A rabbi and his son mourn Oct. 7 victims, disagree on next steps

Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker’s memories of living in Israel with his wife and three kids are infused with sounds, smells and the country’s striking landscape. 

“[We] would walk our kids to school with the sounds of hundreds of different birds who are migrating to Africa, surrounded by bright flowers hanging from every archway,” he recalled of the six months they lived there in 2008. “But just a couple hours later, we could be at the Dead Sea floating into salty waters under clear blue sky.” 

For his eldest son, Eiden, who was 11 at the time, it was a homecoming.

“I know for myself that I felt like I was home for the first time in my life,” he said. 

Today, Rabbi Spilker is in St. Paul, leading his congregation at Mount Zion Temple through the high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — holidays that coincide with the one-year mark of Hamas’ attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people.  

Meanwhile, Eiden Spilker, now 26, is in Providence, R.I., where he recently graduated from Brown University. There, he’s been among Jewish students calling for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict and asking Brown to divest its financial interests from companies that do business with Israel.

While the Spilkers’ shared concern for the Israeli people hasn’t changed, their views on how the Israeli government conducts itself have diverged over the years, and have been particularly strained since Israel was attacked a year ago on Oct. 7.

But rather than let these differences divide them, the Spilkers have learned from each other through a series of conversations about the growing conflict between Israel and the Middle Eastern countries that surround it.

A day of shock and horror

Rabbi Spilker says he learned of Hamas’ attack at his synagogue leading Simchat Torah, an annual celebration of the Torah.   

“When I got home at one in the morning, my executive director called and said, ‘It's happening right now in Israel, it's awful, and this time, it's different,” he said. “The extent and level of the horror made it clear that this was going to be a day that would never be forgotten.”

In Providence, during his last year at Brown University, Eiden was also watching the horror of the attack unfold, trying to sort through information he was encountering online. 

“Especially for the first few weeks or a month, it was a lot of shock, horror, and then a lot of unclear truths, lots of specific claims and wanting to investigate what did happen,” he said. 

Starting in 2021, the father and son were aware of their diverging views around conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians. But in the month after the Oct. 7 attack, it was clear that the two of them saw the situation differently. 

At Brown, Eiden and his peers called for a cease fire and divestment; they’ve also facilitated discussions with fellow students about the Israel-Hamas conflict. 

“There are many people to blame. There are many actions that have been taken from every direction that have made a long-term peace and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians farther from reality,” he said. “But to me, I think that Israel's conduct, especially in this military campaign is concerning and is cause for concern, and especially now where it's escalating to more of the region.” 

Rabbi Spilker said he’d like to see a cease-fire. But not now. 

“I feel that the promotion of a cease-fire now is serving the needs of Hamas,” he said. “We're in an escalation in the north. This is not a time for talking about ideological possibilities. It is talking about, ‘How do pragmatically, people negotiate a time right now to survive?’”

A generational divide

Rabbi Spilker says that the daylight between his views and his son’s is familiar. Within his Jewish community, it’s not uncommon for him to hear that younger members are espousing views different from their parents.

“There are those who still see the struggle and Jewish history, that Israel as a response is to some degree, a miracle. That's an older generational perspective, and a younger generation is not going to see this,” he said. 

And unlike his son and his peers, Rabbi Spilker has lived through the 90s when he said peace between Israelis and Palestinians seemed like a possibility, a development that Spilker still supports and continues to work for. He has advocated for a two-state solution. And he told MPR News host Kerri Miller that in 2009, he tried to block the destruction of a Palestinian home in East Jerusalem by Israeli bulldozers.

But Rabbi Spilker said that in some of their most heated conversations over the last year, Eiden has asked him to “be on the right side of history” by joining calls for an immediate cease-fire, for instance. 

“I find that younger people have a much more certainty that being on the right side of history means pulling away from Israel, and that saddens me and frightens me,” he said.

Right side of history

The Spilkers are still divided on what it means to be on the right side of history in this conflict. 

But their conversations about it have led to epiphanies for both of them. 

“I’m grateful to have Eiden to be an interpreter for me, of people who are feeling so dismayed about Israel right now,” Rabbi Spilker said. “It allows me, in other conversations, to say, ‘Just because someone is against Israel's actions or in actions against the State of Israel doesn't mean they don't love the Jewish people.’”

He added that it’s all about relationships, and “we need to stay in relationship.”

For Eiden, he thinks back to something his dad used to say to him a lot in high school: “The idea of ‘you don't have to be wrong for me to be right.’” 

“There’s more than one way to be right, and I think that we owe it to ourselves, to our communities, to stay in contact and to stay in dialogue,” he said. “To be willing to engage in the broader Jewish community with viewpoints that we disagree with.” 

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