Over fifteen years ago, some Jewish activists launched an initiative they called Project Chayei Sarah. The idea was simple and uncomfortable. They wanted rabbis and rabbinical students to speak honestly with their communities, on this Shabbat, about the on-the-ground realities in the city of Hevron, in the West Bank.
The link between this week’s parashah and that project is clear. After Sarah dies, Avraham seeks a place to bury her. He ends up purchasing a cave from the Hittites, Me’arat haMachpelah. The text says: “Sarah died in Kiriath Arba, now Hevron, in the land of Canaan.” [1] At the end of the parashah, Avraham himself dies and is buried there by his sons, Yitzchak and Ishmael. This small piece of land becomes a shared family burial place, a place that binds together a deeply fractured family.
But that was then. What is the reality in Hevron now?
To answer that, we need to talk briefly about what happened in that area in the past century.
In 1929, during a period of growing tension between Jews and Arabs, sixty-nine Jews were murdered in what became known as the Hevron massacre. A few years later, the British authorities decided to remove all Jews from the city, in order, as they saw it, to prevent further massacres. After more than a thousand years of continuous Jewish presence, Hevron became a place where Jews were forbidden to live.
When Israel conquered the West Bank in the Six Day War of 1967, Jews began returning to the area, first to the settlement of Kiryat Arba, then into the centre of Hevron itself.
When I lived in Israel in 2010, I visited Hevron with a group of former Israeli soldiers called Breaking the Silence. In a city of roughly 250,000 Palestinians, there are fewer than a thousand Jews. The number is small, but the measures adopted to protect them are enormous. To defend this tiny population of settlers, the Israeli army has imposed rules that have closed the main commercial street, sealed the entrances to shops and residential buildings and forced Palestinian residents to improvise new, often humiliating ways of entering and leaving their own homes.
At the heart of the city stands the site that is so central to our parashah, the place we call Me’arat haMachpelah, known today as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and as the Ibrahimi Mosque. Jews and Muslims follow a very choreographed and carefully negotiated script. On some days, Jews may pray in certain sections and Muslims are excluded. On other days, Muslims pray and Jews are excluded. It is a place that should speak of shared ancestors, yet it has also become a site of terrible violence. During Purim in 1994, an American-born Israeli Jew, dressed in Israeli army uniform, opened fire with an assault rifle and killed twenty-nine people, including children as young as twelve, and wounded one hundred and twenty-five others. [2]
These were the kinds of realities the organisers of Project Chayei Sarah wanted rabbis to speak about on this Shabbat. Until now, I have never really engaged with that invitation, because I recognise how divisive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become in Jewish communities around the world. I know that in any room there will be people whose hearts, histories and politics are very different from one another.
This week, though, following a significant increase in terror brought about by far-right Israeli activists against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, I began to feel that remaining silent on this is also a choice, and not a neutral one. For the first time, I decided to speak about it directly from the bimah.
Let me share how one Israeli journalist recently described what is happening. An article in the newspaper Yediot Acharonot reported it like this:
Once or twice a day, sometimes more, a notification buzzes in the Hilltop Youth Telegram group. The wording is always similar. “Arabs report that Jews attacked the village of Raba, in the Jenin district,” with a photo of masked men from Palestinian media outlets. The day before: “Arabs report that Jews attacked Arabs near Hevron,” or “Arabs report that Jews set fire to several vehicles in the village of Mukhmas, east of Ramallah,” with a video of burnt-out cars.
The asterisks are interesting: attacked. set fire to. The wording “Arabs report” is there to make sure the messages cannot be understood as accepting legal responsibility. It is only a report. By “Arabs”. From time to time there are messages of support for detainees, those held for questioning and then released.
This week, footage was released that stirred reactions: dozens of masked Jews torching a factory, a sheep pen and trucks in the Palestinian industrial zone at Beit Lid and in the village of Deir Sharaf. The sheer scale of the terrorist act managed to break into the news cycle. Yet, as the Hilltop Youth forums show, the attacks are a daily occurrence. They stretch from the Jenin area in the north all the way to Hevron. [3]
There was also a short video I saw on Instagram, in which Gilad Kariv, a personal friend, a Reform rabbi and a member of the Knesset, complains about Minister Itamar Ben Gvir handing out baklava in the Knesset plenary to celebrate these attacks. [4] This is an imitation of a practice we know from radical Palestinian militants, who sometimes hand out sweets to celebrate when terror attacks kill Israeli Jews. For many of us, that has always been one of the most painful and offensive images. To see a Jewish minister of internal security now mirroring that behaviour, rejoicing in Jewish violence against Palestinians, is profoundly shocking.
The dehumanisation of the other, which used to belong only to the radical margins of Israeli society and of Jewish communities in the Diaspora, is, tragically, moving closer to the centre. It is becoming, for many, the default way of thinking about how Palestinians should be treated.
I know some will ask why I'm speaking about Jewish violence when Israelis continue to face existential threats. The answer is simple: we are responsible for what is done in our name, under the auspices of our religious tradition. That responsibility doesn't diminish with the reality of threats we face, it is intensified by it.
Rabbi Waskow of blessed memory points to a curious moment in our story. After Avraham dies, the two sons he had set against each other, Yitzchak and Ishmael, come together to bury him. The Torah calls them "Avraham’s sons" only then, as if, Waskow teaches, "they became truly his sons... only by joining in their grief." It was only after mourning the father who had threatened both their lives that they could, as the prophecy says, "live face to face with each other."
Waskow then asks the question that we must ask today:
What does this weave of text and midrash have to say (…) about the lethal violence between the two families of Avraham in our own generation? (…) We might draw a lesson from the shared grief of Yitzchak and Ishmael. (…) Can Jews and Palestinians together share feelings of grief about the deaths of members of our two peoples at the hands of the other? (…) When either community mourns the deaths only of those on “its side”... the outcome is often more rage, more hatred, and more death. If we can share the grief for those dead on both “sides,” we are more likely to see each other as human beings and move toward ending the violence. [5]
Rabbi Waskow’s invitation is not a political programme. It is a spiritual practice. It begins with something deeply Jewish and deeply human and very difficult, the willingness to allow our hearts to break, not only for our own dead, but also for the dead of those who are counted as “the enemy”.
What we are witnessing is not just a political crisis; it is a spiritual sickness. The violence in Hevron and the West Bank, the celebration of it with baklava, is not just killing Palestinians; it is killing the Jewish soul. Our task, as Jews who love our tradition, is to reclaim it from those who would twist it into a weapon.
Yitzchak and Ishmael only become, in the Torah’s words, “Avraham’s sons” when they stand together at their father’s grave. They do not resolve every argument. They do not erase the past. They do not undo the harm that has been done. They simply show up, side by side, in grief.
I do not know if Jews and Palestinians will be able, any time soon, to stand together at our many graves, in Hevron, in Gaza, in the kibbutzim and in the refugee camps. I do not know when there will be leaders on both sides with the courage and imagination to make that possible.
But I do know this. If we, as Jews, cannot even allow ourselves to feel sorrow for Palestinian children, women and men killed by Jewish hands, then we are walking away from the Torah of Chayei Sarah. We are walking away from Avraham. If we are unable to weep for Israeli victims of terror without immediately hardening our hearts against Palestinians, we are walking away from Yitzchak and Ishmael as well.
It is easy to hear these stories from Hevron, from the West Bank, from the Knesset plenary, and to feel paralysed. What can we do, from Johannesburg, faced with such entrenched violence and hatred?
Perhaps the answer of Chayei Sarah is modest, but real. Avraham cannot undo what happened between his sons. Yitzchak and Ishmael cannot undo what their father did to them. Yet, at the crucial moment, they choose to act as brothers, not enemies. They choose to walk together, to carry the same body, to face the same grave.
We cannot dictate policy in Jerusalem or Ramallah. We cannot stop the attacks in the West Bank or the bombardments in Gaza. What we can decide is how we will speak, here. Will we join the dehumanising chorus, in which “Arabs” or “settlers” become faceless categories, fit only for hatred or contempt? Or will we insist on speaking of human beings, created in the image of God, whose blood is equally precious?
My hope is that this community will be a place where we can hold complexity. A place where love for Israel and horror at Jewish violence against Palestinians are not mutually exclusive. A place where solidarity with Palestinians does not require erasing Jewish fear and trauma. A place where, week after week, our Torah pulls us back from easy slogans into the hard, holy work of seeing God’s image in all the children of Avraham.
So my prayer for us, on this Shabbat, is simple and impossibly hard. That we keep our hearts open. That we grieve for all who are killed and terrorized, Jews and Palestinians alike. That we resist every attempt, from whatever side, to teach us that the other is less than human. That, in our prayers, in our words, in the way we talk about Israel and Palestine at our Shabbat tables, we choose the path of Avraham’s two sons, not perfect agreement, not naïve harmony, but the courage to stand, at least in our hearts, side by side in shared grief.
And may that be our contribution, small but real, to healing a land that both peoples love. May we be worthy descendants of Avraham, Sarah, Yitzchak and Ishmael. And may the One who makes peace in the high places teach us how to make peace, at least in our words, our prayers and our hearts, here below.
