Rabbi Steven Abraham

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/opinion/international-world/friedman-israel-gaza-hamas.html Thomas L. Friedman’s column strings together a series of indictments—pariahdom, wanton homicide, political cynicism, deliberate immiseration, communal rupture—and treats them as self-evident. They aren’t. Each claim, examined against the public record and the actual logic of the war, fails to bear the weight he puts on it. Start with the “pariah state.” “Pariah” is not disapproval; it is … [Read more...]

When I cannot sleep at night, I stare at the ceiling, and my mind turns over the questions that do not let me rest. They are not about the next board meeting, or whether the kiddush menu will be well received, or even the number of chairs to set out for High Holiday services. What keeps me awake are questions that cut to the heart of Jewish continuity, questions about whether I am doing enough — and whether we as a community are doing enough — to ensure there will be Jews in Omaha in fifty … [Read more...]

It is a strange thing to argue statistics while people are dying. War is a moral catastrophe before it is a mathematical one. Yet in an age when the language of genocide is flung about so casually, the numbers matter—not as a replacement for empathy, but as a way to discipline our moral imagination. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the population of the Gaza Strip in 2000 was about 1.1 million (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, “Estimated Population … by … [Read more...]

Every few months, someone will tell me—often with the air of having unlocked a great insight—that Israel’s biggest challenge is a “public relations problem.” The refrain is familiar: if only Israel told its story better. If only it explained to the world that Hamas hides rockets in schools, that Israeli soldiers risk their lives by going door-to-door in Gaza’s urban labyrinth instead of simply leveling neighborhoods from the air, that Israel warns civilians before strikes and delivers aid even … [Read more...]

There are trips that imprint themselves on your memory—and then there are journeys that imprint themselves on your soul. This wasn’t our children’s first time in Israel. They had wandered Jerusalem’s golden stones, tasted the falafel, floated in the Dead Sea. But this time was different. This time, something shifted. They were older now—more curious, more awake. They asked better questions. They noticed the details: the soldier’s smile on the light rail, the way the stones in the Old City … [Read more...]

In the spring of 2024, several European nations—among them Ireland, Spain, Norway, and symbolically, the UK and France—issued formal recognitions of a Palestinian state. Framed as acts of moral courage and solidarity with a stateless people, these recognitions were greeted with applause by global progressives and dismay by many in Israel. But beneath the headlines lies a deeper and more troubling irony: the very powers that once carved the modern Middle East into artificial shapes for … [Read more...]

What happens to liberal Zionism if we do not change course? What if we fail to instill in the next generation a love of people and land that transcends disappointment in policy and government? What will our children inherit—an identity of paradox, or a choice between the far left and the far right? These questions are no longer theoretical. They are urgent. “If I am only for myself, what am I? And if I am only for others, what am I?” So asked Hillel two thousand years ago. The question … [Read more...]

On Tisha b’Av, Jews lower themselves to the ground—not just physically, but spiritually. We strip away comfort, quiet our voices, and mourn the irretrievable. We mourn the Temples that burned, the exiles that scattered us, the expulsions, inquisitions, and massacres that followed. We chant Eicha by candlelight and speak of loss across centuries. But this year, it felt dishonest to keep our mourning safely in the past. It felt necessary—emotionally urgent—to include October 7th. Not in euphemism. … [Read more...]

There is a strange kind of holiness in Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av. Not the holiness of joy, not the radiance of Yom Tov or the gentle stillness of Shabbat, but a heavier sanctity—dense with memory, with grief, with longing. A sanctity that does not float but settles, like ash. And yet, to sit in this city on the night of Tisha B’Av is to feel not only its pain but its permanence. To mourn what was lost while surrounded by what has, impossibly, returned. This year, Tisha B’Av begins on Shabbat. … [Read more...]

https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/story/statement-humanitarian-aid-gaza-and-freeing-hostages?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwL5o89leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHiLf0NFck7pTnDJ7Doyvmi5x0dqovhR89nJPoS7p5DwtUzQ8G4XE2H36PsDa_aem_bJsxQC_r5K181oLWJ_WtyQ https://crm.uscj.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=8741 As a Conservative rabbi, I write this response with both sorrow and resolve. I have read the recent statements from the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism regarding the war in … [Read more...]