The senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue and one of the most prominent American Jewish leaders opened her Rosh Hashanah sermon with a plea to hold Israel close while widening compassion. Rabbi Angela W. Buchdahl urged solidarity with Israel and the effort to bring the hostages home, blamed Hamas for the war, pressed Jews to expand empathy to Palestinian civilians, faulted Israeli missteps, including a spring food blockade, condemned far-right rhetoric and settler violence, defended humanitarian aid in Gaza, and warned that the Israel debate is tearing Jewish communities apart.
“I have been a rabbi for 25 years, 20 of them at Central Synagogue, and I have never been so afraid to talk about Israel,” Buchdahl told congregants on Sunday night. She said she wanted to speak openly about her “unconditional love for the Israeli people and our beleaguered homeland,” which was “still desperately struggling to bring its hostages home” and “still trying to eliminate Hamas, terrorists that not only refuse to lay down their arms but intentionally trap their own people inside a combat zone.”
At the same time, Buchdahl said, acknowledging Palestinian suffering had become perilous inside parts of the Jewish community. “This Israel conversation is ripping our community apart,” she said. “It’s been the most painful experience of my rabbinic life.”
A message of empathy: Rosh Hashanah and the Israel-Hamas War
Buchdahl framed her remarks around the Torah reading for Rosh Hashanah, the story of Hagar and Ishmael, to argue that Jewish ethics require compassion for Israelis and Palestinians alike. “Our tradition reveals that the real danger we face is not that we might have too much empathy. It’s that we might not have enough,” she said. “We can feel brokenhearted for the suffering of the children of Isaac and Ishmael. Indeed, we must.”
She stressed Hamas’s responsibility for the war. “It’s clear to me that Hamas is fundamentally culpable for today’s devastating situation,” she said, condemning the group for embedding among civilians, stealing aid, and holding hostages. She also highlighted Israeli vulnerability under sustained fire from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran, and the burden carried by reservists “away from their families for hundreds of days to defend the only Jewish state we have.”
Buchdahl nevertheless pressed Israelis and Diaspora Jews to take a hard moral inventory. She criticized what she called Israel’s temporary food blockade of Gaza from March to May as “an unsuccessful and unwise attempt to force Hamas to surrender.” She added, “Israel is responsible for its consequences.” She also denounced “rhetoric from far-right government ministers who talk about annexation of the West Bank and expulsion of Gazans instead of ending this war and bringing our hostages home,” as well as “settler violence in the West Bank.”
Calling out what she described as a “zero-sum empathy calculus,” Buchdahl warned against hardening hearts on either side. “Too many of us cannot muster any empathy for Israeli families,” she said, while “too many of us label all Israelis ‘occupiers’ and support boycotting Israeli academics, filmmakers, artists, musicians, and scientists.” Within parts of her own community, she noted objections to Central’s weekly prayer for Israel and even to the Israeli flag on the synagogue’s bima, “even though the empty chair it covers stands for the 48 remaining hostages whose families desperately await their return.”
Buchdahl also pushed back at critics who portray empathy as weakness. Citing voices who have called empathy “toxic” or a “fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” she responded, “Judaism says otherwise.” On Rosh Hashanah, she said, Jews are “invited to create the moral universe we want to inhabit, where empathy is not finite but expansive.”
Addressing divisive debates over humanitarian relief, Buchdahl defended a recent UJA-Federation of New York grant to IsraAid for aid operations in Gaza despite backlash from some donors. “For this ‘sin of empathy,’ we should never give another dollar to UJA,” some had argued, she said, before posing her own question: “What happens when we stop caring? And I don’t mean what happens to society or to the world, I mean what happens to our souls?”
She anchored her argument with a line from Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh was held hostage for nearly a year and murdered by Hamas. “I can feel bad for the innocents in Gaza, because my moral compass still works. You do not need to choose,” Buchdahl quoted her as saying.
Buchdahl is the senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue and one of the most prominent voices in American Jewry. A trailblazer, she is the first Asian-American to be ordained as both a cantor and a rabbi (HUC-JIR). She has led Central since 2014, shaping nationally watched High Holy Day services and a large, engaged congregation. Buchdahl, a Yale graduate, is known for clear, compassionate sermons that pair unwavering solidarity with Israel and the hostages with a call for Jewish moral accountability, interfaith bridge-building, and communal unity. Her leadership spans pastoral care, public advocacy, and Jewish education, and she frequently addresses antisemitism, Zionism, and the responsibilities of Diaspora Jews in a time of war.