Le Monde met with rabbi Delphine Horvilleur in her Paris synagogue after she celebrated two bar mitzvahs in a seemingly joyful atmosphere. "I didn't want to steal such an important moment in these teenagers' lives. A bar mitzvah is a celebratory occasion, not a day for the dead," said Horvilleur, a leading figure in liberal Judaism in France. However, in the audience, tearful faces hinted at the dramatic context, a few days after Hamas' deadly attack in Israel. In the face of tragedy, the rabbi called for us not to succumb "to an absolute dehumanization of the other side."

Following the Hamas attacks on Israel, what are you feeling?

Delphine Horvilleur: It's hard for me to answer this question because it depends on the time of day. Like many people, I'm devastated and have become totally pessimistic, even though I've always seen myself as an optimist, confident in the possibility of peace. Today, these lofty ideals now ring a little hollow to me. I feel like the ground has given way beneath my feet, like something has collapsed.

I could speak as a Jew or as someone connected to Israel, of course. But in reality, I simply have to speak as a human being. We are confronted with images of such inhumanity that the question that fills my mind is how to preserve our humanity, how to make sure that, in the times to come, we don't dehumanize the other to a degree that would confiscate our souls.

As much as I can understand that in the Middle East people no longer manage to do it because the level of hatred and rage has reached its peak, we have no excuse here. And I feel anger towards those people from France, who add hatred to hatred and who sink into an absolute dehumanization of the other side. This major empathic flaw is, in fact, a terrible moral flaw, and its repercussion will be the dehumanization of ourselves. It will further enclose us within a bubble of selective empathy, an impossible trust in the words of others because they were not there. We have a duty, from a distance, to be the ultimate guardians of humanity, despite our rage and anger, in the moral necessity of denouncing in the strongest possible terms what has just happened. No cause, no matter how just, legitimizes these crimes by Hamas. No freedom or emancipation can be achieved on the basis of this ignominy.

You've done a great deal to promote dialogue between Jews and Muslims, and you have dedicated an issue of the magazine 'Tenou'a,' of which you're the editor, to Isaac and Ishmael, entitled 'Talking again.' How can the dialogue now be resumed?

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