When I was a kid, before every supermarket aisle was filled with OU symbols, you had to read the ingredients yourself. That’s how you figured out whether something was kosher. No stamp, no shortcut. You made your own call with the information at hand.

It wasn’t perfect but that training carried over to how I learned to read the news. You didn’t wait for someone in authority to tell you what was moral. You read, you weighed, you judged.

After the October 7 Gazans’ slaughter in Israel, non-Orthodox denominations—the same ones least interested in kosher certification—raced to the presses with appeals for peace on both sides and declarations of shared mourning. The Orthodox world stayed largely quiet.

Then in August 2025, Open Orthodox rabbis decided they, too, needed to weigh in, well after Hamas and its allies had been trounced. Their letter condemned Hamas’s atrocities, but it quickly shifted its focus. Israel, they argued, bore moral responsibility for not providing enough food to Gazans and for Jewish violence in the West Bank.

The reaction was swift. The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing a more traditional Orthodox camp, branded the letter a distortion. They accused the signatories of ignoring critical facts, downplaying Hamas’s genocidal intent, and amplifying Jewish sins while minimizing Islamist terror. In other words, the Open Orthodox letter was stamped “Not Kosher.”

But step back for a moment and ask the obvious: who exactly are these letters for? Are the rabbis addressing their own congregants and communities, who look to them for guidance in halacha, prayer, and Jewish life? Are they trying to lecture the Israeli cabinet, which is fighting an existential war 6,000 miles away? Are they speaking to the American press and social media audience, where the concern is whether they will be judged as sufficiently “balanced” or critical? Or do they believe they are the modern equivalent of biblical prophets keeping Jewish kings in check?

The truth is that no single voice speaks for the Jews. And if you want serious political analysis, rabbis are not the address. They are trained to decide what happens when your meat knife slices into a piece of cheese—not how to conduct a multi-front war. When the OU stamps a product, it’s because real diligence has been done: site visits, lab tests, ingredient tracing. When rabbis stamp foreign policy with a moral hechsher, it’s about as kosher as Zabar’s selling ham on Chanukah.

Meanwhile, rabbis are getting urgent war-related questions. Not about ceasefires or humanitarian corridors—but about how to bury a soldier whose body isn’t recovered, or what obligations a spouse has when the other is on the front line, or how to mourn when half a community is shattered. Those questions are answered the traditional way: discreetly, privately, and halachically. That is moral clarity.

Open letters, by contrast, are performative. Nobody asked these rabbis to issue a ruling on how the IDF fights its battles. If anyone had, the question and answer would have been private, rooted in Torah and respect. To publish sweeping pronouncements in American media isn’t moral clarity—it’s moral vanity. It attempts to signal superiority over the very people fighting and dying, while feeding the antisemitic bonfire already raging online.

That may be the point. To profess innocence now that certain lines have been crossed, to posture publicly so that no one can accuse you of silence. But make no mistake: this is not Torah. It is branding.

Moral clarity means living the values you preach and answering the hard questions your people actually ask. It does not mean stamping your moral logo on a war you neither fight nor fully understand.