A Wisdom of the Heart for a Time of War

I read a Facebook post recently saying that you could not engineer a war more carefully calibrated to deepen the divide between Israeli and American Jews. The more Americans pay for this war, it said – in lives, in dollars – the more that divide will grow. One commenter said he hopes the writer is right. Another said he hopes he is wrong.

Late last summer I returned to Israel after four years in northern California. During the 12-day war in June, I was safe in my Berkeley home. This time around, I run four floors down to the bomb shelter from my Jerusalem apartment every time a siren sounds, in what has become one long day divided by alerts and booms. The war structures my day, interrupts my children’s routine, our sleep, our breathing.

There is a real chasm between American and Israeli Jews’ physical experience of this war, and often also their interpretation of it. Many American Jews look at the war and ask whether it is legal, whether its leaders are acting out of necessity or political interest, whether it will entangle the United States in another disastrous Middle East war. They carry the memory of Iraq. They fear for American democracy, already strained and brittle, and worry that this war will deepen those fractures still further. From the other side of the ocean, Israelis overwhelmingly see the war as self-defense and an inevitable continuation of the existential war against Iran. Many see it as necessary not only for Israel’s survival but also as part of a broader battle against the threat to the West. These are not small differences. They are differences in fear, responsibility and moral and political judgment.

I am not trying here to resolve those arguments. I want instead to ask what kind of Jewish posture might allow us to live with them without further tearing the fabric between us. For that, we need what the Torah calls chokhmat lev: wisdom of the heart.

For the past few weeks we have been reading the Torah portions about the construction of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, the portable house of God in the wilderness. These chapters are full of details: materials, measurements, methods. But they also tell us something about the kind of people fit to build a sacred space. Wisdom appears in the story 11 times. Seven of those times, it is not wisdom alone, but wisdom of the heart. Moses does not simply call for the skilled to step forward, but for “all among you who are wise-hearted” to come and build what God has commanded.

That phrase matters. The mind is usually associated with knowledge, the heart with emotion. But wisdom of the heart suggests that true discernment is not only technical or intellectual. It is the ability to understand what another person is carrying – their fear, vulnerability and burden – and to respond without dismissing them. It is neither agreement nor compliance. It is the capacity to let another person’s reality register, even when one remains unconvinced by their conclusions.

That is what we as a People need now. American Jews who are troubled by this war are not naïve, disloyal or blind to danger. Many are trying to think seriously about law, power, consequence and responsibility in a country where this war is not broadly supported. Israeli Jews who overwhelmingly support the war are not callous or intoxicated by power. Many are living inside a reality of threat, vulnerability and memory that makes this war feel not optional but necessary.

The post I read names a real danger. This war could intensify an already strained relationship between Israeli and American Jews. But that outcome is not inevitable. We do not have to flatten the differences between us, and we may not come to the same judgments about this war — about its legality, its necessity, or its costs. But only if we have enough wisdom of the heart to see one another clearly can we live with those differences without losing something essential. The people chosen to build the tabernacle were not only skilled, but wise-hearted. They could bring together precision and sensitivity, craft and human understanding, to make a space where God could dwell. If we want to preserve any shared Jewish house across this divide, we need that wisdom now.

Dr. Masua Sagiv is a senior faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute and a senior fellow at the Helen Diller Institute, U.C. Berkeley.