Leo Pearlman is a London based producer and a loud and proud Zionist. His most recent film about the Oct 7 Nova Music Festival massacre, ‘We Will Dance Again’ has won the 2025 Emmy of the 46th Annual News & Documentary Awards for most ‘Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary’.

As catastrophe strikes Nepal, Israelis have once again travelled thousands of miles to help strangers. Tikkun Olam demands that we try repair a broken world, even when parts of that world despise us.

Something terrible has happened in Nepal. A catastrophic collapse high in the Himalayas sent an enormous torrent of water, rock and debris crashing through the valleys below. Communities have been devastated, hundreds are dead and thousands remain missing across Nepal and Tibet.

Nearly 5,000 kilometres away, within hours of this tragedy striking, in Israel, people started packing their bags. IsraAID, Israel’s largest humanitarian NGO, announced almost immediately that it was deploying an emergency team to Nepal, providing urgent relief, mental-health support and protection for devastated communities.

There is another connection between Nepal and Israel that makes this week’s events particularly poignant.

On October 7th, 2023, 17 young Nepali agricultural students were living and working at Kibbutz Alumim, close to the Gaza border. Ten were murdered by Hamas, an eleventh, 23-year-old Bipin Joshi, was taken hostage. Before he was kidnapped, Bipin managed to throw away a grenade Hamas terrorists had tossed into the shelter where the students were hiding, helping save the lives of many others. For more than two years his family waited for him, eventually his body came home. Bipin had been murdered by Hamas terrorists while held in captivity.

But I want to be very clear about the significance of that connection. Israelis aren’t helping Nepal because Nepalis died alongside Israelis on October 7th.

Nobody from Venezuela was murdered at Nova before Israeli humanitarian organisations responded to earthquakes there.

Nobody from Jamaica was kidnapped from a kibbutz before Israelis responded to the devastation caused by hurricane Melissa.

Nobody from Papua New Guinea had to die on October 7th before Israeli aid workers decided their suffering mattered after a tragic landslide struck in May 2024.

There is no ledger, no debt being repaid, no calculation of who stood beside us before deciding who we will stand beside. The suffering itself creates the obligation.

There is a Jewish name for that idea.

Tikkun Olam - Repairing the world ruled by God.

It is an ancient concept whose meaning has evolved over centuries, but which today expresses something deeply embedded within Jewish life. Encountering a broken world places an obligation upon us to try to repair our little piece of it.

Perhaps nobody captured its spirit more beautifully than the great Rabbi Israel Salanter:

“The material needs of another are my spiritual needs."

The important word is another. Not another Jew, not another Israeli, not somebody who likes Jews, not somebody whose country voted the right way at the United Nations, not even somebody who would necessarily help us. Just another human being.

There is something about the period since October 7 that makes that principle particularly important. On that morning Hamas terrorists poured into Israel and committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Families were murdered in their homes, young people slaughtered at a music festival, women raped, people burned alive. Children, grandparents, mothers and fathers were dragged into Gaza.

Before Israel had even counted its dead, parts of the world celebrated.

Not after Israel entered Gaza, not after months of war, not after images of Palestinian Arab suffering filled our television screens and useful idiots, celebrities and politicians rushed to condemn the Jews and contextualise our murder.

But on October 7th and 8th, while Israeli parents were still desperately calling the phones of children who would never answer. While bodies still lay where they had been murdered and nobody even knew how many hostages had been taken. People thousands of miles away celebrated the “resistance" and caused Jewish schools and places of worship to require additional security.

Think about the depravity of that paradox. Jews had been massacred in Israel and Jews elsewhere, across the world, needed protecting because of it. What followed was an explosion of antisemitism across the Jewish diaspora and an increasingly febrile hatred of Israel that frequently spilled over into hatred of Jews.

You could forgive Jews for concluding that enough was enough. Look after ourselves, let everyone else repair their own world, but that isn’t how Tikkun Olam works. It isn’t transactional. We don’t repair the world because the world repairs us. We don’t recognise somebody else’s humanity only if they recognise ours.

This is not an argument for Jewish moral superiority. Jews are not inherently better people and Israel is not an inherently better country. We fail, Israel fails, sometimes badly. Like every individual, religion, nation and people, we sometimes fall painfully short of the values we profess.

Tikkun Olam isn’t a certificate of Jewish moral perfection, it is an aspiration to Jewish moral responsibility and values matter most when living by them is difficult.

Which brings us back to Nepal, far from an isolated event, simply the most recent. When earthquakes devastated Venezuela this summer, Israeli humanitarian organisations deployed emergency specialists. When a massive landslide buried villages in Papua New Guinea in 2024, Israeli aid workers helped provide safe water and trauma support. Israeli organisations have worked throughout Ukraine, helping communities living through bombardment and displacement. After hurricanes devastated Caribbean communities, Israelis went there too.

Since its creation, IsraAID alone says it has responded to more than 110 emergencies in more than 65 countries. The world breaks, they go, people are in need, they go.

Then there is another, darker reality. Sometimes people desperately need help, Israeli doctors and rescuers are ready to provide it, and their governments would rather say no. There is nothing extraordinary about this, it is simply the world as it is. A world in which even earthquakes, floods and collapsed buildings cannot always overcome the politics of hatred towards Israel. A world in which the nationality of the person holding out a hand can matter more than the life of the person they are trying to pull from the rubble.

After the devastating Turkey-Syria earthquakes in February 2023, Israel offered to send hundreds of rescuers and medical personnel. People desperately needed help, but politics determined whether Israeli help was acceptable and to Damascus it was not.

Buildings collapsed, people buried alive, every minute beneath the rubble reducing someone’s chance of survival. Somewhere a parent waiting to discover whether the sound beneath several tonnes of concrete is their child and somebody is still asking who is offering the shovel.

There is a point at which politics becomes moral insanity driven by hate and idealogy. Yet Israeli humanitarian organisations have learnt to navigate precisely these sensitivities. That means working with local partners, alongside international organisations, finding ways to separate humanitarian assistance from diplomatic recognition.

Forget the flag, forget the photograph, forget the credit. You don’t have to thank us, you don’t have to praise Israel, you don’t even have to tell anybody who we helped.

Just let us help. Tikkun Olam.

Then there is perhaps the hardest test of this principle of all, Gaza. On September 1st, Israeli humanitarian organisation NATAN Worldwide Disaster Relief began supporting a medical clinic for Palestinian Arab children at the Gaza Children’s Village in Al-Mawasi.

Palestinian Arab doctors and nurses will provide the care, supported by NATAN through telemedicine and specialist assistance. The clinic is intended to provide vaccinations, preventative screening, consultations and rehabilitation, potentially reaching 10,000 Palestinian Arab children.

There is no contradiction between believing Israel has the right and responsibility to protect its citizens against Hamas and believing an innocent Palestinian Arab child deserves medical treatment. One is an obligation of statehood, the other is an obligation of humanity.

Judaism demands that we wrestle with both and again, that doesn’t make Jews better than anyone else. It doesn’t absolve Israel of its mistakes or mean we always meet the standards our faith demands. But it does mean that the failure of others to live by our values cannot become an excuse for abandoning them ourselves.

Hatred has the potential to do something dangerous to the person being hated. It tempts us to harden, to retreat, to stop caring. Eventually, perhaps, to allow those who deny our humanity to diminish our capacity to recognise theirs.

We cannot allow that to happen and our faith specifically forbids it. We cannot allow those who celebrated Jewish death to decide what Jewish life represents. We cannot allow governments that reject our help to determine whether we offer it and we cannot make another human being’s suffering contingent upon their opinion of us.

Rabbi Israel Salanter did not say:

The material needs of another are my spiritual needs, provided they like me.

He said another.

So when the earth shakes, the waters rise and buildings collapse, we go. When people who may never have met a Jew need clean water, we go. When governments don’t want our help, we try to find another way and when a Palestinian Arab child in Gaza needs a doctor, we help provide one.

Not because Jews are better, not because the world has earned our compassion, that was never the bargain. Their hatred belongs to them, our values belong to us.

Nobody in this story understood that more instinctively than Bipin Joshi.

On October 7th, 2023, on the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, a 23-year-old Nepali student found himself sheltering from Hamas terrorists thousands of miles from home. A grenade was thrown towards him and his friends, Bipin picked it up and threw it away. He helped save the lives of others, but when Bipin eventually came home to Nepal, it was in a coffin.

Almost three years later, catastrophe has struck his homeland and Israelis are travelling thousands of miles to Nepal to try to save the lives of people they have never met. Not because of Bipin, not because Nepal owes Israel something or Israel owes Nepal, not repayment, not reciprocity, just humanity

Bipin saw another human being in danger and acted. Israeli aid workers see other human beings in danger and act.

That is what repairing the world really means. You don’t ask who deserves your help, you don’t ask what they think of you, you don’t keep a ledger.

You see something broken.

And you try to repair it.