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For several months, a grave accusation has circulated with mechanical regularity: Israel is allegedly starving Gaza’s civilian population.

During the last few weeks, I have been receiving many “forwards” on a family chat. Some of the items represent passionate cases for the need to support Torah learning over everything else. “Without learning in the yeshivas and Batei Midrashim we will lose the benevolence of G-d.” Equally passionate are the arguments advocating service to our country. Reservists (miluimnikim) and their families are pulled away from their lives for hundreds of days. Fighting soldiers face bullets, rockets, and IEDs with no relief in sight. “Israel cannot continue unless the burden is shared.”

As long as there have been wars, official images of heroism stood in contrast to depictions of suffering. In many cases, the latter had a tremendous impact in shaping public opinion. Who can forget Eddie Adams’ 1968 photo of a South Vietnamese police captain executing a Vietcong agent in broad daylight on a street in Saigon? Likewise, Nick Ut’s 1972 photo of a Vietnamese girl fleeing from a napalm bombing in which the South Vietnamese air force accidentally bombed a village. Both photographers received the Pulitzer Prize for these images, which contributed to the rising public opposition to the American role in that war.

There has been a persistent lie amongst the Jew-hating population that their loathing of the Jewish nation is limited only to the Jewish state and not the Jewish people. In other words, they are anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. This has always been a ridiculous notion, proven false time and time again, yet with the ongoing war in Gaza and the lies spread about the state of the civilian population there, the mask of anti-Zionism is harder to keep on. The surge in antisemitic incidents, particularly in the past two weeks, underscores how anti-Zionist rhetoric fuels real-world violence and discrimination against Jews, blurring any supposed boundary between the two.

The Jewish people have always struggled with our propensity to disagree. In the diaspora, this propensity is recorded in the Talmud, which presents endless arguments concerning the “right way to live following Torah values.” As a stateless people for nearly 2,000 years, our ability to debate, analyze, and reason served us and our religion by keeping the Torah alive. Constant reevaluation and, in some cases, new insights (chidushim) kept Judaism alive and relevant to every generation. The fact that in 2025 observant Jews quote the Rambam, the Ramban, Rashi, the Vilna Gaon, and Rav Soloveitchik — commentators who lived one to two millennia after the revelation at Mount Sinai — attests to the vitality and continuing evolution of the Jewish people and its religion.

Compared to the familiar t’hilim, Shema, and Amidah of daily prayers, it can be difficult to keep up with selichos and kinos, which are read only on fasting days, often quickly and without announcing the page. To feel the spirit of Tishah b’Av, I usually take a history book to shul that relates to the first Jewish uprising against the Romans that resulted in the destruction of Yerushalayim and centuries of exile for most Jews.