Of all the people I expected to find myself quoting during the Days of Awe, Ed Sheeran and Bill Maher were nowhere on the list. Yet here we are.

According to the BBC report, the remaining opening acts on Ed Sheeran’s American tour quit after Macklemore was removed from the lineup following his pro-Palestinian performance. Finneas declared that “artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.” Others followed, invoking Palestinian suffering and the moral obligation to speak.

Ed Sheeran did something considerably less fashionable.

He refused to turn his concert into a political rally.

Sheeran said that removing Macklemore had been the promoter’s decision, not his. He described the suffering on both sides as a human tragedy and explained that he deliberately does not use his professional platform as a political forum. His audience includes children and people of many backgrounds, he said, and he wants his concerts to provide “safety and sanctuary.”

For this, apparently, he was insufficiently righteous.

I think he deserves our respect.

Because we have entered a peculiar moment in which certainty has become a substitute for knowledge and volume a substitute for wisdom.

When Certainty Becomes a Moral Credential

There is no question that Palestinian civilians have suffered terribly in this war. Recognizing that suffering is not anti-Israel. Mourning a Palestinian child does not diminish our mourning for an Israeli child.

Judaism should make us especially sensitive to suffering.

The Torah commands, “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). The repetition matters. Justice cannot mean justice only for people on our side.

But justice also requires truth.

The current war did not begin in a historical vacuum. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers killed approximately 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251 hostages. The war that followed has produced catastrophic Palestinian suffering and enormous controversy over Israel’s conduct. Those facts have to coexist in any intellectually serious account of what happened.

What troubles me is the increasingly fashionable reduction of this enormously complicated history into a morality play containing only two characters: oppressor and oppressed.

Once those roles have been assigned, apparently nothing else needs to be learned.

History becomes optional.

Context becomes suspicious.

And asking an........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)