(Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)On Thursday, March 12, a man named Ayman Mohamad Ghazali waited for two hours in the parking lot of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. He had a rifle. He had commercial-grade fireworks. He had jugs of what investigators believe was gasoline. Inside the building were more than 140 people, including preschoolers as young as two.

He drove his truck through the wall of the synagogue, fired through his windshield, and was stopped only because armed security officers—people whose necessity Ghazali’s act should make self-evident—neutralized him before he could reach the children.

Four days later, Peter Beinart posted a video essay on his Substack. The title: “Thoughts on the Michigan Synagogue Attack.” What followed was not, in any meaningful sense, thoughts about the attack. It was a lecture directed at the victims about the sign on their lawn.

I want to take Beinart’s argument seriously, not because it deserves it, but because he has made a career of providing sophisticated-sounding permission slips for people who wish to abandon the Jewish people while still feeling righteous about it. He is taken seriously in certain circles—circles that, not coincidentally, have very little skin in the game when it comes to Jewish safety. And the argument he makes here is not merely wrong. It is spiritually dangerous in a way that requires a rabbi’s response. It requires Torah—the real thing, not Beinart’s bowdlerized version of it.

Beinart’s essay has a simple architecture. He begins by condemning the attack—no one, he says, should target Jews for what Israel does. This is his kavod, his throat-clearing nod toward decency, his ticket that purchases the right to say everything that comes next. He spends roughly ninety seconds on it. Ninety seconds for the children. Then he gets to the real business.

The word he uses is “and.” Not “but”—he is careful about this—and. The rhetorical move is transparent: he wants to maintain the grammatical fiction that what follows is not a qualification of his condemnation, even though it plainly is.

What follows is this: synagogues should remove their “We Stand with Israel” signs because those signs make congregants less safe and because they are immoral. He then compares Israel’s conduct unfavorably to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, proposes that supporting Israel is analogous to supporting Putin, and concludes by suggesting that synagogues replace their signs with the words “This Is a House of Torah”—by which he means a Torah purified of its attachment to the Jewish state.

Let me take each of these claims in turn.

The most repugnant element of Beinart’s essay is the safety argument, and it reveals something essential about the man.

A man drove a truck loaded with accelerants into a building full of Jewish children. He did so because he was a Jew-hater—not an “anti-Zionist,” not a critic of Israeli policy, but a person who decided that the appropriate response to a war between nation-states was to murder toddlers at a synagogue in suburban Detroit. The rubble had not yet been cleared. The parents had barely stopped shaking. And Peter Beinart, from whatever safe room he records his Substack videos in, looked at this scene and said: take down your sign.

This is victim-blaming dressed in the language of pastoral concern. And Beinart has no pastoral standing. He is not these people’s rabbi. He is not their neighbor. He is a commentator who has made a brand out of treating Jewish communal life as a problem to be solved by distancing oneself from it.

Would Beinart tell a woman who was assaulted that her clothing contributed to the attack? Would he tell a Black church firebombed in Mississippi that it should have been less vocal about civil rights? The logic is identical: you made yourself a target, so you bear some responsibility for what happened to you. It is a moral obscenity.

Moreover, it is factually absurd. Ghazali did not attack Temple Israel because of a lawn sign. He attacked Temple Israel because it was a synagogue—because the word “Israel” was in its name, because Jews were inside. The FBI has called this a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community. Not against the “We Stand with Israel” community. Against the Jewish community.

Does Beinart believe that a sign reading “This Is a House of Torah” would have stopped this man? Does he believe that a synagogue in Omaha, or Brooklyn, or Los Angeles, with no sign at all, is safe from someone who has decided that Jews are legitimate targets? If so, he is not merely naive. He is offering false comfort that could get people killed.

The premise of Beinart’s safety argument is that Jewish visibility provokes violence, and that the rational response to provocation is concealment. This is not a new idea. It is the oldest idea in the diaspora. It is the logic of the shtadlan: keep quiet, don’t attract attention, maybe they will leave us alone. Two thousand years of Jewish history testify to the futility—and the cowardice—of this strategy. But it is new to hear it delivered in the register of moral courage by a man who seems to believe he is being brave.

Beinart’s moral case rests on an analogy: if it would be wrong for Russian Orthodox churches to display “We Stand with Russia” signs during the invasion of Ukraine, then surely it is wrong for synagogues to display “We Stand with Israel” signs now. And he goes further: Israel’s actions, he claims, are worse than Russia’s.

This is the kind of argument that sounds clever in a seminar room and disintegrates on contact with reality. It is dishonest at every level.

First: Russia launched an unprovoked war of territorial conquest against a sovereign neighbor. Israel is engaged in a multi-front conflict that began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas—a genocidal organization whose charter calls for the murder of Jews worldwide—carried out the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Whatever one thinks of Israel’s prosecution of the war, to erase the distinction between an unprovoked imperial invasion and a military response to a mass atrocity is not moral reasoning. It is propaganda.

Second: Beinart’s population-percentage arithmetic—more Gazans killed per capita than Ukrainians—is a rhetorical device designed to obscure a fundamental moral difference. Russia deliberately targets Ukrainian civilian infrastructure as a strategy of terror. Israel, whatever its failures and whatever civilian suffering has resulted, operates in an environment in which Hamas embeds its military apparatus inside hospitals, schools, and mosques, and uses its own civilian population as a shield. To compare these two situations as though they are morally equivalent—let alone to declare Israel worse—requires ignoring everything we know about how Hamas fights.

Third, and most importantly: to stand with Israel is not to stand with every action taken by any Israeli government. Beinart knows this. He is clever enough to understand the difference between solidarity with a people and endorsement of a policy. When American Jews say “We Stand with Israel,” they are not issuing a blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu. They are expressing an existential bond with the only Jewish state on earth—a state that exists because the world proved, within living memory, that Jews cannot rely on the goodwill of others for their survival.

Beinart collapses this distinction deliberately, because his entire intellectual project depends on it. If “We Stand with Israel” can be reduced to “We Endorse Everything Israel Does,” then it can be made to seem monstrous. But that is not what the phrase means, and he knows it. The sleight of hand is not subtle. It is just persistent.

Beinart concludes with what he considers his most radical proposal: replace “We Stand with Israel” with “This Is a House of Torah.” He frames this as a return to authentic Judaism, a corrective to what he calls the “idolatry” of the state.

It is here that Beinart’s argument becomes not merely wrong but theologically offensive—and where his lack of rabbinic training shows most clearly.

I am a rabbi. I have spent my career teaching Torah. I have sat with families in grief and in joy, in the pews and at the graveside, in the glow of Shabbat candles and in the fluorescent light of hospital rooms. I say this not to pull rank but to establish something Beinart cannot claim: I know what Torah does inside a living community. He knows what it looks like from the outside, as material for op-eds.

And here is what I can tell him: there is no version of Torah that severs the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. The covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12 and 15, the promise reiterated to Isaac and Jacob, the entire narrative arc of the Torah from slavery to Sinai to the threshold of Eretz Yisrael—this is not a footnote to Jewish theology. It is the spine.

When Beinart says that Israel has “eclipsed Torah,” he is constructing a false binary. Torah contains Israel. The relationship between Am Yisrael and Eretz Yisrael is not a modern political innovation grafted onto an otherwise universalist tradition. It is the tradition. The Mishnah and Talmud are saturated with the longing for Zion. We have prayed toward Jerusalem for two millennia. We break a glass at every wedding. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.”

Beinart wants “Torah” without the parts of Torah that inconvenience his politics. He wants a Judaism that is essentially a progressive ethical framework—universal, cosmopolitan, detached from the particular claims of Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty. This is not Torah. It is an ideology wearing a tallit. It is Christianity without Christ—all universal love, no particular covenant. Beinart may not realize this is what he is proposing. But that is what it is.

The sign “This Is a House of Torah,” as Beinart imagines it, would not be a statement of religious seriousness. It would be a statement of surrender—a declaration that this synagogue has decided to define its Judaism in opposition to the Jewish state, which is to say, in terms that the attacker himself might approve of.

There is one thing conspicuously absent from Beinart’s essay, and it is the thing that tells you everything: he has almost nothing to say about the people who actually want to kill us.

He has plenty to say about Israel. Plenty about synagogue lawn signs. Plenty about what he considers Jewish idolatry. He can lecture at length about the moral failures of the Jewish community. But when it comes to the ideology that sent Ghazali into that building—the eliminationist antisemitism that is not a fringe position but a mainstream commitment of the organizations Israel is fighting—Beinart goes quiet. He does not linger on the fact that this man had Hezbollah contacts in his phone. He does not explore Hamas’s founding document, which calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews. He does not wrestle with the genocidal rhetoric that has animated Israel’s enemies for decades.

Why not? Because engaging with these facts would complicate his narrative. It would force him to admit that the people trying to kill Jewish children in Michigan are animated by something older and deeper than opposition to Israeli settlements. And that admission would collapse the entire scaffolding of his argument.

Instead, Beinart suggests that the synagogue invite “someone from Gaza” to speak before deciding whether to keep its sign. This is not moral seriousness. This is performance art for the comments section of The New York Times. It is the recommendation of a man who has turned the Jewish condition into content—something to be theorized about from a tenured perch, not something that arrives with a rifle through your front wall while your two-year-old is in the next room.

Torah demands that we pursue justice. It demands that we see the image of God in every human being. It demands that we do not oppress the stranger. These are real commandments, and they bind us.

But Torah also demands that we choose life. U’vacharta ba’chayyim—Deuteronomy 30:19. It demands that we protect our children. It demands that we not participate in our own destruction. The Talmud teaches, in Sanhedrin 72a: Ha’ba l’horgekha, hashkem l’horgo—if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first. This is not a marginal teaching. It is a foundational principle of Jewish law.

A synagogue that says “We Stand with Israel” is not committing idolatry. It is fulfilling the covenantal obligation to stand with its people in a time of existential danger. A rabbi who tells his congregation to take that sign down—four days after a man tried to slaughter their children—is not speaking Torah. He is speaking the language of a Judaism that has lost its nerve.

Peter Beinart has the right to his opinions. What he does not have is the standing to instruct synagogues on what Torah demands while ignoring the Torah’s most basic teachings about the preservation of Jewish life. He does not have the standing to lecture grieving communities about signage while the rubble is still being cleared and the children are still having nightmares. He has built a career out of telling non-Jews what they want to hear about Jews. That is not prophecy. That is not courage. That is a business model.

The parents at Temple Israel did not need Peter Beinart’s thoughts. They needed the armed security guards who saved their children’s lives—the same guards whose existence Beinart’s worldview renders inexplicable.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)