Chilul Hashem

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 22 February 2025

It will have been with a combination of grief and relief that on Wednesday, we heard that the bodies of Shiri Bibas, Ariel Bibas, Kfir Bibas and Oded Lifshitz would be returned to Israel and to their families.

On the one hand, our prayers that we have prayed every Shabbat for the last sixteen months were being answered. We have prayed for the release of the hostages. Since the ceasefire last month, we have also been acknowledging the need for strength as we waited to know when specific hostages would be released and reunited with their families – and in what condition they would be when they were.

The grief came in knowing what many had feared for a long time – what indeed had been announced by Hamas but which had not been confirmed by the Israeli government until Wednesday – that the Bibas family, including Ariel (who was 4 when he was kidnapped) and Kfir (who was 9 months), along with their mother Shiri, would not be returning to their loved ones alive. And the tragedy that the 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz, someone who had spent so much of his life as an advocate for Palestinians, would not be released in the same way as his wife had been over a year ago.

Back in November 2023, I gave a dvar torah in which I spoke about Oded’s wife, Yocheved Lifshitz, and her release from captivity, and the way in which she had turned to her captors and, as she departed, said the single word ‘shalom’.

When she said ‘shalom’, doing so was a reflection of her deep commitment to the Jewish value of peace, and the desire to express it not just in theory, but in the most difficult of times, in the bloodiest of conflicts. It is easy for us to sing about it with each other; less so if you have just been released from brutal, tortuous captivity.

Our tradition teaches us that there is no graver sin than ending a human life. To kill another human being, we are taught, is to destroy an entire world.

Last week I spoke about love, and specifically, the way in which God’s love for human beings endows us with infinite worth. It is that unconditional love that makes it true that a human being is worth the same as the entire universe.

Our portion this week is mishpatim. The word mishpat derives from justice. And we will read tomorrow morning a litany of laws that will speak of justice as a transaction. If x then y.

The fiction that is enacted in our portion is that there is justice in the pay-off. That my killing the perpetrator somehow justice is served. Justice is not served. Not by 40,000 dead, not by 80,000. There is no justice in a murdered child. And there is no recourse to justice. There is only grief.

In this moment, when we might be tempted to reproach God for allowing this injustice, we look to our tradition to find that there is another way to think. When the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the midrash tells us that God wept. According to the midrash, the angel Metatron sees that God is weeping, and says instead: ‘I will weep on your behalf.’ God simply responds: ‘If you don’t let me cry now, then I will go to a place where you do not have the ability to enter and I will cry … I am like a person who had only one son and made him a huppah (wedding) and he died on his wedding day at the huppah, and you have no pain for Me or for My sons!  Go and call to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Moshe from their graves, because they know how to cry.’

The Jewish people know how to grieve, how to mourn. We have experienced enough suffering, enough torment. We know that we cannot expect to see justice in what happens to us. There is a word for what has happened – what happened to Shiri and Ariel and Kfir and Oded, what happened to the thousands of victims of 7 October attacks, the thousands who have died in Gaza subsequently – and that word is not justice. It is chilul Hashem – the desecration of God’s name. And all God can do is to sit with us and grieve.

Grieve for those we have lost. Grieve for those who are in mourning for their family and friends. Grieve for the life that we all had before this war began.

And so I just want to finish with the hope with which we ended our Amidah this evening. With the hope that there may be no way of finding justice in what has happened, but that we might, in some way, with God’s help, find our way to healing.

And with the words of the Israeli poet, Osnat Eldar:

Master of all souls,
see our spirits caught in the dance of wounded souls,
seeking comfort.

Healer of the broken-hearted,
bind the sorrow in our hearts
and strengthen the power of their beats.

O God, please heal us.
Grant us the strength to heal and to be healed,
for today is a time to weep,
but also a time to laugh.