Interview with Le Monde

Question

Why did you choose to call the speeches you gave at the Beaugrenelle synagogue in Paris “sermons,” a term that refers to the Christian tradition? Who do you want to sermonize?

Choosing the title for this book was a real dilemma. At first, I wanted to call it “Angle mort” (“Blind Spot”), because I intended to explore my own blind spots and those of the world around us. The term “sermon” does not exist in the Jewish tradition: When a rabbi addresses their community, they give what is called “words of Torah” (dvar Torah). Looking for the closest equivalent, I used the word “sermon” for lack of a better option. In reality, a rabbi is never supposed to lecture their congregation; their role is to offer a journey through the text, encouraging a dialogue between the text and the times we are living through.

That said, the title is also an indirect reference to another theology: the famous “Sermon on the Mount” by Jesus, a monumental Christian text of ethical thought. In contrast to that sermon, delivered from the heights, mine is given from beneath the rubble. In a certain way, it seeks to explore the same question: that of ethics in action, the pursuit of justice in times of war.

Question

Readers who imagine that religious discourse is necessarily ethereal will no doubt be surprised by the strongly political tone of these “sermons.”

That’s true. I wouldn’t even know, today, how not to speak with a political voice – not in the sense of partisan politics, or party or ideology, but in the sense of a responsible commitment to the city and to the world. Every time I reread, over the past three years, sacred Jewish texts, they started to flash in a new way. As if they had been waiting for this moment to speak differently.

In November 2023, as the IDF [the Israeli army] launched its response in Gaza, Jews were entering the festival of Hanukkah. The story of the Maccabees and their military victory more than two thousand years ago is recalled during this celebration. However, rabbis always associate the festival with a warning: Victories are never won by military force alone; they are achieved through spirit and the quest for light.

Another example came a few months later, as Passover began, the holiday that commemorates how the Israelites were once slaves in Egypt. That year, we read the text with our eyes quite literally turned toward Egypt – since Gaza lies on its border – where hostages were being held, some of whom would never be released. It was impossible not to find a strange political resonance in the world.

Question

You criticize the political instrumentalization of sacred texts, something that extremist Jews in particular engage in. But couldn’t the same criticism be leveled at you? And, given that these texts are highly ambivalent, isn’t there something rather futile about this exercise in interpretation?

Exactly, and I address this very issue in the book. A sacred text can always say one thing and its opposite. A fundamentalist interpretation also draws its conviction from traditional sources and will find in the text a way to feed its ideology.

We see this in all religious traditions. Certain interpretations resonate strongly and give the impression that they are the only legitimate ones, while others seem almost silenced. In my book, I try to make those quieter interpretations heard, to show that the text can speak in other ways, because it has done so before.

If a text can be interpreted in many different ways, the only question that really matters is this: What kind of world is born from each of our readings? What do we pass on to our children through the interpretations we give them? Is it a world of war or of peace? Is it a world of walls or of bridges? Is it a world where stories make us greater and more dignified, more suspicious or less courageous?

Question

Through this rereading of your own speeches, you want to engage in a process of self-criticism. What would that look like?

In the speech I wrote just after October 7, I warned that we risked losing our words and, with them, our reason, that we needed to try to preserve our humanity. That happened faster than I had imagined. We all found ourselves trapped in this campism, this feeling that we could only have exclusive empathy for our own people, that the world was sending us back such hatred that we could only care about saving our own ethnic or religious family.

When I reread my sermons, I can only see what the trauma has done to me. After October 7, I was stunned by our pain. This intergenerational suffering and the past tragedies I have inherited echoed so loudly in my mind that I could no longer hear anything, no longer see anything. It took me time to return certain words to my mouth, especially to speak, starting in the spring of 2024, about the suffering of innocent Palestinians.

Some people will say: It’s much too late, those aren’t the right words; others will say: It’s much too soon, you are giving weapons to our enemies... I feel crushed from both sides, between the pain of some and the rage of others, the anger and the uproar, between those who say I am guilty no matter what I say today or tomorrow, and those who claim I am a traitor no matter what I may have said yesterday. And yet, I still believe that everyone must reflect on their own words and understand why blind spots surround us everywhere.

Question

You say that we have entered “an era of unspeakability,” in which “words are emptied of their meaning.” How can we confront this?

Today, we face a collapse of words. I have spoken for a long time about the linguistic crisis we are in; we have now reached a new stage, as the debates over the use of artificial intelligence in literature also show. It seems to me that we stand on the terrifying threshold of a world where words no longer have meaning, nor does truth, for that matter. A time when the mobs howl and people no longer read.

I don’t even know why we’re doing this interview today: People aren’t going to read it; at best, they’ll glance at the headline or the photo, perhaps the short summary, but only insofar as it confirms what they already think of me or of the situation. So few people want to listen, to debate – so what’s the point of speaking? To agree to have a conversation is to take the risk of changing your mind or your point of view. In fact, that’s the shared etymology of the words “conversation” and “conversion.” Words today serve only to rally one side, to put to death, like matadors, the person facing you.

I feel that my book is the opposite of the spirit of the times – that is, of taking sides, of certainties, of words sharpened into weapons. It is more like a testimony, a memory capsule that I would send to the future, for a time when people might wonder how, in 2026, a religious leader spoke to their community. Amid the current clamor, I am already tired at the thought of having to say to so many people: What did you actually read to attribute to me, on social media, so many statements I never made? Maybe we should just wait in silence, stop giving interviews, stop writing and let the machines do it?

I know that many of us feel the same sense of loneliness. But that does not allow us to form a group. Those who operate in a register of verbal attacks always use “we,” while those who strive to remain nuanced generally say “I.” The latter know full well that saying “we” is almost always an abuse of language, a way of hijacking someone else’s voice. But the accuracy of “I” is also what makes us vulnerable and reinforces our feeling of loneliness. There is an urgent need to create a “we” that, unlike that of the extremes, is not consolidated against a “them.”

Question

What do you still believe in?

Despite this nightmarish context, I still have a deep belief in words, in the stories we tell that can create a different future. I believe in the transmission of knowledge, in the bonds between generations, which have been so deeply damaged today.

I believe in poetry. Reading it does me good, because it is a language in which words are less easily put at the service of slogans, ideology or dogma. At the moment, I am reading a lot of Israeli and Palestinian poetry. I have noticed that, very often, their authors, who have no way to speak to one another in real life, engage in a surprising dialogue within their texts. They write about fear, about being uprooted from their land, about the ghosts of our history, the pain of mothers, the death of children. When you read them, you cannot tell who wrote which lines: What comes through is their simple humanity.

Question

You mention, in this book, your “powerful Zionist commitment.” How much legitimacy do you grant to anti-Zionist discourse?

I have always considered myself a Zionist and I still do, even though I am aware that this term has become what is called in Hebrew a shibboleth, a word whose meaning matters less than its function: to unite a group that claims it or to ostracize someone who defines themselves as such.

I believe in the right of Jews to self-determination in a territory to which they are historically connected. I refuse to let others confiscate the meaning of that. When I come across someone who defines themselves as anti-Zionist, I generally have no idea what they mean by that term. Do they mean that the State of Israel does not have the right to exist? Or that it does not have the right to pursue the policies carried out by the current government? That Jews would be the only people denied the right to self-determination among all the peoples who have claimed it throughout history? That no state affiliated with a cultural or religious identity should exist?

In this gray area, conversation becomes very difficult. Whether or not one used those words, what seems most important to say is simple: Neither Jews nor Palestinians are going to disappear from this land. The reality is that the State of Israel exists, and its right to exist is indisputable. In the same way, Palestinians have every legitimacy to seek security, dignity and self-determination on this land.

Question

Major elections are set to take place in Israel on October 27. In your opinion, what is currently the greatest threat facing the country?

Like many people, I dream of a change in leadership in the region, on both sides. We should not imagine that if Netanyahu were no longer in power, everything would be resolved; it would be obscene to absolve Hamas of its responsibility since October 7 and throughout all these years during which it has turned Gaza into a launchpad for missiles targeting Israel.

At the same time, so many things are unforgivable in Israeli political choices, starting with the fact that, three years after the catastrophe, this government is opposed to the creation of a state commission of inquiry. That is an insult to the victims of October 7. There is an urgent need for a new political leadership, but I am terrified that it will not materialize. I decided to vote – even though I have refused to do so since I no longer live in Israel – because something historic is at stake in this election. Not just for the country’s future, but also for the future of relations between Israel and the diaspora: Today, terrible tensions are dividing the Jewish world.

Question

You write, “Without a future for the Palestinian people, there is none for the Israeli people either.” How do you see the future for Gaza and the West Bank?

I don’t know. I am appalled by what is happening in the West Bank, by this ticking time bomb that has been set off. Many of my friends are part of what are called “protective presences” in the West Bank. They regularly go there to stand alongside Palestinians, to protect them and to harvest olives with them. I simply want to support these grassroots forces. They embody an ideal that is dear to me and deserve to have their struggles supported, even if some people will find that insignificant or naïve.

Question

What do you think about Mediapart’s revelations on September 28 of antisemitic remarks made by Rassemblement National (RN) President Jordan Bardella in his youth, while the far-right party regularly presents itself as a bulwark for the Jewish community of France?

I have always been surprised by those who believed in this rhetoric of a shield or a bulwark. At a time of an exponential and despairing surge in antisemitic attacks following October 7, it is of course natural to look for allies. Clearly, the RN is exploiting that despair. I am not surprised that this young heir to a party whose history is so closely tied to antisemitism could himself have been, or might still be, receptive to such rhetoric.

Moreover, all political extremes have, at some point in their history, turned Jews into a political issue to be exploited. Jews have very often been the “them” of history, against whom a “we” was strengthened. Just look at how they ended up being instrumentalized in debates where, in principle, they had no place. On the sidelines of Yellow Vests protests or anti-vaccine rallies during the Covid-19 pandemic, antisemitic slogans would sometimes appear here and there.

That is why believing the political spectrum is linear is a mistake. History has shown that extremes are circular and always end up meeting. They use the same tools: the destruction of language and making a scapegoat out of others. The disaster today would be if these two extremes, RN and La France Insoumise, both made it to the second round of a presidential election. If it comes down to a showdown between them, I will not take part.

Question

In an op-ed published in Le Monde in 2017, the philosopher Achille Mbembe wrote: “What we call identity is not essential. We are all passersby.” Do you not find the constant demand to take a stand on issues of identity, and to position yourself as Jewish, exhausting?

It’s disheartening. In the early 2000s, I was troubled to see how deeply identity politics had permeated American discourse. Every time I heard people begin their sentences with “as a,” I was relieved that the Republic, in France, protected us from that tendency. This brings us back to the question of personal pronouns: The republican promise allows us to say “I” in any circumstance, rather than a “we” that would assign us an identity; the only “we” is that of the nation.

Unfortunately, this permanent assignment to an identity has caught up with us. Today, we no longer have permission to say “I,” because doing so is seen as betraying the collective. Will we one day be able to write again simply as “me, who is human,” and not “me, who defends such-and-such a color or flag”? Identity is the opposite of something fixed; it is what we make of our birth. If we do not revive a constant human, individual and personal responsibility in what happens to us, we are doomed.

Question

You try to understand what “the words addressed to others said about me, about the person I no longer was, or the person I had become.” What are you no longer, and what have you become?

War, antisemitism, rage, death, the devastation of Gaza... All of that has changed us. These past three years have had a terrible – and at the same time very understandable – effect on many people close to me, a reflex to withdraw and protect themselves. I do not judge that instinct, and I completely understand how one might despair of another who was not able to be there. For my part, however, the events had the opposite effect; I felt a much more universalist aspiration growing within me. I needed to think about human suffering in much broader terms.

I find it increasingly difficult to surround myself with people who insist I see only one kind of pain, or who engage in morbid calculations about who deserves more empathy. I do not want to be around people who constantly ask me to keep quiet so as not to play into someone else’s hands. And I want my words to preserve my humanity. There is a famous saying: Once we have opened our eyes, we can no longer pretend not to see.

I feel as though I can no longer avoid seeing suffering, wherever it may be. I am still devastated by what happened on October 7 in Israel, just as I cannot ignore what has happened since, nor pretend that Gaza was not subsequently devastated.

Question

In your speeches, you talk much more about rituals and texts than about God. What place does God have in your life?

Jewish thought holds that what you believe is always much less important than what you do. If what you believe does not translate into action, it is meaningless. That is why rabbis are wary of speeches about God. After the Holocaust, a question emerged: Where was God during the catastrophe? The most traditional and powerful Jewish response was to turn the question around and ask: Where was humankind during the catastrophe?

In a way, we must continue asking this question in every era. We can, endlessly, wonder where God was on October 7, or where God is among the ruins of Mosul [in Iraq], Gaza, Nir Oz [in Israel], or Kyiv, etc. But the real question that matters is rather: Where is humanity in these catastrophes? Until proven otherwise, it is humankind that creates the wreckage of this history.

That is why, no doubt, even if God is absent from it, Sermons sous les décombres is the most religious book I have written. The etymology of the word “religion” is debated. Does it come from the Latin religare (to bind) or relegere (to reread)? Is religion what serves to bind or to reread? In writing this book, I tried to do both: To reread, in an attempt to recreate connections and to reconnect with my own people, with the world and with our history.