I write because I have no choice.
This morning, I woke up and saw a letter. Three hundred names—rabbis, celebrities, intellectuals—signing their names to a cause, making a statement, taking a stand. I read through the list, name after name, and something in me went cold.
None of them are here.
I don’t question their intentions. I don’t doubt that they care. But they are far away, and distance changes everything.
I don’t have distance. I wake up inside this war. My wife works with the wounded—soldiers whose bodies may have healed, but whose minds never left the battlefield. My sons have been in this war. One of them is still in it. My daughter moves through fire with a camera in her hands.
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I know what it is to sit in the dark with my phone in my hand, waiting for a message that may never come. I know what it is to hear the news before I can bring myself to read it. I know what it is to hold my breath for hours without realizing I’m doing it.
But from a distance, war looks different.
From a distance, war looks like an argument, a theory to be weighed, a moral stance to be debated. You hold suffering in each hand like a scale. You measure history like it can be rewritten. You sign your name and believe you have done something brave.
But war is not an equation. War is not an idea. War is not something that fits inside a petition.
War is a father who has not slept since October, who writes at all hours of the night, trying to sort out the mess inside him, trying to hold onto something steady when everything feels like it’s shifting beneath his feet.
War is a mother who folds her son’s uniform, smoothing out the fabric, pressing it to her face for a second before placing it back in his closet, knowing he will wear it again soon.
War is the soldier pressing his forehead against a wall, trying to remember who he was before this.
War is another funeral. Another name. Another empty chair at another Shabbat table.
But from far away, it is easy to believe in John Lennon.
Imagine there’s no countries… nothing to kill or die for… A world without borders, without memory, without the weight of history pressing down on the present. A world where no one has to hold onto anything too tightly. A world where people can afford to let go.
But we do not live in that world.
We live in a world where history is written in blood. Where graves are dug before the bodies have been found. Where memory is the only thing standing between a people and their erasure.
We do not get to let go.
Because when people say let it all go, what they really mean is let go of yourselves. Let go of your grief. Let go of your rage. Let go of your survival. Let go of your right to hold onto anything at all.
And I write because I refuse to let that happen.
I write because I want to bring people closer. Because you cannot love from a distance. You cannot grieve from a distance. You cannot understand from a distance. And if you try, you will get it wrong.
Because the world keeps telling us that justice requires stepping back. That morality demands neutrality. That fairness is found in erasing all that makes us human, as if history is not real, as if attachment is a flaw, as if memory is not the only thing that protects the future.
John Rawls calls it the veil of ignorance—the idea that to be just, one must erase all experience, all connection, all personal stakes.
What does Judaism say?
But Judaism says the opposite.
Get closer. Feel it. Know it.
You shall love the stranger because you were strangers in Egypt. And not just love—you shall know his soul.
Not in theory. Not in abstraction. Not from a safe and measured distance.
So no, I do not stand back. I cannot.
I live inside this war. My family lives inside this war.
And yet, I write for those who do not. For those who watch from afar. For those who care but cannot know.
I write because I want to close that distance, to collapse the space between knowing and not knowing.
I write because I have no choice.
Because I live in it. Because I see it. Because I carry it.
Because words written from far away will never be enough.