ANALYSIS
In the face of unspeakable evil, what does God ask of us?
Yesterday, two beautiful young people, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were gunned down outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., simply because they represented Israel and the values we hold sacred. They were planning to get engaged next week in Jerusalem. Their lives were cut short by a terrorist who told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
My first instinct was rage. My second was grief. But as I’ve sat with this tragedy, I hear God calling us to two things that might seem contradictory but are actually inseparable.
He is calling us to love each other more fiercely. And He is calling us to stand against evil with unwavering resolve.
Both. Not one or the other.
The love God demands is not the weak sentiment that says, “Can’t we all just get along?” It’s the fierce, protective love that binds us together so tightly that no hatred can tear us apart.
When our enemies say, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people,” they understand what we sometimes forget: Jews and Christians are bound together by the same God, face the same enemies, and must stand together or fall separately.
This terrorist didn’t just murder two innocent people. He declared war on everything we believe — that Israel has a right to exist, that Jews and Christians can work together, that human beings are created in God’s image and deserve to live in peace.
Our response must be proportional to that declaration.
We must love each other with a love so deep that an attack on Jews feels like an attack on our own children to every Christian, and an attack on Christians feels like an attack on our own family to every Jew.
But we must also stand against this evil with everything we have: through law enforcement that pursues justice, through unwavering support for Israel’s right to exist, through policies that confront terrorism honestly, and through the moral clarity to call evil by its name.
The same God who commands us to “love our neighbor as ourselves” also commands us to “hate evil” and to stand firm against those who seek to destroy what is good and holy.
King David wrote psalms of love and psalms calling for justice, often in the same breath. He understood that protecting the innocent sometimes requires standing firm against the guilty. That defending what is holy sometimes means confronting what is profane.
This is not contradiction. This is completeness.
When I work to build bridges between Jews and Christians, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, delivering humanitarian aid, that’s the love part. When I speak out for Israel’s right to exist and defend moral truth against those who distort it, that’s the standing firm part. Both are acts of faithfulness to the same God.
The terrorist who killed Yaron and Sarah represented a worldview that sees only darkness, that believes the only solution to conflict is the elimination of the other side. He looked at a young Jewish couple and saw not human beings created in God’s image, but symbols to be destroyed.
We represent the opposite worldview. We see the possibility of light conquering darkness, good triumphing over evil, love and justice working together to build God’s kingdom.
But building that kingdom sometimes requires standing firm against what opposes it.
The same faith that calls us to feed the hungry and heal the sick also calls us to defend truth and confront evil. The same love that builds hospitals also stands for justice. The same hope that reaches out in reconciliation also refuses to compromise with those who reject all possibility of peace.
Our enemies have made their choice. They have chosen hatred over love, destruction over creation, death over life.
This is what I see in my work with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Whether it be persecuted Christians in Syria or elderly Jews in Israel, evangelical Christians give sacrificially because they understand these are not strangers—these are family.
Now we must make ours.
We choose to love each other with a love that unites us across every difference. And we choose to stand against evil with a resolve that will not bend, will not break, and will not compromise until justice and truth prevail.
This is how we honor Yaron and Sarah. This is how we serve the living God. This is how we win.
Yael Eckstein is President and Global CEO of The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, one of the world’s largest religious charitable organizations. The Jaffa Institute’s 2024 Woman of the Year and The Jerusalem Post’s 2023 Humanitarian of the Year, Yael is a Chicago-area native based in Israel with her husband and their four children.
