We thought we lived in a modern world. A world where murdering Jews in cold blood, where the mass slaughter of innocent men, women and children—babies!—in their homes and on their streets was unthinkable. We thought killers leaving the mutilated corpses of entire Jewish families in ditches and marauders taking Jewish captives was a thing of the past. Sure, bad things happen to good people, and every Jew knows he or she is potentially a target solely for their Jewishness, but that a civilized world that preaches “justice and righteousness” could equivocate, or tolerate, or even support such a thing? Today? Impossible.
We were wrong.
The truth is, somewhere deep down we knew this, and always doubted the modern world’s assurances that we were safe. That’s why we obsessed over the past, reading books on the Holocaust, on Stalin, on the pogroms, on the Crusades; why we built museums and created curricula; why we educated and spoke. We joked about it, too, that dark Jewish humor that contains a wisdom none of the museums could ever communicate.
And in the back of our minds, we knew that we had an option: Israel. It was in fact the threat to Israel and its millions of Jews in 1967 that had first reawakened our visceral sense of vulnerability. “We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood,” Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser declared in May of 1967. One week later, we watched as he ordered United Nations peacekeepers out of the Sinai and Egyptian soldiers took up their positions, readying to make good on their vow to annihilate the Jews. We saw then how the world remained silent, again.
Then came that glorious victory, and with it a sense of liberation from a dark history. In six brilliant days Israel—the Jews, really—showed they could fly and outmaneuver their opponents, outsmart their enemies, destroy their tanks and their morale.
At first we were moved by the images of Jewish warriors breaking down in tears as they approached the Western Wall, recognizing that only G‑d Almighty could have delivered such a miraculous victory over eight Muslim armies poised to crush the Jews and push them into the sea.
Over time, we forgot.
Look, Jews are smart and inventive; why shouldn’t we have the mightiest military in the Middle East and one of the most sophisticated intelligence apparatuses in the world? And so, slowly but surely, we began to believe—each of us in our own way—that “[it is] my strength and the might of my hand that has accumulated this wealth for me.”1
Because Israel was strong, every ensuing military setback was crowned by an eventual victory. Because Israel was not only strong, but also moral, it could afford to set out on “brave” quests for peace, offering swaths of strategically vital land in return for pieces of paper.2 And in recent months, because Israel was strong, the Jewish people felt it could afford to bitterly divide itself over trifling politics.
What was there, really, to be afraid of?
On the Precipice
On Oct. 7, 2023—Simchat Torah in Israel—we learned, to our everlasting horror, that the modern world does not exist, that savage murderers reminiscent of the Middle Ages are alive and more bloodthirsty than we could imagine, and that our Jewish military is not invincible—far from it. We learned that not even the most well-meaning assurances of our allies could protect our brethren, and that “brave” quests for peace—whether Camp David, the Oslo Accords, the Wye River Memorandum, or, so obvious in this case, the 2005 Gaza disengagement, in which Israel voluntarily handed an ISIS-like terror group control of a swath of land adjacent to the homes and playgrounds of innocent Israelis—had led directly to the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
That’s where we stand today. For the first time since the early days of the disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur War, we’ve been forced to take seriously the existential threat to Israel’s existence.
But we’ve come to recognize other things, too. We saw how quickly the political differences that had divided the Jewish people fell away, how truly connected the Jewish people are all over the world—one body and one soul.
It is not an accident that the war began on Simchat Torah, the day when we rejoice in G‑d’s gift of the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. It is the Torah that binds us together as one, and the Torah that connects us with G‑d. It is also the Torah that grants us a corner of the world called Israel.
For nearly half a century, the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, spoke and cajoled, cried and begged, that the Jewish people—from the leaders of Israel to the laypeople in New York—see their connection and claim to the Land of Israel not as a gift of the nations of the world, something conferred upon them by the United Nations, but as G‑d’s covenantal agreement with our forefather Abraham, as written clearly in the Torah—a holy book not only for the Jews, but for Christians and Muslims too. That our right to dwell in Israel, and to strongly protect ourselves—not only in Israel, but everywhere in the world—comes directly from G‑d, Creator of heaven and earth.
The joy of Simchat Torah is an expression of our faith and trust in G‑d. It reminds us that our fate depends not on our own military might, intelligence savvy or diplomatic know-how, but on G‑d Almighty, whose “eyes are upon the Land of Israel from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.”3
That same Torah introduced the world to the concept of one G‑d. There, He gave the world seven universal commandments including “Do not murder” and “Do not steal,” not as morals based on the whims of man, but as eternal commandments from a just and merciful G‑d. The Torah that commands man not to murder likewise stresses the vital importance of protecting the lives of the innocent, providing guidelines of how to fight wars and defend yourself when an enemy rises up to kill you.
For 75 years Israel sought to gain recognition in the eyes of the international community by insisting that it is a nation like any other. But it is not. October 7th was yet another reminder of that. As the Rebbe once pointed out to Yitzchak Rabin, the Jews are as the Torah describes them “a nation that will dwell alone, and will not be reckoned among the nations.”4
At this painful inflection point we know we cannot keep repeating the mistakes of the past, but neither can we despair. Instead, we must look towards the eternal Torah for guidance. The path to peace is likewise delineated in the Torah, a true peace—one that rests not on hopes and illusions, but on security. “The L-rd shall grant strength to His people,” King David wrote in Psalms, “the L-rd shall bless His people with peace.” The foundation of true and lasting peace is strength. Without one, you cannot have the other.5
“When the enemy nations of the world see true Jewish strength, not strength that emanates from ‘the strength and might of my hand’ but strength that comes from true faith in G‑d Almighty,” the Rebbe observed in 1968, “then they will dissipate on their own and not even approach to make war.”6
What follows is a brief overview of the Jewish people’s claim to the Land of Israel and its right—duty, in fact—to unapologetically protect the lives of all of her citizens, as delineated in the Torah and elucidated by the Rebbe.7
‘In the Beginning … ’
Everyone recognizes the famous opening words of Genesis 1:1: “Bereishit bara Elokim eit hashamayim veeit haaretz.” “In the beginning of G‑d’s creation of the heavens and the earth.”
The Torah is first and foremost a compendium of laws, and so the medieval master commentator Rashi immediately asks: Why does the Torah start here? Shouldn’t it have rather started with the very first commandment? Then he answers: “For if the nations of the world should say to Israel, ‘You are robbers, for you conquered by force the lands of the seven nations [of Canaan],’ [the people of Israel] will reply, ‘The entire earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it (this we learn from the story of the Creation) and gave it to whomever He deemed proper. When He wished, He gave it to them, and when He wished, He took it away from them and gave it to us.”
It is not incidental that we read Genesis from the Torah scroll on Simchat Torah, the day the war began.
The words written in Genesis, the Rebbe explained, are the foundation for the Jewish people’s claim to the Land of Israel—nothing else. The same G‑d Who created this world granted the Jewish people Israel, a promise reiterated 10 times in the Five Books of Moses, beginning with the covenant G‑d made with Abraham in the Torah portion of Lech Lecha. The only requirement is for the Jewish people to be proud of their identity, know and appreciate the facts written in the Torah, and then share them with the world.
And so the Jew has two ways of broaching the subject of his claim to the land with world powers: 1.) He can state, respectfully but emphatically, that he comes as a representative of the Jewish people to claim what is rightfully his, the Land of Israel promised and granted to the Jews by G‑d in the Bible; or 2.) That this was the land set aside by Lord Balfour as a national homeland for the Jewish people, to be a nation like any other; or perhaps this was what was granted the Jews in the UN partition, back when the world still felt a measure of guilt and pity following the Holocaust; or one of many other logical but debatable arguments.
The first option, the Rebbe explained, is obviously the better approach. The majority of the world believes in the Bible, and at the very least recognizes it and its value to the Jewish people. Balfour, on the other hand, might not be as universally appreciated (certainly not in 2023!). Neither will arguments about what happened in 1948 necessarily ring true to the non-Jewish listener, as compared with the basic facts laid out in the Bible itself. But to proclaim the Torah as the ultimate root of your argument requires a foundation of strong Jewish pride. When the nations of the world see that the Jews themselves truly believe it, they can accept that.
“The argument must be a true one, without a trace of dishonesty!” the Rebbe insisted. “Aside from the fact that dishonesty is against the Torah, such an approach [of relying on worldly sources for the Jews’ claim to Israel] will bring about the opposite of the intended results … . The non-Jew understands that this is not a [decades-old] argument but one that traces back to Mount Sinai, even earlier than that!”8
That the Jewish people’s claim to Israel stretches even further back than Sinai is reference to Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron from Ephron, a business deal whose parameters are extensively detailed in the Torah. (Other legal purchases enumerated in Scripture are Jacob’s purchase of a section of Shechem (Nablus) from its ruler Hamor, and King David’s buying of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem from Aravnah the Jebusite. That David chose Jerusalem as the Jewish capital 1,000 years before any of today’s religions stepped foot in the Holy City was also something the Rebbe pointed out often.)9
Indeed, at the Rebbe’s urging, in the winter of 1976 then-Israeli ambassador to the UN Chaim Herzog submitted the contract between Abraham and Ephron to the UN. “For the first time in history,” the JTA reported, “an agreement made almost 4,000 years ago and recorded in the Bible, has been issued as a United Nations document … .” The Rebbe told Herzog, who later became president of Israel, that his personal claim to Hebron was further bolstered by the fact that he was Levite, with Hebron being one of the cities designated for members of that tribe. Herzog’s son, Isaac Herzog, the current president of Israel, was also present during this encounter.
It is also important to note that the land was not given to any one individual, belonging neither to Israel’s political leaders nor elite, but is the collective possession of Jewish people—every single Jew. Thus no elected leader has the right to negotiate away any piece of the Holy Land, this quite literally being the theft of something that does not belong to him or her.10
Peace Through Strength
An underlying principle in the Torah is that every life is valuable, as the Mishnah in Sanhedrin states: “Anyone who destroys one soul is as if he destroyed an entire world. And anyone who sustains one soul is as if he sustained an entire world.”11
While Jews readily agree that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, in the aftermath of Israel’s 1967 victory and all the land it captured from its Arab enemies, people began arguing that returning pieces to the enemy states might bring about a lasting peace, and was therefore necessary according to the Halachic principle of “pikuach nefesh,” or saving lives. While Judea, Samaria, and Old City of Jerusalem were very obviously the heartland of the Land of Israel and so important to the Jewish people, why should there be a problem to negotiate with the Egyptians, for example, over the vast Sinai peninsula, which had never been a part of the Land of Israel, even in biblical times, and so contained none of the Land’s inherent holiness?
The Rebbe viewed this, too, through a strict Torah lens: any agreement, he declared, that risked Jewish lives in the here and now for an elusive, ill-defined, future state of peace, was—and remains—in contradiction to Torah law. For this he would tirelessly quote the Code of Jewish Law (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 329:6):
… [When] non-Jews take up arms against Jewish towns, if [the non-Jews] come [to attack the towns] for financial gain, the Shabbat may not be desecrated because of them. If, however, [the non-Jews] come to kill, and even if they come with no expressed intent, but there is concern that perhaps they come to kill, one should confront [the non-Jews] while armed and desecrate the Shabbat because of them. [Indeed, these steps may be taken] not only when their arrival is imminent, but even if [the non-Jews] are merely threatening to come.
This is taken one step further in the case of a Jewish settlement defined as a border town. The Code continues:
In a town that is near the border, even if [the non-Jews] only seek to come for matters concerning hay and straw, the Shabbat may be desecrated because of them, lest they capture the town, and from there, the [entire] land will be easier for them to conquer.
The source for this law is the Talmud in Eruvin, where it is applied also to the city of Nehardea in Babylon. In other words, it has nothing to do with the sanctity of the Land of Israel but with the sanctity of Jewish life.12 Allowing enemies to cross into border towns even just to steal hay and straw was an advertisement of Jewish weakness and invited more frequent, flagrant, and ultimately dangerous invasions. The strategic depth offered by the lands rightfully gained in the Six Day War—recall, the Arab states were poised to attack and try to destroy Israel when Israel preempted them, the point being Israel did not launch a war of conquest but won a defensive one fair and square—were vital for the protection of Jewish towns throughout Israel. Conversely, negotiating such territories away quite literally placed Jewish lives in danger.
The underlying principle here is that giving away any hard-earned and G‑d-given territories posed an immediate danger to Jewish lives, this imperative overriding not only promises of peaceful futures but even the potential risks that might come with retaining control of territories, including those containing unfriendly populations.
Just as the Rebbe emphasized Jewish pride and honesty with regards to the source of our claim to the Holy Land, he warned against even conferencing about giving away land, or agreeing to engage in “peace talks” to placate the Americans or the international community, stating that such maneuvers placed Jewish lives in danger and would inevitably backfire.13
The peace-through-strength principle did not only apply to not giving away territories, of course, but also to the larger wars Israel was forced to fight during every decade of its existence. Under no circumstance does the Torah allow for a certain number of “acceptable” deaths or injuries in exchange for living in a tough neighborhood. Instead, it emphatically states that every life matters and demands that each one be guarded. Nothing can stand in the way of accomplishing this, and any moral posturing that stymies this very clear, humane objective—for example, donning the mantle of “the most moral army in the world,” an arbitrary standard no enemy nor ally handicaps itself with—is in fact the opposite of moral and just. Similarly, it was wrong for Israel to wait to get attacked in the 1973 Yom Kippur War just so that the nations of the world might recognize that it was not the Jews who were the aggressors. The war ultimately cost Israel its morale at home and its aura of invincibility abroad; Israel was still deemed the aggressor; and, most devastatingly, it lost nearly 3,000 young men in battle. Standing firm on the Torah’s moral principles would have led to a wholly different outcome.
The point being that according to the Torah, half-measures and haphazard cease-fires are not in fact moral, but prolong and deepen every crisis. Beginning with the 1956 Suez Crisis, through the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War, and the Peace for Galilee campaign of 1982, the Rebbe urged Israel to finish the job it had started by winning a conclusive victory.
Israel, he said, should not have abandoned its victory in the Sinai in ‘56—to which it was eventually forced to return—nor been so hesitant in how it captured Jerusalem in 1967, when they were careful not to damage any historic sites in the city for fear of world opinion, and thus suffered an especially high number of casualties. (The Rebbe stated that even the physical structure of the Western Wall itself, with its eternal significance to the Jewish people, was not worth one Jewish life.)14 During the Yom Kippur War, the Rebbe sent message after message to the Israeli high command to capture the two enemy capitals of Cairo and Damascus, not for the purpose of occupation but to defeat the enemy once and for all.15
One of those tasked with giving over the message to Israel’s-then defense minister, General Moshe Dayan, was Yosef Ciechanover, an Israeli official who has held numerous high-level government posts over the years, including Director General of the Foreign Ministry and head of Israel’s defense mission in the United States. On the fifth day of the Yom Kippur War he received a phone call from one of the Rebbe’s secretaries, Rabbi Binyamin Klein, asking him to go to Dayan and urge him to take Damascus. Though hesitant about Dayan’s reaction, Ciechanover did as requested.
“Dayan took [the Rebbe’s advice] very seriously,” Ciechanover told Jewish Educational Media’s (JEM) My Encounter with the Rebbe oral history project. “He said to me ‘I cannot do it from a manpower point of view.’ I called back Binyamin, and then the Rebbe was on the line. The Rebbe’s answer was: ‘It is a big mistake, it’s a big mistake.’ That’s all.”
In the end, Israel advanced to within 100 kilometers of Cairo and 30 kilometers of Damascus, the roads to the enemy capitals open before them. Instead, succumbing to American pressure, they stopped short of complete victory.
Less than a decade later, when Israel launched the Peace for Galilee campaign to neutralize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) forces that had been launching regular terror attacks on Israelis from bases set up among the civilian population of Lebanon, the Rebbe once again urged Israel to be decisive and take the capital city of Beirut. At the time, the Rebbe compared Israel’s hesitancy during previous military campaigns to a surgeon who keeps being interrupted by a weak-stomached observer each time he begins the operation. On seeing a few drops of blood, the observer calls out, “Now stop the operation, allow the patient to heal and regain their strength, and then you can perform a second operation.” While this medical scenario is absurd, this was exactly what had happened on the military front.
“This is what is being done now to 3 million Jews in Israel, may their numbers increase,” the Rebbe lamented in the summer of 1982. “... We’re now in the midst of the fourth operation, after having already sacrificed hundreds of lives—may G‑d avenge their blood—and hundreds of wounded.” Though Israel had initially vowed to finish off the PLO, a small number of people in the government had decided that “the best way to bring the situation to a peaceful ending … is to leave all the bacteria inside the wound, and just shift around the bacteria from one area to another … .” (Indeed, Israel allowed the PLO to escape to Tunisia, from which it continued its attacks on Israel and the Jews for years to come.) “These ‘experiments’ are being made on 3 million Jews!” the Rebbe cried out.16
One more component that the Rebbe consistently emphasized was who should be directing these military operations. The ones calling the shots should not be politicians, including politicians who’d formerly been military experts, but active generals and military experts given the free rein they required to win without having to deal with any political meddling or pressure.17 Just as Torah requires a person to listen to a doctor in a life-or-death situation, Torah requires active military experts be heeded when lives are at stake.18
Far from war-mongering, this was the surer, indeed the only, path to peace. The results otherwise would be tragic.
“If you do not allow them to complete the operation speedily,” the Rebbe continued in 1982, “then it will be like the prime minister who stopped the offensive during the Yom Kippur War, and later wrote in her memoirs ‘I won’t forgive myself for the rest of my life, for the dead and injured who always stand before my eyes.’”19
(Though I cannot say who made the marks, I do know that in the copy of Golda Meir’s memoir that sits in the Rebbe’s library is underlined, in pencil, this very quote from Meir, ending with her admission that “I will never be the same person that I was before the Yom Kippur War.”)
![A copy of Prime Minister Golda Meir's memoirs found in the Library of Agudas Chassidei Chabad in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her testimony that "the terrible knowledge [of the heavy casualties suffered during the Yom Kippur War] will follow me all the days of my life" is underlined in pencil.](https://w2.chabad.org/media/images/1250/LeoE12509839.jpg?_i=_n504BC99DD0473598AAE3BCDC5D75568D "A copy of Prime Minister Golda Meir's memoirs found in the Library of Agudas Chassidei Chabad in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her testimony that "the terrible knowledge [of the heavy casualties suffered during the Yom Kippur War] will follow me all the days of my life" is underlined in pencil.")
Not Our Strength
A third point the Rebbe commonly made: It is not only that the Jews received Israel as a gift from G‑d and have a Torah obligation to guard her and her people, but that the very source of their strength, the sheer ability to continue existing as “a lamb surrounded by wolves,”20 comes only from G‑d.
After giving a rather depressing (and prescient) 1974 talk in New York City on the outcome of the Yom Kippur War, the political philosopher Hans Morgenthau was asked by an audience member if Israel could truly be destroyed. “That Jews have survived to this day is in itself a mysterious thing which I cannot explain,” he admitted, “and I think nobody can.”
Understanding that G‑d is the answer to the mystery of the Jewish people’s survival is key for us. G‑d is watching and guarding His land and His people at all times, and we must recognize the miracles He performs for us on a day-to-day basis. It was easier to recognize miracles in the dazzle of the Six Day War, but what, if not G‑d, could explain Egypt’s mid-momentum halt in the desert in 1973, when they could have easily continued their march on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem? In many ways, the Rebbe would point out, this was an even bigger miracle then whatever had been experienced in ‘67, because it was transparently not due to the Israeli army’s natural strength but G‑d’s open handiwork.21
The most detrimental thing we could do to our own safety and security is to lose sight of G‑d’s providence and begin believing that “[it is] my strength and the might of my hand that has accumulated this wealth for me.” It is precisely then that the nations of the world begin showing their own strength, and in a battle pitting natural resources, strength and size, the Jewish people are at an obvious disadvantage. On the other hand, when the Jews do everything that is necessary of them from a material vantage point, but all the while place their trust in G‑d, knowing with surety that it is He who has blessed them with what they have and He who will continue to sustain them, then they draw down G‑d’s bountiful blessings and increased strength to persevere and overcome any and all challenges that lie ahead.22
Which is where our mitzvahs come in. Recognizing that it is not only guns and tanks that win wars and protect Jews but also and primarily the blessings that come from on high, causes us to more clearly see the value of the mitzvahs we perform for the safety and security of the Jews of Israel. No longer is a mitzvah for Israel just a nice gesture, but a real and valued component of the war-effort.
Which is why before the 1967 war the Rebbe started the tefillin campaign, prior to the Yom Kippur War he stressed gatherings of children for the purpose of Torah study, and around the Lebanon War introduced the unity Torah scrolls. The Torah that we study and the mitzvahs that we do connect us to G‑d, to our fellow Jews, and to the Land of Israel itself; these are the very sources of our strength.
‘Eyes Upon the Land’
There is a lot we do not know. We do not know what comes next, when the remaining hostages will be released, or when the invasion will begin. We do not know if more enemies will join in, or if Israel’s allies will begin ratcheting up the pressure again soon, just as they’ve always done.
But we do know that something has drastically changed. That we are no longer doing things the way we did until now. And that if we really, truly want this to be a lasting change, then we must ground our newfound clarity in the eternal truth of the Torah. For despite the terrible blow we experienced on October 7th, we know that G‑d made many miracles then too, ones we are beginning to hear about, and others we might not recognize for many years to come. But that is the nature of the Jewish people and the Land of Israel: G‑d is master of our fate. He made miracles in the past, is making them at this very moment, and will continue to do so in the future.
And so it is time for us to stand up and proudly declare the truth about the Jews and Israel: It is our land because G‑d gave it to us, it is our highest moral duty to protect her citizens no matter what anyone says, and we know with every fiber of our being that we will be successful, for G‑d has promised that His eyes will be upon the Land “from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.”
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