There are hours when history feels like a corridor with no doors – only walls, only echo, only the heavy breath of power behind you. In such hours, tyrants want you to believe that the world is made of stone, that the heavens are silent, and that your suffering is an unnoticed detail.
But the Torah, which has seen more empires than any regime will ever manage to become, insists on a different accounting.
It begins with a promise that is not sentimental but structural: that blood has a voice.
After the first murder, the first attempt to erase a life and then to erase the meaning of that life, G-d says to Cain: “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.” Not blood – bloods, the sages teach: plural. A life is not a single thread; it is a tapestry of what might have been – children, friendships, works, words, songs, and mornings that never arrived. When a tyrant kills, he thinks he is ending an argument. The Torah says he is beginning one. The earth itself becomes a witness. The ground remembers.
So when thousands of Iranians have been slain – when your streets have swallowed names and your prisons have swallowed faces – do not accept the regime’s second violence: the demand that the dead be forgotten, that grief be private, that meaning be buried alongside the bodies. The Torah does not permit that. It says the blood cries out. It says the murdered are not mute. It says the story does not end where the regime writes the final line.
And then it teaches something else, more scandalous still: that oppression, when it looks most complete, is already overreaching.
Pharaoh did not enslave the Israelites because he was strong; he enslaved them because he feared them. He looked at a people who had no army and no palace and saw an ungovernable truth: that a nation can be held down without being owned. In Egypt, the Israelites were reduced to brick and quota, to labour and exhaustion – and yet the Torah describes them multiplying. That is not only demography. It is theology. It is the insistence that life expands where tyranny tries to compress it.
The regime in Tehran has made its own Egypt: quotas of obedience, bricks of propaganda, taskmasters in uniform and in clerical robes. It polices the human spirit the way Pharaoh policed the supply of straw. But tyranny always commits the same error: it believes the soul is a material object. It can break bones, it can bruise bodies, it can terrify households – yet it cannot manufacture belief. It cannot order hope into extinction. It cannot legislate dignity into disappearance.
There is also, in our tradition, a story that belongs to your land with a peculiar intimacy: the story of Esther. It takes place in Persia, in the courts of a capricious empire, where the fate of an entire people hung on the whim of power and the craft of an enemy who understood how to make hatred sound like policy. And what is most startling in that book is that God’s name does not appear. Not once. The heavens are not announced; they are hidden.
And yet the story turns.
It turns through courage that is not loud but stubborn: a young woman who steps into danger with the knowledge that the machinery of the state may crush her, and a man who refuses to bow – refuses the small act of surrender that tyrants rely on to make their power feel natural. Esther teaches that even when G-d is hidden, responsibility is not. Even when the world seems indifferent, the moral architecture remains. Even when no miracle is visible, the story is still being written.
This, too, is for you.
You may look around and see governments that trade lofty words for cheap convenience. You may see a “world community” that issues statements as if statements can stop bullets. You may see men in suits treat your agony as a variable in a negotiation. It will tempt you toward despair – the most lethal ally of your oppressors.
But the Torah does not ask you to have faith in foreign ministries. It asks you to have faith in Truth.
And it offers you imagery for the hour when strength is needed. It says that a people can cross a sea that appears closed. It says that walls can become passage. It says that what looks like an ending can be an entrance. Not because water obeys slogans, but because tyranny is, at its core, a bluff: a performance sustained by the belief that it is unbeatable.
When the Israelites stood at the sea with Pharaoh behind them, they did not possess certainty; they possessed forward motion. Tradition speaks of Nachshon stepping in until the water reached his neck – until the situation was no longer theoretical. And then the sea split. The miracle, in other words, met the movement. The Torah is ruthless about this: redemption is not something that comes to spectators. It comes to those who walk.
Now hear me carefully, because the cheap version of this story is dangerous. Courage is not recklessness. The Torah does not sanctify martyrdom. It sanctifies life. It commands: choose life. It demands that you protect one another, that you be wise as well as brave, that you do not confuse unnecessary death with noble sacrifice. The regime wants your blood; do not give it freely. Preserve yourselves as fiercely as you resist. Let your courage be disciplined, communal, intelligent – because nothing terrifies tyrants more than people who refuse to be provoked into hopelessness.
And there is something else I must say, plainly, because it is true and because you deserve to hear it without euphemism: if the world is willing to abandon you, the Jewish people are not.
We are not strangers to the moment when the doors of compassion close. We know what it is to watch civilisation busy itself with procedure while human beings are crushed. We know the sickening sound of “not our problem” spoken in refined accents. We also know, in our bones, that survival is often a chain of small solidarities – of those who refused to forget, refused to bow, refused to be trained into silence.
Our nations have been entwined before, not only in politics but in memory. Persia is not merely a geography in our texts; it is a chapter of refuge, of reversal, of unexpected deliverance. Your oppressors invoke religion to sanctify domination. Judaism, at its best, does the opposite: it teaches that power is answerable, that rulers are not gods, that the human being is made in the image of God and therefore cannot be owned.
That is why your struggle matters to us. Not as a slogan, but as a moral kinship. A free Iran is not a threat to the Jewish people; it is a vindication of the same principle that keeps any minority alive: that conscience cannot be legislated out of existence, and that truth is not the property of the strong.
So let the dead be spoken of – not as numbers but as lights extinguished by thieves. Let their memory be a cord braided into your resolve. In Jewish mourning we say: May their memory be for a blessing. A blessing is not a soft thing. A blessing is a force that continues. It is a life that still acts upon the world.
And when fear presses close, borrow our ancient words from the Psalms, words made for nights like yours: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow…” The valley is real. The shadow is real. But it is a passage, not a home.
Hold on, then – not to fantasy, but to the deeper truth beneath the noise: that regimes built on terror are not everlasting, because terror is a poor architect. It cannot build legitimacy. It can only destroy it. It can command silence, but it cannot command consent.
Your voices are not disappearing into the air. They are entering the record of the earth.
Your dead are not erased. Their blood cries out.
And those who still possess a conscience will not meet that cry with silence.