How Will We Respond to These Murders?

My heart filled with anguish and anger; I could not sleep all night. The cold-blooded murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky late Wednesday were just too much to bear. Yaron, 30, had just bought an engagement ring and planned to propose to Sarah, 26, on a trip back home to Israel.

And then they were murdered, just because they were Israelis. It didn’t matter that they were walking side by side, a couple very much in love. It didn’t matter that they were both idealists, firmly committed to bridging the gaps between Arabs and Israelis. It didn’t matter that they were in Washington, DC and nowhere near Gaza.

The only thing that mattered was that they were Israeli, citizens of the Jewish State.

These murders were a shock, but they were not shocking. Violence has been in the air for a long time. Luigi Mangione murdered a healthcare executive on a New York City sidewalk; and for that politically correct crime, he has become a celebrity. In this era of great polarization, politics has replaced ethics and religion. Whether what you do is right or wrong is no longer relevant; all that matters now is if it favors the right or the left.

So we have arrived at the point where one’s personal views on public policy are reason enough to commit murder. Politics has become an all-encompassing passion; advocates are blind to their own subjectivity. In a short personal aside in his Halakhic Man, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik shares his view that the philosophy of ethical autonomy, that each person can determine their moral obligations on their own, has brought “chaos and disorder” to the world.

Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote that in 1944. But the same is true of 2025, when each political faction remakes what were once universal ethical norms in its own image.

And, as usual, the Jews are the first to suffer. Joshua Trachtenberg, in his book The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism, points out that after the Crusades, a particularly noxious form of antisemitism arose in which Jews were associated with the devil. This later strikes deep roots in the Western tradition. In The Merchant of Venice, one of the characters plainly states: “Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnate.” Both the elite and the masses thought it was normal to believe that Jews murdered Christian children to take their blood to make Matzah, and, in their hatred of Christians, poisoned wells and caused plagues.

A similar demonization is taking place today. On college campuses, Israel is scapegoated for all of the ills of the Western world. Lies about her are front-page news in major media outlets, only to be quietly retracted days later. And to add insult to injury, Holocaust inversion is a staple of pro-Hamas propaganda, turning the language invented to describe the murder of six million Jews against their descendants. Now, a war against Hamas is proclaimed a genocide, even though the population of Gaza has grown during the war. This nauseating picture of Israel and the Jews has corrupted the minds of America’s best and brightest.

Tragically, this demonization has claimed the lives of Sarah and Yaron. There’s a straight line from the encampments to these murders. There’s a straight line from justifying the harassment and assaults of Jews to this attack. There’s a straight line from appeasing Hamas supporters to Hamas-style violence on our streets.

Elias Rodriguez was university educated, an English major who learned well the language of highbrow hatred. Before he murdered Sara and Yaron, Rodriguez penned a manifesto, in which he wrote: “Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity.”

For Rodriguez and his ilk, Israelis aren’t human beings. Sadly, that’s nothing new. Rodriguez would have fit in well with the medieval mobs that believed blood libels and murdered Jews.

Now, we have to confront antisemitism once again. Just this past Sunday, I walked down Fifth Avenue with an Israeli flag on my back. It is a sobering thought to think that its blue and white Magen David is a target for self-righteous haters who want to save the world by murdering people like me.

Since the murders, I have had several conversations about them, conversations clouded over with worry, fury, and sorrow. Our synagogue is ramping up its security once again, making sure that our members are absolutely safe; and once again, the NYPD will increase patrols around Jewish institutions.  As usual, we will press our elected officials to do more, and hopefully they will. We will demand that elite universities finally take anti-Zionist antisemitism seriously; but one has to be skeptical. The same day that these murders occured, a damning report was published in The Free Press about how Harvard did its best at every turn to ignore campus antisemitism.

Most importantly, we will bounce back. Wednesday night, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, said, “We are a resilient people.”  Indeed we are. And our response to these murders will be as it always has been: with a determination to continue our mission.

At the opening of Hebrew University in 1925, the renowned writer Chaim Nachman Bialik gave a speech. In it, he spoke about how Jews, in the most difficult of times, found inner strength in their spiritual heritage.  In it, he quoted a Midrash on Parshat Bechukotai:

It is impossible to avoid mentioning at this moment a saying from our sages, one that, in my opinion, is unmatched in its bitterness and sorrow. That Talmudic sage, upon reaching the verse ‘Yet even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them nor abhor them…’ said bitterly: ‘I will not reject them nor abhor them? What, then, is left to Israel in exile that has not been rejected or abhorred? Have not all the good gifts that were given to them been taken away? What remains to them?’ 

His answer: ‘The Torah scroll”…

The verse states that God did not abandon the Jews in exile. The Midrash bitterly wonders what that means, considering all of the persecution and suffering Jews had endured; finally, the Midrash points to the Torah scroll. The Torah was a divine lifeline, and all the Jews needed to survive.

Bialik describes how throughout history, Jews were sharpening their minds while others sharpened their swords; how the Jewish love for the illumination of the Torah took precedence over everything else. This is how the Jews survived the bitterest moments of exile.

We are not in exile anymore, but there still is too much heartbreak. We have to wonder once again: How will we respond to these murders? The answer is: No differently than our ancestors. We will respond with defiance and determination, courage and compassion. But above all, we will respond by not wavering from our mission. We will not let go of Sara and Yaron’s idealism; and at the same time, we will not back down from our love for Zion.

And no matter what, we will continue to declare: “Am Yisrael Chai.”

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York.