Open Letter to My Students 82: Freedom of Speech

Posted on October 3, 2025 | 2 comments

As a rabbi and professor who writes every day, I pay special attention to the line in my Yom Kippur confession that asks pardon for sins of dibbur peh, the damage done simply by “speaking.” Included in that rubric is everything from conversations that are simply a waste of time, to arguing, lying, and using language lightly without regard for its weightiness: its power to convince but also to hurt.[i] Jewish law best captures that hurting power under the category of lashon hara, “evil speech.” 

America, these days, is awash in concerns for “evil speech,” especially as it butts up against our first-amendment right to freedom of speech. A lengthy history of free speech by Princeton professor Fara Dabhoiwala demonstrates how complex the topic really is, but the book’s subtitle alerts us in advance to his conclusion: not just What is Free Speech? But The History of a Dangerous Idea! 

Is the very idea of free speech dangerous? Judaism’s many warnings about speech going wrong might lead us to think so. Lashon Hara, it turns out, is but one of three categories of hurtful speech that Judaism prohibits. The least serious is r’chilut, repeating ordinary “gossip,” that might seem relatively innocuous but is, by definition, negative. Lashon hara is worse, in that it designates purposely malicious speech that will likely damage others, even if it is true.[ii] Outright slander, making up lies about someone, thereby ruining someone’s reputation (motsi shem ra), is the worst of the three.

Given these grave concerns, we might wonder if Judaism even does advocate freedom of speech. Our classic sources are certainly more focused on its limits. Some organizational websites try to demonstrate that the right of free speech is, nonetheless, a Talmudic value.[iii] Their evidence is, at best, suggestive.

But we shouldn’t expect anything better. Dabhoiwala traces the whole idea of free speech only to the 17th-century and its dawning Enlightenment.[iv]  The question ought not to be whether the Rabbis anticipated the Enlightenment (why would they?) but whether Enlightenment ideals are at least consistent with rabbinic values. The best evidence regarding freedom of speech is the very fact that the Rabbis prohibit some categories of speech in the first place; from which we can deduce that any speech other than the restricted categories is permitted!  Hence also the supporting evidence from Talmudic arguments, which encourage differences of opinion, and do not censor out the side that loses the argument. 

So freedom of speech is a modern idea. The Talmud had not foreseen it; but would have welcomed it, albeit with due regard for the damage that improper speech can inflict.

I make this argument for both liberals and conservatives, because both sides accuse one another of limiting free speech, to advance each other’s perspective in today’s culture wars.  With conservatives now in the ascendancy, it is the liberals who denounce the administration’s forbidden (and perhaps even punishable) word-list : such “woke” language as “non-binary” and “gender diversity.”[v] But when liberals held power, conservatives had similar grievances: having to say “the global south” rather than “the third world,” for instance, or (closer to home) having to worry about using the right pronouns. I make no judgement here on either set of claims. I just point out that both sides of the American divide feel victimized by having their freedom of speech curtailed.

More serious is the category of hate speech that Jewish tradition has long warned against. But what counts as hate speech? And does the first-amendment guarantee of free speech have limits. Apparently it does: we cannot maliciously yell “fire” in a crowded theater. White racists cannot burn a cross on someone’s lawn. 

But things get tricky. When he was charged by President Johnson to plan the “War on Poverty,” sociologist (and later, senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan believed that the horrific conditions in our inner-city ghettos is partly the result of problems within black families. Can Moynihan say so? He did. And even write a treatise on it? He did that too.[vi]

Suppose someone believes that Israel is an aggressor, a colonial power. Can they say that? Yes. Write a treatise on it? Also yes.

What they cannot do is say the same thing outside a crowded synagogue, in such a way as to suggest violent action, to a crowd of people waving Palestinian flags. 

Why not? 

It helps to distinguish “word” from “message.” The same words can imply vastly different messages, depending on how and in what context they are said. Limits on free speech are protections not just against words, but against the messages inherent in them. Freedom of speech protects the flow of ideas expressed usually (although not only) through words; it does not permit any and all messages.  

One more thing. The Jewish laws of damages are framed illustratively: mayhem caused a goring ox, for example. A particularly interesting case is “pebbles,” damage caused not directly by the animal, but by pebbles that it kicks up and that fly off and injure someone at a distance. It is not just the message of the moment that we worry about; our concern (especially in this age of social media) is damage at a distance, how messages get spread and magnified until they pollute the very way people think, causing damage over time.

A reviewer of Dabhoiwala’s book concludes, “Such freedom [of speech], the skeptics insist, is not an unalloyed good. They’re right. It is an alloyed good. But alloyed goods… are the only kind we ever get.”[vii] And we need them.

[i] Iyyun T’efilah, Siddur Otsar Tefillot (Vilna: 1914; reprint. 1938), d.h. b’dibbur peh, vol 2, p. 1122 

[ii] Maimonides, Hilchot de’ot 7:2. 

[iii] See, e.g, https://truah.org/resources/freedom-of-speech-in-jewish-tradition/; https://rac.org/jewish-values-and-civil-liberties.

[iv] To John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) and John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689).

[v] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html

[vi] The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: The Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, March 1965).

[vii] Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Watch What You Say,” The New York Review of Books (September 25, 2025), p. 66.

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Open Letter to My Students 81: Recapturing Eternity

Posted on September 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

It is time to reclaim timelessness, “foreverness,” the way we fit into eternity. But only the right kind.

The “right kind” is not new; and it takes two forms. Individually, eternity is some form of “moreness” in which we participate after we die; and, possibly, before we are born as well: an eternal soul, perhaps, that transcends our corporeal being and produces our deepest form of identity in this, our earthly state. There is also a corporate dimension, the way even our tiny lives contribute to a larger destiny for humanity – if not an actual eternity, at least an “almost” one, in that we see our impact joining that of others and stretching out at least as long as our planet survives (some 7-8 billion years or so).

Despite the impossibility of producing evidence one way or the other, we have believed in at least one of these two eternities for almost all of human history. Despite the  same impossibility of producing evidence one way or the other, many people now disparage that belief – with terrible consequences. Among them is the urge to carve out ersatz experiences of eternity: oases of quietude or of hedonistic pleasure that deny reality round about them. Like William Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us.” By “getting and spending,” he added, “we lay waste our powers.”[i] Not so us. We conclude, falsely, that by “getting and spending,” we can escape the noise around us while the world goes away.

Alas, the world never does go away. 

A case in point comes from Jenny Erpenbeck’s remarkable novel, Visitation. A woman moves into a spacious lakeside estate, what she calls her “piece of eternity.” In the perfection of being that followed, “her laughter was the laughter of today, of yesterday and just as much, the laughter of twenty years ago,” as if time were “at her beck and call, like a house in which she can enter now this room, now that.” 

But the world intrudes. It is the early days of Nazi Germany; she must ignore the fact that the property has been “purchased” from Jewish owners who were forced to “sell” it. Then the war doesn’t go well, and the woman’s finances are drained. When the war finally ends and Soviet soldiers utterly ransack the place, the woman bemoans their “drilling a hole in her eternity.”[ii] Her remaining years are spent stranded in Communist East Germany. She is clearly on the wrong side of history. 

Now let us extend the story. With her false eternity fading away, the woman discovers she will inevitably age, sicken, and disappear into the nothingness of death, that, for her (with no real eternity to draw upon) must be like the black hole of dying stars that suck up the light of the universe and never give it back. 

“Mass,” say the physicists, is the amount of matter in an object, the extent of its resistance to being buffeted about by change. What if humans have not just physical mass, however, but moral mass as well, measurable by the extent to which we resist being thrown into dismay by the events of the moment? What if moral mass is augmented by imaginative mass, the capacity to think beyond the moment, to see ourselves as part of a larger cosmic plan where the “almost” eternity of history and the actual eternity of a soul are better measures of what matter? 

We need not make do with counterfeit eternities and the knife wounds of history that perforate it. We can look to those real eternities of which we are a part. Eternity is not a carved-out part of life; life is a carved-out part of eternity.

I said that there is no real evidence of either eternity, but where there is no evidence, the Talmud suggests there may at least be intimations: finite intimations, that is, of infinite realities.  Shabbat, for example, is an intimation of the world to come. Yom Kippur is shabbat shabbaton, “a sabbath of sabbaths” where the gates that open onto rebirth and a betterment of time never close. 

So too we have humanity’s own intimations of timelessness: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for example. And nature’s own intimations too: a harvest moon; sunsets over the ocean; and stars – the endlessness of starry nights, stretching into vastness. Like ultra-rationalist Emanuel Kant, I too am filled with awe by “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”

Medieval rabbis ascribe special necessity for congregations gathering on the High Holy Days not just to pray together but to pray out loud together so that “individuals may learn from one another.”[iii] What must they learn, if not the intimation that none of us need face the future alone? The High Holy Days also spotlight the absence of those who once sat beside us but are no more. I hear Kol Nidre and sing Avinu Malkenu in a room filled with people and a space that is resonant with those who once heard and sang as I still do, but who are gone. I am part of a generational chain, dedicated to the promise that goodness, sweetness, and kindness will prevail. 

When artificial attempts at manufacturing eternity are hollowed out by the terrors of time, I remember that no amount of leakage can make actual eternity less than what it is. Take away a million, a billion, a trillion, from infinity, and you still have infinity.  Bombard eternity with however many attacks on the human spirit, and you still have eternity. These days of anger, confusion, and fear, are real. But what keeps me going is the High Holy Day intimation that in my own little way I am part of something more capacious, part of two kinds of eternity that are just as real and maybe even more so. 

[i] William Wordworth, sonnet, “The World is too much with us,” composed c.1802. 

[ii] Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation. Original German, Heimsuchung, 2008. English ed., Susan Bernofsky, trans., New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 2010, pp. 52, p. 51, 54, 55.

[iii] See, e.g., Mateh Moshe, by Moses ben Abraham of. Przemyśl, 1591, Section 693.

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Open Letter to My Students 80: What I Believe About Israel

Posted on July 24, 2025 | 1 comment

After my latest Open Letter on the generation split among Jews, regarding Israel, I have been asked what I would say, were I to be in dialogue with those who do not think as I do. So here goes…

At stake are three questions:

1. Do Jews even have a right to a nation state? 

2. If so, where? 

3. Given that they have such a state, and conceding that a Jewish state (like all states) must guarantee their citizens’ safety, how should that state prosecute its current war?

Would-be Jewish critics must first concede that it is the Israelis, not Diaspora Jews, who were massacred on October 7; it is they, not we, whose lives depend on the war-time decisions that we discuss from the comfort of our studies and dinner tables. Still, the ripple effect is impacting Jews everywhere. We all have a stake not just in Israel’s survival, but in the kind of state that Israel is. It is painful watching it move implacably toward excommunication as a rogue state in the community of nations. Also, Israel’s policies impact anti-Semitism toward Jews in general. Finally, Israel came into being as a Jewish state, not just an Israeli state. Jews world-wide have the right to an opinion.

With that in mind, I begin with Question 3: Israel’s war in Gaza. 

If you read deeply about past Israel-Arab wars, you cannot but marvel at  the complexity of military decisions and how little we outsiders knew at the time. So too now: lacking military expertise ourselves, we must draw conclusions from a host of rival reports, some reliable and some not. I give greater credence to the free press in Israel than to reports from within Gaza that are subject to totalitarian Hamas propaganda. It matters, then, that many reliable Israeli voices, some of them in the military and security establishment itself, suggest that the war is no longer tactical but punitive, political, or driven by right-wing ideologues intent on driving the Arabs out altogether.

To complicate matters, Hamas leaders, sitting comfortably nowhere near the war zone, are happy to see the war continue. Even as I write this, international negotiators from Qatar itself are rejecting Hamas proposals as being unworthy of even bringing to the table. So peace may be impossible, no matter what Israel does, but more bombing and killing, more population displacements, and the non-stop demolition of infrastructure that provides food and medical care are looking increasingly suspect. 

So in Question 3, I am increasingly critical of Israel’s government and its right-wing coalition partners who sometimes admit outright that their goal is to make good their biblically based “right” to own it all. “From the river to the sea” is a despicable phrase no matter who says it, Arab or Jew. 

More troubling are Questions 1 and 2, where critics deny the very right to have a Jewish state; especially on the biblical land that was once Judea/Israel, and then renamed by Rome as Palaestina (Palestine).  

Their most strident objection is that Israel is the fruit of imperialistic colonialism. But just the reverse is the case. If anything, Jews are the indigenous people to the area. To be sure, the Amorites, Jebusites, and so on were there first, but that was in pre-antiquity, akin to the multiple tribes that preceded classical Rome. Jews are to Judea as Romans are to Rome. Dig deep enough in Israel’s soil and you get biblical cities, Maccabean homes, and ancient synagogues. The return of Jews to the biblical and rabbinic Jewish land is a lesson in anti-colonialism, even though their internationally approved right to return to part of it does not entitle them to claim it all.

True, the return was facilitated by colonial powers. But so too were the Arab states that came into being simultaneously: not just Israel, but Syria, Iraq, and Jordan too were colonial inventions, part of the 1916 pact whereby Francois Georges-Picot for France and Sir Mark Sykes for England unfurled a map of the Ottoman empire to carve a set of arbitrary states out of it. 

In the Arab-Jewish war of 1948, all these just-being-born states fought not only to defeat one another but to expand territory as well. Jordan hankered after the entire West Bank. Iraq sought parts of the Galilee all the way to Haifa. Egypt dreamed of owning the Negev and the Mediterranean coast. 

Yes, contrary to the angelic picture offered many of us in synagogue religious schools, we now know that Israel too sought territorial expansion. And yes too, Israel was born by an ethnic people (the Jews) seeking to return to its geographic roots, its legitimate home-land. To oppose Israel, however, but not all the other ethnically derived states that the twentieth century birthed (Rumania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and so on) is anti-Semitism. 

Still, all such states are properly held to moral standards – which I addressed above.

There is some hope – at least long-term. British foreign secretary and then prime minister Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) opined that nation states have interests, not friends. “Interests,” he averred, “are eternal and perpetual” but “we have no eternal allies, and no perpetual enemies.” In other words, even enemies can become allies – as we now see with Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and maybe even Syria and Saudi Arabia in the near future. In time, we may see a Palestinian state as an ally – but only if both sides wish it to be so. Continued war and takeovers, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, are not the way to get to “Yes.”

Palestinians, like Israelis, want a home, but looking homeward can be good or bad, depending on where you train your vision. Neither side can look to what home once was, as if to restore some prior golden age when Muslim powers relegated Jews to subservience; or when biblical kings owned Israel/Judea, centuries before Islam was even born. We Jews cannot convince radical Islamists, but we can do the right thing ourselves. 

Israel is a proper and necessary Jewish state; it needs secure borders; it does not need more territory. 

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Open Letter to My Students 79: Mamdani Long-Term, and the Jewish Future

Posted on July 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

As intellectual Gertrude Stein lay dieing, her disciples are said to have pleaded with her, “Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?” She responded, “What is the question?” Everything depends on the question. 

Hence, the Passover Haggadah’s “Four Children” narrative. What makes each questioner wise, evil, or naive is the question they ask.  

What question, then, should we ask about Zohran Mamdani’s election as the Democratic party’s mayoral candidate in New York City? Wall Street wonders how a socialist mayor can run the city that is the epicenter of American capitalism. Jews agonize over an anti-Israel candidate who even advocates the “globalization” of the Intifada.  

 These are real issues, and immediate ones. But long-term, we might wonder whether the voting pattern that brought Momdani his victory spells something larger: the passing of one Jewish era and the birth of another. Trigger warning, first: if you are a baby boomer or older, you might not like the answer. 

Precincts populated by older and established Jews voted against Mamdani. Precincts where young Jews predominate voted for him. The explanations are several. Young people who suffer from New York’s high cost of living found Momdani’s populist socialism appealing. Momdani also mastered the social media by which young people follow the news. But many young Jews supported him not just despite his anti-Israel rhetoric, but because of it. 

This Jewish generational split may be temporary. But what if it is more? What if we are witnessing a genuinely historic moment: not just the end of the boomer generation’s influence but the end of the entire era. As boomers continue aging out of their influential years, the younger generations’ ambivalence about Israel may become the new norm.  

At stake is what has been called “Jewish Civil Religion,” an idea that goes back to a 1967 article (“American Civil Religion”) by sociologist Robert Bellah.[i] Bellah analyzed religion into its component parts: beliefs, sacred holidays,  sacred stories (or “myths”), a code of behavior, and so on. All of those, he said, are offered by just being American. “Americanism” is itself a sort of shadow religion to which all Americans can feel that they belong.

In 1987, Jonathan Woocher applied Bellah’s theory to American Jews.[ii] Side by side with their official Judaism, he said, Jews here are fiercely loyal to a civil Jewish religion, in which pride in Israel is central. Its sacred “myth” is the story of near destruction in the Shoah, but rebirth in the Jewish State. Its rituals include missions to Israel, or even (acting out the myth) travel first to Auschwitz and then to Israel to celebrate redemption there.

Israel in the 1980s, when Woocher wrote his book, was threatened as much as (and maybe even more than) it is today. Israelis were regularly being killed or maimed by terrorist attacks, to the point where Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But the attacks continued. A 1983 assault on an IDF base caused 60 Israeli casualties.1984 ended with the UN denouncing Israel as “not a peace loving nation.” In 1985, Israel had to down two Syrian MIGs; and sink a terrorist ship just off the coast in the Mediterranean; on October 7 of that year (yes, October 7) Palestinian terrorists hijacked a ship and then shot and dumped overboard the body of a wheelchair-bound American Jew, Leon Klinghofer. 

But through it all, the sacred myth remained intact, because Israel still looked to be on the side of the angels. In the face of the crisis, Yitzchak Shamir (right-wing Likkud) and Shimon Peres (left-wing Labor) formed a unity government. We were shocked to hear that in Lebanon, Israeli officers looked away, while their allies, Christian militias, massacred the Muslim population in Sabra and Shatila. But almost immediately, the Knesset empowered a Supreme-court appointed commission of inquiry, which censured those involved and forced several resignations.[iii] In 1985, an Israeli court convicted west-bank settlers of terrorism and even murder. Can we imagine that happening today?

I will not address here the complex situation in Gaza, because debate over the extended war there hides more obvious and unforgivable travesties on the west bank. Israeli settlers, often aided by the IDF itself, are systematically taking over Arab land, while terrorizing and even killing its long-time owners. This wanton behavior hardly comports with our civil-religion tale of an Israel to be proud of. 

This Jewish civil religion animated the baby-boomers’ love affair with Israel. Their Gen X  children grew up with at least some familiarity with it. Not so, the millennials who supported Mamdani; they were born well after these glory years of a Jewish State with a conscience. They have probably never even heard of the Jewish civil religion from the 1980s; and if they have, they would find it laughable. 

Every generation has a window of influence, usually the period from about age 40 to 65 or 70. Boomers born in 1946 to 1964 are now 61 to 79 years old. Their Gen X children (born 1965–1980, now aged  45-60) are still a moderating bridge to what’s coming. But tomorrow will be written by generations who see Israel altogether differently. That is not just a generational turnover; it is a change of era. 

Some caveats apply. The current war may end with Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Iran so weakened, that Gaza can be rebuilt into a Palestinian partner with Israel. The Israeli electorate may at last drive out its current ruling coalition and the west-bank adventurists whom it is empowering. Maybe also, the absurdity of demanding the dismantling of a Jewish state because of so-called “colonial” beginnings will dawn on the American Jewish critics; who simultaneously may discover the vast majority of  their Israeli Jewish counterparts who supported this war because Hamas had to be destroyed, but who deplore the Jewish thugs as much as they, the American millennials, do.   

It may be too that the Jewish youth in New York are so utterly different from the rest of the country that my entire analysis is irrelevant. But I doubt it. The Mamdani phenomenon may repeat elsewhere, with other Mamdanis, and other Jews too who will attain their own era of influence while believing that Zionism is evil, and that the Israel of their parents was an illusion. That is what scares me. 

[i] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus 96:1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21.

[ii] Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

[iii] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-kahan-commission-of-inquiry

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Open Letter to My Students 78: The Excellence of Excellence

Posted on May 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

I am by nature a liberal. But I read conservative authors to keep myself honest.

Anthony Kronman is such an author, whose recent book True Conservatism chides liberals for valuing equality at the expense of excellence.[i]  Surely, he reasons, we want excellence in doctors and carpenters. Why shouldn’t we expect similar excellence in simply being human? Everyone should have equal opportunity to develop human excellence, but as a matter of social policy, we should cultivate that excellence and expect it of people.

Do we have an obligation to foster a society where human excellence is the goal? Religions, certainly, would seem to say yes. The Jewish version is the adage by Hillel, “Where humanity is lacking, strive to be humane.”[ii]

The most immediate liberal objection is the cultural bias inherent in defining “humanly excellent.” We can more easily agree on what counts for excellence in doctors and carpenters (they themselves have criteria for what they do). But who is to say what counts as human excellence? 

We can reframe the question by asking how human beings are unique among animals. What is it that the evolution of human beings has uniquely outfitted us to do? 

I know of several impressive answers to that question.

The first is by Aristotle, who calls human beings rational animals. Only humans can reason their way through thick cobwebs of arguments to arrive at logical conclusions. It would follow that schools should teach the ability to reason wisely; that politicians should demonstrate the art of rational debate and deliberation; and that individuals should dedicate themselves to lives of thoughtfulness.  

Aristotle further believed in a uniquely human form of happiness, not momentary hedonism but “morally virtuous action guided by reason,”[iii] which he thought would produce the long-term sense of well-being that Greeks called eudaemonia. Human excellence lies in “the hunt for the life that is truly worth living”?[iv]

But there are other options. Human reason is an extension of our ability to manipulate language, which philosopher Ernst Cassirer saw as a complex system of symbols. For him, we humans are not so much rational, or even eudaemonia-seeking, animals, so much as we are symbol-appreciating animals. A society that values excellence would imbue its members with an appreciation of symbols — not just language, but mathematics and the various arts as well, for these too are symbolic systems that stretch our human imagination.  

But what about religion, a symbol system whose purpose is to seek the eternal, the transcendent, a “cosmic connection” in which we see the world as “shot through with joy, significance, inspiration.”[v] Hence a third view, represented most forcefully by Mircea Eliade, who pioneered the discipline called History of Religions: Human beings, he says, are religious animals. We should create societies where the search for transcendent meaning is foremost; and where the legitimate religious expression of that human urge for ultimacy can thrive. 

And finally, the view of Karl Marx, who brilliantly redefined human beings as the species that works.Marxism (untethered from Communism) is the commitment to guarantee everyone a form of work that satisfies because it is rewarded and fulfilling. The search for social excellence would transform work itself as part of that “life worth living.”

Liberals might still object that these definitions of human excellence are by white men who are part of the classic philosophical heritage which denied equality to women, condoned slavery, and colonized native peoples worldwide. And there is some truth to that. Aristotle taught Alexander the Great who “colonized” a good deal of the entire known world. Eliade once flirted with his native Rumania’s nationalist but anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Marxism was concretized in Communist states that suppressed everyone around them. As a Jew who fled Germany and denounced both hero-worship and racism, Cassirer seems the least implicated, but until Hitler came along, he certainly was part of the European intellectual establishment.  

Still, shouldn’t the claim for human excellence be judged on its own merit? 

A related charge is that advocating excellence as the ultimate human goal sounds elitist, especially in a society with chronic inequality and rampant poverty. But these human ills are heinous precisely because they run counter to the right of every person to aspire to the excellence for which being human is intended.   

What can possibly be wrong with a national agenda that demands 1. rational conversation as a path to ongoing happiness; 2. the right to be at home in the distinctively human symbol systems of language, mathematics and the arts; 3. access to religious systems that provide transcendence and religious meaning; and 4. work that is rewarded and rewarding? In fact, I see no reason why any of this need be a specifically “conservative” doctrine. Liberals too should claim as their own. 

Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher whose Jewish parents imbued her with the leftist doctrines that were commonplace among Jews who hailed from eastern Europe. Her recent book, The Left is Not Woke, attacks the woke doctrines that are currently popular on campuses and distinguishes them from true liberalism, the point of view that traces its roots to the Enlightenment, esteems rational discourse, and seeks to better the lives of human beings everywhere. 

Defining human excellence as I have may not be compatible with wokeness, but it is perfectly in keeping with Susan Neiman’s liberalism, which is my brand of liberalism too.

True liberals should demand this kind of excellence. We should insist on a national conversation on how to reframe our institutions, government, and culture to embody and to emphasize a life worth living — the virtuous, peaceful, and universal sense of human dignity toward which human equality of opportunity should aspire. 

[i] Anthony T. Kronman, True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025).

[ii]  Avot 2:6. Literally “Where there are no men, strive to be a man.” Avoiding the sexist “men” is difficult here. But I think I have captured the idea correctly.

[iii] A nice turn of phrase I borrow from Riin Sirkel, review of Øyvind Rabbås, Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, Hallvard Fossheim, and Miira Tuominen (eds.), The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness(Oxford University Press, 2015). https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-quest-for-the-good-life-ancient-philosophers-on-happiness/.

[iv] Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, Eds., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), Introduction, p. 14.

[v] Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Cambridge and London:  Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2024), p. xvi.

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Open Letter to My Students 77: Up or Down

Posted on May 7, 2025 | 10 comments

I think of Judaism as a tradition that prefers counting up, not down. Take the period in which we find ourselves now: s’firat ha’omer (“the counting of the omer).

Jewish history wonks who study this kind of thing know that it reflects the biblical commandment to count the days and weeks between the barley harvest (that matures on Passover) and the wheat harvest (that matures some seven weeks later at the festival of Shavuot). 

An omer is a biblical measure, one days’ worth of manna, the food dropped from heaven to feed the Israelites in the wilderness (Exodus 16). But it is also the first sheaf of the barley harvest brought to the Temple (Leviticus 23:10). Josephus says it was dried, crushed, and ground up; some of it was then thrown on the altar as a sacrifice; the rest was baked and given to the priests.[i] It inaugurated the counting period that lasted until Shavuot. 

When the Temple fell in the war against Rome (70 CE) so too did the sacrifices, but the counting ritual remained and was eventually associated with certain mourning customs (a ban on weddings, for example). Medieval Jews connected the mourning with a Talmudic tale about 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiba who died during the omer as punishment for envying one another’s mastery of Torah. Other, midrashic, sources give the number as 12,000, or only 300, and do not necessarily connect it with the omer period or explain it as student envy. What came first, the mourning customs or the explanation for them, is a good question. But either way, counting of the omer has continued to this day, sometimes, in fact, called simply s’firah, “counting.”[ii]

And the point is, we count the omer by counting up, not down. 

The same is true of Hanukah candles. The Talmud (Shabbat 21b) discusses whether we should go from eight candles on day one to a single candle on day eight, or vice versa? Counting up won.

A third example is the Seder song, “Who knows One,” the point being the singularity of God. But the various verses count up: “Who knows two?” “Who knows three?” all the way to “Who knows Thirteen?”

By contrast, North American culture prefers counting down. Think of New Year’s Eve and a crowd of thousands in New York’s Times Square, waiting for the ball to descend. As midnight approaches, they count down: “10, 9, 8,” until finally “1” – and then a burst of apocalyptic joy: fireworks, applause, embraces, and kisses. It’s mania on Main Street in a million similar gatherings across the world. 

The launching of a NASA spacecraft too comes with a countdown. Who hasn’t watched TV coverage of the countless Apollos, Challengers, and Voyagers and heard “10, 9, 8…. 1 – We have liftoff.” 

Counting up or down matters. “Down” has a necessary ending: zero. Utter finality. “Up” ends arbitrarily at any number we want, but wherever we stop counting, there are more numbers waiting in the wings. “Down” delivers an absolute end, a vacuum of nothingness, the end of days, a new world aborning, the long-awaited Apocalypse, finally at hand. 

Yes, Apocalypse. Counting down is the way any number of devotees throughout history have measured off the years until a messiah was due to arrive (and then didn’t). New Year’s Eve is itself a secular version of messianic anticipation. Out with the old; in with the new. And what is our space program, if not the hyped-up hope of discovering new worlds, stretching our reach through the universe, “to go where no man has gone before,” in Star Trek lingo. 

And that, perhaps, is why Jews prefer counting up. We have been burned too many times by false messiahs. Our tradition warns against imagining we can hasten the messianic coming; the Talmud even curses anyone who thinks they know when that will be;[iii] and, frankly, given the Talmud’s bloodcurdling warnings about the period leading up to the messiah’s coming (devastation, suffering beyond measure),[iv] I’m not so sure we want even to be there. 

Mainstream Judaism’s messianism is not a single apocalyptic Armageddon. It is a cumulative piling up of good deeds; penitence for the wrongs we put out into the world; and acts of loving kindness, that whittle away at the corrosive cruelty around us. 

British Poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a sad soul, who virtually starved himself to death at age 63, despite becoming a favorite poet of his generation and receiving numerous awards for his work. He spent his last thirty years as a librarian, had a few lovers off and on, but died wifeless, childless, and friendless, with a reputation for being parsimonious, misanthropic, misogynistic, and even racist. But I read his poetry anyway – were I to measure art by the character of the artists who produce it, I’d have to forego the music of Wagner, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the stories of Roald Dahl (anti-Semites); the literature of Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens (colonialists); and the writings of Flannery O’Connor (racist). So I read Philip Larkin, who had this to say:

“Always too eager for the future/ we pick up bad habits of expectancy.” And in the end, we are left “holding wretched stalks of disappointment.”[v]

So I restrain my eagerness for a revolutionary end to all that ails us; I don’t count down; I count up, postponing whatever final victory there may be some distant tomorrow. Especially in moments of despair, when it seems beyond me to effect revolutionary change, I remember how Judaism has never liked revolutions anyway, and how it prefers the strategy of regularized drops of human kindness, that can offset  an entire sea of human ugliness. 

Tonight is Wednesday May 7; 25 days, which are 3 weeks and 4 days of the omer.” Onward and upward, still counting!     

[i] Josephus, Antiquities 3:250-251.

[ii] Cf. Talmud Babli, Yebamot 62b (24,000); Ecclesiastes Rabba 11:6 and Genesis Rabba 61:3, Tanchuma Chayei Sarah 6 (300).  For the history of the omer, see Efrat Zarren-Zohar, “From Passover to Shavuot,” in Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, Two Liturgical Tradition,” Vol. 6, Passover and Easter: The Symbolic Structuring of Sacred Seasons (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), pp. 71-93.

[iii] Sanhedrin 97b

[iv] Sotah 49b.

[v] Philip Larkin, “Next Please,” in Philip Larkin Poems: Selected and With an Introduction By Martin Avis(London: Faber and Faber, 2011), pp. 24/25.

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Open Letter to My Students 76: Peace of Mind

Posted on April 23, 2025 | 2 comments

Primo Levi, recently released from Auschwitz, recalls a savvy confidante warning him, “The war is not yet over – not for you.” Indeed, on July 4, 1946, the few remaining Jews in the Polish town of Kielce were herded together and clubbed, stoned, or stabbed to death.  In 1946 as well, Jewish survivors elsewhere, barely alive from concentration-camp starvation and forced death marches, languished in Displaced Persons camps with nowhere to go. Even here, 64% of American Jews claimed personal familiarity with anti-Semitism. 1946 was not a very good year.

How amazing, then that in 1946, the leading book on the New York Times best-seller list was authored by a Rabbi from Boston, Joshua Loth Liebman, and entitled Peace of Mind. 

“This is the gift that God reserves for special proteges,” Liebman wrote. “ Talent and beauty God gives to many. Wealth is commonplace, fame not rare. But peace of mind – that is the fondest sign of God’s love.” 

Peace of mind is an inner virtue: not something we gain from life’s experiences, but something we take to them, to help us make it through them. Think of the biblical Aaron, who suffers the sudden death of his two oldest sons. The Torah defends the event as divine punishment for offering “alien fire,” an obscure sin that neither the Talmud nor the commentators explain very satisfactorily.  I read the account as a case of “grasping at straws,” like Job’s friends who imagine all suffering must be deserved. It isn’t. When inexplicable tragedies strike — through hurricanes, earthquakes, and such – we too call them “acts of God,” without really meaning it.

What matters, however, is not the logic we supply but the response we manage to muster. Aaron, the Torah says, is silent. He endures the loss and moves on.

With all our sophistication on dealing with bereavement, we tend nowadays to fault him for not venting his anger, railing at God, crying foul. I don’t necessarily recommend such stoic silence, but I do marvel at the Torah’s picture of Aaron the father who takes even the tragic death of his children with apparent equanimity. 

 By contrast, when King David’s son Absalom dies (while in armed revolt against him, no less), David laments, “Oh my son Absalom, Absalom my son, would that I had died instead of you.” What do we learn from Aaron that we do not see in David?

Every biblical hero is painted with faults, but also redeeming virtues.  Abraham almost sacrifices his son, but is faithful; Moses loses his temper, but is humble; And Aaron? Aaron’s failure is his compolicity in making the golden calf. What is his distinctive virtue?

From Passover to Shavuot, the period we Jews are traversing at this very moment, we read our way through Pirkei Avot, the rabbinic book of wisdom par excellence. I love the instalment that says, “Be among the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing it.”  Aaron’s genius, apparently, lies in the attainment of peace. 

But not just any peace.

We normally think of peace as something external, peace between individuals or nations.  Aaron was apparently sensitive to that – too sensitive in fact, to the point where he placated the stormy Israelite rebellion at the foot of Mt. Sinai by letting them build the golden calf that was later seen as Aaron’s moral downfall. But I doubt if Aaron could have much luck in the world today. Peace between Ukraine and Russia? Peace for Israel and its Hamas neighbors? It if were just this outward sort of peace, I don’t think Jewish tradition would have bothered mentioning it. Aaron was not anticipating Machiavelli; he was no Henry Kissinger. 

So whatever his success at internecine or international intrigue, the peacemaking for which he was reputedly famous was something else altogether — not peace without, but peace within, the kind of inner peace that allows Aaron the father to go on in life despite the trauma of two lost children. Aaron had mastered Joshua Loth Liebman’s peace of mind.  

We especially need peace of mind when other forms of peace are lacking. Sooner or later, we all discover our lives spinning out of control.  We wake up one day with a rare disease that we thought only other people get; a drunk driver barrels into us and cripples us for life; we discover that someone we love has lied to us; undergo a miscarriage, suffer mid-life crises and problems with aging; lose a job and all the collateral damage that comes with being jobless. 

All the more so is that true of our times today, when we cannot even keep up with the daily barrage of news; when no matter how hard we try, we wonder if we are making a difference. How in the world do we get through all that? How do we sleep through the night and manage to get up and face another day? 

Only with what Liebman describes and Aaron epitomizes: the inner serenity of soul, the peace of mind that lets us separate briefly from the ongoing traumas that afflict us. I don’t mean deceiving ourselves, declaring ”’Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace,” as Jeremiah puts it. I mean harboring our inner resources lest we deplete ourselves utterly and become a problem to those who love us, and even to ourselves.

“Loving peace of mind and pursuing it” is the only armor we have against life’s inevitable and in tractable trials. It was Aaron’s secret and I try to make it mine as well.

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Open Letter to My Students 75: Do I Believe in God?

Posted on April 9, 2025 | 3 comments

Google “Song, ‘I Believe’” and you get some sixty entries. The most famous dates to 1953, and has been sung repeatedly by the likes of Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley, Glen Campbell and Barbra Streisand. “I believe above the storm the smallest prayer will still be heard; I believe that someone in the great somewhere hears every word.”

Conclusion: Americans may believe in different things, but they all believe in believing. 

I am never surprised, therefore, when people ask me if I believe in God. When I pose that question at congregations where I teach or consult, most people hesitantly raise their hand, but only when given a choice of “Yes, but….” Mostly, Jews avoid the question.

And for good reason: it isn’t a Jewish question altogether.

To be sure, the entire rabbinic tradition just assumes the existence of God. But belief is less central for Jews than for Christians. That is because, from their very inception, Judaism and Christianity went different ways. 

Christianity was popularized by Paul, a first-century Greek-speaking Jew from Asia Minor; so was influenced heavily by the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition that asked questions of belief. Rabbinic Judaism, by contrast, remained true to the biblical focus on behavior: what we should do, not what we should believe. Classical Christian literature is theological; the Jewish equivalent is legal. 

 To be sure, Jews are not uninterested in matters of faith. But we are quicker to doubt tenets of belief and slower to adopt them officially. 

The church father Tertullian (160-240) is usually credited with saying, credo quia absurdum, which religious sceptic Voltaire (1694-1778) translated as “I believe because it is absurd.” Although Tertullian may not actually have said it[i] (let alone meant it that way), it is sometimes cited as a justification for believing in what science and reason doubts. Isn’t that the point of faith after all? 

Not necessarily. When I say I believe in my son, I may have all kinds of evidence to back up my statement. And in any case, I certainly don’t mean that I believe in his existence. Similarly, when I say that I believe in myself, I have in mind trusting my ability to make good decisions, not deciding after some serious doubt that I exist. Does “I believe in God” affirm God’s existence? I don’t usually use the expression “believe in” that way.

We might, of course, ask, “Do you believe in Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster?” There we do question actual existence. But is God like that? 

If you press me, I’d say I do believe in God, but the way  William James did: not because the evidence supports it; and certainly not because it is absurd; but because there is no evidence either way — if God is beyond time and space, what kind of evidence could there even be? And where there is no evidence, James declared, we should choose to believe whatever will help us live a better life. It’s like the question we ask of a new acquaintance, “Does he like me?” If we wait for certain evidence, we will never trust enough even to begin establishing a friendship.[ii] So we assume the best and see what happens. 

So too with God. I don’t assume (for example) that God inevitably heals the sick; I have evidence against that. But believing in “God,” as some supportive presence beyond me that explains the order in the universe while affirming the good and the just within it is something that I find helpful. As I said in an earlier letter, faith is a strategy we employ more than a thing that we “have.”

But we need not go that far. For over a century now, we have known that to get at what words mean we need to watch how they are used.[iii] Instead of asking if we believe in God, we should ask how we use the word God in the first place. 

If my cancer test comes back negative, I may say, “Thank God.” If I promise to attend your wedding next year, I may add “God willing.” I do not believe that an entity named God saved me from cancer or cares whether I attend your wedding. God is not an entity altogether. When I say these things I am simply testifying to the extreme importance of “escaping cancer” and “getting to the wedding.” I use the word God to name those things that are of inestimable importance to me. My life is richer for elevating them that way – a whole lot better than “Gee whiz, I’m cancer free,” or “Yeah, I’ll try to get to your wedding.”

God is not a piece of furniture in my life; not some thing that I feel obliged to describe and refurbish on occasion, to make God fit nicely with other things in which I believe. God need not be a thing to still be a reality: something like loyalty, love, beauty and harmony. I experience all of these and have words for them.

When it comes to God, I start at the wonder that the human condition entails. At hand right now are a return of spring and life and color and joy; a family Passover seder; a newborn baby cousin; a multitude of new ideas that even at my age I find exhilarating. At hand too are daily headlines that testify to the loss of honesty, integrity, love and compassion — attributes that I consider essential. I invoke “God,” as the best means I have to do these things justice. 

[i] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/church-history/article/abs/i-believe-because-it-is-absurd-the-enlightenment-invention-of-tertullians-credo/69340C3AF8366E79BCF3BDD804DED82E

[ii] William James, The Will to Believe And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1897) pp. 23–4.

[iii] Cf., e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953: 4th ed. London: Blackwell, 2009); J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). For a nice summary of this school of thought at Oxford, see Nikhil Krishman, A Terribly Serious Adventure (New York: Random House, 2023).

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Open Letter to My Students 74: Will the Real Jews Please Stand Up?

Posted on March 9, 2025 | 2 comments

Some 70 years ago, a rabbi (Morris Kertzer) described inviting a visiting Japanese army officer to attend a Shabbat service. When it was over, the officer surprised the rabbi by asking, “What kind of Christian are you?” Upon being informed that he was a Jew, the officer inquired, “Jews? What are they?”

Yes, what are Jews? That question arises again today, not because some visiting army officer from Japan, Jakarta or Johannesburg has never heard of us, but because we ourselves need to decide what we are. There are different kinds of answers. 

Halachah: The usual answer is halachic, the way Jewish jurisprudence sets boundaries to Jewish Peoplehood: to decide who is in and who is out.

Race: The Nazis used a racial definition:  to decide who to murder. 

Secular: Israel, a secular state with an admixture of halachah, has struggled with the issue – as in the case of Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew and Zionist, who hid from Hitler in a convent; then was baptized, became a Carmelite Friar, and took the name Father Daniel. In 1959, he sought entry to Israel under the Law of Return. Israel, he claimed, admits born Jews who identify as ethnically Jewish even though they are atheists and practice no Judaism whatever. Then why is he any different? He too was a born Jew who identified as ethnically Jewish. At least one of the supreme court justices who heard the case was inclined to accept his petition, on the halachic grounds that even Jewish sinners remain Jews. But the court rejected a halachic solution. The Law of Return, it said, “does not refer to the ‘Jew’ of Jewish religious law, but to the ‘Jew’ of secular law.”[i] 

Gender egalitarian: In 1983, American Reform Judaism decided to honor patrilineal (not just matrilineal) claims of Jewish descent. 

Were the Japanese army officer to ask today, “What  are Jews?” we would have to answer, “Regarding what? It all depends,” for there are other definitions too, including a moral one. Consider convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein, clearly Jewish by any halachic definition. But when the case came to light, several people said, “Well, he’s not very Jewish in my book!” Yes, Jeffery Epstein was legally Jewish but morally, he was not “very Jewish in my book.”  

I want to build on that moral answer using the Max Weber’s concept of “ideal type.”  An ideal type is a hypothetical model, an abstract ideal (positive or negative) against which examples of real life can be measured. Each culture has its own ideal type. 

From about the 5th century to the 13th, the ideal type for classical Christianity was the monk, who exchanged the real world for the monastery, a place to work, meditate, and pray. The American ideal type is the capitalist entrepreneur who goes from rags to riches by dint of hard work and business acumen. 

Traditionally, ideal types were gendered. The ideal Victorian man succeeded at business, but was also titular master of his home and family; like Mr. Banks (appropriately named) from Mary Poppins. The ideal Victorian woman was a home maker, mother, and moral exemplar for her children.  

The classical Jewish ideal type is 1. a Torah scholar, who, however, 2. uses Torah learning to be a good person in the world. It’s not unlike Plato’s ideal of 1. a philosopher, who 2. pursues wisdom to achieve virtue. Yiddish eventually provided a word for the second half of the Jewish ideal: mensch. 

With secularization, that ideal was generalized to scholarship in general. Stories abound about immigrant Jewish mothers giving library cards to their little children. To this day, Jews attend college and even graduate school in record numbers. But the Jewish ideal type must also use all this education for good:  the “mensch  factor,” that is, which shows up in the percentage of educated Jews who are honored for accomplishments that benefit humanity.  Between 1901 and 2023, of the 965 winners of Nobel Prizes, at least 216 (22%) have been Jewish.  

It is not enough to be highly educated and financially successful. The Jewish ideal must strive publicly for the general good of humanity. We will never know the intimate details of people’s private lives: their messy divorces, their failures as parents, and such. But we expect them to try to live good lives at home; and if their private failures degenerate into moral disasters, they lose all claim to ideal status: The Jeffrey Epsteins and Harvey Weinsteins, for example, are out.  So too are the Bugsy Siegels and Meyer Lanskys, mob bosses in what has been called the Kosher Nostra.[ii]

I’m willing to bet that Bugsy and Meyer, at least, never claimed to be ideal Jews. But some Jews do claim the mantle of Jewish respectability, even though their actual lives defy the very notion of the historic Jewish type. I think, particularly, of the West Bank settlers bent on violently displacing Arab landowners, to fulfil a dubious biblical promise of a Greater Jewish Land of Israel.

So like the Japanese officer, I ask, “What is a Jew?” – not halachically, racially or ethnicly, but morally. What is the age-old ideal type that Jews for centuries have pursued as the right and proper way to realize their Jewish identity. It is not the west-bank thuggery but scholar mensch who betters the human condition. 

[i] Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior [Father Daniel Case] Israel Supreme Court, HC 72/62 PD 16 2428 (1962). Here in the United States, Commentary (the most prestigious Jewish journal at the time) published a dissent, charging that Father Daniel’s commitment to Jewish history and even peoplehood was clear; the court should have admitted that it was specifically Father Daniel’s Christianity that decided the case (https://www.commentary.org/articles/marc-galanter/a-dissent-on-brother-daniel/). Indeed, a Jew who practices Yoga and accepts the dictates of Buddhism would doubtless be admitted today. 

[ii] https://mjhnyc.org/events/kosher-nostra-the-life-and-times-of-jewish-gangsters-in-the-united-states/

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Open Letter to My Students 73: October 7, Revisited

Posted on February 6, 2025 | 1 comment

Last week, while lecturing in Miami, I went to see Nova, a traveling art installation described as “an in-depth remembrance of the brutal massacre at the Nova Music Festival on October 7…. the largest massacre in music history.”

I say I went to “see” it, but “see” doesn’t do the experience justice. I was totally immersed in it; and through it, immersed also in Israel’s trauma and (by extension) in the Jewish condition through time. I am congenitally an optimist, so I loved Nova’s insistence that,despite it all, “we will dance again.” That said, the exhibit hammered home what some of my long-time liberal friends who are not Jews – and even some who are – do not, I fear, fully comprehend. 

I don’t mean just the all-out protesters on college campuses. I mean good solid friends who support a Jewish state and who phoned me in solidarity on October 8 or 9; but who, later, as the war ground on, became fixated on the need for an immediate peace, because war is inherently bad and Israel had done too much damage already.

I too question much about the policies of Israel’s right-wing government; I too watched the Gazan suffering in horror. Neither my friends nor I have the benefit of military intelligence, but were we to know all the facts, we would probably agree on a great deal. So I am not arguing policy here. I am not arguing anything at all. I mean only to say that something very deep within me was confirmed by the Nova visit, something that I find hard to convey to even these lifelong friends: the realization that the October 7 victims were my people, that my people were being slaughtered once again.

I visited the Nova exhibit from a sense of Jewish obligation – the way one visits a Holocaust Memorial, hardly out of curiosity, much less to be entertained, or even just to learn something that we don’t already know. Not a day goes by without my thinking about the butchery that felled so many Jewish innocents. Some victims were not Jewish, mind you. But they were collateral damage, caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. October 7 was the underbelly of the human race unleashed upon Jews, first, last, and foremost.

The exhibit consists largely of some warehouse space, filled with detritus from the actual Nova campsite: tents, camping gear, skeletons of burned out cars, clothes scattered everywhere. Visitors shuffle along in the semi-darkness, stopping every few yards to watch videos recorded during and immediately after the attack.

I watched each video at least twice over, the scenes of Jews who came to dance through the night and greet the morning sun, only to be murdered wholesale by Hamas attackers who shout over and over, ”Allah is great” and (at one point) “We are heading for Paradise now, guys.” A Jewish survivor describes the scene afterward: “Kids tied to a tree, naked girls tied up everywhere you look.” As I took it all in, I recited what I could remember of El Malei Rachamim, the signature Jewish burial prayer composed after similar slaughters by Ukrainian Cossacks in 1648. I thought back to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s epic poem that memorializes the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. “Get up and head for the city of slaughter…. See for yourself the trees, stones, and fences laden with spattered blood and dried out brain matter.” 

I shed Jewish tears left over from 1648 and 1903 and so many other times as well. There must be a chamber of the heart where old tears get saved up like a bank account, and then accrue with time, to be withdrawn and spent on the likes of October 7.   

It goes deeper than the heart, however. We properly differentiate head from heart: the cold rational intellect that thinks versus the warm, emotional sentiment that feels. We either believe something strongly or feel something deeply. I both felt and thought my way through the Nova exhibit; but my tears came from somewhere deeper.

They came from what the Yiddish calls kishkes; in English, “the gut.” A “gut punch” is a surprise blow to the stomach that stops you in your tracks, takes everything out of you, and leaves you reeling, shocked, dazed, enraged, and afraid for your life. 

This is more than just metaphor. Scientific research posits an actual brain-gut connection. There is clearly a well of commitment, devotion, and faithfulness that transcends both head and heart, both thinking and feeling. We do not even know it is there, until we feel threatened to the very core of our being. 

It is, I think, the personalized outrage that comes when one’s family is threatened; and what I cannot adequately convey to others is that Jews like me do somehow sense that Jews everywhere and through all time are an extended family. I don’t mean rank tribalism, because anyone can become Jewish by choice. But in so doing they do not so much convert as they join the family. I am proud of that family, of its heritage and its commitment to a wise and compassionate world. I particularly deplore other Jews whose immoral behavior defiles everything Judaism hold dear: Bernie Madoff and Harvey Weinstein in America; the right-wing Settler Movement in Israel. I applaud responsa that insist on the rightness of informing on our own wayward family members whose behavior is evil.[i]

By the same token, I am happy to engage critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. I am critical myself. But those critics need to know that Israel is my family. They can take issue with me but only if they also make a shiva call to offer their condolence. People who celebrated October 7 celebrate also my own imminent demise, for I am a Jew.

Edmond Fleg (1874-1963) was a French Jew, totally assimilated, until 1894, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army was imprisoned on the trumped-up charge of treason. The episode awoke in Fleg his all-but-completely suppressed Jewish identity. “I am a Jew,” he wrote, “because born of Israel and having found it again, I would have it live after me.” By Israel, he meant the People, not the state, which didn’t yet exist. But the Dreyfus case convinced him, as it did Theodor Herzl, that only a Jewish state could be counted on to shelter Jews unwanted elsewhere and to protect them, come what may. I would say, “I am a Jew, because having been born of it and never lost it, I know not just in my mind and heart but in my very gut how right Herzl was, and how Jewish I really am.

[i] See, e.g., https://www.jewishideas.org/article/reporting-and-prosecuting-jewish-criminals-halakhic-concerns

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