Seeking spiritual fixes to new terror in Israel

Their pictures and their names are burned on our hearts—victims of terrorism whose final moments we can’t even imagine.

All across Israel, rabbis are being asked to make whatever sense can be made of the ongoing wave of Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli Jews doing the kinds of regular things people do: going to work, dropping off the kids, visiting friends, going shopping, attending synagogue services.

“It’s been a very sad day,” Rabbi Shlomo Riskin said on Oct. 9, a day when the founding chief rabbi of Efrat had visited four homes observing shiva. “But I see these as the best of times and the worst of times—the best because for the first time in 2,000 years, we can carve out our own destiny and future in our land, as we witness an ingathering of our exiles from all over the world. The worst because the Palestinians have started a mountain of lies that we are encroaching on the Al-Aqsa mosque. They’re starting a budding intifada in malevolent and treacherous ways, which Abbas fomented in his speech before the U.N.”

“It’s something,” he adds with a sigh, “that I hope the world is beginning to see.” 

Rabbi Berel Wein—historian, author, and rabbi of the Bet Knesset Hanasi congregation in Jerusalem—lays much of the blame for the current attacks at the feet of the media.

“The violence against Jews has been going on for 100 years here, so the uptick is because of the news coverage—the terrorists win by publicity,” he says. “Television made ISIS.” 

What does Wein recommend as a response to terror? 

“You can’t live a hermetically sealed life, but you also have to try for the best security, at least until they finally make up their minds that Jews have a right to be here,” he says.

Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Western Wall and the Holy Sites of Israel, argues that Israelis can’t run away in fear. 

“Of course we hope that the attacks stop and at the very least, the security steps the government is taking will help avoid new problems,” he says.