Rabbi Steven Abraham

Last night, I finally grasped the full emotional and moral weight of the dilemma surrounding Israel’s religious exemption from military service. It is a dilemma that sits at the intersection of covenant and contract, faith and citizenship, Torah and national responsibility. And with the war now entering its second year, and reserve soldiers on their fifth or sixth call-up, this issue is no longer theoretical. It is breaking people. It is breaking the country. When David Ben-Gurion carved out … [Read more...]

Walk the alleyways of Tel Aviv, and the walls begin to speak. Not softly, not diplomatically, but with urgency—sometimes in grief, sometimes in rage, sometimes in biting satire. One mural shows the child from the Warsaw Ghetto—hands raised, cap on his head—standing beside a Hamas terrorist in military garb. Above them looms the phrase “NEVER AGAIN,” with the word “never” violently crossed out. The image is jarring. It collapses time, forcing us to admit that Jewish history is not as safely … [Read more...]

It’s different when you’re older. And it’s different when you’re a parent. There were times in my life—when I was younger, bolder, fatter—when I traveled to and lived in Israel. I walked through the Old City like I owned it. I watched the sun fall behind the hills of Jerusalem, confident the next morning would come. During the second intifada, the sound of sirens and ambulances was part of the city’s background music. You’d hear one siren—an ambulance—no big deal. Two? Still probably nothing. … [Read more...]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/opinion/palestinians-right-of-return.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare The New York Times recently published a moving essay about an 82-year-old Palestinian woman displaced first in 1948, then in 1967, and again in 2023. Her suffering is real. Her story deserves compassion. But her story, like so many others used as moral leverage against Israel, is incomplete—and the omissions are telling. Nowhere in the piece is there mention … [Read more...]

I’ll admit it: defending Israel can be exhausting—emotionally draining, intellectually disorienting, and at times, profoundly lonely. That fatigue is part of why I love being in Israel. Not because Israelis uniformly agree with me—they don’t—but because they don’t have the luxury of indifference. Their children, not ours, serve on the front lines. Their grandchildren don’t theorize about the ethics of sovereignty from a seminar room. They bear the burden of defending our homeland. They have skin … [Read more...]

This Sunday, we leave for Israel. It will be Naama’s fourth trip. Leor’s second. But this one feels different. The world feels different. We feel different. Since October 7th, I’ve questioned many things. I’ve wept in ways I haven’t wept before. I’ve felt grief that turned to rage, and rage that turned into prayer. I've watched the world shift beneath our feet — old certainties eroded, old friendships strained, and moral clarity suddenly in short supply. And yet, in that churning storm … [Read more...]

In 1923, in the wake of Arab riots in British-controlled Palestine and a faltering Zionist movement unsure of its future, Ze’ev Jabotinsky penned an essay that remains one of the most controversial—and prescient—documents in modern Jewish political thought: The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs). The central thesis was simple and deeply unsettling to many of his contemporaries: the Arab world will never willingly accept a Jewish state. Therefore, Jabotinsky argued, Zionism must not depend on Arab … [Read more...]

At the conclusion of every Passover seder, millions of Jews rise and sing the words our ancestors have chanted for centuries: L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim — “Next year in Jerusalem.” We sing it not as nostalgia but as promise. We recall a place — not abstract values, but land. Stones and soil. A city with a name and a people with a memory. And then, astonishingly, some of those very same Jews — often proudly identifying as progressive, compassionate, and justice-minded — will turn around and … [Read more...]

In 1948, as Israel declared its independence and the Arab world declared war, a simultaneous catastrophe unfolded—less narrated, less politicized, but no less traumatic. Nearly 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim-majority countries: from Baghdad and Cairo to Tripoli, Damascus, and Aden. They left behind homes, businesses, synagogues, and cemeteries. In many cases, they were permitted to take only a suitcase. In others, they fled amid pogroms and threats of imprisonment. Millennia-old … [Read more...]

Let’s not lose the plot. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has done real, impactful work in American schools and communities for decades. Its No Place for Hate program, in particular, has helped foster safer, more inclusive environments for thousands of students — a rare example of values-based education that transcends partisan lines. Walking away from that work isn’t a principled stand. It’s a disservice to the children the National Education Association (NEA) claims to … [Read more...]