I have just recorded my podcast episode for this week. Before I gave a d’var Torah for this week’s Torah portion of Shoftim, I made these comments:

We all are still reeling from the horrible news of the discovery of the bodies of the 6 murdered hostages in a tunnel in Gaza this weekend. It has just been another step in a nightmare which began October 7 for the people of Israel and the Jewish people

The issues are still the same: the absolute moral depravity of Hamas that conducted these horrendous terrorist attacks on October 7 and held these hostages and now murdered so many of them. It is just unthinkable and unthinkable  that anyone could support or praise these actions any place in the world.

We also think though, about the missed opportunities to perhaps have brought an end to this part of the nightmare in the return of the hostages through negotiations. It doesn’t seem that either side was prepared to make the compromises necessary to bring an end to the fighting, even if only temporarily, a return of the hostages and some relief to the terrible suffering which is taking place in Gaza.

We also have to consider that terrible suffering and realize that even as the root cause is the actions of Hamas towards their own people, still we have to recognize the fact that the pain and the horror among the innocent people in Gaza, especially the children and now subject, if nothing else after all that they have suffered, facing the prospect of an epidemic of polio and that should lead us to ask: how can we not be crying for them and how can we not have them enter into our thoughts about what Israel should do in the future?

This has been a terrible nightmare over the past ten, eleven months and all of us should be wrestling with all of the issues, seeking a way in which in this part of the world which has seen so much death, and so much terror and so much horror, that all people can somehow come out of this and give hope to children in Gaza, in Israel, for a better future.

It is so sad and so heartbreaking. 

I invite you to listen to the entire podcast which will be posted on Thursday. You can hear it at wrestlinganddreaming.podbean.com on Thursday morning.