Joseph knew how to stop a famine. Can he show us how to fix Gaza?
Way, way back many centuries ago, Jacob’s favorite son taught us how to prevent a famine. The key is a little advance planning, and the understanding that suffering knows no borders.
The last time the children of Israel were involved in a famine, they didn't cause it - they solved it. In these very trying times, maybe we can turn to the example of the biblical Joseph for some inspiration.
We know that there were four key ingredients to Joseph’s solution to his famine problem: some advance planning, a jolt of compassion, a realization that suffering knows no borders, and an acceptance of a regional power’s responsibility for what happens on their watch.
I’ll return to Joseph in a bit. But first… where things stand right now.
Israel has enacted a "humanitarian pause" in parts of Gaza on Sunday morning, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said Saturday night in a statement. The Foreign ministry also rejects what it calls “starvation propaganda.” 1
See Jerusalem Post article: “The IDF on Sunday announced localized ceasefires from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. in portions of Gaza in order to expand food aid distribution to the civilian population.”
Food drops are happening.
As ceasefire talks flounder, hostages are still being held captive by Hamas.
Israel mourned the loss of another soldier killed in Gaza.
A couple of days ago, a letter began circulating internationally, primarily among rabbis, expressing dismay over the loss of life due to the catastrophic conditions that have been imposed on residents of Gaza.2 It was strongly critical of decisions made by the Israeli government, though broadly supportive of Israel. I signed pretty early on (#216) and then watched as hundreds of my colleagues joined in. On Friday, just before Shabbat on the east coast, nearly 750 had signed. By Sunday morning the number had risen to 900.
Calling this a “grave moral crisis,” the letter condemns the “use of starvation as a weapon of war,” speaking on behalf of the Jewish people and Judaism itself:
In the name of the sanctity of life, of the core Torah values that every person is created in God’s image, that we are commanded to treat every human being justly, and that, wherever possible, we are required to exercise mercy and compassion;
In the name of what the Jewish People has learnt bitterly from history as the victim, time and again, of marginalization, persecution and attempted annihilation;
In the name of the moral reputation not just of Israel, but of Judaism itself, the Judaism to which our lives are devoted,
Israel’s friends around the world cannot put themselves in a position to defend the indefensible. That’s why rabbis are now speaking up in large numbers.
This is no longer merely Israel’s responsibility. This is a burden the Jewish people will bear for generations. Just as I've long stated that the Hamas crimes of October 7 must be assessed independently of all attempts to contextualize them based on the long history of the conflict, so does the conscious decision to use hunger as a weapon need to be assessed on its own, as a singular act within the context of a (much too) long war. This decision was made relatively recently, with the stated objective, on the part of some in the government at least, being to encourage emigration and without regard to human life.
To be clear, Hamas and its enablers brought this destructive war on itself. But this particular decision was Israel’s to make, and Israel is in control of these areas, not Hamas.
Just this week, far-right minister Amichai Eliyahu denied that Gazans are not getting enough food, calling it a campaign against Israel, but noted that the country was at war and trying to kill “these monsters.”
“There’s no hunger in Gaza,” he said. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”
The Gaza war was certainly justified when it began. But the starvation of a population was never - and can never be - justified. And hundreds of rabbis - many of whom risk condemnation from their congregants - could not just stand by and watch.
The world needs to know that there are sane voices among Israeli leaders. Opposition leader Yair Lapid said this week that Eliyahu’s comments on Gaza were “an attack on values and a public relations disaster.”
“Israel will never convince the world of the righteousness of our war against terror so long as we are led by an extremist minority government with ministers who sanctify blood and death,” Lapid said in a statement, as reported by Times of Israel.
Lapid added that Israel’s soldiers are not “fighting, dying, and being injured in order to wipe out a civilian population.”
“This is a government that has lost its sanity, I tell you,” The (Israeli) Democrat party’s leader Yair Golan wrote on X.
Israel’s friends around the world cannot put themselves in a position to defend the indefensible. That’s why rabbis are now speaking up in large numbers. As I wrote in my previous posting, the messianic fever-dream that is this extremist government is about to break. It is not representative of the values of Judaism and Zionism, or a majority of Israel’s people.
Israel has faced moments of moral slippage before and dealt with them responsibly. The Sabra and Shatila carnage in 1982, which Israel did not perpetrate but happened on Israel’s watch, led to the Kahan commission, which eventually resulted in some accountability, as well as huge street protests by Israelis. No one denies that the current disaster is occurring on Israel’s watch as well, even as Hamas’s refusal to release the remaining hostages remains a prime impediment to the feeding of its own population.
If the Israelis are concerned that Hamas would abscond with transports and sell the food on the black market, “flooding the zone” with provisions would reduce prices and thereby thwart Hamas’s designs. If the storehouses can be filled with enough food for seven years of plenty, we’ll be able, theoretically, to take a big bite out of this seven-fold famine.
Journalist Jonathan Freedland, a staunch supporter of Israel but critic of the government, suggested “flooding the zone” with food this week in the podcast Unholy. He also wrote in The Guardian that there are no excuses for allowing this catastrophe to continue for one day longer.
It’s no use Israel complaining of bottlenecks and the like. This is a country with the technical knowhow and ingenuity to hit nuclear and other targets in distant Iran and to eliminate Hezbollah fighters by means of their own pagers. If they wanted to ensure the starving of Gaza received food, water and medicine, if they had the will, they could make it happen right now. (Note Friday’s decision, doubtless in response to the current international outcry, to allow airdrops of aid from Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.) It is a political choice Netanyahu is making, an unconscionable one, using the flow of aid as a bargaining chip in his ongoing and so far fruitless ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, just as it is a political choice by Hamas to refuse to make the concessions that might ease the horror being visited on their own people.
So how can the biblical Joseph help us out here?
Joseph overcame famine by stockpiling food ahead of time. Its too late for “ahead of time” right now, but even at this late date, Israel can work with international agencies to bring in food - lots more food than may be currently needed.
Joseph fed the world, including his enemies - who happened to be his brothers - who had wanted to kill him and then had sent him as a hostage to Egypt. And yet Joseph told them, “I will provide for you — for there are yet five years of famine to come — that you and your household and all that is yours may not suffer want” (Gen. 45:11).
So Joseph saw it as his obligation to feed everyone, including his tormentors. Why? Because he could. He was in control of that area. He was the responsible power.
When Joseph revealed himself to his brothers a few verses before, he immediately asked, “Is my father still alive?” But he knew that Jacob was living, as Judah had mentioned him no fewer than fourteen times in his plea that Joseph not take Benjamin as prisoner.
“For how can I go back to my father unless the boy is with me? Let me not be witness to the woe that would overtake my father!”
Some interpret this question as in fact an exclamation. Joseph knew that his father was still alive, though tortured with grief, and it was still not too late to save him. .
The J.P.S. commentary speculates that Joseph asked about his father so impulsively, despite already knowing the answer, because he was shaken to the core by the overwhelming impact of hearing Jacob mentioned so many times.
The statements follow in rapid succession with no pause between them. Judah could not have known it, but more than anything, it was the repeated mention of the aged father—no less than fourteen times—that shook Joseph and brought his self-restraint to an end. No wonder, then, that Joseph's first thought is for the welfare of his father. True, he had already sought and obtained the information he wanted, yet the terrifying picture Judah has painted makes Joseph cry out in such a way that his words are more an exclamation than an inquiry. That is why there is no reply and Joseph does not press the point.
It is too late for many of the victims of these horrible past two years, but it is not too late for humanity to shine a light from the depths - as it did for Joseph. Joseph, who himself knew what it was like to emerge from near-death experiences in the pit and jail, was brought to tears simply by hearing of his father and seeing the faces of his brothers. Israelis cannot help but see the very real faces of babies suffering in Gaza. Their media is covering this story. They see the world’s front pages.
Joseph saw it as his obligation to feed everyone, including his tormentors. Why? Because he could. He was in control of that area. He was the responsible power.
I pray for words of compassion to find their way into Israel’s leadership once again, and into America’s. For it is from such a foundation of compassion that Joseph spoke when he realized it was still not too late to save his father. It is still not too late to save those neighbors of Israel’s who don’t seek to destroy, who don’t hate, who only suffer.
Joseph, the son of Israel, fed the world instead of starving it. He fed his enemies too. He taught them how to avoid future famines. He was the best that Israel, the patriarch, would ever produce. He cared, he cried, and in doing so, he did his father proud.
And because of that, Israel, is still alive.
Od Avinu Chai! Our father yet lives!
The modern song that Shlomo Carlebach wrote based on this verse has become the quintessential anthem of Jewish defiance (“The nation of Israel lives! Our father still lives!” - Am Yisrael Chai).
But in fact, as Joseph experienced it, it was less a song of solidarity than empathy.
Recognizing the overpowering impact of love, whether for a father, one’s siblings or for total strangers, Joseph understood that if his father was going to be kept alive, it would have to be through an unbounded love, for his brothers, for everyone.
That’s the kind of love we need right now.
We need to look squarely at this situation and ask, like Joseph, “Are they still alive?”
Too much death! It is time, without hesitation, to feed the hungry and bring the hostages home.
NOTES:
See the posting from Foreign Ministry
It’s really hard to respond to that accusation when photos like this are now finding their way into Israeli newspapers and TV coverage
The full letter, issued by : Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, London, Rabbi Arthur Green, Boston, Rabbi Ariel Pollak, Tel Aviv
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The Jewish People face a grave moral crisis, threatening the very basis of Judaism as the ethical voice that it has been since the age of Israel’s prophets. We cannot remain silent in confronting it.
As rabbis and Jewish leaders from across the world, including the State of Israel, we are deeply committed to the wellbeing of Israel and the Jewish People.
We admire Israel’s many and remarkable achievements. We recognise, and many of us endure, the huge challenges the State of Israel relentlessly confronts, surrounded for so long by enemies and facing existential threats from many quarters. We abhor the violence of such nihilistic terrorist organizations as Hezbollah and Hamas. We call on them immediately to release all the hostages, held for so long captive in tunnels in horrendous conditions with no access to medical aid. We unequivocally support the legitimacy of Israel’s battle against these evil forces of destruction. We understand the Israeli army’s prioritization of protecting the lives of its soldiers in this ongoing battle, and we mourn the loss of every soldier’s life.
But we cannot condone the mass killings of civilians, including a great many women, children and elderly, or the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Repeated statements of intention and actions by ministers in the Israeli government, by some officers in the Israeli army, and the behaviour of criminally violent settler groups in the West Bank, often with police and military support, have been major factors in bringing us to this crisis. The killing of huge numbers of Palestinians in Gaza, including those desperately seeking food, has been widely reported across respectable media and cannot reasonably be denied. The severe limitation placed on humanitarian relief in Gaza, and the policy of withholding of food, water, and medical supplies from a needy civilian population contradict essential values of Judaism as we understand it. Ongoing unprovoked attacks, including murder and theft, against Arab populations in the West Bank, have been documented over and over again.
We cannot keep silent.
In the name of the sanctity of life, of the core Torah values that every person is created in God’s image, that we are commanded to treat every human being justly, and that, wherever possible, we are required to exercise mercy and compassion;
In the name of what the Jewish People has learnt bitterly from history as the victim, time and again, of marginalisation, persecution and attempted annihilation;
In the name of the moral reputation not just of Israel, but of Judaism itself, the Judaism to which our lives are devoted,
We call upon the Prime Minister and the Government of Israel
To respect all innocent life;
To stop at once the use and threat of starvation as a weapon of war;
To allow extensive humanitarian aid, under international supervision, while guarding against control or theft by Hamas;
To work urgently by all routes possible to bring home all the hostages and end the fighting; To use the forces of law and order to end settler violence on the West Bank and vigorously investigate and prosecute settlers who harass and assault Palestinians;
To open channels of dialogue together with international partners to lead toward a just settlement, ensuring security for Israel, dignity and hope for Palestinians, and a viable peaceful future for all the region.
‘I am a Jew because our ancestors were the first to see that the world is driven by a moral purpose, that reality is not a ceaseless war of the elements, to be worshipped as gods, nor history in a battle in which might is right and power is to be appeased. The Judaic tradition shaped the moral civilisation of the West, teaching for the first time that human life is sacred, that the individual may not be sacrificed for the mass, and that rich and poor, great and small, are all equal before God.’ Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now (London 2000).
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Currently enrolled rabbinical students are welcome to sign.
To see current signers, click here:
From Sunday’s NYT:
JERUSALEM — For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.
But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.
In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.
Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from — and dying of — starvation.
More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.
Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.
David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.
On Saturday night, however, the Israeli military announced that it would revive the practice of dropping aid from airplanes…
It’s impossible to hit a 💙 on this latest article. All week long, in comments I have written, I’ve implored readers to remember the plight of the Palestinians. Starvation in a time of plenty is insanity. Israel’s NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR is starving. Flood the zone with aid trucks. Airdrops are incredibly dangerous for everyone involved. From afar, this situation smacks of Nazi genocide.
Thank you Rabbis for forcefully addressing this issue. (With a strongly worded letter).
The letter does my heart good. Thank you for bringing this to our attention as well as the Joseph story. It is uncanny that anyone can support this action by the Israeli government.