On the Jewish calendar, the period from the first day of Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur is known as the Ten Days of Repentance, traditionally a time of introspection and heightened religious devotion. Judith Bleich examines one of the oldest and most foundational Jewish texts on the subject of repentance, or t’shuvah: Psalm 51. She looks specifically at the final two verses: “Do good in Your favor unto Zion, build the walls of Jerusalem. Then You will desire the sacrifices of righteousness, burnt-offering and whole-offering; then will bullocks go up upon Your altar.”

Many non-traditional scholars find these final remarks a puzzling and even incongruous conclusion. They underscore the somewhat contradictory references to sacrifices and claim that the closing comments are anticlimactic following as they do a verse extolling “a heart broken and humbled.”

Perhaps . . . one may offer an alternative resolution to the question of the choice of these sentences as the finale of the psalm. . . . There is [a] teaching regarding repentance emphasized by Maimonides: “All the prophets, all of them, commanded regarding t’shuvah, and Israel will only be redeemed by t’shuvah. And the Torah has promised that ultimately Israel will repent at the end of the exile and immediately they will be redeemed. When each of the individuals who collectively constitute [the Jewish people] will engage in introspection and be spurred to wholehearted repentance, society will be transformed and we will merit redemption.”

In this psalm, King David reinforces the various lessons of t’shuvah and the manner in which we should engage in the repentance process with contrition, sincerity, and humbled hearts. Then, he concludes, will the final teaching of t’shuvah also become a manifest reality: “Do good in Your favor unto Zion, build the walls of Jerusalem.”

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.