Word salad was not on the menu on the first day of the war. Kamala Harris, asked for her reaction to the U.S.–Israeli strike on Iran that eliminated forty leaders of the terrorist regime responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans over the decades, spared us her specialty gibberish. 

That was unfortunate, because what she offered instead was worse.

She opposed the attack, she explained. And so should all Americans. It simply is not what the American people want right now. This, she declared, was a “war of choice.”

What exactly did she mean?

She offered no arguments. No reasoning. No alternative plan. Nothing. Just the reflexive response of a party apparatchik: if Trump supports it, we oppose it. For her, “choice” appears to mean doing nothing at all.

What is missing here?

As so often, the Bible provides clarity. In Deuteronomy (30:19) we read: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.” Fair enough. We know what to do with that. Of course we want life!

But the verse does not stop there. It continues: “You shall choose life, so that you will live.”

Living requires choosing—real choosing.

Even after telling us that life and death hang in the balance, the Bible insists that we must make deliberate decisions about how to proceed. Instinct can help us avoid immediate danger, but life itself is rarely so simple. It does not yield to slogans or reflexes. Choice requires weighing evidence, confronting competing arguments, and thinking carefully about consequences.

That takes time—and seriousness.

“Liberty is a strong food, but it needs a stout digestion,” wrote the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What many people find hardest to digest is precisely the responsibility of making real choices. Studies show that people can become overwhelmed when presented with too many options—even when choosing something as trivial as a product in a supermarket. Many therefore prefer to surrender their freedom to demagogues and cult leaders who will make their choices for them.

Among the most dangerous of these are religious extremists. They exploit the human longing for transcendence that G-d placed within us and twist it into something grotesque and death-affirming. The Islamist mullahs who rule Iran have secured the loyalty of roughly twenty percent of their population by feeding them simplistic slogans and reductionist certainties.

Our politics, at times, is not very different.

Avoiding choices is easier than thinking. It is far simpler to repeat a slogan than to grapple with the reality of a regime led by religious fanatics—one that was only weeks from nuclear capability, already possesses vast stockpiles of missiles, and commands enough naval power to threaten the oil lifelines on which the global economy depends.

“It’s just not what the American people want.”

How shallow. How dangerous.

We have been here before. Faced with the rise of Nazi Germany between the world wars, figures such as Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee urged isolationism—avoiding conflict with Germany at almost any cost, even if that meant accommodating Hitler. Just three months before Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh—who had accepted a medal in 1938 from Hermann Göring—blamed “the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration” for pushing America toward war.

They were aided by religious agitators such as Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Charles Coughlin, who blended Christian nationalism with conspiratorial antisemitism in urging America to stay out of a conflict thousands of miles from its shores. Hitler, they insisted, posed no immediate threat to the United States.

Where would the Free World be today had more Americans listened?

Authentic believers in the Bible understand that part of what it means for human beings to be created in the “image of G-d” is the obligation to use the intelligence that G-d has given us to make difficult choices rather than evade them. They also understand the extraordinary power of religion—for good and for evil.

Those who believed, as President Obama once suggested, that easing sanctions and accommodating Iran would persuade the regime to moderate fundamentally misunderstood the nature of religious passion. At its best, religion elevates the human spirit and deepens our relationship with G-d. But when corrupted, it can reduce the world to a terrifying moral simplicity that sanctifies destruction.

And that brings us back to the language of “choice.”

Peace is not a magic word that, if repeated loudly enough, somehow creates itself. Peace is something that must be built, defended, and sometimes fought for.

Ecclesiastes tells us plainly: there is a time for peace—but also a time for war.

The real danger is not choosing wrongly. It is refusing to choose at all.

May G-d grant us both the courage to make difficult choices—and the wisdom to choose life.

*Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is the Director of Global Faith Engagement for Israel365. Before moving to Jerusalem, he was the Director of Interfaith Affairs for many years at the Simon Wiesenthal Center