National Scholar Updates

The recent Iron Swords War has highlighted many flaws with the political order in general and the international criminal justice system in particular. Attempts to indict Israeli leaders in the International Criminal Court alongside preposterous accusations of genocide have led many to conclude that the politicized system is built on a (anti-Semitic?) bias against Israel. In this article, I hope to show how these well-founded concerns were already raised by rabbinic scholars in the earliest days of the League of Nations. I further argue that these problems have continued to confound many Jews who were otherwise tempted to support a system that promised a new world order.

Jewish Internationalists and Dreams of a New World Order

On November 12, 1917, while World War I continued to rage, R. Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook sent a letter to his son R. Tzvi Yehuda: God’s light has finally pierced into our dark world. The redemption has begun.[1]

What inspired this proclamation? Ten days earlier, the British foreign minister issued the Balfour Declaration establishing support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The British soon afterward conquered Palestine from the Turks, ending 400 years of Ottoman control of the Holy Land and raising hopes of Zionists around the world. 

R. Kook had been waiting for this moment. Now dwelling in London, he had been delivering Bible-laced sermons praising British patriotism and their fight against Germany.^[2] With the declaration of the world’s great power, he wrote to Seidel, the messianic process has begun! The Lord, who is “master of battles and sprouts salvations,” had delivered.[3] It’s true, he conceded, the bloody war had revealed the depravity of modernity and its European delegates. God, however, had now made it possible for people of uplifted spirit to bring about a new era. 

A few years later, the Balfour Declaration was incorporated by the newly established League of Nations into its broad mandate system that would govern territories of collapsed empires. Belgium controlled Rwanda and Burundi; the French oversaw Syria and Lebanon; and the British governed Palestine and Transjordan, to name a few prominent examples. The goal of the mandate system, at least as proclaimed by its founders, was to end the colonialist era of exploitation. At the base level, this would entail protecting the rights of the local inhabitants through a system of international law. More ambitiously, the mandate system would facilitate the founding of new states. Concomitantly, various treaties were enacted to ensure minority rights in all nation-states, new and old. Taken together, a new world order was sought to preserve peace between states and prevent persecution of minorities within them.

Many Jews, including some avowed Zionists, were deeply involved in these movements.^[4] One such figure was a rising academic star and legal activist, the Polish-born Hirsch Tzvi Lauterpacht (1897–1960). In the days after World War I, Lauterpacht had witnessed the horrible November 1918 pogrom in Lemberg, a contested city within the newly independent Poland. The war was over, yet Jews continued to be slaughtered.[5]

As borders were getting drawn anew across the globe, Lauterpacht dedicated his life to providing protections for minorities in these new states. He believed that Britain could use its imperial power to bring lasting peace, including support for both Jewish nationalism in Palestine and rights for Jews and other minorities throughout Europe.^[6] Lauterpacht would become a leading law professor at Cambridge and later a judge on the International Court of Justice. He is credited with establishing that international law prohibited territorial conquest through warfare; that’s precisely the expansionist “discretionary wars,” to use rabbinic terms, that Kook wanted to end. Lauterpacht also helped establish that those who waged aggressive warfare could be placed on trial. His advocacy directly led to the Nuremberg trials against Nazi figures after World War II. This was a deeply personal case for Lauterpacht. His parents, siblings, and extended family were all killed in the Holocaust.^[7]

Another prominent international jurist who escaped Europe before the war and worked with Lauterpacht on the Nuremberg trials was Jacob Robinson (1889–1977). Robinson was born in a small village in the Russian empire to an Orthodox Jewish family from distinguished rabbinic lineage. Like many others, he sought solutions to the “Jewish problem” after the antisemitic violence in Kishinev and elsewhere. After earning his law degree, he was drafted into the Russian army in 1914. He was captured by the Germans and spent the next three years in eight different German POW camps. Somehow surviving, he returned home to the newly independent Lithuania, where he not only led a Hebrew-language school but was also elected to the Lithuanian parliament. Robinson became a renowned advocate for national minority rights, playing critical advocacy roles in the Congress of European National Minorities and at the League of Nations. Throughout the 1920s, he promoted a “pan-Europa” transnational community that would allow minorities to peacefully live within whatever national borders they found themselves.^[8] At the same time, he was also the de facto leader of Lithuanian Zionism. Ben-Gurion even deemed him as “the most important man in Lithuania.”[9]

For many Jews, international governance presented an enticing alternative to pacifism toward achieving the prophetic visions of a new world order. We don’t need to naively declare that violence is never justified. Instead, we can work to create an institutional system that will find alternative methods for conflict resolution. If peace efforts fail, then these bodies will act to ensure that any belligerent aggressors face justice. The world can together agree upon what military actions are acceptable. They will provide direction for moral dilemmas alongside clarity for determining which sides were right or wrong. For many, this was, and is, an alluring vision of prophetic proportions.^[10] 

Yet could international governance deliver on these high hopes? Could world powers, in fact, now provide justice for the Jewish people and other persecuted groups? 

Two Excommunicated Rabbis and the Changing Self-Image of the Jew 

In August 1920, a book ban was issued by the leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community of Jerusalem. The author of the prohibited book was none other than Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who had recently returned from London to assume the position of the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. Once settled, R. Tzvi Yehuda published his father’s major treatise, Orot (Lights), which included his reflections on the Great War from Switzerland and his hopes for a new era in international relations. 

What raised the ire of his critics to ban this book? R. Kook had equated the spiritual merits accrued by youthful physical training to those gained by piously reciting Psalms or mystical enchantments. This was not the first time R. Kook had aroused controversy for praising the ethos of self-defense. In the first years of the twentieth century, Jews—usually immigrants fleeing from the pogroms in Russia—founded different groups to build character based on physical toil and exercise. “Muscular Jews” could work the land and fight for themselves. Kook wrote enthusiastically about the importance of Jewish self-defense, viewing the phenomenon as “heartwarming.”^[11] While recognizing that these groups were led by secular Jews, he embraced their efforts. He mourned for two that were killed in 1911 as “holy martyrs,” despite the fact that both had abandoned the religious lifestyles of their upbringing.^[12] For R. Kook, physical strength was a sign of renewed Jewish vigor to develop the homeland and instill fear in its enemies.

Yet his latest expression of praise for profane labor and physical strength—comparing it to a classic religious act of beseeching God for assistance—was too much for those who viewed the Jewish hero as pious, pensive, and passive. They wanted R. Kook out of Palestine. The controversy quickly spread throughout the Jewish world, with competing images of Jews and Judaism at stake.^[13] 

Unlike several of R. Kook’s apologetic defenders, one of his most strident supporters felt that R. Kook didn’t go far enough. What’s the benefit, he asked, of simply reciting Psalms as a protective charm or incantation? 

It is unquestionable that to strengthen Jewish boys to enable them to defend themselves against their pursuers (with God’s help) is a greater mitzvah (religious deed) than reciting Psalms.… Reciting Psalms is the task of the indolent; calisthenics is the task of the industrious. 

Prayer, he added, can have a valuable role, but only alongside self-defense training. He further accused R. Kook’s critics of timidity and suggested they instead go back to Europe. Their cowardice was only causing fear among the Jewish residents from antisemitic Arabs, who looked upon diffident Jewish neighbors as “dead meat.”^[14] 

R. Kook’s defender, Rabbi Hayim Hirschensohn (1857–1935), knew something about rabbinic bans. He himself had left Jerusalem two decades earlier following controversies over his own publications. Unlike most of the prominent Zionists of this era, Hirschensohn was born in the Land of Israel. His parents were proto-Zionists (ĥovevei Tziyon) who had immigrated from Pinsk in 1847. They helped develop Jewish settlement in the cities of Safed and Jerusalem before Herzl was even born. The younger Hirschensohn followed in their footsteps by organizing the acquisition and development of properties around the country. He later became a founding member of the religious Zionist movement, Mizrachi. 

As a scholar, R. Hirschensohn aroused the ire of traditionalists in Jerusalem. This was partly because of his outspoken advocacy for reviving Hebrew as a spoken language, including his founding, with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, of an organization toward that goal. (He and Ben-Yehuda were the first two families to enforce Hebrew-speaking in their homes). He also displayed openness toward analyzing classic rabbinic texts from a critical historical lens. These factors, among others, led to his formal excommunication by the old-school rabbis of Jerusalem. Needing to make a living, Hirschensohn was forced to leave his birthplace. 

So, in 1904, the same year that R. Kook immigrated to Jaffa, R. Hirschensohn made it to Hoboken, New Jersey, where he served as a rabbi for the rest of his life. During World War I and its aftermath, he attests, he was deeply engrossed in pastoral work with veterans and their families, for which he received a letter of commendation. R. Hirschensohn remained active in various Zionist organizations and maintained correspondence with the great rabbinic figures in Palestine. Yet he died in relative obscurity, with his writings becoming well-known only in the past couple of decades. His works remain particularly important because in the wake of the horrors of World War I and the excitement of the Balfour Declaration, he wrote several books dedicated to establishing the legal groundwork for a democratic state within Jewish thought, including addressing the dilemmas of war and conquest.^[15] 

The Jewish Legion and the Hasmonean Spirit of Self-Determination 

The 1920 excommunication controversy was not the first time that Rabbis Kook and Hirschensohn had supported Jews taking up arms. Both men had endorsed enlistment during World War I in the so-called Jewish Legion, battalions within the British army composed of Jewish volunteers from England, North America, and other countries to fight in Palestine. They were created upon the initiative of Joseph Trumpeldor and Vladimir Jabotinsky. Trumpeldor was a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War in which he lost his left arm and received four medals of bravery, making him the most decorated Jewish veteran of the Russian Army. Jabotinsky was a Russian writer who made Bialik’s poem on the Kishinev pogrom famous by translating it into Russian. More significantly, he had been an organizer of Jewish self-defense organizations and an advocate for minority rights in Europe, seeking to protect the Jewish people with both law and shield.^[16] 

During World War I, Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky sought British permission for Jews to fight the Ottomans in Palestine. After protracted negotiations, including those of Chaim Weizmann, the Legion finally formed and played a minor role in completing the British conquest of Palestine in 1918. Its fighters included David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister; Eliyahu Golomb, the founder of the pre-state Haganah defense force; and Berl Katznelson, a future labor leader. 

The Legion did not accomplish much and soon disbanded, yet it transformed the image of the Jew into someone who could fight for himself and his homeland. The chaplain of the Legion was Reverend Leib Falk (1889–1957), who grew up in Boisk and studied in the school of R. Kook and Seidel. In a Hanukka holiday sermon, Falk reflected on the significance of the first Jewish military corps that had fought in nearly eighteen hundred years: 

The whole world was watching [and] were looking on us, but they see now the Maccabean spirit revived, they see now that Israel is not only powerful with his voice, but he has also a mighty arm.... The Jewish soldier upholds now the honour of our nation. The Jewish warrior saved our national honour which was at stake.^[17]

While the troops were still in England, R. Kook visited Falk and his men. Previously, R. Kook had opposed the enlistment of yeshiva students (frequently new immigrants from eastern Europe) into the British army because of their inability to maintain a religious lifestyle.^[18] Yet he bestowed Jewish Legion fighters with blessings of strength while deeming them as the bearers of the beginning of salvation.^[19] Years later, when the Jewish Legion’s flag was brought to Palestine for a grand ceremony, R. Kook compared it to the banners that the Israelites used in the desert on their way to conquering the Land of Israel.^[20]

Yet it was R. Hirschensohn who penned the most extensive treatise in support of the Legion. Even though Jews were fighting within a foreign army, he nonetheless deemed fighting in Palestine as within the category of an “obligatory war” for the liberation of the homeland. Earlier rabbinic Zionist figures were concerned that military activity may violate talmudic oaths that prohibited the Jews during their exile period from “rebelling against the nations” or “rising up together in force.” ^[21] They thus advocated for a peaceful settlement through land acquisitions. R. Hirschensohn was not deterred by this talmudic prohibition; it applied, in his mind, only to rebellions in foreign lands, not to conquering the Holy Land. This was especially true since the British had recognized the right of the Jews to establish a state in Palestine. This was not treason, but rather a deeply honorable fight by soldiers for their homeland which had been taken from their people centuries beforehand. Most significant about his declaration was the negation of the talmudic impulses against militarism as binding on the Jewish people in the current era. It was a holy deed, in his mind, not just to settle the land, but to fight for it.^[22] 

A Temple of Peace Without Sacrifices?

Renewed Jewish warfare naturally meant that Jews would need to think about the legacy of biblical warfare. Like R. Kook, R. Hirschensohn sought to neutralize the ethos behind the Bible’s total wars, albeit more radically. First, he contended, any remnant of the Canaanite nations has long been lost, thereby making the commandments irrelevant. Second, while the commandment to conquer the land is eternal, the clause to “leave no one alive” among the land’s inhabitants was only applicable to Joshua’s generation, when such military tactics were necessary to conquer the land and remove the fears of the Israelite people. Once completed, however, no such clause existed; as such, we don’t find Kings David or Solomon fighting total wars against the local inhabitants.^[23]

Even if we could identify the seven Canaanite nations, he further argued, we would not wipe them out because such behavior is morally unacceptable in our era. “It is prohibited to violate international law that regulates the conduct of war by charter. God forbid that Israel be regarded by the nations as barbaric murderers who violate international law and the norms of civilization.”^[24] The continued history of biblical warfare—alongside our moral intuitions—proves that this biblical verse was a temporary provision, not a permanent commandment. 

Given his embrace of the norms of civilization to reject this biblical model of warfare, one might expect that R. Hirschensohn would be enthusiastic about the postwar treaties to prevent armed conflicts. Yet R. Hirschensohn expressed doubts that these proposals to resolve international conflicts would be more successful than earlier treaties. ^[25] Those rules, which governed hostile conduct, seemed utterly ineffective during the Great War. Hirschensohn was skeptical that the efforts of American president Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, meant to prevent the outbreak of war, would be any more effective. Ultimately, these bodies were subject to the political interests of powerful nations, which would thwart any real attempt at justice. 

Indeed, an early glimpse of this problem emerged in the aftermath of the post-war Lemberg pogrom. Wilson initially pushed hard for strict provisions of minority rights as a condition for Polish sovereignty. He pulled back when a related measure was proposed that would possibly sanction racial segregation in America.^[26] Protecting minority rights was important, but only if it didn’t endanger American interests. 

Instead of a politicized court, R. Hirschensohn desired to build, in the spirit of the prophets, a new house of worship on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It would feature song and prayer but leave out the animal sacrifices mandated in the Bible. The Temple would serve as a “House of Peace” to advocate for each nation to thrive within its own borders without succumbing to the evil excesses of nationalism. He penned an extensive essay to resolving how Jews could walk onto the Temple Mount in light of heavy ritual restrictions against treading on its sanctified grounds. Hirschensohn sought to ensure that Zionism would have a center for religious and moral development that would guide Jewish nationalism. It would also serve as a model for nationalist movements around the world.^[27]

Yet he also had a political agenda: If the Jews did not develop the Temple Mount, it would not remain closed to all. Instead, it would be controlled by foreigners and Arab Muslims. The Jews would be left standing, as they had throughout centuries of exile, by the Dung Gate, with all that this name entails. 

R. Kook rejected this proposal. While agreeing that Jewish nationalism must be rooted in a religious spirit, he disallowed stepping on the Temple Mount, let alone building on it. He further criticized R. Hirschensohn for eliminating the use of animal sacrifices. Hirschensohn had written that the restoration of the sacrifices “would make us the object of ridicule before all the nations of the world. Instead of being a light to the nations, they would think of us as an unenlightened people who walk in darkness.”^[28] In R. Kook’s mind, this was a religious reform corrupted by the ideals of European philosophy. We should leave the Temple Mount alone and instead build a synagogue next to the Western Wall that could serve as a house of prayer and peace.^[29] 

R. Hirschensohn, in reply, accused Kook of making a religious and political error that was equivalent to the 1903 “Uganda plan” to grant the Jews a state in Eastern Africa. Just as you can’t temporarily replace the Holy Land with some other territory, you can’t replace the heart of the Temple Mount with its outer western wall! Either Jews settle their territory or someone else will. As for R. Kook’s jibe that he was overly influenced by Western norms, R. Hirschensohn replied that there is no doubt that the Great War had shown the failings of European culture. Nonetheless, the prophets repeatedly asserted that God did not truly desire animal sacrifices.^[30] With all the failings of Western culture, knowledge and wisdom would not recede backward, or as he put it, that “which is uncivilized will not suddenly become civilized!”^[31] In any case, the mission of the hour was to purchase all holy sites toward ensuring our political and spiritual future.^[32]

The Value of Treaties 

R. Herschensohn’s idyllic visions for a “Temple of Peace” are stirring yet fantastical. He also does not offer a sufficient answer as to how it would avoid the politicization that plagues other international bodies. It’s possible that this was more a theoretical exercise than an actual plan.^[33] 

Nonetheless, his writing reflects a deep ambivalence on the potential success of international bodies to execute justice in a world of competing nationalistic claims. On the one hand, there is a genuine desire to promote humanistic values that will avoid a repetition of the unnecessary bloodshed of the Great War. On the other hand, R. Hirschensohn recognizes that political interests will dominate international bodies. Therefore, to achieve equity, Jews need to take hold of what belongs to them, such as the Temple Mount, based on their own values and interests. Otherwise, someone else will decide based on their interests, not justice. 

This weariness toward international political bodies is also reflected in R. Herschensohn’s extended 1926 treatise on the standing of international treaties. Nations should be careful before signing treaties, he believed, because once they commit, they are liable to punishment for breaking their word. This is why the Israelites were punished by God for violating the covenant at Sinai and breaking His law. So too, he asserted, Germany got its due in World War I because Kaiser Wilhelm had treated the 1839 Treaty of London that granted sovereignty and neutrality to Belgium as “a scrap of paper.”^[34] The Allies were justified in resisting Germany since treaties are only binding when they are reciprocally observed.^[35] 

Yet treaties are not the only obligations that are binding on the Jewish people. So, too, are the ethical practices of “civilizations.”^[36] While he doesn’t fully translate that term, it seems that he has in mind the widespread moral sentiments of modern civilized nations.^[37] Violating these standards, in his mind, constitutes a grave desecration of the reputation of God and His people. Considering these beliefs, we can further understand his rejection of the models of fighting against Amalek and the Canaanite nations. Whether or not there is a treaty against total war or genocide, Jews must hold themselves to the highest standards of morality and build a stellar reputation.^[38] 

So what would a Jewish state do in this era of treaties? R. Hirschensohn argued that it should make accords with as many foreign nations as possible—in Europe, America, and Africa. Like R. Kook, R. Hirschensohn asserted that imperialist excursions beyond Israel’s borders had no place in contemporary Jewish law and that all wars required moral justification.^[39] Nations must stick to their own borders. As such, there was a confluence here between the religious value of international peace and Jewish national interests. 

What about Arabs living within Palestine? R. Hirschensohn claimed that permanently ceding territory in the Holy Land would violate the biblical mandate to conquer the land. He also believed that Jews should not quickly initiate negotiations that would put them in a position of weakness.^[40] Yet he recognized that despite the Jewish historical claim to the land and the Balfour Declaration, there was an Arab population who had legitimate conflicting claims to the same territory. This was primarily because they were residents in the land. At the end of the day, the strongest claim to any territory is based on settlement. Given these competing legitimate claims, he suggests that Jews should form long-term peaceful accords with their neighbors. One day, he hoped, the Jews could peacefully get full control of the territory. In the meantime, it was in the interests of all parties involved to have peaceful relations.^[41]

Independent of one’s assessment of R. Hirschensohn’s particular strategy, the framework of his analysis is particularly striking. On the one hand, he embraces positive developments in international mores. Judaism is a peace-promoting religion that should support all initiatives to reduce animosity and bloodshed, even with those competing for hold of the Holy Land. This entails integrating new values—including democracy, minority rights, and conventions to limit the horrors of war—by finding support for them in traditional Jewish texts. 

On the other hand, he understood that it was far from clear that international institutions will have the ability to promote and enforce these values. There are too many national interests at stake to make this possible.^[42] Thus, Jews must wisely develop a strategy that will endorse refined values while actively promoting their own political interests. In his time, this meant taking hold of their homeland through the purchase of holy locations and the settlement of the Land of Israel. 

Arab Riots in Palestine and the Triumph of British Political Interests 

The most pressing question, however, was whether force would also be necessary to reestablish Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. Both Rabbis Kook and Hirschensohn hoped that a combination of Jewish political initiatives and international diplomacy would be sufficient. Yet this was not meant to be. In March 1920, Trumpeldor was sent to help protect Tel Hai, an upper Galilean settlement that ended up under French control in the unstable period after World War I, leaving those Jewish settlers suddenly outside of British auspices. In a chaotic confrontation with Arab Bedouins from Syria, Trumpeldor was killed, alongside five other Jews, including a couple of other Jewish Legion veterans. His alleged dying words become immortalized as the fighting spirit of the new Jew: “No matter, it is worth dying for the country.”[43] 

Trumpeldor would become lionized by Zionist writers like Hayim Yosef Brenner, who eulogized this “symbol of pure heroism” for teaching that it is good to die for the national cause. Tamares the pacifist had opposed the Jewish Legion and saw Trumpeldor’s legacy as the embodiment of force and ultranationalism, but his views were hardly noticed.^[44] The self-image of Jews was being transformed. A few years later, Jabotinsky would break away from the Zionist Organization and establish the revisionist Zionist organization “Betar.” The name commemorated the last fighting ground of the Jewish people in the second century, but also paid homage to the fallen hero of Tel Hai, with the letters of Betar standing for “the covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor.” 

Jewish-Arab tensions were also rising in Jerusalem. Jabotinsky warned the local British military governor of an upcoming slaughter, this time by Arabs against their Jewish neighbors. Jabotinsky and other founders of the Jewish Legion had been busy training the Jews in calisthenics and self-defense; it was their group, among others, for whom Kook’s praise in Orot had earned him the scorn of the local ultra-Orthodox leaders just a few months later. When the riots started in Jerusalem’s Old City, however, his men were not around. Several Jews were killed and over two hundred more were wounded. Two sisters were raped. 

Long aware of the self-defense groups, the British governor nonetheless arrested Jabotinsky and his men for carrying illegal weapons, with Jabotinsky receiving a fifteen-year jail sentence. Hirschensohn, from afar, would cite the case as an example of the ways in which a civilized justice system can become corrupt.^[45]

R. Kook joined others in demanding Jabotinsky’s release as he and his comrades threatened to go on a hunger strike. R. Kook saluted their brave efforts but warned that Jewish law strictly prohibits taking such drastic protest measures.^[46] Jabotinsky stopped the hunger strike. Soon afterward, his sentence was commuted, alongside those of many of the Arab rioters. R. Kook protested to the British high commissioner that the Arabs should be punished politically for the violence, but to no avail.^[47] 

For now, the international community stayed the course with British plans for Palestine and affirmed the Balfour Declaration in the San Remo conference a month later. Yet Arab-Jewish tensions remained high and in May 1921, riots would break out again, this time in Jaffa. Forty-seven Jews were killed, and over 140 more wounded. Among the dead was the writer Brenner, who had been busy editing the letters of Trumpeldor. 

Yet the biggest turning point was 1929. Arab-Jewish tensions over control of the Western Wall had existed for several years but escalated after a march in Jerusalem’s Old City on Tisha B’Av, Judaism’s annual day of mourning for the Temple’s destruction. R. Kook, who had protested restrictions on Jewish access to the wall for several years, supported the march, telling a local newspaper that the youth had demonstrated “national pride and Maccabean zealousness” toward defending Jewish rights to the holy site.^[48] Arab riots soon broke out in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and other locations. 

The riots left the Jewish community particularly vulnerable since most of its leadership was in Zurich for the sixteenth Zionist Congress. Beyond working with the remaining Zionist authorities to secure British protection for the Jewish settlements, R. Kook sent a brief letter through the head of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “To the entire Jewish world: All of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel is in danger. Act to save us in any way you can as fast as you can.”^[49] The sense of urgency was palpable. 

Robinson and other activists organized mass rallies, sent urgent telegrams, and penned editorials to get the League of Nations to act. They called on the mandate’s commission to protect the Jewish people, noting their centuries-long connection to the Holy Land. They further demanded the removal of British officials who had not come to their rescue. No response came. In the end, more than 130 Jews were killed over two hot August weeks. 

Lauterpacht, the rising jurist now teaching at University College of London, lamented the tepid British response and its failure to ascribe full blame to the Arab side. Why did the British fail to protect the Jews? Lauterpacht’s answer was telling: even the mighty British empire had to cower before the prospect of a religious war with all of Islam. Britain cares about minority rights. But it had to take into consideration its own political interests in placating the feelings of the millions of Muslims that lived within its empire.^[50]

Lauterpacht’s conclusion was reached after the publication of the findings of the Shaw Commission that investigated the riots. The Muslim mufti, Haj Amin al Husseini, blamed the Jews for provoking the rioters. Kook forcefully retorted these claims and accused the Husseini of incitement. While expressing hope and belief that most of the Arabs wanted to continue to live in peace with the Jews, he insisted on Jewish rights to their holy sites and encouraged their settlement.^[51] A similar sentiment was expressed by Hirschensohn, who further encouraged Jews to learn Arabic so that they could build personal relations with their Arab neighbors and thereby circumvent the incitement of their leaders. 

After their investigations, the Shaw commission concluded that the Arabs were the guilty instigators. Nonetheless, they argued that the broader cause of the violence was Jewish immigration. How could the British recognize that the Arabs were guilty of violence yet punish the Jews politically? Many in Britain had concluded that the Balfour Declaration was a mistake and against their interests. The solution came in the White Paper issued by Colonial Secretary Passfield in October 1930. Britain must restrict Jewish immigration and land purchases to ensure that the Jews remain a minority and do not negatively impact the Arab economy – or broader Arab support for Britain. R. Kook, for his part, condemned Britain for its treachery. He wondered aloud if his Majesty’s government had abandoned its esteemed role in the world’s redemption. Deliverance, he asserted, would come in other ways.[52] 

It certainly didn’t come from Britain. Ultimately, after another extended period of violence later in the decade, the British would issue, on the eve of the Holocaust, an even more restrictive immigration policy (the 1939 “white paper”) which essentially undermined the Balfour Declaration and their entire mandate. Weizmann appealed to the League of Nations, but to no avail. 

Stung by the betrayal of the British, Zionists learned what R. Hirschensohn had declared several years beforehand: when it comes to international politics, interests will trump justice. 

“The Generation Is Not Ready”: The Education of Jacob Robinson 

If the mandate failed to protect Jews in Palestine, it did little better in Europe. The idea behind the minority rights treaties was a sense of reciprocity between different states: “I protect your minority; you protect my minority.” Yet as the interwar period progressed, it became clear that attempts to protect minority rights in Europe were no guarantee to help the stateless Jews. Jewish loyalty was regularly suspect in these new ethnic states, with Jews suffering discrimination and persecution in Hungary, Poland, Romania, and elsewhere. As Robinson darkly quipped about the interwar period, European reciprocity meant “I hit my Jews, you hit your Jews.”^[53] Recognizing the failure of the interwar treaties to protect Jews or other minorities, Robinson recognized that the only real solution for European Jewry was to emigrate to Palestine, or as in his case, to flee to America.

While Lauterpacht would continue to promote international legal protections as a judge on the International Court of Justice, his colleague Robinson became more skeptical of its potential efficacy. After Israel’s founding, Robinson served as a leading adviser on diplomacy and international law to the Israeli delegation at the United Nations. He was weary of the prospects of the UN providing real solutions to human rights problems. Its Genocide Convention, developed in the wake of the Holocaust, was too vague and lacked any enforcement mechanism that would make it efficient. Moreover, it and other UN initiatives would be manipulated by Israel’s Arab neighbors and minorities to attack the Jewish state, even as these countries would do nothing to respect the human rights of minorities in their own lands. 

While he remained a prominent, albeit somewhat reluctant, international jurist, Robinson understood that national interests and politics would forever play a problematic role in international law. Toward the end of his life, he would assert that while local protections for minorities remained important, the globalized system had failed. Recalling his childhood yeshiva education, he cited the talmudic expression lo ikhshar dara (the generation is not prepared) to assert that the world had been insufficiently ready to weave minority rights into its social fabric.^[54] 

In the coming decades, rabbinic scholars would collectively take a similarly ambivalent but increasingly critical view of such international bodies.^[55] Many were thankful for the essential role of the UN in the eventual establishment of the State of Israel after World War II. This was despite it coming way too late to save the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust and not preventing the Jews from still having to go to war to gain what the international community had been promising for over thirty years.^[56] Going beyond particular Jewish interests, others appreciated the attempt by international organizations to reduce warfare and limit the atrocities committed when war occurs. They further noted that despite the imbalance of power between strong nations and weak ones, the United Nations and other bodies still promote the important idea that even the smallest of nations have basic rights that should not be trampled upon.^[57]

One scholar, Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli, even went so far as to assert that Jewish law would obligate Israel to observe all international treaties limiting warfare—including a total ban on war—provided that all parties equally respect these obligations. In the meantime, he noted, lo ikhshar dara, the generation is not ready to reciprocally implement such measures.^[58] 

Aspirations are not a measure of success. The criteria must be whether treaties are loyally followed by their signatories and if international bodies prevent moral mayhems. In the years that have passed since R. Hirschensohn wrote, these institutions were entirely ineffective in preventing the continued pogroms in Europe after World War I, the horror of the Holocaust, and the forced migration of 850,000 Jewish residents from Arab countries in the 1950s and 1960s, to name just a few egregious examples. When preparing to attack Israel in May 1967, the Egyptian army demanded that UN peacekeeping forces immediately leave the Sinai area; the UN forces hastily left without even an appeal by the UN secretary-general to Egyptian leaders.^[59] In 1975, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism,” with the support of the USSR, Arab- and Muslim-majority countries, and many African countries, essentially rejecting, again, the justice of the Balfour Declaration. (The resolution was repealed only in 1991.) Many observers also accuse these bodies of unfairly singling out Israel for censure in its complex and protracted struggle with Palestinians while ignoring many travesties around the world.^[60] This alleged bias has, in part, led many rabbis and Zionists to severely question whether these international bodies can ever provide justice in the Middle East and around the world.^[61] 

Rwanda, Syria, and the Education of Samantha Power

The “failure to protect” critique against international bodies has extended well beyond Jews and Israel. It has also been leveled against Pol Pot’s terror in Cambodia, Saddam Hussein’s destruction of the Kurds in northern Iraq, the Bosnian Serbs’ eradication of non-Serbs, the Rwandan Hutus’ systematic extermination of the Tutsi minority, and the systematic killing of ethnic Darfuri people in Western Sudan. There are many reasons given for these failures. Some assert that the diffusion of responsibilities to prevent war crimes absolves too many specific international players of taking the lead.^[62] Yet it’s also clear that the politics of these bodies regularly prevents them from acting. To take the most obvious example, the UN Security Council, with veto power given to its five permanent members, is helpless in addressing Chinese human rights abuses or the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and its subsequent invasion of all of Ukraine. As historian Paul Kennedy has documented, the granting of additional privileges to great powers is inherent to the UN system and, more fundamentally, to any international body that is dependent on its member-states to provide its funding and soldiers.^[63] Despite its improvements over the League of Nations, the UN cannot circumvent the political nature of any international body.       

There was no greater critic of the Western response to these twentieth-century atrocities than Samantha Power. Her award-winning, best-selling book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide extensively documented these cases, including the 1994 ethnic cleansing in Rwanda. Power showed how political considerations led the Clinton administration to ignore the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Tutsis who were killed and raped over four months. U.S. officials, for example, purposely avoided utilizing the “G-word” (genocide) in describing the atrocities because that might obligate them—morally, if not legally—to intervene under the 1948 Genocide Convention. This treaty, whose potential effectiveness was doubted by Robinson, as we noted, was the culmination of years of work by Lauterpacht and especially Raphael Lemkin, another European Jew who had fled Europe and became a leading international jurist. They believed it would succeed in committing countries to prevent and punish “crimes against humanity,” a term coined by Lauterpacht.^[64] It was signed and affirmed by well over a hundred nations, including leading superpowers. None of those signatures helped when the Hutus began their slaughter. 

Power singled out senior administration officials like National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who had written a well-known critique of immoral realpolitik considerations in previous eras of American foreign policy yet had now fallen into the same trap. Power’s book helped inspire the 2005 “Responsibility to Protect” declaration of all UN member states to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. 

Two decades later, Power became the American ambassador to the United Nations under President Barack Obama. A civil war was raging in Syria, with the UN Security Council unable to act because Russia vetoed any measures against the Syrian government. Then Syria used chemical weapons against her own citizens. Such weapons have long been banned under international law with a nearly universal and unprecedented endorsement from countries around the world. This had been a declared “red line” of Obama, even as he was wary of an unpopular excursion of American troops into another bloody Middle East conflict. According to one aide, Obama even noted, “People always say never again, but they never want to do anything.” ^[65]

Yet Power wanted to act. She declared in the UN that the international system had broken down in Syria, with one side being gassed and the other feeling it could get away with it. Claiming that all alternative options were exhausted, she called for limited military strikes. “If violation of a universal agreement to ban chemical weapons is not met with the meaningful response, other regimes will seek to acquire or use them to protect or extend their power.”^[66] At stake, in other words, was whether treaties had teeth or were just another scrap of paper. 

In the end, Obama called off airstrikes, instead electing to work with the Russians to get the Syrians to give up their chemical weapons. Subsequently, Obama’s aides have testified about the many political and strategic considerations that led the White House to abandon this limited military action. Some have further asserted that Obama did not want to risk ruining negotiations with the Iranians over their nuclear ambitions.^[67] Whatever the reason, America, followed by others, backed away. Syria, with Russian support in both the UN and on the battlefield, continued to commit atrocities in places like Aleppo, including the repeated use of chemical weapons it hid from international inspectors. 

Power, for her part, was left to Twitter to share her indignation while delivering scathing speeches at the Security Council against the Russians. “Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later. Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and now, Aleppo.… Are you truly incapable of shame?” Powerful words, but international treaties were meant to be backed by more than speeches and 140-character tweets. The Russian ambassador retorted by calling her Mother Theresa and called it a day. Since then, critics of American policy have labeled Power a hypocrite and questioned whether she should have resigned.^[68] 

In her memoir, aptly titled The Education of an Idealist, Power admirably lays out her conflicting feelings. Perhaps American intervention would have failed and uselessly endangered American soldiers. Or perhaps the administration, and the entire system, simply failed. 

The ultimate result was pretty bad: the Syrian regime, with Russian and Iranian support, massacred hundreds of thousands more while causing a flood of refugees which has left them homeless and Europe politically unstable. Western inaction also left the roughly 30 million Kurds quite vulnerable to the whims of the despotic leaders of four countries in which they reside, one hundred years after the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, signed between the Allies and the defeated Ottomans, called for an independence referendum in their territory. Despite all the treaties and promises they were given over the century, they have neither a state nor minority rights. 

These examples only strengthen R. Hirschensohn’s basic claim: International laws and treaties provide no guarantee that justice will be executed or that the innocent will be protected. Sometimes they will help, which is a good thing, but many times they will not. Even people with the best of intentions like Lake and Power fall into the trap of allowing power and politics to color, if not shape, international legal bodies. 

This sad but important truth does not mean that we should simply dismiss the ethics that international law aspires to implement. While displaying great skepticism about the efficacy of the system, R. Hirschensohn affirmed many of the values of “civilized society.” He sought to prove how Judaism may incorporate concepts like democracy and minority rights in order to make them valuable to Jews on their own terms, independent of their enforcement in broader international society. If, for example, forsaking total war tactics is an upright decision, then Jews should integrate and implement those values for integral reasons, let alone for preserving our reputation as an ethical people.^[69] 

At the same time, Jews should not be naive about the prospects of international bodies providing them with support or protection. In practice, self-help is the prevailing rule of world affairs. Jews cannot wait for others to deliver justice. In an international order deeply impacted, if not driven, by interests, then Jews need to proactively do what it takes to protect themselves. 

Notes

Book Review

By Rabbi Hayyim Angel

Michelle J. Levine, Navigating Wilderness: Ramban’s Commentary on the Exodus and Numbers Narratives (Kodesh Press, 2025)

          In a book review essay I wrote over twenty years ago on a Memorial Volume for Professor Nehama Leibowitz (Pirkei Nehama), I outlined a fundamental difference that generally exists between those who study Tanakh as the primary text, and those who focus on the work of a particular commentator:

In line with all traditional exegesis, Professor Nehama Leibowitz emphasized that we must scrutinize the meaning and significance of each word and passage in the Torah, and perceive its messages as communicated directly to us. We accomplish these daunting tasks by consulting the teachings of the Sages and later commentators. In effect, they serve as our eyes through which we understand the biblical text in its multifaceted and ever-applicable glory. Of course, their opinions must be painstakingly evaluated against the biblical text...

          To those studying parshanut as a discipline, whether for methodological approaches or in historical context, Midrashim and commentators are no longer secondary to the biblical text. They are three-dimensional people living in specific times and places. Parshanut scholarship investigates how a given exegete approached the text, and what influenced him, such as Midrashim and earlier commentaries, intellectual currents of his time, and other historical considerations beyond purely textual motivations. The student of Tanakh views commentary as secondary literature, while the student of parshanut or history treats exegetes as primary sources. These contrasting perspectives almost necessarily will yield different understandings of the comments of our commentators (Tradition 38:4, Winter 2004, pp. 112-113).

          Professor Michelle J. Levine’s recently published volume on Ramban’s interpretation of the wilderness narratives in the books of Exodus and Numbers is a remarkable exception to the aforementioned dichotomy. She takes readers on a journey through the biblical narratives through the eyes of one exceptional commentator, Ramban (Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, Spain-Israel 1194-1270). Levine’s expertise in Ramban’s commentary and the secondary scholarly literature on Ramban’s work shine forth on every page and in her learned footnotes. Strikingly, Levine provides a holistic approach on how Ramban learns the biblical texts.

          Ramban composed a three-tiered commentary, exploring the layers of peshat (plain sense, contextual meaning), derash (deeper meaning, homiletical teachings), and mysticism. Ramban navigates his own path guided by Midrash, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Rambam, Radak, and Rabbi Joseph Bekhor Shor. Transcending the works of his illustrious predecessors, Ramban also “often groups many biblical verses together to develop a wide-all-encompassing analysis that seeks to educe their integration as a literary unit and to extrapolate their fundamental motifs and concepts” (5). Ramban stresses that while God revealed the Torah and it is true, it is vital to focus on how God, as Narrator, relates the story. The literary form of the narratives contribute substantially to the meaning of the Torah (8). These overarching premises of Ramban’s commentary remain relevant and illuminating to this very day.

          For example, Ramban observes that after Pharaoh decrees that Egyptians must drown baby Israelite boys, two Levites get married and have a son:

Then Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, “Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.” A certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw how beautiful he was, she hid him for three months (Exodus 1:22-2:2).

These Levites, whom we later learn are Amram and Jochebed, just gave birth to Moses. We also learn later that Moses already has an older brother, Aaron, and Moses’ sister (generally, but not universally, understood to be Miriam) watched over him in the ensuing narrative. From the impression given by the narrative, however, it would appear that Moses was born right after his parents’ marriage, as there is no notification of the births of Miriam and Aaron.

          One midrashic reading (Sotah 12a-13a) assumes that after Pharaoh’s evil decree to drown all baby Israelite boys, Amram and Jochebed separated since there was a 50% chance of having a boy who would be drowned. They were filled with despair and helplessness. It was their precocious daughter Miriam who persuaded them to resume having children so there would be a chance to have girls and thereby perpetuate the nation of Israel. The Torah presents Moses’ birth after his parents’ marriage since Moses was born after the remarriage of his parents.

          Ramban disagrees with this reading. The juxtaposition of Pharaoh’s decree and Moses’ parents’ marriage serves to highlight the moral courage and heroism of Amram and Jochebed who challenged Pharaoh’s decree. The Torah does not mention the births of Miriam and Aaron at this juncture, since Pharaoh issued his decree after they already were born. The Torah wants to focus the reader’s attention on the heroism of Moses’ parents and on the birth of Moses.

          Ramban notes further that Jochebed also acts courageously by attempting to save Moses. Ramban then connects this narrative to the exceptional virtue of Pharaoh’s daughter, who rescued and adopted Moses, defying her own father’s evil decree. Ramban even surmises that Pharaoh’s daughter subsequently persuaded her father to repeal his wicked decree. Levine concludes, 

Thus, Ramban’s commentary spotlights how Moses is surrounded by central personages who act with intent, purpose, and focus in order to be vehicles for salvation from a situation of oppression. With this in mind, readers can better appreciate when Moses himself initiates his own parallel actions to save others from injustices (37).

          Through this and countless other examples, Professor Levine’s volume is a truly welcome contribution, enabling readers to have a sustained focus on Ramban’s singular contributions to Tanakh learning and its religious meaning.

On Shabbat, May 10, from 10:00-11:30 am ET, Rabbi Hayyim Angel will lead the next Foundations Minyan. Foundations is a full-length service, and features explanations on the weekly Torah reading from Rabbi Hayyim Angel.

The service is free and open to the public. It is located at Congregation Beth Aaron, 950 Queen Anne Road, Teaneck, New Jersey.

            I’ll never forget what happened on my first trip to Israel.

            It was the summer I turned 25, and I had been working on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. At the time, I had been invited to join a parliamentary fact-finding mission organized by the Canadian Jewish community through the Canada-Israel Committee. 

            I had joined the trip having been raised a Christian in rural Canada—a world that can feel light years away from the Jewish community, let alone the Middle East. It was my first trip overseas and, suffice to say, I would experience many “I’m not in Kansas anymore” moments in our brief but packed time in Israel.

            Of all the remarkable sights, people, and conversations I would encounter, one that still resonates took place at the Kotel. A small group of us—all Canadians who were not Jewish—were standing in the men’s section of the plaza, observing this fascinating world in which we found ourselves. An Orthodox Israeli said something to us, possibly in Hebrew, and our guide responded to him. Apparently, he had asked if we were Jewish and would like to borrow tefillin, to which our guide politely responded that the group wasn’t Jewish. 

            The Orthodox man quickly and warmly responded in English: “Welcome to Israel!”

            Three simple words in an encounter I’m sure he would forget momentarily, and one that he no doubt had experienced many times before. But for me, it spoke volumes. 

            Here we were at a site of extraordinary holiness to a man who, by all appearances, took the holy very seriously. We were tourists soaking it all in and standing out in the crowd with our awkward, cardboard kippot.

            And yet, he made us feel welcome. Like we belonged there.

            When I share my story of choosing to become Jewish, I always speak of the power of that trip—and so many other serendipitous events that would draw me to discover the beauty of Am Yisrael and the beauty of our precious Torah. Little did I know back then that an unexpected moment at the Kotel would be a milestone on a journey into Zionism, Judaism, and ultimately dedicating my career to serving the Jewish people as an advocacy and communications professional. 

            In the years that followed, my spiritual path went hand-in-hand with my career path. I took a job at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA—the advocacy agency of Canada’s Jewish Federations) and, later, UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. In a world where Jews and Israel are so often misunderstood, if not outright maligned, I was passionate to make a difference. And I felt that my personal and professional background could make for a unique contribution. 

            So, too, my training in public opinion research—developed at a consulting firm I had joined after Parliament Hill—would give me a window into how Canadians view Jews, Israel, and antisemitism. Over the years, I would have the privilege of working on the research teams conducting some of the most important studies of Canadian public opinion on these issues, uncovering data trends and messaging proven to open minds and win allies for our cause.

            Those years of research, including data gathered in the wake of the heinous October 7^th attacks, revealed a wide range of nuanced findings that are perhaps best left to another essay. But in the context of the title topic of this article, I am reminded of a few findings that offer compelling evidence of the power of the personal model—the power of Kiddush Hashem—in shaping views of Jews beyond our community.

            In Canada, home to the Diaspora’s third-largest Jewish community, Jews constitute roughly one percent of the general population. Broadly speaking, the research is fairly consistent in terms of how Canadians perceive us. 

            When it comes to views of different religions, Judaism is among the most positively regarded, with favorability scores similar to Protestant Christianity. The only religion that typically surpasses Judaism in popularity among Canadians is Buddhism. Every other religion, including Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity, enjoys lower favorability scores than Judaism.

            But to be Jewish is, of course, also to be part of a people. And when it comes to views of Canadians of different ethnic or cultural backgrounds, Jews are similarly seen in very positive terms. The proportion of Canadians who have positive views of Jews is comparable to those who have a positive view of people of British or French origin, the two groups with the highest such scores in Canada (which is no doubt indicative of their relatively large representation within Canadian demography). Across studies, there is a consistent majority of Canadians who feel that Jews make a positive contribution to Canadian society. 

            On the other side of the ledger, the research certainly shows that antisemitism exists in Canada. Based on all of the studies I’ve worked on or reviewed, I would estimate that somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of Canadians hold clearly antisemitic views. Depending on the antisemitic trope being tested by a pollster, the numbers climb disturbingly higher than that threshold on particular questions. Most Canadians have little understanding or opinion either way when asked about antisemitic tropes. The issue is largely tabula rasa to a public that has devoted minimal consideration to a topic that appears to have no meaningful connection to their lives. However, as a general rule, when asked whether a respondent agrees with a particular antisemitic trope or conspiracy theory, for every one Canadian who agrees with such a hateful statement, there are approximately two Canadians who strongly disagree with these views. 

            A two-to-one ratio is, of course, an encouraging sign if one is marketing a product or a political party. But that’s not what we’re doing when we advocate for Jews, Israel, and—for that matter—fundamental human rights. Experience suggests that it doesn’t require a hateful majority for a society to cross an antisemitic Rubicon. It simply requires the forces of moderation to remain silent and preoccupied with other matters, while a loud and aggressive fringe dominates the discourse and shatters the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable—increasingly marginalizing and threatening Jews in the process. Of the many lessons we Diaspora Jews should urgently internalize from the post-October 7^th experience, it’s the danger posed by this dynamic. The question is: How do we combat it? 

            In 2022, I was privileged to be part of a team that conducted a public opinion study as a collaboration of CIJA, Federation CJA of Montreal, and UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. In addition to asking Canadians what they thought of Jews, Israel, antisemitism, and various related issues, we asked the question: Do you have a close Jewish friend or colleague? Nearly one in five respondents answered in the affirmative. We examined their views in depth, and the results were remarkable.

            Respondents who had a close Jewish friend or colleague were two times more likely to say that Jews make a positive contribution to Canadian society, as compared to those who did not have a personal connection to Jews. Similarly, those with a close Jewish friend or colleague were twice as likely to strongly oppose antisemitism, again compared to those without a personal relationship to a Jew.

            Prior to my conversion, I once spoke to a group of Jewish students in Ottawa, with whom I shared that they would be wise to see themselves as ambassadors for the Jewish people. Having grown up in a rural area where there are virtually no Jews, I shared with them that they may be the first and only Jew that someone meets—and that this comes with both opportunity and responsibility. Years later, I was seeing this principle come to life in the data before my eyes. The results were a stunning demonstration that, just as they say that all politics is local, the personal is powerful when it comes to how we understand people from different lived realities. 

            “Sanctifying the Name,”[i] a characteristically thoughtful essay by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, zt”l, unpacks how the principle of Kiddush Hashem (sanctifying the divine name) has been interpreted by rabbonim throughout history. He notes that martyrdom is, of course, core to our understanding of Kiddush Hashem, citing the willingness of Jews to sacrifice themselves for their faith—be it at the hands of the Seleucid Greeks, the Romans, or the Crusaders. But Rabbi Sacks goes on to cite a passage from Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, which has powerful import for our daily lives:

If a sage “speaks pleasantly to others, is affable and gracious, receives people pleasantly, never humiliates others even though they humiliate him and honors others even though they disrespect him…with the result that all praise him, love him, and approve of his deeds—such a person sanctifies God’s name. Of him, Scripture (Is. 49:3) says: “And He said to me: Israel, you are my servant, in whom I will be glorified.”

            Like most of us, I cannot credibly speak of what it means to be a sage. But as Jews who live in a free and democratic society—a society in which we can express our authentic selves to the world around us—we each have an opportunity to infuse the underlying principles of Kiddush Hashem in our daily lives. In this regard, the data seems to paint a compelling picture. By simply being openly Jewish and a good, relatable person, one has the power to strengthen the “brand” of the Jewish people and reduce antisemitism among their peers.

            To be sure, this is not to suggest a singular solution to antisemitism. Nor is it to imply that the same kindness and personal connection that creates allies among people of goodwill can somehow transform a hardened antisemite or protect our community from those who wish us harm. But it is to say that, in the fight against antisemitism, if we are solely focused on those who hate us, we are ignoring those who—with the right outreach—will stand with us and on the right side of history. 

            I would also argue that effective ally-building doesn’t begin by telling people beyond our community what they should think. Rather, as the data suggests, it begins by simply showing up as a good person—as reliable friend or colleague—who is openly Jewish, and therefore brings credit to the Jewish people.

            In today’s environment, it also seems clear that it isn’t enough to simply show up. At a time when antisemites are attempting to defame what it is to be Jewish, we need to own and define our identity—and not only for ourselves. We need to warmly share our experiences—our Passover sedarim, our Shabbat dinners, our Chanukah parties, our family histories, our photos and stories from our last trip to Israel, and so much more—because the humanization of the Jewish experience is a powerful antidote to the dehumanization of Jews. And as someone who has lived that journey of discovering the beautiful world of Jewish life, I have seen firsthand how we look from the outside in—and we need to open those windows wider than ever if we want a society of allies rather than bystanders.

            And last but not least, humanizing the Jewish experience also means humanizing the impact of the hate we’re facing. There is compelling psychological research to demonstrate the power of personal anecdotes. We can and must talk about history, hate crime statistics, and the geopolitical threats facing Israel and Jews. But if we talk in abstract terms—if we fail to share the personal impact of antisemitism on our families and communities—we risk giving the impression that this is an academic matter, rather than a threat that’s harming and hurting the people they care about: their close Jewish friends and colleagues.

            Welcome to Israel. If three simple words from a stranger can shift a paradigm and enter the heart, one can only begin to imagine the power of our personal example—through everyday acts in the spirit of Kiddush Hashem—on the lives of those around us.

On Wednesdays, May 7,14, 21, and 28, from 8:30-9:30 pm ET, Rabbi Hayyim Angel will teach a four-part Zoom series on the biblical book of Ezra-Nehemiah. We will consider the central themes of the book, and consider how strikingly relevant the book is to today's times.

The classes are sponsored by the Jewish Center of New York, and are free and open to the public.

Registration is required to join the class and receive the Zoom links, and sponsorship opportunities are available. To register and for more information, please go to this link:

https://www.jewishcenter.org/event/Ezra%20and%20Nehemiah 

            The High Holiday season—in the midst of which I am writing these words—calls on Jews to examine ourselves, to reflect on our moral and ethical shortcomings, and to seek ways of mending these faults so as to turn, or return, to the right path. Moreover, our tradition makes clear that we are to subject ourselves to this self-examination not just as individuals but collectively. The confessional sections of our liturgy are replete with verbs in the first-person plural. We, like our ancestors who came before us, have sinned. We have turned from God’s goodly laws and commandments. We have sinned against God, willingly and unwillingly. Not to mention entire piyyutim (liturgical poems) of more specific, concrete offenses to which we confess, knowing that we individually have not committed these acts but accepting collective moral responsibility for the possibility that someone in our community has.

            To be sure, Jews are not alone in being called to this effort of self-examination. The Puritans who founded my university and nurtured it in its early years likewise felt the obligation to probe their innermost consciousness, and not just once per year. Calvin wrote, "Let us … unremittingly examining our faults [and] call ourselves back to humility. Thus, nothing will remain in us to puff us up; but there will be much occasion to be cast down.” And in the same vein, “the more severe we are toward ourselves, and the more sharply we examine our own sins, the more we ought to hope that God is favorable and merciful toward us.” For Calvin, of course, and among the Puritans more generally, the emphasis on atonement and redemption that we find in our tradition is largely missing. Reflecting on one’s faults had religious value—“it could not happen otherwise than that the soul itself, stricken by dread of divine judgment, should act the part of an avenger in carrying out its own punishment,” and “those who are really religious experience what sort of punishments are shame, confusion, groaning, displeasure with self, and other emotions that arise out of a lively recognition of sin”—but when it came to possibilities for redemption, the non-elect were the non-elect, and that was that. By contrast, for Jews a large part of the motivation for self-examination is the desire to return: at the individual level to improve one’s personal behavior, and at the community level to repair the world in which it is our lot to live.

            This collective sense of moral responsibility for our world feels especially acute in the wake of the events of the past twelve months. Most obviously, for those living in Israel and in surrounding areas the past year has brought unspeakable atrocities, violence on a horrifying scale, and widespread death. But for us as Jews living in the United States, and especially in the privileged setting of a university like mine, the past year has also brought experiences no one wishes to relive, including repeated and sustained outbursts of raw bigotry of a kind rarely seen in our normally more elevated community. It is hardly surprising that this experience has brought forth a profusion of efforts to understand what has happened, and to search out the flaws in our community’s institutional make-up, and especially that of our universities, that have fostered these failings. More in keeping with the Jewish tradition than Calvinist thought, much of this effort is now devoted to considering changes for which the need is plainly urgent. 

            The twentieth-century theologian Langdon Gilkey observed that “what we believe is largely determined by where the evil seems to lie.” Over the past year we, meaning Jews but also the American polity more generally, have gained a new understanding of where the evil lies that has so devastatingly infected our lives. Although I hesitate to place too positive a gloss on this new understanding—to repeat, it has emerged as a consequence of events no one would choose to relive—there is moral value in seeking to make our world better, and to the extent that knowledge of our collective and institutional shortcomings is a necessary precursor to undertaking that improvement then it too has value. Gilkey was a theologian and I am not, and so I may well be using the word “believe” in a different sense than what he had in mind. But I am comfortable nonetheless with the notion that what we have learned has shaped our understanding in ways that signal what is to be done.

            I think we can apply this new understanding in two distinct areas. One concerns us directly as Jews. The other concerns our universities, but it turns out that we as Jews have something specific and important to bring to that effort as well.

            To begin with the Jewish world, following the events of the past year we now have a different sense of where the salient threat lies—not the armed threat to Israel, but the threat to the wellbeing and security of our own community here. Groups of fellow-citizens whom Jews have overwhelmingly supported in the past, and with whose fundamental goals we still feel resonance, have actively and aggressively arrayed themselves against Jewish interests and derisively dismissed Jewish concerns. Nor were these reactions a response to the violence of Israel’s response to the October 7 terrorist attack. Numerous groups were willing to proclaim their total lack of sympathy for the victims on the day the attack occurred, before Israel had launched any response whatever.

            What kind of values, we are entitled to ask, do these groups hold? And given whatever values they do hold, are we really obligated to support these groups? Simply seeking to promote one’s own interest, or one’s own group’s interest, is hardly a valid moral principle. That requires some broader, more universalistic basis. For all the reasons that our tradition so eloquently teaches, we sympathize and seek to ally ourselves with people who meet persecution, or discrimination, or other forms of unfair treatment. “You shall have one manner of law as well for the stranger as for one of your own country” is a valid moral principle and we are right to adhere to it, whoever is the “stranger” in question. But institutionalized groups who insist on this principle for themselves while denying it for others are not, in fact, principled. They forfeit their claim to our support on moral grounds. 

            In a similar vein, we have learned that familiar principles of civic engagement, most obviously free speech, are likewise subject not only to abuse (Jews have known this for centuries) but to misappropriation for self-serving purposes. As we look back on the past year, it is breathtaking how rapidly many in our universities have pivoted from full-throated advocacy of trigger warnings and safety zones to the notion that any verbal or written statements, even the vilest calumnies deliberately designed to provoke, humiliate and offend, are sacrosanct. Moreover, many of our students, and their supporters, now exhibit an understanding of free speech to mean not only that they are entitled to say whatever they want, about anything or anyone they choose, but, further, that there should never be any consequences to them for the content of that speech: freedom of speech somehow has come to encompass freedom from criticism for whatever one has said. Members of the Jewish community cannot help but notice that this stunning pivot from over-protection to anything-goes took place only once the identity of the people who might benefit from the protection against unlimited free speech, including hate speech, shifted from the traditionally shielded groups to Israelis, Zionists, and Jews. 

Yet more troubling at a practical level, and especially visible at our universities, is today’s invocation of the principle of free speech to defend acts that would plainly be prohibited if they were to be committed in a different context. Is someone impeding your ability to walk from one building to another? In the eyes of many of my faculty colleagues at Harvard, he’s merely exercising his right to free speech. Is someone blocking students from entering their classroom? Again, merely exercising free speech. Is someone shouting into a bullhorn so that our students can’t hear either the instructor or one another? Here too, all merely free speech. Roughly a half-century ago, as a then-young member of the Harvard faculty, I served on a committee that considered, among other questions, whether the university should have a separate disciplinary code for political offenses—in effect, analogous to the long-ago practice in Tsarist Russia. Suppose, for example, some student threw a brick and smashed a shop window on the street: should there be one penalty if he was simply drunk, and a different penalty if he meant the act as a political statement? Our committee voted not to have separate disciplinary systems; a violation was a violation, regardless of what inspired it. I thought that decision was right then, and I think it’s right now. Preventing other people from going about their everyday activities is not merely exercising free speech, no matter what the person doing the obstructing is saying.

In this context too, we as Jews do well to take notice of the different principles that many, again especially at our universities, seek to apply depending on the content of the speech. I am confident that most faculty members at most universities would sharply condemn disruptive actions by students and others calling to end affirmative action admissions while concealing their identity by placing over their heads white pillowcases marked with gold crosses. Today all too many of them, I fear, would view differently the identical disruptive acts committed by people calling for an end to the admission of students from Israel, while concealing their identity with white-and-black checkered dishtowels. 

Most urgent, I believe, is the need to prevent our public spaces, in the universities and elsewhere, from becoming areas where Jews do not feel comfortable going. In the 1930s, in Germany, Austria, Poland, and other European countries, everyone understood that urban public spaces were places where Jews were not welcome and should not go. We must not allow the public spaces of our American cities to become Jew-free zones. Here too, Gilkey was a theologian and I am not, and so all this may not constitute “evil” in the sense that he had in mind. But it constitutes an existential threat to our community, and for our purposes learning what that threat is and where it lies rightly shapes what we believe.

The second area in which what we have learned over the past year has changed our beliefs concerns our universities more specifically. At Harvard, I am glad to say, our leadership has at least voiced an intent to set the university on a path to useful reform. There is now widespread acknowledgement, as reflected in the recent report of the university’s working group on “open inquiry and constructive dialogue,” that in fact too much of our inquiry is not open and too much of our dialogue is not constructive. Many ideas that are widely held among the American population are, for practical purposes, impossible to express on our campus. The result is to circumscribe not only everyday conversation but the content of both teaching and research.

There is also now recognition that we too often fail to expose our students to ideas and even facts that challenge or extend the preconceptions with which they arrive here. In an earlier era, it was widely accepted that part of the purpose of a university education was precisely to lead students to question their pre-college perceptions. Max Weber wrote that “the primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ truths.” In more recent times such notions have faded from view. In his address to our entering class at this year’s fall convocation, Harvard President Alan Garber recommended that each student make it a point to take at least one course that would likely make him or her feel uncomfortable. He likewise recommended that students deliberately place themselves in settings, either in the classroom or elsewhere, where they would encounter views with which they disagree. The contrast to the recent commitment to trigger warnings and safety zones is self-evident.

Part of the underlying problem, I believe, is the atomization of our society that our universities simply mirror. We attach enormous value to the diversity of the student body, at least in some dimensions, so much so that at my university we engage in hugely expensive and time-consuming litigation to preserve it. But once students are here, there is little effort to prevent their separating themselves into highly homogeneous enclaves. Our universities are, in microcosm, an example what my Harvard colleague Michael Sandel calls the “sky-boxification” of America—except that in this case it is not merely the wealthy and privileged who seek to separate themselves. None of this is new, and it is probably less true today than it was in the past. But it remains true nonetheless, and we now have a deeper understanding of the harm it does. Specifically, it shields our students from awareness of ideas and concerns from outside their narrow circles. It thereby blunts our efforts to educate them to become effective citizens of the republic.

Further, to the extent that views held in one circle may have as much claim to validity as those in another, this segmentation thwarts yet another aim of the education we seek to impart, namely the difficult and sometimes uncomfortable ability to cope with conflicting ideas. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Over the past year we have seen the harm done by the lack of that ability. A building in Gaza is a Hamas arsenal? No, it’s a hospital. Jews have a right to self-determination in their own independent country? But Palestinians have a right to self-determination in their independent country. If two ideas are in tension, at most one can be right. The examples are endless.

The solution to this intellectual limitation surely does not rest on perfunctory training sessions administered to students by a constitutionally unsympathetic DEI bureaucracy. What is required is a more serious form of engagement, in which students and others do not simply hear about the value of considering competing world views but actively participate in doing so, both in the classroom and in other settings. One of the most rewarding pedagogical experiences I’ve had in my more than 50 years of university teaching was a course that for many years I co-taught with a close friend in the English Department. The object of the course was to explore how people from different intellectual disciplines view topics of common interest; I represented the social sciences, my colleague the humanities, and we had numerous guest speakers from the natural sciences. Our aim was not to cover over differences in viewpoint but instead to highlight them and explore them. Some of our disagreements were sharp. I recall, for example, that my English professor friend was (as he remains) a committed devotee of Henry David Thoreau. I find much of Thoreau not just wrong but wrong-headed. We sometimes had that debate in class, and it was a vigorous one. For the students who watched it, realizing that the two of us were, and remained, close friends was probably more educational than whatever either of us actually said.

And here I think we as Jews have a particular contribution to make to this effort. Jewish learning has always, and perhaps uniquely, emphasized the value of debate and disagreement.  The Talmud tells us that for three years the house of Shammai and the house of Hillel disagreed: these said the halakha is in accordance with our opinion, and those said the halakha is in accordance with our opinion. Ultimately, a divine voice emerged and proclaimed “both these and those are the words of the living God” (Eruvin 13b). The fact that the voice went on to say that halakha is in accordance with the opinion of the house of Hillel is almost beside the point. The Tosefta instructs us to “make for yourself a heart of many rooms, and enter into it the words of the house of Shammai and the house of Hillel.” 

The value Jewish learning places on disagreement also emphasizes the interpersonal aspect of the learning process. The education our universities provide should not be parallel play in a sandbox. We need to encourage our students to regard one another as partners in learning. The value Jewish tradition places on debate and disagreement as essential to the learning process appears perhaps most dramatically in the poignant and ultimately tragic story told of Rabbi Yohanan, one of the leading amoraim of the second generation, and his friend and study partner (as well as his brother-in-law) Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish—commonly called Reish Lakish—whom Rabbi Yohanan raised up from an unsavory background to become also one of the leading Torah scholars of the time. According to the Talmud (Bava Metzia 84a), one day, during the course of arguing a point of halakha, Rabbi Yohanan said something that offended Reish Lakish. The two men quarreled, which so affected Reish Lakish that he died. Rabbi Yohanan’s colleagues, recognizing the void left in his life, chose Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat as his new study partner. The story continues,

Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat went and sat before Rabbi Yohanan. With regard to every matter that Rabbi Yohanan would say, Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat would say to him, there is a ruling taught in a Baraita that supports your opinion. Rabbi Yohanan said to him, in my discussions with the son of Lakish, when I would state a matter he would raise twenty-four difficulties against me in an attempt to disprove my claim, and I would answer him with twenty-four answers, and the halakha would become broadened and clarified. And yet you say to me, there is a ruling taught in a Baraita that supports my opinion. Being rebutted by Reish Lakish served a purpose. Your bringing me proof to my statements does not.

Soon thereafter, Rabbi Yohanan went insane and then died.

The value of entertaining conflicting opinions, and of engaging in debate, reflects a further core principle that also belongs at the center of the education we seek to provide: The uncertainty that results from our innate human limitations. This principle, too, is essential to Jewish learning. Even for those who take the written Scriptures to be the sure words of the divine, the interpretation of these words is necessarily a human endeavor, and therefore subject to uncertainty and error. Learning about one’s own ignorance is also an important part of a university education. In Jewish learning, it is that essential human ignorance, and the inescapable uncertainty to which it gives rise, that renders disagreement and debate worthwhile. This does not mean, of course, that any claim, no matter how absurd or offensive, must be entertained. A community is entitled to rule some ideas out of bounds, and the community that gave us the Talmud did so. But disagreement and debate are key to how we learn, and not just when we are students in the narrow sense. They are also part of how we humans make intellectual progress.

The past year has been a difficult one for all of us, and unbearable for many. It has taught us some things we would prefer not to have known.  But we have lived through this experience, and we have learned from it. We now know that we can no longer count on what we thought we could count on. It is now our obligation to act accordingly. 

Devarim 4:5–8 paints an idyllic word-picture of how Gentiles will perceive Torah-observant Jews:

Behold, I have taught you statutes and regulations, as Hashem my God commanded me, for you to do them in the midst of the land which you are coming to inherit. You will preserve them and do them, because they are your wisdom and discernment in the view of the nations, who will hear all these statutes and say: “Indeed this great nation is wise and discerning.”

History has rarely corresponded to this picture. Moreover, rabbinic literature is fully aware that some biblical commandments arouse mockery or disdain among many non-Jews. Dismissing those non-Jews as shallow does not resolve the problem that the Torah seems descriptively false. Claiming that the Torah’s description applies only to a perfectly observant community, and thus blaming Jews for incomplete observance, seems disingenuous and victim-blaming.

And yet there was an exception. American Jews in the late twentieth century could reasonably perceive themselves as living mostly in the Torah’s world. The phrase “Judeo-Christian values,” however problematic historically and fraught politically, amounted to Gentile recognition and endorsement of what they perceived as the values of the Torah. Laws such as kashruth were seen as legitimate and praiseworthy means of preserving identity while expressing universal values, rather than as illegitimate and blameworthy separatism. Even the ban on intermarriage was tolerated by the broader society, although I suspect only because it was honored mostly in the breach.

Nonetheless, the logically inescapable truth is that on any issue that is controversial in Gentile society, Jews and Judaism cannot take a firm position without earning praise from the Gentiles on one side and criticism from those on the other. The substance of Torah can be universally admired only in a consensus society, or else if Torah refracts into multiple and mutually exclusive positions corresponding to the broader society’s moral/ideological factions. 

If America was a consensus society, it is no longer; and of course, one can argue that the supposed consensus was always an illusion fostered by an elite. Political data suggests that we are consciously or unconsciously adopting the refraction strategy to meet the new polarized reality. Orthodox Jews are increasingly going with Republicans or MAGAism, and non-Orthodox Jews with Democrats or progressivism. Anecdotally, this sorting is self-reinforcing, as Jews are also switching or dropping out of denominational life because of political discomfort. 

It's entirely reasonable for the Jewish community overall to have roughly the same political spectrum as the society around it, and for Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxy to favor different sides of a major cultural conflict. And it is natural that some Orthodox Jews will have different sympathies than most of their peers and as a result feel isolated. But I think what particularly troubles sincere, idealistic Orthodox Jews is when the moral positions of their shulmates or religious institutions seem to be changing to justify their political affiliation rather than developing autonomously out of the tradition. They want to belong to a Torah community that serves as a light rather than as a mirror to the nations. 

How can we best create such a community?

Because Jewish tradition is genuinely multivocal and legitimately responsive to changes in the world, I don’t think that drawing objective red lines, i.e., trying to rule specific positions out of bounds, is likely to be an effective strategy for preventing moral followership. 

It’s also important to recognize that reaction can be as inauthentic as conformity. If anti-Semitism continues to become more prevalent and more socially acceptable, there may be a natural internal Jewish reaction to ascribe greatest Jewish authenticity to those aspects of Torah most criticized by anti-Semites, especially to those who are on the other side of a polarized political space. Similarly, where the Torah can be interpreted in multiple ways, there may be pressure to demonstrate authenticity by adopting the interpretations that most annoy the anti-Semites on the other side. These pressures may manifest on both sides in areas as diverse as Middle East politics, gender/sexuality, public health policy, and more.

Rather, I suggest that we need to collectively develop a procedural/epistemological checklist that lets us challenge ourselves and each other whether we are making a sincere attempt to authentically represent Jewish tradition, and to meaningfully discuss across party lines whether a position of ours meets that challenge. 

For example: If you are making a claim about Jewish tradition, do you know the most common traditional sources used to challenge your position, and can you convincingly explain them? If your application of Jewish tradition rests on a claim of fact, have you seriously engaged with scholars who reject that claim? If you are arguing from contemporary authority, have you discussed these issues with respected scholars who are not public figures and/or are politically uninvolved, to make sure that you are not just listening to the loudest voices or aiding a campaign of intimidation?[1]

Let’s suppose—a huge if—that we can accomplish this. I want to be clear that this is not enough to meet our Torah obligation vis-a-vis the human societies we participate in. In fact, my use of autonomy and authenticity as lodestars for developing positions might create the false impression that we are indifferent to what non-Jews think of Torah.

One standard Jewish expression of an obligation to care about what non-Jews think is or laGoyim, “light unto the nations.” I have trouble using this phrase because it seems to result from what is known as a Mandela effect, a collective false memory. That expression does not appear in Tanakh. Rather, Yeshayahu 42:6 and 49:6 each say that God will make the Jewish people l’or goyim. It’s possible that the meaning remains the same, but I have heard various efforts to argue for fundamental differences.

My preference instead is to use the categories kiddush Hashem (sanctification of the Name) and hillul Hashem (desecration of the Name). My argument is that these categories legitimately place pressure to make halakhic choices and interpretations that inspire non-Jews to value Torah. My argument is grounded in the following two texts from the Jerusalem Talmud.

1. Yerushalmi Bava Metzia 2:5 (translation modified from Guggenheimer)

Simeon ben Shetacḥ was in the linen trade. His students said to him: Rebbe, to make it easier for you, we will buy you a donkey so you won’t have to work so hard. They went and bought him a donkey from a Saracen; a pearl was hanging on its neck. They came to him and said: From now on you will not have to work anymore. He said to them: Why? They told him: We bought a donkey for you from a Saracen and a pearl is hanging on its neck. He asked them: Did its owner know about this? They answered: No. He told them: Go return it! 

But did not Rav Huna Bibi bar Gozlan in the name of Rav say: 

“They objected before Rebbe: ‘Even according to the position that an object robbed from a Gentile is forbidden, everybody agrees that his lost object is permitted!?’” 

What do you think, that Simeon ben Shetacḥ was a barbarian? Simeon ben Shetacḥ wanted to hear: “Praised be the God of the Jews” more than any gain in this world.

It’s not clear whether the last two elements of the passage are an editorial reflection on the story, or rather an anachronistic recreation of the dialogue between Shimon ben Shetach and his students (they quote rabbis who lived many centuries after their time). Regardless, the text is explicit that only a barbarian would keep a Gentile’s lost object, even though all halakhic positions are understood to permit keeping it. 

This implies that the permission can be kept on the halakhic books as-is only because Gentiles don’t know about it. I contend that Shimon ben Shetach fundamentally argues that the permission codifies a lost opportunity to make Gentiles think well of the Torah of the Jews—for kiddush Hashem—and therefore cannot be sustained as practical law. 

It makes little sense to say that our interest is in having Gentiles think well of Torah that is not actually Torah. That might even be a violation of the prohibition of geneyvat daat, which includes gaining goodwill under false pretenses). Possibly, however, the law would remain on the books for hypothetical societies (think Sodom and Gomorrah) so stuck in selfishness that people returning valuable lost objects would be regarded as fools rather than as moral heroes. Nonetheless, that context would have to be provided whenever the law was taught.

2. Yerushalmi Bava Kamma 4:3 (Translation mine)

A story: The government sent two investigators to learn Torah from Rabban Gamliel. They learned from him Scripture, Mishnah, Talmud, Halakha, and Aggada. In the end they said to him: “Your entire Torah is attractive and praiseworthy except . . . that you say . . . “objects stolen from a Jew are forbidden, but objects stolen from a Gentile are permitted.”

Immediately Rabban Gamliel decreed that objects stolen from a non-Jew would be prohibited to prevent desecration of the Name. 

This text explicitly endorses a change in halakha for the purpose of preventing non-Jews from thinking badly of Torah, which is termed “desecration of the Name,” or hillul Hashem.

My bottom line is that Gentile moral evaluation is a legitimate factor to consider when deciding halakha. 

            Readers are strongly encouraged to challenge my argument via the procedural/epistemological checklist above. I fervently hope this will lead to a conversation in which we together seek to figure out the limits of this principle, and which opinions in which societies we honor and which we proudly flout. Only in that way can our Torah become a genuine source of light for the world. 

Note

Torah versus Prejudice

To the sacred memory of those driven by societal prejudice to take their own lives.

©

Rabbi Isaac Sassoon[1]

            Potiphar was no muggins. The trust he places in Joseph bespeaks a man possessed of astute discrimination and sound instincts. If he sized up the newcomer Joseph, his wife he must have known like a book. It is therefore highly doubtful that Potiphar fell for her ladyship’s concoction. To be sure, Genesis 39:19 reports Potiphar’s anger; but significantly, Joseph is not said to have been its butt. “When his [Joseph’s] master heard the words of his wife which she spoke to him saying such and such has your servant done to me he became angry”. We are then told that his master ‘took Joseph and put him’ in prison. Not sentenced to death nor shoved into a pit (as he was by his brothers; Gen 37:22, 24), Joseph is taken and put like the Testimony. For the identical pair of verbs – taking and putting - describes the depositing of the ‘edut (Testimony) in the Ark (Exod 40:20). Commentators interpret the ‘edut’s taking and putting as deferential, kid-glove handling. The phrase’s presence at Genesis 39:20 adds to the picture of a Potiphar skeptical of his wife’s slander. But if Potiphar doubts Joseph’s guilt, why jail? The answer is a single, tyrannical word: respectability. Potiphar dreads the obloquy that awaits a man seen to believe his servant above his wife. It could cost him his prestige; not a pretty prospect for anyone whose self-esteem hangs on the establishment’s approval. 

            Today honor and respectability may have lost their former leverage, but public opinion still counts, and people are still blacklisted for failing to toe the line. This holds even in the arena of Torah. Thus, non-partisan Torah students, unwilling to play to the gallery, must be prepared for criticism all round. The charges may range from obscurantism and fuddy-duddyism, hurled by so-called progressives, all the way to heresy and schism thundered forth by the anachronistically grandiloquent. Speaking from personal experience, a well-intentioned friend tried hard to discourage the present essay. “It will come back to haunt you” he warned. “People with a reputation to sustain, do not touch this kind of taboo with a barge pole”. 

            Taboo, of course, loomed large once upon a time. That was prior to the demythologizing process begun in the Bible and carried forward by hazal. But though taboo waned, its congener, bias, especially ingrained bias, persisted. Unconscionably, biases invaded Torah, infesting it like a maggot that, once inside, would turn Torah into its home and sanctuary. Most notorious, is the infestation that parasitized Genesis 9:22-27. As recently as 1861 a leading Orthodox Rabbi by the name of Morris Jacob Raphall, preached in defense of slavery quoting, among other scriptures, Genesis 9’s Curse of Ham. Having cited the texts that allegedly sanctioned slavery, the rabbi went on “I find, and I am sorry to find, that I am delivering a pro-slavery discourse. I am no friend to slavery in the abstract, and still less friendly to the practical workings of slavery. But I stand here as a teacher in Israel, not to place before you my own feelings and opinions, but to propound to you the word of G-d, the Bible view of slavery ….”. Rabbi Raphall was declaring his hands to be tied; his commitment to Torah, as he understood it, did not give him leave to condemn slavery outright.

        Parallel to racism’s appalling exploitation of Ham’s story, homophobia found to‘ebah at Leviticus 18:22 and hijacked it. While bigotry got away with profaning Torah, many of us sat idly by instead of toppling homophobia from its Torah perch. And make no mistake: in select circles it retains its dominion. Exodus 23:13 deters mentioning the names of idols. Yet one comes across people who treat homosexuality as if it were an idol, referring to it only by epithets such as perversion or toeivah. Their purpose, they claim, is to instill revulsion and horror for something unmentionable.[2] The connotation of to‘ebah (or to‘abat hashem) in its varied Torah contexts is clearly negative; but the very diversity of those contexts precludes a narrow definition. Let’s see what light the sources can shed on to‘ebah; we all probably agree that hazal’s ideas deserve more attention than the bigots’. 

R. El‘azar ben Azaryah taught: a person should not say Wearing kil’ayim [linsey-woolsey] is repugnant to me, eating swine’s flesh is repugnant to me, the ‘arayoth [incest; illicit relationships in general] are repugnant to me. Rather should one say: These things are not distasteful to me, but I avoid them in obedience to the commandment that my Father in heaven has laid upon me ... .[3]   

            R. El‘azar can be seen to replace disgust with submission to the divine will as the proper motivation for eschewing kil’ayim, swine’s flesh and ‘arayoth.  Whether these three precepts were picked by way of illustration or by virtue of some intrinsic peculiarity, in either case, their very linkage speaks volumes. ‘Arayoth are classified as to‘eboth (Lev 18:26-30; Yeb. 21a, etc.) and non-kosher foods (of which swine’s flesh is the standard exemplar) are generically labeled to‘ebah (Deut 14:3; Hul.114b, etc.). Kil’ayim, never characterized to‘ebah, is the odd man out. Yet, for purposes of right motivation, rather than distinguish the two to‘ebah categories from non-to‘ebah kil’ayim, R. El‘azar equates them. Thus we learn that whatever the Torah’s objective in attaching to‘ebah to certain prohibitions, it was not the enshrinement of primitive aversions. After R. El‘azar, it comes as no surprise to find the Talmud endowing Leviticus 18:22’s to‘ebah with moral and reasoned purport, rather than treating it as code for ‘go ahead and indulge your homophobia’. 

“Bar Qappara asked Ribbi [Judah the Patriarch] ‘What does to‘ebah mean?’ Every explanation that Ribbi offered he refuted. So Ribbi said to him, ‘You explain it!’. He [Bar Qappara] replied... ‘This is the meaning of the Torah. To‘ebah means: You stray by this [to‘eh-attah-bah]’ …” . The commentary attributed to Rashi[4] elaborates: “such a man leaves his wife who is permitted and takes hold of that which is zenuth [harlotry, any illegitimate relationship]” (Ned.51a). Inserting a wife into the scenario, reminds us that the addressees of Leviticus 18 are men of, ostensibly, heterosexual proclivities - insofar as the ‘arayoth listed are mostly relations with women. Verse 22 is directed at that selfsame adult, male, heterosexual audience; not a few of whose members are likely to be married. Could one say, then, that for Bar Qappara the chief concern of Lev 18:22, is the wife’s humiliation caused by her husband’s ‘straying’? Or did Bar Qappara perceive homosexuality as posing a threat to married life and, ultimately, to human reproduction; a top priority both instinctively and halakhically?[5] Some extrapolate from this טעמא דקרא,[6] that since the risk to human survival from lower birthrates is no longer as dire as in bygone ages, homosexuality’s threat-level might drop concomitantly. Moreover, gay-oriented people tend not to marry spouses of the opposite gender or to reproduce biological offspring; making their impact on population size inconsequential. However, one has to wonder whether such individuals were even within the purview of former generations. A theory has been floated that Jews of gay orientation were unknown, or at any rate unacknowledged, by halakhah. This theory might explain legislation such as the following: “A man who has passed the age of twenty and does not want to marry, the authorities force him to marry in order to fulfill the mitsvah of פריה ורביה”.[7] Had gay orientation been recognized, the suffering of a wife trapped in marriage to a man thus oriented, would surely have given pause before coercing all and every reluctant male.[8] Firmer evidence for the ‘floated theory’ would appear to transpire from the teshuvah of a foremost twentieth century halakhist: 

It is incomprehensible that this thing could involve desire. For in the creation of the human being [or: man] there was no desire in his nature to lust after mishkav zakhur.[9]  That is why Bar Qappara said to Ribbi that it means to‘eh-attah-bah… It is G-d’s scriptural admonition to the wicked: For this transgression behold there is no lust whatsoever, as the lust I created in them was for women because without it human continuity would be impossible as taught at Yoma 69b and San. 64a… But for mishkav zakhur there is no lust whatsoever … Only because it is something prohibited does he do it as an act of defiance … In any event, lust for mishkav zakhur goes against the very nature of lust itself. Therefore any desire for this is only because it is forbidden and the evil inclination entices him to disobey G-d’s will.[10]

Obviously, gay orientation does not exist for this responsum. If such a construct served as a working premise in halakhic deliberations, it opens the door to the application of a classic strategy, or legal fiction, called  הטבעים השתנות. Recognizing changes in nature (and possibly in culture), that strategy re-examines views that may have rested upon an earlier state of affairs before the change – whether real or fictive. In the case of homosexual orientation, it is contended, that since it formerly had no halakhic existence, Providence must have seen fit to intervene by granting many contemporary human beings an unprecedented kind of orientation. And if so, it may be time to revisit judgments based on a reality (or perceived reality) that predated the ‘intervention’.

All the above theories, however cogent, are extraneous to the beth midrash, inside whose walls students seek guidance from the extant talmudic corpus. In that corpus Lev 18:22 is understood to prohibit categorically a specific act between two men. No rationales are formally offered in that literature other than incidental ones of which two have already been noticed – namely, R. Elazar’s concept of blind obedience to a peremptory fiat and Bar Qappara’s תועה אתה בה. 

That said, we must not overlook the amply documented resource whereby the rabbis appealed to one scripture in order to override the literal sense of another scripture. Take, for instance, Leviticus 11:8. Referring to the four animals itemized in verses 4 through 7, verse 8 continues: “Their flesh you shall not eat and their carcasses you shall not touch they are unclean unto you.” Logically, the two - eating and touching - demand parity; either both are absolutely proscribed or else neither is. But the Rabbis on confronting this text, whose literal meaning forbids touching the cadavers of the camel, cony, hare and pig, responded as follows. “Can lay Israelites really be prohibited to touch carrion? Scripture says [Lev 21:1] ‘Speak unto the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say unto them, none shall defile himself for a dead person among his kin.’ It is Aaron’s sons that are prohibited, not the children of Israel. If a potent generator of defilement [i.e., a human corpse] had to be avoided by priests alone but not by lay Israelites, a fortiori a lesser generator of defilement [i.e., dead animals]. So what is the meaning [of ‘their carcasses you shall not touch’]? Its meaning is Do not touch the carcasses on the festival.” (Rosh Hashanah 16b; cf. Sifra). 

More famous is the fate of the lex talionis: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth etc. (Exod 21:24-25 cf. Lev 24:19-20, Deut 19:21). At Numbers 35:31 the rabbis uncovered their cue for commuting these corporal penalties to monetary restitution. Numbers 35:31 ordains “You shall not take a ransom for the life of a murderer” - whence the Talmud deduced “For a murderer’s life you may not take ransom but you may take ransom for limbs” (BQ 83b).         

Where is the counter scripture with the potential to mitigate Lev 18:22? Actually we believe such a scripture to exist; but neither the text we have in mind nor, for that matter, any alternative is brought to bear by the Talmud. Therefore, unless - or until - the Talmud-faithful can be persuaded otherwise, received meanings stand. When it comes to Lev 18:22, the received meaning of that verse is unequivocal and precise. As noted, it names a very specific act which it outlaws; neither more nor less. Thus, there seems little leeway for the conscientious stalwart of traditional halakhah.

            Those whose view of halakhah is less than sanguine, may feel that view reinforced by our last, unapologetic, paragraph. Yet, how can one apologize for reporting a straightforward reading of the relevant texts? By the same token, one is duty-bound to show the other side of the coin. Because the Talmud, that proscribes a particular behavior, does not doom anyone to a life of enforced desolation. Quite the contrary: it leaves room, as we are about to see, for two individuals of the same gender to experience intimacy with one another without having to infringe Lev 18:22. 

            The crucial text occurs in Yerushalmi Sanhedrin. It deals with the question of why forbidding an integral act between men requires two scriptural sources - one each for the active and passive roles. The Talmud knows R. Ishmael and R. Aqiba to have deemed Lev 18:22’s wording (as masoretically vocalized), inadequate to take care of both. To appreciate the anomaly of requiring twofold scriptural authority, one must remember how the rabbis approached the other ‘arayoth injunctions of Leviticus 18. Although those injunctions also address a single party, invariably the male, the rabbis read them as targeting both male and female partners. The clearest enunciation of this principle - that the ‘arayoth laws in general are intended for the absent woman no less than for the directly addressed man - occurs in Sifra.

            Leviticus 18:6 launches its ‘arayoth laws as follows: “Man, man! ye shall not draw near to any sh’er basar (near of kin; literally, flesh of flesh) of his to uncover nakedness...”.  Sifra notes that the mention of man might suggest that women are not being charged to keep these laws. Such an inference, Sifra continues, would be erroneous “because plural ‘ye’ (in lo tikrevu, 'ye shall not draw near') indicates that both men and women are being addressed”. This teaching of Sifra is axiomatic to all rabbinic discussions of ‘arayoth, and underlies the question of R. Bun bar Hiyya. 

R. Bun bar Hiyya asked R. Zera “Why did R. Ishmael and R. Aqiba treat relations between two males and relations between a person and a beast differently from all other illicit relations [for in all other illicit relations both parties are made liable by a single scripture]?”  He [R. Zera] said to him “In regard to all other illicit relations there is a general and inclusive reference to sh’er basar (Lev 18:6) while in the present cases there is no such reference to sh’er basar”. An objection was raised: “Lo, there is the case of relations with a niddah which is not a sh’er basar relationship [and therefore not covered by Lev 18:6]. Yet, did they [Rabbis Ishmael and Aqiba] treat them [the man who has relations with a niddah and the niddah] as liable [without any additional verse]?” R. Jeremiah [said] in the name of R. Abhu: “Since it is written ‘drawing near’ [at Lev 18:6] and ‘drawing near’ [at Lev 18:19] it is as if all the rules pertaining to the one apply to the other”.[11]

            As so often, the Talmud astounds by the closeness of its reading. In this instance, R. Abhu notes that ‘drawing near’ in combination with ‘to uncover nakedness’ occurs but twice in Lev 18 - once in the preamble (v.6) and again in connection with niddah (v.19). Individually, neither ‘drawing near’ nor ‘uncovering nakedness’ is unattested.[12] But conjoined to form a single phrase קרב+גלות ערוה appears nowhere else. R. Abhu further implies, that the phrase’s distribution is not random. Its first occurrence governs the sh’er basar ‘arayoth; its second is called for by niddah. The latter stands apart from sh’er basar ‘arayoth inasmuch as it is not incestuous (i.e., not ‘flesh of flesh’). Indeed, niddah applies to parties that are lawful husband and wife. That would appear to leave the rest of the pericope’s prohibitions outside the ‘drawing near’ loop. In any event, as regards the prohibition of verse 22 the Yerushalmi is unambiguous: neither the first nor the second ‘do not draw near’ extends to verse 22. Now the meaning of ‘drawing near’ in Lev 18 is disputed by rishonim. Maimonides defines it as any physical contact of an intimate kind that leads to carnal knowledge.[13] For Nahmanides, on the other hand, the phrase is a euphemism for actual cohabitation between man and woman.[14] But irrespective of its meaning, the Yerushalmi sets the parameters of לא תקרבו, and 18:22 falls outside those parameters.[15]

            As an Orthodox Rabbi, one would be remiss not to give prominence to a source as weighty as this Yerushalmi, especially when its conclusions are so demonstrably rooted in the Written Torah. Furthermore, it is a source that corroborates the Talmud’s assertion: “Everything that the Merciful One has forbidden us, He has permitted us its counterpart” (Hul. 109b). Being able to advise people of homosexual orientation about the counterpart that the Merciful One allows them, adds credence to halakhah’s interdiction. For what it interdicts is precisely and graphically demarcated by Rabbis Ishmael and Aqiba as an act whose performance involves an active and a passive partner. Delineating so exactly the prohibited conduct, hazal exclude by implication interaction short of penetration. To be sure, Rambam - as we have seen - derives fromלא תקרבו  a ban on lesser degrees of interaction. But this is where the Yerushalmi comes in: תקרבו  לא does not apply to Lev 18:22. So to reiterate, the Torah relegates no human being to a life of loveless solitude. This information may relieve the pressure from rabbis and religious counselors; they who agonize over “Vainly paining the heart of the righteous when I had not pained it…” (Ezek 13:22). If, as hypothesized above, halakhists of yore were oblivious of gay orientation, they could discourage, as they often did, all bonding between men without compunction about causing pain. Today we know: and that knowledge deprives us of the luxury to insouciantly condemn fellow Jews to a monastic life on the pretext of ‘being on the safe side’.[16] 

       Acquaintance with the complementary rulings, and with where halakhah draws the line, could also empower the decision-making of homosexually inclined women and men who cherish halakhah. In turn, their peers will have to ask themselves: What right have we to be חושד בכשרים or במי שמעשיו סתומים? For once R. Abhu’s Yerushalmi teaching is out there, the mere fact two gay individuals live together will not license an honest bystander to automatically assume that they are in breach of halakhah. Because as Jews familiar with this nuanced halakhah, they will have the presumption of faithfulness to its guidelines. The Talmud depicts a marriage, albeit a heterosexual one, in which the two parties lived together as a couple in all respects except cohabitation, on account of halakhic qualms (San.19b). Huge praise is heaped upon the couple for their heroic abstinence. But how did the rabbis know what went on in the couple’s bedchamber? Either the couple revealed it or, more likely, the rabbis relied on the assumption that observant Jews make every effort to adhere to halakhah.

Are these assumptions compromised when two men publicly proclaim their partnership a marriage? While prying is abhorrent, recent debates have brought the question into the limelight. Surely it depends whether or notבלשון בני אדם  ‘marriage’ is, by definition, a relationship that flouts halakhic boundaries. In other words, if society recognizes in a declaration of marriage the conscious intent of the parties to engage in the specific conduct disapproved by halakhah, then that declaration would tacitly seem to fall under the strictures of ‘writing a ketubah for males’ (see Hullin 92a-b). The ketubah, of course, includes the pledge למיעל... כאורח כל ארעא ; and if a comparable pledge were implicit in ‘marriage’ it would be tantamount to the writing of a ketubah. On the other hand, if ‘marriage’ is adopted to denote sincere commitment, then notwithstanding the public announcement, the presumption (explained above) need not necessarily be undermined.[17] Mutatis mutandis, halakhically-educated heterosexual couples are assumed to observe niddah separation, even though the wife neither moves out of the house for the duration nor is she expected to wear distinctive niddah clothing as was customary among certain Jews in the distant past. Needless to say, we do not venture to advise any individual how to live her or his life. Our mandate is strictly academic; setting forth as best we can the germane texts. 

            “R. Qatina said When the pilgrims came [to the Temple] on the festivals, they [those in charge] would roll back the veil to let them see the cherubim intertwined with one another.  They would say to them: ‘Behold your endearment before G-d is like the endearment of a man and a woman’” (Yoma 54a). But were the cherubim male and female? Elsewhere the Talmud portrays them as having the faces of young lads (Suk. 5b; Hag. 13b; cf. Torah Temimah on Exod 25:18). So as it turns out, the divine love towards Israel was symbolized by two lads locked in a tight hug as if husband and wife. The image of this aggadah speaks for itself. Like the halakhic passage we saw in Yerushalmi Sanhedrin, it reminds us that love is not condemned, but only its expression in the one way interdicted by Torah. Is it naive to find a modicum of healing in such a message?

            Some day, more reverential and prayerful study will perhaps yield unforeseen results. When Esther and Mordecai sought to institute the new feast of Purim, the Elders were greatly perturbed. “Moses said to us no other prophet is going to innovate anything henceforth. Yet Mordecai and Esther seek to innovate. They did not stop debating until the Holy One blessed be He lit up their eyes and they discovered it written in the Torah, in the Prophets and in the Writings”.[18]