This week we begin reading the fourth book of the Torah, B’midbar, the Book of Numbers. Its Hebrew name, B’midbar, means “in the wilderness.”
The wilderness in Torah is never simply a geographic place. It is a spiritual landscape. A place of uncertainty and vulnerability. A place where identity is forged and tested. In the wilderness, the Israelites begin the long transformation from a ragtag group of liberated slaves into Am Yisrael, the People of Israel, a covenantal people bound not only to God and to one another, and also to moral responsibility.
This week, as we begin B’midbar, we also mark Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day), commemorating the reunification of Jerusalem after the Six Day War in 1967. Jerusalem has always represented more than land or sovereignty in Jewish consciousness. Jerusalem symbolizes homecoming, memory, longing, and the fragile hope that human beings can build a society rooted in justice and holiness.
Jewish tradition speaks of two Jerusalems: Yerushalayim shel la’matah, the earthly Jerusalem shaped by politics, power, conflict, and human imperfection; and Yerushalayim shel la’malah, the heavenly Jerusalem, the vision of what we might yet become when we live according to our highest moral and spiritual aspirations.
That hope feels extremely fragile right now. We are living through a moment in which truth itself often feels contested, fractured, and weaponized. A moment in which the distance between the Jerusalem below and the Jerusalem above can feel painfully wide.
This week, two deeply disturbing reports were published one day apart.
Their juxtaposition laid bare the painful distance between Yerushalayim shel la’malah, the Jerusalem of justice, truth, and human dignity to which we aspire, and Yerushalayim shel la’matah, the fractured world of politics, trauma, outrage, and moral confusion in which we actually live.
First came Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times opinion piece highlighting allegations of sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners by Israelis. Allegations of abuse anywhere must always be taken seriously. Jewish tradition is unequivocal about the dignity of every human being, created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. No society, including Israel, is beyond moral scrutiny or accountability.
At the same time, many Jews experienced the article as deeply troubling in both timing and framing. Some of the claims presented were extraordinarily sensational and appeared without the kind of corroboration, evidentiary transparency, and methodological rigor that accusations of this magnitude demand. Kristof’s piece relied heavily upon reporting from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, an organization whose work on Israel has itself been the subject of significant criticism and dispute.
One day later, the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children released its 300-page report, Silenced No More – Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity. (Warning: This report contains graphic and deeply painful descriptions). The contrast in methodology and documentation could not have been more striking.
The Commission’s investigation was conducted over two years and drew upon what it describes as a “uniquely constructed and independently secured war crimes archive.” The report documents more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, over 1,800 hours of visual evidence, and more than 430 testimonies and interviews with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts, and family members. Materials were systematically logged, cross-referenced, geolocated, and reviewed using internationally recognized trauma-informed investigative standards.
What emerges from the report is not a collection of isolated allegations, but a documented pattern of systematic sexual violence perpetrated during the October 7 attacks and throughout captivity afterward. Its contents are extraordinarily painful to read. They are also essential to confront and bear witness to.
For many Jews, the juxtaposition of these two publications felt disorienting. Not because Jews oppose accountability or fear scrutiny, but because moral seriousness requires distinctions. Journalism, human rights reporting, and public moral discourse all depend upon careful evidence, intellectual honesty, and methodological integrity. When those distinctions collapse, the wilderness deepens.
This leaves many Jews inhabiting a painful wilderness.
How do we hold onto moral seriousness while living in a world saturated with outrage, accusation, distortion, and trauma? How do we remain capable of self-reflection without accepting narratives that erase context, flatten complexity, or portray Israel as uniquely monstrous? How do we defend our people without allowing defensiveness to harden into indifference toward the suffering of others?
The wilderness blurs boundaries. Fear hardens us. Pain narrows our capacity to discern clearly. Torah’s great challenge is not simply how to survive the wilderness, but how to remain human within it.
Holding these tensions simultaneously is spiritually exhausting. It is also part of the moral calling of Jewish life.
B’midbar reminds us that the wilderness is not the end of the story. The wilderness is the place where a people learns who it wishes to become.
Perhaps that is the enduring challenge of Jerusalem itself. To live in the uneasy space between Yerushalayim shel la’matah and Yerushalayim shel la’malah. Between the earthly Jerusalem shaped by politics, fear, grief, power, and human frailty, and the heavenly Jerusalem that calls us toward truth, justice, compassion, and holiness.
One Jerusalem reflects the world as it is. The other insists the we still have the ability to create the world as it ought to be.
Jewish history has always unfolded in the tension between those two Jerusalems. So too does Jewish moral life.
May we never lose the courage to confront painful truths honestly. May we never allow outrage or despair to strip us of our humanity. And may we continue striving, even in the wilderness, to narrow the distance between the Jerusalem below and the Jerusalem above.
May this Shabbat bring wisdom, renewal, courage, and peace.
Shabbat Shalom!