As innocent people die in war, we wonder this: How can humans be so cruel to each other?

I appreciate a challenging conversation about God. Truly, I like it when folks like to debate or even argue about the God we know through study in the Torah and the Bible.

Recently, I had such a conversation with a man I respect who reminded me of the story of Nadav and Abihu, two of the four sons of Aaron, the brother of Moses. In Leviticus 10, God explains to Aaron, the chief priest of the new Israelite faith, that when you offer sacrificial offerings, you do it by God’s way and from God’s instructions.

These two lads decided in one fateful evening to disobey God and offered Esh Zara, or strange fire, not according to divine protocol. Consequently God, probably in a moment of fury, sent down a bolt of lighting and killed the two sons. The Torah says this about Aaron, upon hearing the news of his two sons’ deaths: “And Aaron was silent.”

My friend exclaimed, ‘How could God do this? How could God suddenly enact this punishment? Wasn’t this punishment totally disproportionate to the transgression which might just have been an innocent error or an unintentional mistake that these careless young men committed? What kind of God is that, Rabbi?”

We discussed several other incidents in the Torah when God might have overreacted and brought on a punishment out of proportion to the transgression. We both acknowledged that there were several incidents when one could argue that catastrophes in the Bible which God brought against humanity might be excessive.

These are eternal questions that have consumed biblical commentators from Judaism and Christianity over the centuries as well. Scholars and laity alike ask the questions, but the answers never seem to be convincing enough for all to agree on. I don’t believe that is a bad thing. I believe that God likes when we challenge divine authority and wisdom when we are trying to understand what is behind God’s actions. It is a healthy dialectic between us and God.

I must confess that I like the idea of God wrestling in theological terms. Yet, what mystifies me more than what God does to people or to humanity as a whole is what humankind does to itself.

I wrestle in my mind with why Cain murdered his brother Abel. How could a generation of people build a Tower of Babel believing that they could climb up to God and believe themselves to be divine? These stories of violence or lapses of faith and common sense make me scratch my head. How can humans be so cruel to each other?

This leads me to the subject of war, because it is also a mystifying subject. The Torah and the entire Bible contain plenty of stories of conflict and death. Today, we refer to wars that define our lives and our generations. We see heroism and honor. We see defeat, agony, pain and suffering. We call upon God to be on our side. Is God on our side or on all sides?

When we were speaking about conflicts in war and the innocents who die, I listened to my friend carefully. He is a man who immigrated to America from Russia over 40 years ago. He has seen war from a completely different perspective than in America.

I asked him about the situation for Israel in Gaza and the collateral damage in Gaza as well as the deaths of innocents in Israel during Hamas’ incursion into Israel on Oct. 7. I said, “Do you feel bad about the deaths of so many innocent people, especially the larger numbers in Gaza?”

He answered, “Yes I do but, Rabbi, it is war.”

Maybe it was the way his voice pierced my soul. I felt like Aaron in the story of hearing of the deaths of Nadav and Abihu when the Torah said, “And Aaron was silent.”

I was silent as well.

I thought that my father, a disabled veteran of D-Day at Utah Beach, and he probably would have said the same thing. I would have been silent there too.

For me, the numbers of deaths of innocent bystanders in either country are no longer the point anymore. My silence takes me back to last year at the tour group where we visited three communities exactly on the border at Gaza. Many of those residents were slaughtered by Hamas. I am sure that the tears for Israelis are the same for the innocents of Gaza. If only God could intervene and make the decisions as to how to resolve this conflict! But that is not how God works.

Demonizing Israel in the propaganda wars in this country, at the United Nations or at the International Court of Justice will have little impact on the will of the Israeli people. We will only get to the point of building peace when the hostages are released and Hamas, a unadulterated terrorist organization, is defeated. Then, the powers of the nations will help mediate the day after this war concludes.

I can put up all the theological and philosophical doctrines about just wars which have been developed by Jewish and Christian scholars over the centuries. We can watch all the protests against Israel in social media, but I do believe that only when Hamas returns all the hostages, those alive and dead, will there be a chance for peace and a ceasefire.

I believe in God, and I do not believe that God wants us to gloat over the deaths of each side’s adversaries let alone the innocents who have perished in this war. Maybe God is crying too at the carnage on both sides.

We who are all bystanders to this conflict should remember that sometimes God’s silence and Aaron’s silence may be a lesson for us all in coping with this ongoing conflict. All of us are human and God’s children, and that is the tragedy of it all.