JTA — For 48 years, until he moved to Israel earlier this year, Rabbi Yosef Blau was the “mashgiach ruchani” at Yeshiva University, a revered figure who served as a sort of spiritual guidance counselor to students at Modern Orthodoxy’s flagship seminary.

In that role, he said this week in an interview, his job was to be “available to help students on issues that bother them, rather than issues that bother me.”

Last week, he told the world what was bothering him, and the world took notice. Blau, 86, is the author of “A Call for Moral Clarity, Responsibility, and a Jewish Orthodox Response in the Face of the Gaza Humanitarian Crisis,” an open letter signed by 80 Orthodox rabbis. The letter forthrightly condemned Hamas, but took the Israeli government to task for its halting response to what most of the world sees as a hunger crisis in Gaza.

“Hamas’s sins and crimes do not relieve the government of Israel of its obligations to make whatever efforts are necessary to prevent mass starvation,” the letter reads.

The letter also decried extremist voices in Israel, the hardening of sentiments about Palestinians, and the explosion of settler violence in the West Bank. But unlike the growing number of similar statements released by non-Orthodox denominations and other Jewish groups, the letter was written by and for an audience of Modern Orthodox Jews, on balance the staunchest defenders of Israel among the major Jewish movements.

“This moment demands a different voice — one grounded in our deepest Jewish values and informed by our traumatic history of being victims of persecution,” the letter reads. “Orthodox Jewry, as some of Israel’s most devoted supporters, bears a unique moral responsibility.”

The media treated the letter as a tipping point in the internal Jewish dismay over the war in Gaza — Blau said he was “stunned” that The New York Times wrote about it. The letter also sparked a passionate, often angry debate among Blau’s fellow Orthodox Jews, especially those who tend to identify with the “religious Zionist” camp that weds religious piety with a deeply nationalist view of Israel.

While the letter was cheered by groups like Smol Emuni US, which represents Orthodox and otherwise observant liberal Zionists, and by individual Orthodox and non-Orthodox Zionists who have been critical of the Israeli government, the critics have been vocal. They accused the author and the signers of representing a fringe within Orthodoxy, aping the criticism of NGOs and governments hostile to Israel, and providing aid, comfort and talking points to Israel’s enemies.

This week Blau was back in his office at Yeshiva University’s Upper Manhattan campus, where he still has a volunteer role counseling students when he is not at his new home in Jerusalem. In a recent conversation with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he responded to his critics, explained why he wrote the letter and talked about his lifetime attachment to religious Zionism and where he thinks the movement has gone wrong.

Raised in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in a non-Hasidic Orthodox family, Blau attended the Yeshiva University High School for Boys when it was located in Brooklyn. He received his bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva College and his rabbinic ordination from its Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. In 1977, he was appointed mashgiach ruchani by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, perhaps the most important Modern Orthodox figure of his era, and Rabbi Norman Lamm, Yeshiva University’s longtime president.

From 2005 to 2017, Blau served as president of the Religious Zionists of America.

The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the timing of the letter. What compelled you to write it, and what were you hoping and still hope its impact would be?

It’s been on my mind for some time. I had [moved to Israel] about four or five months ago. I didn’t want to write things as soon as I got to Israel, and wanted to get more of a flavor of things. Someone, I’m not going to mention his name, contacted me and a bunch of rabbaim [rabbis], and he was concerned, I think accurately, that the impression was that the Orthodox community, in particular the........

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