May 15, 2026
We have entered the wilderness. The fourth book of the Torah reflects the Israelites journey through the midbar, this intermediary period from the moment we left Egypt and received Torah to the time we entered the land of Israel. Torah commentator Aviva Gottleib Zornberg explains in her commentary, Bewilderments, that the book is intended to capture a brief episode in our history, but she explains, it tragically swells to deathly proportions. We imagine a moment in our people’s story when we are essentially homeless. It is a time period that ultimately sees one generation go and another come. That image is meant to change the mindset of Egyptian slavery, not to forget the story but to know that the lived experience of our slavery could not build a new society. As we wander throughout this land that is largely uninhabitable, we encounter little bushes with sharp spikes, there’s sand and rock all around us. We are hungry and thirsty; we long for what was because we cannot see a better future. This experience is fragile; we are vulnerable; we are attacked from behind; we battle for our future. The JPS Torah commentary calls the midbar uninhabited and unirrigated pastureland where Moses takes the flocks to pasture. As a shepherd he has some familiarity with this. We know from the citation of Michael Walzer’s words in Mishkan Tefilah that, “wherever we go it is eternally Egypt that there is a better place, a promised land; that the winding way to that promise passes through the wilderness.” Walzer’s enduring lesson to us is multifaceted. Our experience in Egypt is eternal; it lives in us and calls to us from the depths of history. We reach moments that are like a promised land, but we can only get there when we wind our way through a wilderness, a place where we encounter other challenges and obstacles that will help us reflect and grow.
One might argue that metaphorically in this moment in history, the Jewish people are in another wilderness. It is a time when we are constantly attacked from multiple places. The trauma of October 7th still lives within us. As Israelis are striving to rebuild their lives. Americans Jews are facing antisemitism on campus and on social media. Though the ADL reported the number of antisemitic incidents in 2025 decreased from 2024, the number of violent antisemitic attacks increased. We see this with attacks on synagogues in Jackson, MS, and West Bloomfield, MI. Jewish life across Canada, Europe and Australia is increasingly difficult. Many are asking themselves the question, is it time to leave, and if not today then when? This is a barren wilderness in which we feel threatened, when the likes of the Amalekites or others attack us. And we are being attacked wherever we turn.
Before I continue, I need to offer a warning, what I am about to discuss may be quite graphic and triggering and so I want to preface these words with that warning. I imagine most of us have read or at least heard about Nicholas Kristof’s opinion piece in the NY Times this week entitled, The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians[i]. The piece contains no less than 14 claims about brutal sexual abuse and rape by Israeli prison guards perpetrated against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. The charge is not that there were just incidents but “Israel employs systemic sexual violence that is widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.” Before continuing, I want to be clear that allegations of rape and sexual abuse need to be taken quite seriously and investigated. We know that there are incidents of sexual abuse, and those incidents must be dealt with, and those perpetrators must be punished. Every prison system in the world has issues of abuse and those issues must be responded to accordingly but to make a claim that Israel’s is systemic takes isolated incidents a step further into the world of blood libel.
Of the claims Kristof makes, twelve of them have no names attached, and no date or time, they occurred. He also publishes the claims of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor as fact. This group is long known to be affiliated with Hamas. To justify his claims, he approaches former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who was Prime Minister over twenty years ago. Olmert is quoted in the article saying, “Do I believe it happens? Definitely. There are war crimes committed every day in the territories.” The day after the opinion piece was published Olmert said, “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity, that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systemic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims.”
Olmert references what maybe the most outrageous claim of the opinion piece, that Israel trained dogs to commit sexual abuse and assault. Not only is this scientifically impossible, as Matti Friedman explains in the Call Me Back Podcast with Dan Senor[ii], it is a claim that has been around in the fringes of anti-Israel conspiracists for years but had been ignored by mainstream media because it was ridiculous. What Kristof has done is brought it into the mainstream. Matti Friedman is a well-respected journalist who used to work for the Associated Press, he has published several books. Friedman teaches us about the historical approach to delegitimize Israel. First there was the apartheid claim which got some people upset, then you make the claim that Israel is a genocidal state, something worse than being an apartheid state. Last year claims surfaced about Israeli soldiers intentionally shooting children, and that Israel was intentionally starving Gazans. Friedman explains that you have to keep coming up with more and more charges so that Israel and Israelis can look terrible in the eyes of the world.
I want to offer two more reflections. This piece appeared in the opinion section of the NY Times, not the investigative journalism section. Kristof could publish it appearing as investigative journalism because the opinion section editors would not push for fact checking. Second, this piece appeared in the Times the day before Israel was set to release a well-documented and researched report of Hamas sexual violence on October 7th that is corroborated with Hamas’ own video evidence published to social media on that day. What we are seeing is a systemic effort to delegitimize Israel in the eyes of the world. The efforts work this way, if something horrific was committed against the Jews, like genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, then the Jews must be guilty of it too. If Hamas committed sexual violence against Israelis, then Israel must be doing it too. This effort makes claims that Israel is among the worst perpetrators of crimes against other humans. It delegitimizes Israel on the world stage which also results in those filled with hate to aggressively attack Jews around the world.
Matti Friedman helps us understand a framework for which we can approach an understanding of this blood libel. Back in 2014 for an article in the Atlantic, he wrote that “Western media has become less an observer of this conflict and more of an actor in it.” They are fueling the fire that is raging all around us. He invites us to think about such a piece in two ways. First, we might ask the question, is the writer trying to make Israel better or is the writer trying to make Israel go away? Kristof is not trying to make Israel better which begs the question is the conversation about it even worth having. For Friedman, if the discussion is about “how to make Israel a better country, a more moral country, a more successful country, a better place to live for Jewish citizens, for Muslim citizens, I’m very much interested in having the discussion, which is, I think, the most important discussion.”
If one needs further evidence of this, on the same day the NY Times published Kristof’s opinion piece, it also published an investigative journalism piece entitled, “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool.” The article sites numerous instances in which Primer Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government advertised and encouraged voting in the contest. Government involvement is forbidden, according to Eurovision’s rules. What the piece fails to mention is that Israel was responding to efforts made by other countries to exclude it from competition. I decided to search the word Eurovision in the NY Times search bar to see how often articles about the contest appear in the newspaper. In 2025 and 2026 there have been 15 articles about Eurovision. Only five do not discuss Israel and the political situation. Two about how to watch, two about the favorites, and the last is about a new Eurovision contest beginning in Asia. Every other piece about Eurovision in the last two years involves some discussion of boycotts, Israeli influence in the voting, or something to do with Israel and the recent war. One cannot help but wonder if there is an agenda behind all this.
As consumers of news, how should we respond. The Midrash might offer several options. Bamidbar Rabbah teaches us that Torah was given in fire, in water, and in the desert[iii]. Why? Because this is how a person should acquire Torah, with a fiery enthusiasm, in a calm manner to understand the Torah correctly, and with the desert, to be humble enough to recognize that we must empty our minds to acquire a deeper understanding. One member of Dan Senor’s team responded in such a way. That person, in preparation for the podcast, messaged Dan saying, “the hard part is that, even if the worst claims in the piece are distorted or false, that doesn’t make the real failures in the Israeli prison system, any less painful.” We know there are real failures in the system, and we, like many Israelis want those who perpetrated abuse or sexual violence to be held accountable. That is the humility we must bring to such a situation, recognizing that there were abuses and harm done. That must be corrected. Second, we must fight such blood libelous claims with a passionate fire with a hope that people actually realize the ludicrous nature of such claims. We must ask that journalism standards return to those that require sourcing and verification. And like water, we must remain calm, not react immediately and use our own internal wisdom to start asking questions.
One other approach may come in the second verse of our parshah in which we read Seu et rosh[iv]. It is usually translated as “Take a census of the whole Israelite community.” More literally, it means “lift up the head.” A Hasidic commentator, named Shaloh explains that the word literally uses the word rosh here which means head. It teaches us the importance of the Jewish people, that each is a head, each is important. Each member of the Jewish community must feel the responsibility for their individual actions, for every action can improve the condition of the world. This, then, must be our focus. There will always be writers like Mr. Kristof who sling blood libel at us. We know our focus is to do mitzvot and bring light into the world. In Theodore Herzl’s book entitled The Jewish State, his concluding words are, “We shall live at last as free [people] on our own soil and die peacefully in our own home. The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare will react with beneficent force for the good of humanity.” Herzl’s vision for Israel is not for the sole benefit of the Jewish people. He believes our accomplishments will improve the world, they already have and may they continue to do so in the future,
Living in this wilderness is incredibly challenging. But we remember the wilderness is the place where Torah was given. Let us receive it with a profound openness so it can teach us a measure of discernment to decipher truth from fiction and a calmness to engage in the discussions about how Israel can become a better society for all her inhabitants. Kein yehi ratzon.
[i] The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians
[ii] All references to Matti Friedman’s insights are from Call Me Back – with Dan Senor: The Making of the Kristof Column — with Matti Friedman, May 14, 2026
[iv] Torah Gems, Volume III Bamidbar, English Edition