IN THE SHADOW OF THE PROPHETS: A LETTER TO JEWISH CONSCIENCE ON THE EVE OF PASSOVER AND GOOD FRIDAY
By Paul Alexander Wolf | April 2025

“Do not stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is shed.”

— Leviticus 19:16“Whoever kills a single innocent life—it is as if they have slain all of humanity. And whoever saves one life—it is as if they have saved all of humanity.”

— Qur’an 5:32“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

— Matthew 25:40

—

Once again, we enter holy ground.
But this year, the ground itself is burning.

For Jews, it is the season of Passover—liberation from bondage.
For Christians, Good Friday—a reckoning with injustice and sacrifice.
For Muslims, Ramadan has ended—a month of fasting, mercy, and renewal.

And this year, they converge beneath a single, searing question:
What does it mean to be righteous in the face of mass suffering?

That question is no longer abstract.
It rises from the dust and blood of Gaza.

This is no longer a war.
It is a siege—aimed not just at Hamas, but at hope itself.

Civilians bombed. Children buried alive. Aid blocked.

This is no longer about self-defense.
It is a sustained, systematized devastation.

We must speak without euphemism.
A line has been crossed—not only politically, but morally. Spiritually.

In 1968, on the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy—who had denounced the Vietnam War before it was popular or safe—spoke not of vengeance, but of conscience.
He warned of what he called the “senseless menace of violence… which again stains our land and every one of our lives.”

He wasn’t speaking of Gaza.
But he spoke into it—before it ever was.

Because what we see now is a menace—not of one people against another,
but of an entire world failing to confront the cost of unrestrained power.

Let us be clear:
This is not an attack on the Jewish people.
This is a plea to the Jewish conscience.

To remember that Jewish greatness has never rested on force,
but on the courage to speak truth to it.

The prophets of Israel—Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah—were not court poets.
They were firebrands—truth-tellers, holy troublemakers.
They stood not beside power, but in its path.

“Woe to those who build Zion with blood,” said Micah.
“Even if you fast and pray, I will not hear,” said Isaiah, “if you trample the poor.”

These weren’t cries against enemies.
They were pleas to Israel itself.

Yes—Hamas committed brutal, unspeakable crimes.
Yes—Israel has the right to protect its citizens.
But that right is not a blank check.
And survival cannot be sanctified through mass suffering.

Over 30,000 Palestinians killed.
Half of them women and children.
Entire neighborhoods flattened. Generations erased.

This is not collateral damage.
It is the outcome of deliberate policy.

And it cannot be justified by history’s wounds.
It is not security. It is desecration.

The Holocaust was a singular atrocity—unforgettable, unrepeatable.
But its memory must never become a shield against accountability.

For we now face the unthinkable:
That a people once herded into ghettos are now agents of a brutal siege.

Not all Israelis. Not all Jews.
But enough—to stain the soul of a nation.
And enough for the world to ask:
Where are the voices of dissent?

They exist.

Israeli reservists refusing to serve.
Jewish academics risking careers to speak.
Holocaust survivors pleading: “Not in our name.”

They are not traitors.
They are today’s prophets.

And courage lives in Muslim hearts too—
those who reject Hamas’s cruelty and still grieve for Gaza’s dead.

It lives in Christians who remember that Good Friday was not a coronation of empire,
but a lament for the innocent condemned.

If Jesus walked through Gaza today,
He would not walk with missiles.
He would walk with the wounded.

If Moses stood at the Rafah border,
He would cry again: “Let my people go”—
not to conquer, but to live.

If Muhammad looked upon the ruins of Khan Younis,
He would echo the Qur’an:
“Whoever kills one innocent life—it is as if they have slain all of humanity.”

The divine message has never been conquest.
It has always been compassion.

Let us speak plainly:

Benjamin Netanyahu is not above judgment.
He invokes Jewish trauma to justify collective punishment.
This is not defense—it is domination.

Tehran is no innocent—arming proxies while silencing its own.
Hamas violated every moral law by targeting civilians.
And the West—especially the United States under this leadership—
arms the destruction – while previously preaching human rights is not a reality anymore…

No one escapes this reckoning.
Not even us.

There is a difference—an essential, sacred difference—
between killing the innocent and stopping the violent.
Stopping a tyrant early can be an act of mercy.
Had Hitler been stopped before his rise, the Holocaust might never have happened.
Had Pol Pot or Idi Amin been confronted early, millions could have been spared.

Justice is not passivity.
And peace is not the absence of resistance to evil.

So what is asked of us?

Not perfection. But principle.
Not silence. But moral clarity.

Because history will not be fooled by clever rhetoric.
And heaven is not deceived by tribal loyalty.

If we are to mean what we say—about justice, about human rights, about never again—
then we must mean it now, even when it is costly.
Especially then.

The God of Passover heard the cry of the oppressed.
The Christ of Good Friday stood with the crucified.
The Prophet of the Qur’an defended the orphan and the stranger.

Each reminds us:
We are not measured by our power, but by how we use it.
We are not judged by tribe, but by truth.

So let it be said:
We did not look away.
We remembered who we were.
We chose dignity over domination,
Mercy over might,
Truth over fear,
Justice over vengeance,
And love—over indifference.

Because the prophets have not gone silent.
They are watching.
And so is the world.

And if Jerusalem does not rise to become a city of light,
It may fall—not by foreign hands,
But in the shadow of its own prophets.

—

Paul Alexander Wolf
Family Physician, Australia
April 2025
Written in a personal capacity.

This message is a call to conscience, not political partisanship. It is written in my personal capacity as a private citizen and doctor committed to the sacred duty of preserving life and human dignity. These words do not represent any institution or professional body. They are offered in the spirit of healing, peace, and moral reflection—across all faiths and nations.