TheJewishStar.com
Honest Reporting • Torah-True
June 20-26, 2025
24 Sivan 5785 Sh’lach Vol. 24, No. 20 Reach the Star: Editor@TheJewishStar.com 516-622-7461 x291
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NYC IRAN No place for Jews? No place for nukes Cuomo: Not a first choice, but the only choice. P. 2
Israel’s Iranian payback is long overdue. P. 3
As bombs fall, it’s OK to ask: Where is G-d? SHMULEY BOTEACH
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Missiles fired from Iran over Jerusalem on June 14.
Menahem Kahana, AFP via Getty Images via JNS
n Oct 7, 2023, the Jewish state endured the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Babies beheaded. Grandmothers burned alive. Young women raped next to the corpses of their murdered friends. And now, just months later, thousands of Iranian missiles are blowing Jewish and Arab Israelis to smithereens. Where is the world’s outrage? But more hauntingly — for believers like myself — where is G-d? It’s a question many religious leaders are too afraid to ask. But
Judaism is not a religion of silence. Ours is not a faith of resignation. We do not submit to suffering — we challenge it. In the Jewish tradition, it is not only permitted to question G-d in times of moral catastrophe — it is a mitzvah. Because the opposite of faith is not doubt — it is indifference. And the Jewish people, even in our darkest moments, have never been indifferent to G-d’s silence. We have challenged it. Our very name — Yisrael (Israel) — means one who wrestles with G-d. Not worships blindly. Not accepts passively. But wrestles. When Abraham stood before G-d and heard that Sodom would be destroyed, he did not fall to his knees in obedience. He stood tall and asked: “Shall the Judge of all the
earth not do justice?” When Moses descended Mount Sinai and saw the Golden Calf, he did not excuse G-d’s wrath — he smashed the Tablets, demanded mercy, and told G-d He would need to forgive the people or blot him out from the Book of Life. This is our spiritual inheritance: not piety in the face of evil, but protest. And today, in the wake of Oct. 7 and in the shadow of Iranian rockets, we must summon that protest once more. e must ask the Almighty: How can You allow such horrors to befall Your people? We rebuilt the land You gave us, we revived Your Torah, we made the deserts bloom, we returned to Zion not with swords but with song — See As bombs fall on page 27
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