Category Archives: yom kippur

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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Posted in american religion, constitutional rights, freedom of speech, modernity and religion, yom kippur

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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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Posted in belief, death and dying, High Holidays, jewish spirituality, liturgical insights, modernity and religion, philosophy, science and religion, secularity, spirituality, theology, values, yom kippur

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The Inevitability of “Alone”

Posted on September 4, 2016 | 3 comments

“Do you have what it takes to survive by yourself in the wild?” So goes the come-on for the hit reality show, Alone, where “hard core survivalists” spend a year in the wilderness – all alone.

Judaism’s spiritual parallel is Yom Kippur. Not exactly “the wild” or “wilderness,” and only for a day, but despite the Kol Nidre crowd, it’s all about being alone with just yourself; and even (to trust the liturgy) surviving. Are you capable of spending even a day alone confronting everything you’d rather not admit: how fast you’re aging, what you have amounted to so far; and whether you have it in you to change. Preparation for Yom Kippur began this week with the reading that introduces the penitential month of Elul: “See,” it proclaims, “I set before you blessing and curse.” Though addressed to all of Israel, the verb “See” is in the singular, leading commentators to explain, “Spoken to each and every person, singly”– as if alone.

The shofar is blown daily during Elul, just a single lonely blast, quick and piercing to the individual soul – because the commandment to hear the shofar is addressed to each of us, alone: No one else can hear it for us.

And no one can confess for us on Yom Kippur. Though our confession sounds communal (“For the sin which we have sinned…”) the Rabbis instruct us to confess in our own words as well.

Jews are not good at being alone. We like talk, not quiet. Even the so-called “silent” prayer (the Amidah) is noisy. We like to hear each other, to know we’re not alone.

But we are.

Daily moments of aloneness arrive with choices of conscience, decisions no one knows about except ourselves. They wink at us each morning from the bathroom mirror, reminding us of who we really are, before we dress up to look our best. They hammer on our consciousness when we are sick, depressed, or weary – when people say, “I know how you feel,” but we know they don’t.

If we are lucky, we will get time to age: another case of being alone, this time in progressive disengagement from responsibilities and schedules; from assistants and associates who once answered beeps and sent us daily emails; and eventually, as loss of memory and mental competence sets in, from friends and family too.

Final aloneness arrives with death, “the stoppage of circulation, the inadequate transport of oxygen to tissues, the flickering out of brain function, the failure of organs, the destruction of vital centers” (says medical expert Sherwin B. Nuland in How We Die). Others watch; even hold our hand; but we alone must face the awful fact of being, really, “here today” but “gone tomorrow.”      Our model for aloneness is Moses himself, as human a character as ever lived. Moses leads as we wish we could, but errs as we know we do. He loses his temper (kills the taskmaster); suffers self-doubt (needs Aaron as his spokesman); is not your ideal parent or family man.

But he knows what it is to be alone. As a solitary desert shepherd, he sees the burning bush. Alone atop the mountain, he receives the Torah. And alone again, atop another mountain, he will die.

Or Hachayyim thinks Moses himself is saying “see,” instructing us the way God instructed him: in lonely solitude. “We all inherit a spark from Moses,” says the Zohar: the spark of knowing how to be alone.

But the spark needs fanning – for which we have Elul: to try each day to disengage, at least a tiny bit, from the din of daily wear and tear; to reflect each day on who we are and who we want to be. To arrive at Yom Kippur, prepared to be alone, as if it were the day of death itself. Do that, and it won’t be so bad even on the day we really die. Like anything else, dying too needs practice. And it’s never too soon to start.

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Posted in elul, jewish spirituality, Uncategorized, yom kippur