a prayer for the congregation, a prayer for our country, a prayer for the State of Israel, a prayer for peace. Before October 7th, 2023, we tended to skip all of these in the interests of moving things along. (A full kriyah takes a while.) But for some time now, we’ve been saying a prayer for the State of Israel, a prayer for the safe return of the hostages (we actually do that one a bit earlier in the service), a prayer for the Israeli Defense Forces (to the standard text of which our rabbi added lines specifically praying that they have the wisdom and character to distinguish the innocent from legitimate targets, and to protect the innocent), and a prayer for Gaza.

That prayer was carefully crafted so as to affirm certain principles but not to dictate actions. It prays for an end to the violence—but doesn’t call for an immediate cease-fire. It recognizes that both peoples, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, have a legitimate right to call the land between the river and the sea home, and prays for that recognition to become general—but doesn’t specify how that recognition would be manifested (two states? one binational state? something else?) nor how we might get there. The core of the prayer asks that we, those praying, retain our humanity, that we be able to hold in our hearts simultaneously the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Notwithstanding this wordsmithing, the addition of this prayer has not been uncontroversial. Some have criticized it precisely for its careful language—and therefore for not speaking out plainly and forcefully, even prophetically against injustice. Only a few of those, I suspect, are outright anti-Zionists who, while they decry the murders perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th, nonetheless think Israel is fundamentally illegitimate in its existing form, and that therefore we shouldn’t be praying for the state’s health but for its fundamental transformation. A larger number are simply appalled by the war and have no confidence in the integrity of the current Israeli government. Regardless, for these critics a mealymouthed prayer that we hold suffering Gazans in our hearts is totally inadequate. If we’re not doing anything to relieve their suffering, then we don’t really hold them in our hearts, and we’re just making ourselves feel like better people than we actually are by reciting such a prayer.

Others, I suspect a more substantial contingent, have criticized the prayer from the opposite perspective—for being included at all. I’ve heard various forms of this complaint. One friend asked why we should be praying specifically to end the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza—unless we feel the war itself is unjust, why would they rank higher in our concern than innocents suffering in Chinese slave labor camps, or being massacred in Sudan? Another simply couldn’t bear praying for the welfare of people who cheered Hamas for their murders, who threw stones at the hostages when they were being paraded through Gaza. One explicitly said that we’re not supposed to pray for our enemies. We can pray for peace, sure, pray that they stop being our enemies. But praying for our enemies’ welfare is just masochistic—or, worse, Christian. Yet another friend said that they have to deal with pro-Palestinian protests all the time, and synagogue should be one place where they can relax and feel at home. Instead, every time they hear this prayer, they feel like someone has slammed their own door in their face.

They’re coming from opposite political perspectives, obviously, but the two groups of critics have a couple of things in common. For one, they both seem to think that the prayer should express their feelings about what is right—if the war is wrong, it should condemn it, and if the war is righteous, it should support it. Second, they both evince a sense that there is something false, unserious and self-regarding about the prayer, a sense that it is kind of virtue signaling. I worried that both sides might have a point, and so I wanted to think about whether I agreed with it, and if so what could be done to mitigate that sense.

The first question that occurred to me when grappling with the question is: what are any of these prayers for? Tomorrow is Shemini Atzeret, and I’m the one who’s going to lead the congregation in the traditional prayer for rain that is recited on that holiday. I am fairly confident that nobody in my congregation believes that this prayer will be efficacious in the sense that, without it, the rains would not come in their season. Similarly, I don’t think anyone believes that if we pray really hard for the return of the hostages, or for total victory over Hamas and Hezbollah, or for the end Gaza’s suffering, that because of our prayers these things will come to pass. So why are we doing it?

If we’re doing it just as a matter of signaling, saying to each other what we already think is right, then all of these prayers are subject to the same critique of unseriousness. If the left-wing critics got their way, and we prayed that Israel end the war immediately, that would just be putting a different sticker on the bumper; it wouldn’t be changing anything in the real world. Ditto if we ditched the prayer entirely and simply prayed for speedy victory—that would just be sending a different signal, to each other, about which tribe we are. Inasmuch as the current prayer is sending a signal, then, the signal is precisely that this is the common ground of the community—that we can agree more on this as a common feeling we share and want to vocalize before the Almighty than on any other expression. The fact that it remains controversial just proves that there isn’t any such consensus of feeling—it doesn’t prove that there’s some other wording that would better express the consensus.

But I don’t think these prayers should fundamentally be signaling at all. They shouldn’t be expressions of a feeling that already exists about what is right. Rather, they are or should be expressions of a feeling that we believe should exist, and, perhaps, are a way of inculcating that feeling.

Consider some of the other things we pray for regularly. Asher yatzar, the prayer traditionally said after going to the lavatory, and also included among the first prayers of the morning, is a statement of gratitude that one’s intestines and other internal organs are working properly. God created us with many openings and passages, the prayer says, and if any of them were ruptured or stopped, we would be unable to survive. The plain and obvious purpose of this prayer is to make us more conscious of how miraculous it is that all our parts do fit together, that we are such a complex organism and yet functional, and we don’t generally even have to think about how we function, we just do. We don’t say the prayer fundamentally because we are feeling grateful for this state of affairs (though in any given instance we may, particularly if we’ve just experienced one of those dangerous ruptures or obstructions). We say the prayer as a formal expression of gratitude because we believe such an expression is appropriate, is what we should feel. And, perhaps, in order to feel grateful.

I look at the prayer for Gaza similarly. It’s not, or it shouldn’t be, a way of reassuring ourselves that we’re the good people, that we have right and enlightened attitudes, unlike those benighted brutal nationalists who don’t care about the poor Gazans. Nor is it a form of political expression of any kind; it changes nothing out there in the world. It’s an attempt—perhaps poorly executed, though I personally don’t think so—at formal expression of what we should feel even if we don’t.

Why, though, should we feel it? I think the answer is only partly: because we should always be mindful when we cause suffering, even if we believe that suffering is necessary. That’s true, but I think there’s a sharper reason. Gaza is not now part of the territory of the State of Israel, and perhaps it will one day become the territory of another sovereign state, such as a Palestinian state. But it is plausibly (though not unequivocally) part of the land of Israel as religiously imagined. And even if it isn’t, the Palestinian people more generally certainly are people who dwell in the land of Israel—both in the West Bank and within Israel’s generally recognized borders. So it seems to me that any prayer for the welfare of those who dwell in the land—prayers that are an uncontroversial part of the liturgy—implicitly includes the Palestinians under its ambit.

If that is the case, and I think it is, I think we should be mindful of that fact as well, especially now. When I affirm that prayer for Gaza, that’s part of what I’m thinking. I’m reminding myself that Israel’s current war isn’t just a war with an external enemy, that it is, in some ways, a civil war, and that its ultimate resolution will, of necessity, look something like the resolution of civil wars. Achieving that resolution is generally more difficult than in other kinds of wars, because the emotional demands it makes of the former combatants are so much higher, because those former combatants have to live together after the war is done. But the importance of achieving that resolution is all the greater for precisely the same reason.

Precisely because those demands are so high, I empathize with those who are not ready to accede to them, especially now. But it’s also the reason that I do think it’s worth making those emotional demands, even now, on the yahrzeit of those murdered on October 7th.

Chag sameach.