Rabbi Yosef Blau, Author of an Orthodox Rabbis’ Letter Calling Out Israel, Responds to His Critics

NEW YORK (JTA) – For 48 years, until he moved to Israel earlier this year, Rabbi Yosef Blau was the “mashgiach ruchani” at Yeshiva University, a revered figure who served as a sort of spiritual guidance counselor to students at Modern Orthodoxy’s flagship seminary. 

In that role, he said this week in an interview, his job was to be “available to help students on issues that bother them, rather than issues that bother me.”

Earlier this month, he told the world what was bothering him, and the world took notice. Blau, 86, is the author of “A Call for Moral Clarity, Responsibility, and a Jewish Orthodox Response in the Face of the Gaza Humanitarian Crisis,” an open letter signed by 80 Orthodox rabbis. The letter forthrightly condemned Hamas, but took the Israeli government to task for its halting response to what most of the world sees as a hunger crisis in Gaza.

“Hamas’s sins and crimes do not relieve the government of Israel of its obligations to make whatever efforts are necessary to prevent mass starvation,” the letter reads. 

The letter also decried extremist voices in Israel, the hardening of sentiments about Palestinians, and the explosion of settler violence in the West Bank. But unlike the growing number of similar statements released by non-Orthodox denominations and other Jewish groups, the letter was written by and for an audience of Modern Orthodox Jews, on balance the staunchest defenders of Israel among the major Jewish movements. 

“This moment demands a different voice — one grounded in our deepest Jewish values and informed by our traumatic history of being victims of persecution,” the letter reads. “Orthodox Jewry, as some of Israel’s most devoted supporters, bears a unique moral responsibility.”

The media treated the letter as a tipping point in the internal Jewish dismay over the war in Gaza — Blau said he was “stunned” that the New York Times wrote about it. The letter also sparked a passionate, often angry debate among Blau’s fellow Orthodox Jews, especially those who tend to identify with the “religious Zionist” camp that weds religious piety with a deeply nationalist view of Israel. 

While the letter was cheered by groups like Smol Emuni US, which represents Orthodox and otherwise observant liberal Zionists, and by individual Orthodox and non-Orthodox Zionists who have been critical of the Israeli government, the critics have been vocal. They accused the author and the signers of representing a fringe within Orthodoxy, aping the criticism of NGOs and governments hostile to Israel, and providing aid, comfort and talking points to Israel’s enemies. 

This week Blau was back in his office at Y.U.’s Upper Manhattan campus, where he still has a volunteer role counseling students when he is not at his new home in Jerusalem. In a conversation with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday, he responded to his critics, explained why he wrote the letter and talked about his lifetime attachment to religious Zionism and where he thinks it has gone wrong.

Raised in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in a non-Hasidic Orthodox family, Blau attended the Yeshiva University High School for Boys when it was located in Brooklyn. He received his bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva College and his rabbinic ordination from its Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. In 1977, he was appointed Mashgiach Ruchani by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, perhaps the most important Modern Orthodox figure of his era, and Rabbi Norman Lamm, Y.U.’s longtime president. 

From 2005 to 2017, Blau served as president of the Religious Zionists of America.

The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the timing of the letter. What compelled you to write it, and what were you hoping and still hope its impact would be?

It’s been on my mind for some time. I had made aliyah about four or five months ago. I didn’t want to write things as soon as I got to Israel, and wanted to get more of a flavor of things. Someone, I’m not going to mention his name, contacted me and a bunch of rabbaim [rabbis], and he was concerned, I think accurately, that the impression was that the Orthodox community, in particular the Orthodox rabbinate, was the exception to the concern about the hunger in Gaza. He wanted to gather together the different rabbis that he knew who felt differently. I picked up the challenge and wrote up a statement. 

One criticism of the letter says that by urging Israel to “make whatever efforts are necessary to prevent mass starvation,” you were accepting the judgment of NGOs or Hamas that there was in fact starvation in Gaza and contradicting the Israeli government. What made you confident of the facts on the ground to talk about Israel’s “moral responsibility” in this regard?

Yes, you don’t trust Hamas, but Israel doesn’t allow reporters in to give an alternate view. Every bit of information that I’ve been able to ascertain, and I read different things, and I listen to reports from doctors, is that it’s a crisis. How profound is the crisis? I don’t really know, but certainly it’s a crisis, and the fact that Israel chose to fight in a manner which involved destroying 70% of the homes in Gaza, destroying all the hospitals, whether it was necessary or not, has impact on the ability of people to feed themselves. They don’t have their homes, they don’t have access to medication and to doctors. There’s no economy so objectively to say that there is hunger makes perfect sense. It’s hard to imagine that there isn’t. And in response you have all these statements coming out, and not from the Orthodox community.

Some critics also charge, even though the signatories include the chief rabbis of Denmark and Poland and a number of respected Modern Orthodox thinkers and scholars, that the signers include fringe figures and few pulpit rabbis, and as a result the letter doesn’t represent majority or mainstream views. As one critic put it, “I do not quite see their signatures on this letter as compelling or representative of a genuinely Orthodox position.” How do you respond?

Two things. Number one, it is true. Tactically, it could have been done differently, and it has a lot of people who are on the left fringe of Orthodoxy. But there are many rabbis who agree, but who can’t sign, because it’s controversial in their congregations.

But we never claimed to speak for everybody. I mean, that’s a strange criticism, right? These are the people who signed. You say that they represent only a fraction — OK, so maybe they reflect a fraction. We never said we’re speaking on behalf of everybody else. So it’s a criticism of something that was never claimed in the first place.  

The criticism that I think I’ve seen the most is this: that by joining in criticism of the Israeli government, it is giving succor, aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies, and undermining Israeli morale. What do you say to such criticism?

I’m living in Israel. There are demonstrations in Israel daily against the government, right? It is the strength of Israel that it’s a democratic country, that people have different perspectives, not a sign of weakness. There’s nothing in the letter that is more than people say in Israel all the time, and [are found in] many other letters that have already gone out. I find that one disingenuous, because this is going on anyway. 

Number two, I think it strengthens Israel, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Israel’s image in the world has suffered dramatically in this war, and I’m not talking about the open antisemites. I’m not talking about the supporters of Hamas. I’m talking about the broader Western world. I’m talking about all the studies that show Americans under a certain age are no longer sympathetic with Israel. And what I personally suspect, though I don’t say so with the same level of certainty, is that this [decline in support for Israel] is happening within the Jewish world in terms of the age gap, and beginning to happen in the Orthodox world. 

I think it’s critical that people who self-identify as Zionists say, “We are Zionists. We support the State of Israel. We’re unhappy about certain things going on in Israel now.” We think that strengthens the tie with Israel, rather than weakens it.

Let me go one step further. There’s objective reasons to believe that the center of Jewish life has shifted to Israel, not only in terms of the number of Jews, but in the nature of how Judaism is being perceived in the world. It’s affecting the future of Judaism. I look at Israel today, and I say, if I’m a young Israeli, “I’m not coming from the religious world. And I look at religious Jewry in Israel. I see them in the political process. I see the haredim not serving in the army and taking money from the government. I see the religious Zionists being the extremists in the government. So what do I think Judaism stands for — our exclusivity? I don’t see a Judaism that stands for moral values that I can identify with.”

And that’s what concerns me, perhaps more than the immediate situation. And therefore, I want to be sure that Judaism at least presents a different model, even if it’s a minority model at this point. We have to present what I think is a model of Judaism that other people can identify with. 

Your letter not only talks about the hunger crisis in Gaza, but the explosion of settler violence in the West Bank. You have previously been vocal about the situation there, and that Israel too seldom punishes the perpetrators. Did you have qualms about specifically calling out fellow religious Zionists? 

It’s coming from within the religious Zionist world. What particularly concerns me is the role of the rabbinate in the religious Zionist world. Now, when it comes to Jewish violence, there have been people who have spoken out, prominent people, but certainly it’s not the main thrust. In fact, strikingly, when I wrote a blog in the Times of Israel about the violence, I got a response from a prominent rabbi who was part of the Chief Rabbinate attacking me by name.

He was among the critics who said that the violent settlers are a tiny minority of the movement as a whole, and that the letter tarred the Orthodox majority with the radical actions of a few. How deep do you think this radicalism goes within the religious Zionist mainstream? 

It’s coming from an extreme element. There’s no doubt it’s not coming from all the settlers. However, it’s a growing phenomenon, and it’s moved from revenge for specific Palestinian terrorist attacks to where the initiative comes from groups working to force Palestinians to run away, to leave their villages. And it’s not a government policy, it’s not approved by the government, but the elements in the government that are most sympathetic to it, again, come from religious Zionism. It’s [Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [Bezalel] Smotrich that are the elements that look the other way. [Ben-Gvir is the minister of national security from the far-right nationalist Jewish Power party, and Smotrich, the finance minister, heads a party called Religious Zionists; both are considered members of the religious Zionist camp.]

So I felt it was important to speak up on that as well, and that’s why the two elements got incorporated in the statement.

Ben-Gvir represents a religious Zionism that is very different from the one that I believe in. They’ve captured the religious Zionist world, at least politically, and it concerns me greatly that their mentality has been the extreme in the government.

How so?

One is in terms of how we respond to the noncombatant population in Gaza. To me, the moral perspective is that you do minimal damage to noncombatants. And if there is a world standard, we do better than the world standard. That’s what Israel stands for. And therefore, when there’s a conflict about providing humanitarian aid, and if there’s a question about, well, how much starvation is going on, we do better than simply deny it.

They’ve also explicitly said that Palestinians should starve because they are all Hamas. [In July, Ben-Gvir denied a real hunger crisis in Gaza and posted on X, “I support starving Hamas in Gaza.”]

So this, to me, is a battle that has to be fought, even if I’m going to lose, it has to be fought. But we have to be careful here. I am talking about officials. There are religious Zionists who are not in the Knesset and span the political spectrum.

Still, you see a movement that as a whole has shifted well to the right, correct?

Very much it shifted. It goes back to right after the Six-Day War, to after the Yom Kippur War, and the emergence of Gush Emunim [the vanguard of the religious settlement movement]. It’s a religious Zionism based on an understanding of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook [the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of pre-state Palestine] as interpreted by his son [Zvi Yehuda Kook, the dean of the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva], with a very strong nationalistic motif, with the universalism of the original Rav Kook played down, and very messianic.

Certainly the religious Zionists in America respected Rav Kook, but we come from a different mentality, a totally different mentality, a much less mystical, much more rationalistic Judaism. I spent many years as a student of Rabbi [Joseph] Soloveitchik, and while I don’t like quoting anyone who is no longer alive and can’t contradict you, his mentality was not seeing Israel in messianic terms, but in very practical terms, and being very concerned about what it means to be the power and the dangers of power to Jewish life. 

When I was president of the RZA, I knew I was to the left of most of the other people in the organization that I was president of. I am old enough to remember and have known Meir Kahane [founder of the Jewish Defense League]. He was my age. I am very familiar with the mentality of Meir Kahane, and always we rejected it. It was rejected as extreme. 

Why do you think religious Zionism made that rightward lurch?

The Bible says, in the Messianic period, we’re going to return to the full territory of Israel, and therefore it’s very territorial. That’s the key to it. If you’re messianic, then you’re not supposed to have the Arabs there.

In contrast, you have the writings of Rabbi Herzog [Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandate of Palestine and of Israel after its creation in 1948]. And he writes from a halachic [Jewish legal] perspective why we have to allow full minority rights — which, by the way, is much easier with Muslims than with Christians, from a halachic perspective, because the Muslims are monotheists, and traditional Christianity has the Trinity. We have to accept that as reality. We have to find a way of living with the Palestinians. The notion of expelling them is horrendous. It shouldn’t even be in our vocabulary — that’s my feeling. I can’t explain why other people have gone in different directions.

I want to ask about your role as mashgiach ruchani at Yeshiva University, which we usually translate as “spiritual adviser.” How do you define that role? 

I interpret the job as someone who is available to help students on issues that bother them, rather than issues that bother me. Primarily they have religious, theological, personal issues on their mind, and they want to talk about them. I tried to make myself available to them without trying to force ideas upon them. I do not talk politics, here or in Israel. 

To me, a meaningful life means a life with values. We talk to our students about how they behave in the workplace, for example, because what they do reflects on Judaism, and I feel very strongly about that. I want to work with the students to help them with this. My particular approach is not to lecture them. This is unusual for me, to write statements.

What has been most surprising to you about the response to the letter? Has anything in particular disappointed you?

What has surprised me has been the extent of media interest. I was stunned by the New York Times article. I was called to be on a podcast with Ha’aretz. Someone from Reshet Bet [a popular Israeli radio channel] called me this morning to respond. I agreed to speak Saturday night on a radio broadcast [“Talkline” with Zev Brenner] where I know the audience is going to be hostile. I’m open to this dialogue. 

I’ve had other people say, as we discussed, that I made a tactical mistake by being associated with people on the fringe of Orthodoxy, which is probably correct tactically. 

Otherwise, the personal comments I’ve gotten have been essentially positive. My wife had one of our neighbors in Yerushalayim in the apartment on Friday, just after I left for the United States and my wife wasn’t able to go with me because of some illness in the family. The neighbor came downstairs to give her flowers because she’s so excited about what I wrote.

Is there anything you wanted to add that we haven’t touched on? 

You know, there are two advantages of being my age. One, if you’re retired, no one can fire you.

And secondly, hopefully I’ve been around long enough that people know who I am, so they take what I say in context of what they know about me. If I was 25 years old and I made a statement, there would be no context, right? When you’re 86 and you make a statement, there is a context.