Stop Digging

or Where is Our Pope Leo

An email arrived this morning from a Jewish woman asking:

“Where is our Pope Leo, who dares to oppose Trump, saying, ‘When you beseech Me with outstretched arms, I will turn My eyes from you; when you make many prayers, I will turn deaf ears to you—your hands are full of blood’?”

What? Yes, Pope Leo said that, but he was quoting Isaiah 1:15.

“Where is our Dalai Lama,” she continued, “who says, ‘My simple religion is that there is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart are our temple; and our philosophy is kindness’?”

I love the Dalai Lama, too, but the Prophet Micah said the same thing millennia ago: “Shall I come before the Divine with burnt offerings, year-old calves, thousands of rams, rivers of oil? Shall I kill my firstborn for God? Of course not! What does the Divine require? Only this: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God!” (Micah 6:4-8).

I emailed her the Isaiah and Micah passages. She replied that she had left her synagogue, where all she heard from her rabbis was “Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust, all Jews are Zionists, all Palestinians are antisemites, and Israel must defend herself by any means necessary.”

I urged her to seek out other rabbis at other synagogues. There are rabbis speaking out, but they lack standing comparable to that of Popes and Dalai Lamas.

We do have Chief Rabbis, however. But they can’t speak out against war, apartheid, or genocide because they are captured by a Zionism mired in war, apartheid, and genocide, serving an ethno-national theocracy devoted to Jewish Supremacy and militarized messianism.

It’s hard to speak out against genocide when your god commands you to “kill men and women, infants and nursing babies, oxen, sheep, camels and donkeys” (I Samuel 15:3).

It’s hard to speak against war when your god “is a man of war” (Exodus 15:3).

It’s hard to speak out against the slaughter of innocents when your god blesses those who seize your enemies’ infants “and smash them against the rocks” (Psalm 137:9).

But our god is Pope Leo’s god, and his Church is drenched in blood: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, the treatment of Indigenous populations, the capitulation to the Nazis, and the rape of young boys and girls. Yet he somehow manages to sidestep all that and stand as a moral bulwark against the madness of the world his Church helped create.

So why aren’t more rabbis standing with Isaiah and Micah to denounce evil?

Money.

Back in 1976, during my first week of rabbinical school, my classmates and I gathered for a seminar where we were offered a choice: would we be prophets or clerks? We were told that most of us would be clerks. The reason is simple: prophets wander in the wilderness wearing rags, while clerks dress well and have 401(k)s.

What Christian Bible Scholar Walter Bruggemann (1933-2025) wrote about the church applies no less to the synagogue: “The prophetic tasks of the church are to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, grieve in a society that practices denial, and express hope in a society that lives in despair.” But this is difficult to do when half your congregation—often the wealthy half—sees nothing wrong with Jewish supremacy and believes the Holocaust excuses anything Jews choose to do to others in the name of national security.

Rabbis must—and many do—free themselves from a system in which money trumps morality and the rich determine what is kosher. Being a rabbi was meant to be an avocation. Rabbis were supposed to be financially self-sufficient. They worked as farmers, artisans, builders, doctors, and lawyers. The Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidic Judaism, was a “school bus driver,” walking little kids to and from school while leading them in song. As the 1^st-century sage Rabbi Zadok taught, “Do not make of Torah a shovel with which to earn a living” (Pirke Avot 4:5).

Sadly, most rabbis are hired to dig holes by people who can’t agree on where to dig.

Maybe things will change as younger Jews and newer rabbis reject the evils of Jewish supremacy, recover from PTSD (Post Traumatic Shoah Syndrome), reclaim the Jewish ethical tradition— “Justice, justice, you shall pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20)—find new ways to build community, and return to our original rabbinic ideal of prophetic courage and financial self-sufficiency.

Maybe. In the meantime, to my fellow rabbis, I say this: If you can, stop digging.