“I hope that your job is eliminated.” 

Ordinarily, that’s not something you expect to hear when meeting someone for the first time. I hear it a few times a week. 

I don’t take it personally. As the Executive Director of IDF Widows and Orphans USA, I understand exactly what people mean. Like them, I long for an Israel in which no man or woman receives that knock on the door, and no child grows up without a parent. 

I too wish we could shutter our Otzma (“strength”) camps, where hundreds of children gather with the only people who truly understand their loss. I wish there were no need for our midwife program supporting women who were pregnant when their husbands were killed, ensuring they do not face birth and early motherhood alone. I wish we did not need to provide scholarships, job training, mentorship, and psychological care. 

And yet, even if the impossible were to happen, if wars were to cease and swords were beaten into plowshares, this work would not end. Because loss does now end when the war does. 

Since October 7, more than 350 widows and widowers and over 800 children have joined this community, each one entering it in a single, irreversible moment. They stand alongside thousands whose loss stretches back to Israel’s earliest days. Their lives are forever altered in a single moment, but our responsibility to them does not fade with time. 

Because in Jewish life, from the very beginning, care for widows and orphans is not an act of charity. It is a core obligation, central to what it means to be a Jewish society. 

In Deuteronomy, we are reminded that God Himself “upholds the cause of the orphan and the widow.” Again and again, the Torah returns to this commandment, placing the widow and the orphan at the center of our moral consciousness. Because how we treat them reveals who we are. A society that protects its most vulnerable is not simply compassionate. It is accountable.

And for those of us who have chosen to live outside of Israel, who will never wear an IDF uniform, that responsibility is not abstract. It is immediate. 

We are not bystanders to Israel’s story. The soldiers who fall do not defend only a distant country. They defend a people, a history, and a future that belongs to all of us. Their families carry the cost of that defense in ways that are intimate, permanent, and deeply personal. But the obligation that emerges from that loss does not belong to them alone. 

Support for Israel’s policies has never been monolithic in the Jewish community. Nor should it be. The soldiers who fell held a wide range of views about Israel’s future, its leadership, and its decisions. 

From afar, it is easy to critique, to focus on what Israel does wrong, to wish its messaging were better, its politics more coherent, its leaders more compelling. 

But if we are spared the knock on the door, then we are all the more responsible for those who are not. 

That is the obligation we carry. 

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)