There is no justification. For the attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists there is no justification. It begins with the fact that in 2005, despite many Israelis who wanted to remain in Gaza, where they had homes, synagogues, schools, and businesses, then PM Ariel Sharon insisted that Israel withdraw completely from Gaza. Gazans had their own territory and their own choice to thrive or not. Later, in a misguided effort to export democracy, the U.S. supported the idea that Hamas should be on the ballot for Gazans to enjoy free elections. They chose badly. Once they held power, Hamas acted as a proxy for Iran extremists and governed with only one goal in mind: the destruction of Israel. Supplies, money, and goods were redirected to build terror tunnels, bombs, and, ultimately, to perpetrate this past week’s barbaric and monstrous attack on Israel. The people of Gaza were either complicit, themselves, or victims of the regime that rules them.

Israel was brutally attacked by animals, as the world has come to label them. There is no international law of war or any human instinct that would explain, justify, or permit such barbarism. Once we know them by what they are, Israel and the world can act to ensure that they cannot kill again. Animals are taken down. Animals are held back. Animals are kept behind secure fences to prevent them from harming human beings.

Chaos isn’t new to us, but it is uncommon. We rely on order to live in covenant with God as Jews. It begins in Torah, in this week’s portion, Bereisheet, where we read, “When God began to create heaven and earth — the earth being unformed and void…” it was “tohu vavohu.” Out of chaos came order in six days of creation. It’s not how we understand that the physical world was actually formed as evidenced by science, but it is how we understand that the world must function in order to live in covenant with God. All things on earth have their roles and places, and human beings, created in God’s image, have the largest role to play as moral exemplars on earth. But as the Garden of Eden story explains, our lifelong struggle is to overcome our baser human instincts and to rise up to our human duties and greater humanity.

In effect, that’s exactly what Israel will do in coming weeks and what the world will observe. It’s not vengeance for vengeance’s sake; it’s transforming “tohu vavohu” into order again so that life in Israel can resume, and the world can rely on humanity’s greater instincts to thrive, to respect life, and to find peace. It’s been said that we don’t make peace with our friends; we make peace with our enemies. It, too, is a way of putting peoples, even when they hate each other, into their respective places where they can live apart from each other.

Remember what Elie Wiesel taught: the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. Love is an emotion we know very well. Hate is an emotion we learn to temper and transform. Even our enemy who hates us can be addressed over time as evidenced in history and in recent times between Arab nations who have long been Israel’s enemies. But indifference is to be without emotions we recognize in human beings. Indifference makes one an animal that acts on instinct without compassion, intelligence, or free-will. It’s a trait we avoid and fear.

At the end of six days of transforming an “unformed and void” world into order, there was Shabbat. God sanctified the seventh day and made it holy. It’s our day of rest and joy, and a day of gratitude to God, for creating us to live in covenant with God. We can act, too, and pray that in six days we might glimpse order that will emerge from the hands and hearts of brave and strong men and women of the IDF, whose responsibility it is to bring us all back to a day of rest, a day that honors God’s works of creation, a day we know as Shabbat.

May this day come speedily; may this day come without more agony; may this day bring resolution about our loved ones who are missing; may this day restore order to a land and a people we love, now and always. Am Yisrael Chai.