In the West today, most people, regardless of religious attitudes, desire the freedom to choose their moral path and the obligations that come with it. Reform Judaism, in the roughly two centuries since it emerged, has always been aware of the tension between the ideas of human autonomy and of divine command. Yet, Rabbi Leon Morris argues, there is a need to “recalibrate” that understanding:

Personal choice needs to shift from being Reform’s central principle to being a starting point. Of course, the ultimate authority in religious life lies with the self. But what do we do with that? If we understand idolatry as the worship of one aspect to the exclusion of the whole, we have arrived at a moment where we in the Reform movement have turned personal autonomy into an idol. We have isolated one aspect of contemporary Jewish life from all the other values that need to live alongside of it.

To find a path forward, Morris turns to a talmudic exegesis of a verse in the book Exodus, which describes the word of God as having been “engraved upon the tablets” that were given to Moses. The rabbis play on the similarity between the words harut (engraved) and herut freedom. Morris comments:

What at first glance seems to be the polar opposite of freedom—the law literally written in stone—is, in fact, the very basis of freedom. The mitzvot also allow us to transcend our mortality by committing our lives to a system that will outlive us, and to a God who is eternal. Commandment and freedom are not polarities. Rather, freedom expresses itself most fully through the opportunity to hear and live the commandments. . . . Such dialectic tension will create an impetus for deep thought, for serious and engaging study, and for creating environments that use liberalism as a way into deeper Jewish engagement rather than out of it.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.