Rabbi Zvika Krieger, Chochmat HaLev
August 1, 2025

Tomorrow night, Jews around the world will be observing Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, when we mourn the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem. The day is marked by fasting, sitting on the floor, refraining from pleasurable activities, and reading from Eichah, the Book of Lamentations, which is the Prophet Jeremiah’s portrait of the destitute city of Jerusalem in the wake of its decimation by the Romans.

As I read through Eichah this week in preparation for Tisha B’Av, I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that we are living in a period of similar despair and destruction — both physical and spiritual. Climate change, autocracy, inequality, polarization, gun violence, transphobia, the list goes on and on. As Jeremiah writes in Eichah as he surveys the ruins of Jerusalem, “False prophets and immoral leaders shed the blood of the innocent in our midst…a fire consumes our foundations.”

But Jeremiah’s imagery of starving children and leveled cities feels particularly haunting this year. “They have destroyed without pity all the dwellings; in wrath they have torn down the refuges… Children and infants languish in the streets of the city. They say to their mothers, ‘Where is bread and wine?’ as they faint like the wounded.”

Reading these descriptions, it feels impossible not to think about Gaza. The killing of tens of thousands, including women, children, and the elderly. The forced dislocation and now mass starvation of over two million. Gunfire sprayed into frantic crowds desperately searching for food.

I think of Zainab Abu Halib. At the time of her death on Friday in Gaza, the 5-month-old weighed less than 4.4 pounds — two pounds under her birth weight, her eyes sunken, her ankle smaller than an adult’s thumb, as reported by the Associated Press. She was the latest of 85 children in Gaza to die of malnutrition-related causes amid mass starvation. “With my daughter’s death, many will follow,” her mother, Esraa Abu Halib, said. “Their names are on a list that no one looks at. They are just names and numbers. We are just numbers. Our children, whom we carried for nine months and then gave birth to, have become just numbers.”

I think of the haunting words of Nick Maynard, a British surgeon volunteering at the same hospital where Zainab died: “The expression ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do it justice, I saw the severity of malnutrition that I would not have thought possible in a civilized world. This is man-made starvation being used as a weapon of war and it will lead to many more deaths unless food and aid is let in immediately.”

Let’s take a breath. This may be hard for you to hear. It is certainly hard for me to talk about. As an ardent Zionist whose family has lived in Jerusalem for eight generations, as someone whose father and three brothers live there, and who has lived there myself for stretches over the past few decades. As someone who worked for years at the US Defense Department and State Department on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, security assistance, and humanitarian aid. And at a time of intense polarization on this issue, I worry about how my words will be parsed, I worry about saying the wrong thing. I speak as a Jewish spiritual leader, but also as a human being. So I ask for your compassion tonight as I try my best to rise to what this moment demands.

We can argue about whether the death toll in Gaza is 30,000 or 80,000 or even more, and what percentage of those people are Hamas terrorists. We can argue about how much aid is being stolen by Hamas to fund their attacks on Israeli civilians. We can argue whether the current military strategy and aid restrictions will help bring the Israeli hostages home or if that is even the Netanyahu government’s goal anymore. We can argue about the extent of the food scarcity and whether we’ll be seeing mass casualties from starvation in days or in weeks. We can argue about the UN’s competency in distributing aid. We can argue about whether the current situation satisfies international law’s technical definition of a genocide, or if it’s “just” an atrocity and a war crime.

Those arguments are all worth having. But what is beyond argument is that what is happening in Gaza right now is an abomination. It is absolutely antithetical to Jewish values. And it must end immediately.

Israel has a right to defend itself, to dismantle Hamas’s terror infrastructure, to bring back its hostages, to prevent future terrorist attacks like the gruesome killings, rapes, and kidnapping of October 7. Those of you who have heard me speak over the past two years know that I have tried to be very nuanced in my critiques of the Israeli government, and I attempt to be even-handed in blaming Hamas and other actors in perpetuating this travesty. But as Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza nears its third year, its reckless conduct has crossed the line into unconscionable depravity.

Israel is not fully to blame for the dire situation in Gaza right now, but we must reckon with the ways in which it is. It is a stain on the legacy and moral conscience of the Jewish people, and those of us in America bear responsibility for how our government has and continues to perpetuate it.

The sages teach in Eichah Rabbah, the rabbinic interpretation of the Book of Lamentations, that the destruction of the two Temples was brought on by moral failings of the Jewish people of the time, and that Tisha B’Av is a time for both kinah and tochecha, to lament our horrid reality and to be accountable for how we got here. So did our ancestors, and so must we.

In the opening chapter of Eichah Rabbah, Rabbi Levi tells a story to explain the downfall of Jerusalem. His analogy is of three people who sit by quietly while their friend descends into complacency, recklessness, and disgrace. Let us learn from our ancestors and not be those silent friends. I believe that future generations will look back on this moment and see it as a consequential turning point in Jewish history. Our grandchildren will ask us: What were you doing while the children of Gaza starved to death?

So on this day when we reflect on the spiritual decay that led to the destruction of our two sacred Temples in Jerusalem, let us explore what led to that collapse and what we might be able to learn about our current moral crisis.

The Talmud teaches that the First Temple was destroyed because of the sins of idolatry, sexual exploitation, and bloodshed, and the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam — often translated as baseless hatred. To quote the Talmud: “[The parallel of these sins] teaches that sinat chinam, baseless hatred, is equivalent to those three sins.”

So how is baseless hatred considered as grave as the three cardinal sins? The rabbis and sages have offered their own elaborations to help us understand what would be so egregious as to fundamentally upend Judaism and Jewish life. I’ll offer a few here to help us make sense of what is happening in our world today — in Gaza, in America, and in our own hearts. 

1. Indifference

One definition that particularly resonates right now is sinat chinam as the sin of indifference. I think of the line from the Talmud in Tractate Shabbat that says, “Whoever is able to protest against the sins against the world and does not — they are held accountable for the sins of the world.”

When the Israelites are attacked by our mortal enemy, the Amalekites, the Torah says we were karcha baderech, we were attacked on the way. But the mystics teach that karcha comes from the root kar, cold — that the Amalekites hurt us so deeply not because they attacked us, but that they made us cold, indifferent. That our trauma of being the victims made us numb to the suffering of others.

In this reading, sinat chinam isn’t hatred through active aggression, but rather through passive apathy. It’s the kind of hatred that comes from not caring, from insulating oneself from others’ pain — especially when that pain is politically inconvenient. When we see images of Gazan children starving and say, “Well, it’s Hamas’s fault, if only they would release the hostages,” that is not only moral bankruptcy, as if saving 23 hostages justifies starving 2 million people. But it is also a spiritual numbness—a refusal to feel.

In this view, the Temple was destroyed not because people fought, but because people stopped feeling. They stopped seeing the Divine image (tzelem Elohim) in the vulnerable, even in the enemy. The Divine Spirit cannot dwell among a people who refuse to make space in their hearts for others’ suffering. As Nour Abdel Latif, a poet in Gaza, wrote last month:

If I must starve,
let it be while I still cradle my child’s hope,
not as a number lost in footnotes.

Let the sea carry my name
to shores that forgot my people,
and let the wind whisper:
she fed love when bread was gone.

Silence in the face of mass starvation, especially when caused, even in part, by Jewish power, repeats the sin of the Second Temple generation. Even if you believe that there are people still in Gaza complicit in the heinous attacks of October 7. Even if you can rightfully point to Hamas or the UN as partially to blame for the current humanitarian crisis. We must heed the guidance of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, the brilliant mystic and first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, who wrote: “If the Temple was destroyed by baseless hatred, it will be rebuilt through baseless love (ahavat chinam).”

2. Tribalism

Some Hasidic and modern thinkers define sinat chinam as exclusionary love — the kind that reserves dignity and empathy for one’s own tribe, sect, or nation. In this frame, the Jews of the Second Temple period didn’t necessarily hate each other maliciously. But they narrowed their circle of moral concern. They loved their neighbors, their ideological allies, their co-religionists — but not those outside their faction.

Today, many in our community weep over Israeli pain, and rightly so. I know I do. But when that empathy stops at the border, when Gazans are treated as disposable, when we justify collective punishment, as ministers in the Israeli government have been doing — we are committing a form of sinat chinam. As Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada wrote before she was killed at home in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike, “This is another age of ignorance. Cursed are those who divided us in war and marched in your funeral as one.”

Some of you might be feeling, “Why is he focusing so much on the Palestinians, this is a synagogue, what about all the Jews who were killed on October 7, and who are still held hostage?” My response is that caring about Israelis and Palestinians is not mutually exclusive. Over the past two years, I’ve shared and cried with you over many stories of Israeli victims and hostages from October 7. But when the suffering reaches these extreme levels of disproportion, there is a time and place for our attention to reflect that disparity. When we rightfully cry out in outrage about an emaciated Israeli hostage being forced to dig his own grave by Hamas, as happened this week, but then implicitly or explicitly use that to justify starving people in Gaza — that is sinat chinam. Both demand our condemnation and our tears. If you feel a responsibility to care for Jews in Israel, then you must feel responsibility for what is being done in our name as Jews.

The Temple is destroyed whenever we reduce compassion to a loyalty test. When we feed our own and let others starve, we desecrate the sacred. As said in Eichah, the book of Lamentations: “The hands of compassionate women have cooked their own children; they became their food in the destruction of my people.”

3. Certainty

The Talmud in Tractate Bava Metzia says that “Jerusalem was destroyed because people judged each other according to the letter of the law, and not beyond it.” This teaching reframes sinat chinam as what I would describe as legalistic righteousness—the sin of being technically correct but spiritually dead.

We are in the fog of war, and it’s important to question terminology and sources and facts and accusations. But when we argue about whether Israel’s behavior technically constitutes genocide, or when we dismiss a New York Times article about the mass starvation because it was accompanied by an inaccurate photograph, we are missing the point. We transition from being discerning news consumers to being ideologically blindered, closing ourselves to uncomfortable truths that challenge our pre-conceived worldviews.

For those of us who have deep love for the State of Israel, it can be hard to critique its actions when it is being subjected to so many double-standards, biased news coverage, and even anti-Semitic tropes. But we are at a turning point. Stalwart allies of Israel, who have been giving Israel the benefit of the doubt for the past two years, are now standing up and saying: Enough. So are many Israelis, hundreds of thousands of whom are taking to the street in the thousands to protest the inhumane tactics of the Netanyahu government, which are neither making Israel safer nor securing the return of the hostages. I feel no joy but also no choice in adding my voice to that rising chorus of ardent Zionists who are saying: Enough.

Over the past two years, I’ve seen time and again that when a life-long Israel supporter criticizes the actions of the Israeli government, many in the Jewish community immediately move them from the “friend” to “foe” category. I imagine that is what many will do to me. But if you’re one of those people, I implore you to pause and consider that maybe the battle-lines are shifting, both in terms of the severity of what is happening in Gaza and what it means to be a friend to Israel. And that maybe it’s time to look beyond our tribal loyalties and grapple with the harsh reality.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the teaching by the 19th century mystic Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbitz, that people often come to hate one another not out of malice, but out of fear — fear that the other’s truth will invalidate their own. Our certainty that we are “right” may itself be the sin. The Temple is destroyed when moral clarity becomes a bludgeon, rather than a doorway to humility. We must see Palestinian children not as statistics or future threats, but as sacred beings—worthy of bread, water, safety, life. And that doesn’t have to be in conflict with a love of Israel; I’d argue that a love of Israel in fact demands that clear-eyed view.

***

Indifference. Tribalism. Certainty. In all three interpretations of sinat chinam, the message is the same: The Temple wasn’t destroyed by people who thought they were evil. It was destroyed by people who thought they were right—but failed to see the other as holy. Each time we look away from the starving, justify their suffering, or recoil from our own moral discomfort, we reenact sinat chinam.

Usually in my sermons on Friday night, I end by inviting everyone to pair up and share on a prompt related to the teaching. But honestly, these days I find there’s too much talking, too many words, that are distracting us from feeling. So instead, we’re going to sit in quiet for a few minutes, a silent vigil in which we refuse to look away, to numb out, to justify – and instead, we just grieve. We witness. We feel — as an act of resistance.

As you sit in silence, I invite you to consider: If you could speak to Baby Zainab, the five-month-old who died of starvation last week, what would you say to her? Imagine holding her fragile, lifeless body in your arms. Notice if any “but what about” thoughts are coming up, any resistance to feeling what a human should feel in this situation. Let go of what political opinions might need to flow from that empathy, and just allow yourself to feel.

This Tisha B’Av, I invite you to join me in fasting from sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday, as an act of spiritual accountability, an act of solidarity with those in Gaza — including the Israeli hostages — for whom fasting is a forced necessity, an act of refusing to look away from the suffering, a visceral way to feel that pain in our bodies. Read the names of the 18,500 children killed in Gaza since October 7, together with the names of the Israelis who were killed on October 7 and those still held captive. Join us at Chochmat on Sunday at 10am for a powerful Tisha B’Av program of ritual, reflection, and exploration with Rabbi Shifrah Tobacman, Jen Roitman, and Zvi Beilin. Take time on Sunday to donate to reputable organizations that are delivering aid in Gaza. Find ways to get engaged – call your members of Congress to make your voices heard.

I want to close by suggesting that just as these moral failings of indifference, tribalism, and certainty have enabled the suffering in Gaza for far too long, and to have reached these extreme levels, so too have they fueled the crises in our own country, in our communities, perhaps even in our homes and hearts.

The Temple will not be rebuilt with bullets or nationalism or vengeance. It will be rebuilt in the unseen acts of love we offer one another, in the boundaries we break down, in the comfort we extend beyond our tribe. And if we truly believe that every human being is made in the image of the Divine — every child, every parent, every stranger — then let us live in a way that reflects that holiness. Let this be the fast that opens our hearts. Let this be the grief that leads us back to love. And let us rise from our mourning not with despair, but with a fierce and tender resolve to make this world — broken as it is — a sanctuary once more.

Eichah Rabbah teaches that the Moshiach is born on Tisha B’Av. While Moshiach is sometimes defined as Messiah and embodied as a single redemptive person, the Jewish mystics define it as a liberatory consciousness that ushers in a new era of abundance, compassion, and unity. And indeed, out of the ashes of the second Temple emerged a complete reimagining of Judaism, innovations that now define so much of the Judaism we know today – synagogues, rabbis, Shabbat tables, sacred texts – practices that arguably have allowed Judaism to thrive for another two millennia and enabled us to be sitting here today.

The 18th century mystic Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev teaches that on this Shabbat, known as Shabbat Chazon, or the Shabbat of Vision, each of us is merited to see a vision of the Third Temple.

So let me end with a prayer: Mi Sheberach Avoteinu, Imoteinu, V’Horeinu – may the sacred Oneness that blessed our ancestors bless us with the strength to help a renewed Judaism emerge from the rubble of our crumbling temples, one that meets the urgent moral imperatives of our time, that rejects tribalism and honors the sanctity of all lives. May we be blessed with the courage to grieve and mourn and feel, and may those powerful emotions inspire us to fight for and manifest that liberatory Moshiach consciousness that the world so desperately needs. Amen.

Rabbi Zvika Krieger is the spiritual leader of Chochmat HaLev. You can read more of his teachings here.