by Sarah Rosen for Times of Israel
Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is an Israeli who founded the progressive Jewish community Lab/Shul. He spoke at a Simhat Torah gathering in Brooklyn on Saturday night, speaking to the extreme grief and pain he had for missing family members. He said he was pained by the loss of innocent civilian life, both Israeli and Palestinian.
In a phone interview, he said he’d been attacked online by “people [who] refuse to see the nuance.”
On the one side are those who demand standing “only with Palestine right now, [which is] equating Hamas with all the Palestinians, which is just ignorance and awful,” said Lau-Lavie. On the other side are those who “get mad at me for saying I am heartbroken for the innocent Palestinian lives.” He also spoke to the hurt of people not checking in to see if his family and friends were safe and to see how he was doing — a feeling shared by others interviewed.
“This brings up a lot of triggers of trauma and neglect and denial of the depth of the situation. I’m not one to live with fear. And as a son and grandson of Holocaust survivors and victims, and as an Israeli in America, I’m not walking around worried about antisemitism,” Lau-Lavie said.
But now he had concerns. “The fragility is real,” he said.
