In recent weeks, two incidents have forced themselves upon our attention. A soldier in Lebanon was filmed destroying a statue of Jesus. A nun was assaulted near the Cenacle on Mount Zion, beside the place Christians hold as the site of the Last Supper, steps from the traditional Tomb of King David.
I want to be clear about what these incidents are. They are not the excesses of a fringe. They are not unfortunate anomalies to be noted and moved past. They are acts carried out in public, in places of profound significance, and they have been seen by the world.
There are moments when silence is not neutrality. It is complicity. This is one of those moments.
Chillul Hashem – the desecration of God’s name – rarely announces itself with fanfare. It begins with something smaller: a gesture of contempt, a word of mockery, a pilgrim spat upon in the street.
A nun was struck near a holy place. A church was defaced under the cover of night. A Christian made to feel unsafe in the very land that calls itself holy. Each act alone might seem containable. Together, they are something else entirely. They are fractures in the moral fabric of a people entrusted with something far greater than themselves.
Jerusalem is not an ordinary city. My father, Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz z”l (may his memory be a blessing), would often say that in Jerusalem, nothing remains private. Every act echoes. The city carries memory, weight, and consequence in a way no other place on earth does.
What is done in its streets does not stay in its streets. It rises. It becomes a reflection of us all, and when that reflection is one of contempt and violence, it is the Jewish people who bear the shame, and it is the name of God that is diminished before the nations.
When Jacob awoke from his vision at Beit El, he did not say: This is my place. He said: “Surely the Lord is in this place... this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:16-17). He understood that a holy place does not belong to its guardian. It belongs to heaven. And its guardian is accountable to heaven for what happens within it.
Shared spaces belong to all
My father taught something I have never forgotten: the public domain is never ownerless. A street is not empty space. Shared space belongs to all who walk within it. When one damages that space, he does not damage an abstraction. He damages his neighbour, his community, and ultimately himself. But beyond the physical public domain lies something more. The honor of Israel, the dignity of Torah, the perception of God in the world, these are the true public domain, and they too can be damaged, and they too belong to all of us.
When a Jew humiliates or harms a Christian in Israel, the act does not remain between aggressor and victim. It wounds that deeper domain. It distorts the purpose of the place itself.
The Torah is unambiguous about what is at stake. In the weekly torah portion of Emor, we read: “You shall not desecrate My holy name, and I shall be sanctified among the children of Israel” (Vayikra 22:32). This verse is not incidental. It is the very source of the concepts of chillul Hashem and kiddush Hashem – the sanctification of God’s name – it sits at the heart of a weekly torah portion devoted to the holiness required of the priests, those designated to carry God’s name into the public world.
The verse does not speak of private piety. It commands sanctification among the children of Israel, in the open, in the seen, in the shared world. Holiness, in the Torah’s understanding, is a public matter. Or it is nothing.
I know the counterarguments. Some will invoke history: centuries of Christian persecution of Jews, blood libels, forced conversions, expulsions. The pain behind those arguments is real, and I do not dismiss it. Others will reach for halachic categories, or speak of the imperative to protect the sanctity of the land.
I understand the impulse. But none of these arguments survives honest contact with the verse. The Torah does not permit desecration of God’s name as a response to historical grievance. It does not authorise the humiliation of the vulnerable in the name of the holy.
A soldier of Israel who shatters a sacred image, a man who strikes a nun beside a place of pilgrimage, he is not defending Torah. He is desecrating it.
This is not a misunderstanding of Torah. It is an inversion of it.
And Torah does not only prohibit. It points toward something. The prophet Isaiah’s vision is not a marginal footnote: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:7). This is the identity of Jerusalem. The city is not diminished when others come to pray within it. It is fulfilled. The Christian pilgrim who travels across the world to stand in the Old City, in awe and in faith, is not an inconvenience to be managed. That presence is part of what this city was always meant to hold.
At a time when Israel faces scrutiny from every direction, when every action is examined and judged, our failure to live up to that vision carries weight far beyond our borders. It becomes not a local failure but a desecration visible to the entire world.
So let me say this plainly, without qualification: Christians in Israel must be safe. They must be respected. Clergy and pilgrims, churches and monasteries, every Christian holy site, all must be treated with the dignity that Torah demands we extend to every human being created in the image of God.
Not because the world is watching, though it is, but because God is watching.
Kiddush Hashem is not merely the absence of violence. It is conduct that causes others to say: look at these people, look at what their Torah made of them. It is the lived argument that the God of Israel is the God of all dignity, all humanity, all nations.
Anything less is not strength. It is not faithfulness. It is a shame.
The writer is the director of the Steinsaltz Center, dedicated to continuing the life’s work of Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz z”l; creating accessibility to foundational Jewish texts and tradition for every Jew.