A Tribe Is a Home. Tribalism Needs an Enemy.

Deciding who you are is hard work. Deciding who you’re not is easy, and that ease is exactly the trap.

We may not always know what we believe, or what kind of future we’re building. But we know, with total confidence, that we are not like those people. Not that political party. Not that denomination. Not that kind of Jew. Tribalism sells identity at a discount: skip the self-examination, skip the hard work of naming what you actually stand for, and just point at whoever irritates you. Stand somewhere else. Done.

But here’s what tribalism gets wrong: tribes themselves are not the problem. They’re not even optional. Human beings need people who know our stories, carry our memories, and show up when everything falls apart. A tribe hands us a language we didn’t invent and obligations we didn’t choose – and that’s a gift, not a limitation.

Jews should know this better than anyone. We are, in the truest sense, a tribe. We call strangers family because they carry the same ancient memory. And especially now, with antisemitism rising in plain sight, we owe no one an apology for seeking each other out and protecting what we have.

The danger isn’t the tribe. The danger is the moment belonging inside starts to require that someone else stay outside.

That’s the real weight behind Tu B’Av, the holiday everyone shorthands as “the Jewish day of love.”

The Talmud gives several reasons for the day, and two are about the tribes of Israel directly. One tradition holds that Tu B’Av was the day different tribes were first permitted to intermarry with each other. Unmarried women of Jerusalem danced in the vineyards, while eligible men came out to watch and find a match. Another says it was the day the tribe of Benjamin, cast out, shunned by the rest of Israel, was finally welcomed back in, permitted to marry into the community again.

Notice what didn’t happen: the tribes didn’t dissolve. Judah stayed Judah. Benjamin stayed Benjamin. Every name, every history, every distinct character remained intact. What changed is that those identities stopped being the wall. They stopped deciding, once and for all, who someone was allowed to love and build a life with.

That’s why this day belongs to love, and not to some vaguer idea of unity. Tribalism looks at a person and sees a category. Love insists on seeing the person. It doesn’t erase the differences between us, it just refuses to let those differences be the whole story.

There’s a sharp little truth buried in the Hebrew here: shevet and mateh each mean both “tribe” and “staff” or “rod.” A tribe is something we lean on. Tribalism is what happens when the very staff that holds us up gets picked up and swung at someone else.

The old denominational maps are fading fast; Pew found in 2020 that nearly a third of American Jewish adults claim no branch of Judaism at all. Many are searching for a form of Jewish life the old categories were never built to describe.

At TAMID, the synagogue where I serve, people often hand us a multiple-choice test: Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox? “Independent” can sound like a dodge, like we couldn’t decide, so we ducked the question.

It isn’t a dodge, and we shouldn’t let it sound like one. Independence can mean the opposite of vagueness: it can mean taking full responsibility for naming exactly what stands at the center. The old question was which movement do you belong to. The question worth asking now is what kind of Jewish life are we actually building.

And let’s be honest, independent communities aren’t immune to tribalism either. “We’re not institutional” or “we’re not like those synagogues” can calcify into its own smug identity, built entirely out of opposition to something else. No structure, however new or well-intentioned, is automatically safe from this.

So here’s how to actually check yourself:

Can you explain what you stand for without naming an enemy?

Can someone challenge your group without being called a traitor?

Do you judge your own side by the same standard as the other?

Can you still see the image of God in someone whose beliefs you think are dead wrong?

None of this requires agreement. It doesn’t mean pretending every position is equally valid, some aren’t. It means refusing to shrink a human being down to the worst thing they believe, or the group they were born into.

And the answer to tribalism is not to become rootless. Erasing your differences, building a community with nothing solid at its center, that’s not the cure, it’s a different kind of loss. A person with no tribe isn’t automatically open-minded. Often, that person is just alone.

What we need are communities with strong centers and open doors. Both. Not one traded for the other.

Tu B’Av doesn’t ask us to stop being Judah or Benjamin, Reform or Orthodox, hiloni or dati, liberal or conservative. It asks something more demanding: are those identities strong enough to stand on their own, without needing an enemy to prop them up?

A tribe gives you a home. Tribalism needs an enemy. Tu B’Av is the question underneath both, are we secure enough in who we are to know the difference?