A Rabbi’s Plea for Peace | 2025 in Review
What Next
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
All this week, What Next and What Next: TBD are re-airing some of our favorite conversations from throughout the year and checking back with the people in those conversations to see how things have – or haven’t – changed. This episode is from August.
More than a thousand rabbis and Jewish leaders have signed a letter calling for Israel to end “the use and threat of starvation as a weapon of war.” This New York rabbi, who has felt a connection to Israel her whole life, explains why she signed.
Guest: Sarah Reines, rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan.
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Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Men. Say what you will about Christmas. It's got a good tagline. |
| 0:05.7 | But 2025 has not really been delivering on either front. |
| 0:12.8 | Goodwill has been replaced with deportations, bombing fishermen, racist rants calling Somali's garbage. |
| 0:19.9 | And peace, well, this year, peace has been complicated. |
| 0:25.1 | After a years-long war that left more than 11% of Gaza's population killed or injured, |
| 0:31.3 | a peace deal did emerge between Israel and Hamas back in October. I don't want to suggest I |
| 0:37.3 | wasn't happy, but I had to suggest that I wouldn't be able, |
| 0:41.3 | that I wasn't filled with joy is a truth. |
| 0:45.3 | Rabbi Sarah Rhinis of New York's Temple Emmanuel received this news with trepidation. |
| 0:51.3 | You know, people are having some very different reactions and, you know, the Zoom lens |
| 0:56.4 | is bigger and smaller. |
| 0:58.6 | Some people found it a less complicated moment than others. |
| 1:02.6 | For herself, Rabbi Rhinus thinks of this as a more complicated moment. |
| 1:07.0 | For one thing, more than 370 Gazans have been killed by Israel since this ceasefire took effect. |
| 1:14.6 | There's nothing resolved about any of this. |
| 1:18.2 | I never thought for a split second that the Israeli government or Hamas were done. |
| 1:23.5 | Like that was never, so I was not at all surprised. |
| 1:27.9 | We spoke to the rabbi earlier this year, because since the war erupted, she's been making |
| 1:33.2 | the Jewish case for peace to her congregation. |
| 1:36.2 | And to say it was not always well received is an understatement. |
| 1:40.8 | But she kept speaking. |
| 1:42.7 | And now that peace is maybe in the air, she isn't ready to stop. |
... |
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