Rabbis in Wartime

When pulpit rabbis speak to current events, they are often dismissed by the chattering class as second-tier pundits. But it’s not as if they have much choice. As we have seen since October 7, in times of crisis, congregants look to spiritual leaders for heartfelt guidance, if not professorial analysis. “Pundit,” after all, wasn’t always the term of art for media-savvy expertise. In Sanskrit, it meant a religious authority who blended wise counsel with ritual facilitation, which suggests that rabbis don’t pretend to the role so much as take it back.

This pastoral function has been complicated by the ever-shifting post–October 7 landscape, which has tested the interpretive capacity of even seasoned public intellectuals. The horrors of that day gave way to the sprawling Israeli military campaign, bifurcated by the success against Iran and its proxies and the brutal humanitarian quagmire in Gaza, all played out against the backdrop of surging global antisemitism, the machinations within the Knesset’s governing coalition, and the controversial employment of Jewish anxiety as a cudgel by the Trump administration. In the waning days of summer, Trump has said the war will end in a few weeks, while Netanyahu pushes forward with plans to take Gaza City.

After two years of this, the cumulative body of rabbinic messaging might seem to resemble a steaming pile of hot takes. But, for better or worse, a rabbi’s project is never simply fact-based. It lies, rather, in the articulation of a spiritual approach to hemorrhaging information—a proposal to the Jewish people of how to make meaning out of chaos. As we mark another somber anniversary, it might therefore be more generous to assess rabbinic October 7 literature not simply for its factual immediacy but also for the staying power of its visions.

Two books written in the aftermath of October 7 by prominent liberal rabbis demonstrate this point. Delphine Horvilleur’s How Isn’t It Going? Conversations after October 7 came out in English in January, almost a year after its original appearance in French. Elliot Cosgrove’s For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today was published last September. These texts also provide a study in contrast: The first is a brief and vulnerable cri de coeur and the second the magisterial address of a man with a plan.

Horvilleur, for her part, is having a moment. Only the third female rabbi in French history, she is the inspiration behind the charming, if slightly precious, series “Le Sens de Choses” (“The Meaning of Things”), which just aired its first season on HBO Max under the Americanized title “Reformed.” Based loosely, as the opening sequence explains, on her poignant 2021 bestseller, Living with Our Dead: On Loss and Consolation, the adaptation is not a matter of content so much as sensibility. Almost no actual episodes make it from page to screen, but, against the swirl of fictional headwinds faced by the young rabbin, what comes through is a profound rabbinic philosophy of storytelling:

Knowing how to narrate what has been said a thousand times before, while giving the person who hears the story for the first time unique keys with which to unlock the meaning for themselves—that is my function. I stand by the side of women and men who, at turning points in their lives, need stories.

It is a technique based less in clerical authority than compassionate unknowing. As an Orthodox colleague (and potential love interest) says to Léa Schmoll, the show’s Horvilleur stand-in: “The world doesn’t need more rabbis full of certainties. Those who are looking for something else need you.”

Horvilleur’s ruminations, composed only months after the attacks, display this mode of sensitivity and also bring out the extent to which it is rooted in her own inner life:

Since October 7, 2023, around me the world has filled with people who have more or less the same conversation as mine with their parents or with their (dead) grandparents. . . . And in my work, I spend a huge amount of time listening to narratives that echo one another with a residue of inherited trauma.

As a storyteller, Horvilleur looks for terms to describe her own “inherited trauma,” so as to also hold up the mirror to what others are suffering. It’s an anxious search, which doesn’t so much find a resolution as grapple with the unassimilable shards of a shattered Jewish reality, the result both of the Hamas assault and its worldwide cheering section.

At the same time, there’s a compelling playfulness to her effort, a kind of sober whimsy through which she teases profundity out of ordinary material, like common phrases, song lyrics, and old television shows. Her title itself, a negating twist on the usual “comment ça va?,” speaks to the post–October 7 fog of emotional dislocation, which makes it difficult to exchange habitual greetings:

Every day our paths cross but it’s as if we had lost sight of each other. I meet men and women with whom I don’t really know how to engage in conversation. It’s strange, but it’s as if the language of the everyday has ceased to function.

Her organizing principle takes its cue from this failure of small talk, consisting of ten imagined conversations, each lasting several pages, as the discombobulated author steps back from chatter into the meditative space needed to process the shocking reassertion of Jewish vulnerability. The most significant are daydream rendezvous with her grandfather, a Francophile grammarian saved by the French Resistance, and her grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor from the Carpathians. “It goes without saying” she writes, “that on October 7, History sent them a sacred convocation. It summoned them to turn up and, of course, they both landed in my head.” Musing on her grandmother’s Yiddish, she writes: “I convinced myself that all those bad things wouldn’t happen to us again. I imagined that for my generation, protected from threats, this language would be less pertinent, less meaningful.”

Elsewhere, to characterize the protean nature of Jew-hatred for the benefit of “antiracist” comrades, whose willful ignorance feels like a betrayal, she borrows a lyric from the late French pop star Claude François: “It goes away and it returns, it’s made up of little nothings.” But, as a fellow progressive, she also draws on biblical narrative to express her ambivalence over the State of Israel: “Child of the diaspora that I am,” she says, “heir to the limping Jacobs of history, I look at this country that I love, and I have qualms about its Esau-ification.”

The book culminates in a “Conversation with Messiah,” in which Horvilleur critiques the bellicose demand for one-sided narratives and imagines the invention of a “new language” that might encompass shared tragedy. “I search for the words which would really convey to both the Palestinians and the Israelis that their suffering will never leave me indifferent,” she writes, “that one has to cry with one side and with the other.” This messianic ideal so resembles the image of the rabbi as an uncertain storyteller that it might seem nakedly self-promoting if it weren’t also so earnest:

I don’t know where the Messiah will come from and whether he has any reason to come. It seems to me he will be neither a minister, nor a general, nor a strategist. Perhaps he’ll be a poet or an interpreter of scripture, a man or a woman who knows how to hear words, how to play with them and thus to build another world.

Recalling, in his introduction, the immediate aftermath of October 7, Cosgrove, the long-serving spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue, quotes the bracing words of one of his congregants:

The Jewish people are in need of leadership, and you occupy the pulpit of a major synagogue in the heart of the largest diaspora Jewish community. I can’t help but think that you didn’t choose this moment—it chose you. Who knows, maybe it was for such a time as this that you are in your position.

In the echo of Mordechai’s words to his niece, from the book of Esther, Cosgrove hears not only a personal destiny but also a rallying cry. “We can all feel empowered by Esther’s heroism,” he writes. “Her courage lay not merely in the choices she made, but in her decision to be an agent in shaping the future of her people.”

His overarching thesis is that October 7 has forced an “Esther moment” upon American Jewry. “We too have made bargains with modernity,” he writes. “We too have adapted to our host culture, only to discover that we are not quite as much at home as we thought we were.” But the peril of the moment is also its possibility. Esther’s reclamation of her ancestral identity, in response to a crisis of assimilation, is an opportunity also available to today’s Jews:

Faced as we are with the prospect of a world inhospitable to Jewish identity, where the line between anti-Zionist and antisemitic sentiment is blurred, where the Jewish people themselves may be divided concerning the terms and substance of diaspora Jewry’s relationship with Israel, the case for a return to the basics of Jewish life and living—mitzvot—is more compelling than ever.

A striking byproduct of this argument is that Cosgrove’s book comes to seem only tangentially about October 7 itself and more like the kind of tract an earnest and thoughtful rabbi might compose, whether or not the attacks had occurred. This is made nearly explicit in his central claim that October 7 should be seen not so much as a watershed event as an inflection point:

As shocking as October 7th and its reverberations may be, it is best understood as an accelerant or catalyst—not something entirely new. All the fault lines—relations between Israel and diaspora Jewry, antisemitism, the double consciousness of American Jews—have long been with us. October 7th brought them into full relief and gave them new urgency.

Though he speaks eloquently to the principles of “grief, clarity, [and] solidarity” by which he led his congregation in the wake of the initial violence, most of his text is therefore devoted to a more general exposition of the abiding dilemmas of Jewish life. Though eschewing silver linings, his goal seems to be the leveraging of this Esther moment toward a renewed commitment to Judaism, one that might lead to the redress of some of its simmering tensions. “This story cannot be tied up neatly in a bow,” he writes, while nonetheless proposing “a vocabulary for the work ahead to create a loving, informed, civil, and respectful Jewish communal future.”

This admirable call for solidarity and renewal is a little short on specifics. In the chapters of his concluding section, “What Might Be,” Cosgrove speaks in generalities—for example, about a “‘Marshall Plan’ to rebuild our deficit of memory.” But the bulk of his message is even more rhetorical, operating as a set of homilies rather than a five-year plan. In an extended meditation on the prominent talmudic expression teyku, used to put a tourniquet on unresolvable debates, and traditionally read as an acronym for “Elijah the Tishbite will reveal the answer” (meaning the dilemma won’t be settled till the prophet Elijah announces the coming of the messiah), Cosgrove suggests that the term expresses “epistemic humility.” “Truth as represented by Elijah,” he writes, “is neither singular nor sudden. It is modest, humble, and steady, able to hold its ground even as the world around it shakes.”

This stands in contrast to the bitter contemporary culture of closed-minded opposition. Though Cosgrove cites examples from both the American right and left, including the January 6 riots and campus cancel culture, he seems most preoccupied by the phenomenon as it shows up within the Jewish world: “Brothers and sisters, members of the same family, unwilling to imagine a side of the story different than the one they have told themselves all these years.” Teyku, as a call toward respect across ideological divides, might therefore serve as an effective guiding principle for communal healing.

But Cosgrove underestimates the extent to which October 7 itself has exacerbated differences between Jews. He unintentionally illustrates this point in a chapter called “The Generational Divide.” In it, he recalls “being shaken” by a conversation with a contemporary of his college-age daughter, a “proud Jew” who startles him by “espousing a non-Zionist manifesto.” What follows is his own version of an imagined conversation: a multipage exhortation to “Maya” to rejoin him in the liberal Zionist camp. Though he takes pains to appreciate her sincerity and to inch the tent poles to accommodate some degree of her critique, Cosgrove believes this Esther moment really necessitates her movement toward him: “Israel is now in crisis,” he writes. “Are you going to exit—walk away and stand on the sidelines?” Right or wrong, this doesn’t sound like epistemic humility (or Horvilleur’s unknowing) so much as rabbinic insistence with finesse. It also calls into question the extent to which he’s really sounded the depth of contemporary Jewish anti-Zionism, which isn’t so much standing on the sidelines as on the other side, particularly as the depredations in Gaza have continued to grind on. It’s not hard to envision the Mayas of the world bristling at Cosgrove’s paternalism or offering a strident rebuttal to the premises he takes for granted.

Some of the differences between these two volumes can be chalked up to their publication dates. Writing in the months immediately following October 7, Horvilleur put her thoughts in the present tense, and her words pulsate with the pained irresolution of a shiva. Published almost a year later, Cosgrove’s book speaks retrospectively, in the synoptic cadences of an unveiling, when thoughts turn to memorialization and legacy.

Beneath this distinction are a few broad commonalities, albeit with additionally significant variations. Each rabbi does fall somewhere on the two-state spectrum, though Horvilleur seems more wounded by the horns of this dilemma, bookending her text with poems by Mahmoud Darwish and Yehuda Amichai and dedicating it to, in addition to her children, “all the other ‘mensch’ [sic] to come, in Paris, Tel-Aviv, Gaza, and elsewhere, who will emerge from hatred and illuminate the darkness.” In contrast to her “new language” of peace, Cosgrove’s teyku is an internal Jewish appeal for civility.

They are more closely aligned on antisemitism, both seeing the erosion of Jewish security in the post–October 7 era as a result of the resurgence of a primordial hatred of Jews. Cosgrove writes:

The world’s oldest hatred, remains and continues to shape-shift and proliferate. Who would have believed that on October 7th, and over the months that followed, we would see this hatred, in all its manifestations, emerge with ferocity, diversity, and ubiquity, as it did?

Fantasizing about a docudrama that would explore the historical permutations of antisemitism, Horvilleur says, “The only good news is that my television series . . . is unlikely to end or be cancelled by the network or streamer. This infinite hatred will feed many more episodes.” Given the last couple of decades of antisemitic violence in France, and the anxiety and insecurity it has engendered, it is significant to observe American Jewry catching up in just a few years.

But it’s also worth asking whether, writing today—two years in—either author would nuance their assessment of what makes this era unique in the annals of Jew hatred. Where does the capacity of a Jewish army to inflict massive damage in a war whose ends and means are increasingly murky, even to many Israelis, fit into such reflections? Though time-honored conceptualizations of anti-Jewish hostility may be both largely accurate and oddly galvanizing, they seem insufficient to the task of fully naming the weird situation continuing to unfold.

Horvilleur’s book is the more compelling work of literature, briefer and less ambitious but also more expansive and open ended in its contemplation of the precarious moment. Her project, which she self-consciously associates with the work of other experimental Parisian writers with their roots in Ashkenaz—Romain Gary and Georges Perec—is fueled by the anxious creativity of a mind rifling through its storehouse for the terms to accommodate a rupture that beggars understanding. “The words we considered penetrating lead nowhere, and those we thought mild soothe no one,” she writes.

Cosgrove tends to set aside perplexity for inspiration. “Holding pain, even as we dream of brighter times,” he writes in valediction, “ready to begin, and begin again. Remembering the hurt, but nevertheless putting one foot ahead of the other.” His appeal to Jewish resilience in the wake of October 7 is inspiring and necessary, and his clear sense of direction may appeal to temperaments made uneasy by Horvilleur’s deliberative uncertainty. But the overriding impulse to associate October 7 with the familiar doesn’t do justice to the terrible gravity of our present circumstances. Greater sensitivity to the agony of unprecedented times—like Esther herself must have felt when preparing to appeal for mercy before the king—might more effectively ground his proposals in a sense of the real.

But, in the end, it’s not really a question of better or worse. Rabbis will be judged by whether their guidance is helpful. Here, as in everything else rabbinic, it is ultimately the congregations who decide.