Backsliding Into Tribalism: A Response to Mijal Bitton

In her Times of Israel op-ed of September 4, Dr. Mijal Bitton admonishes “liberal Jews everywhere” that “Jewish survival isn’t immoral”—and she calls for an “internal fight” against Jews like me to achieve the “reawakening and rededication of the Jewish people.” As a Reform rabbi, I want to push back against her view of Jewish morality and explain why many liberal Jews see it differently.

Dr. Bitton is right to criticize Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s troubling comment that Jews should sacrifice themselves for the sake of humanity. But her assertion that Nessel’s view is a natural outgrowth of liberal Judaism is not only wrong; it also condescends to liberal Jews who care about the future of the Jewish people no less than does Dr. Bitton herself.

It is true that liberal Jews tend to reject the tribalist mindset she promotes—but not, as she claims, because we think Jewish particularism has to “apologize for itself and explain why it deserves to survive.” We reject it because we do not believe the tribe is an end unto itself. We hold, rather, that the tribe is charged with carrying out the ethical demands of the Torah. Therefore, the tribe is subordinate to those demands.

Self-defense, of course, is a halakhic and ethical imperative. As the Sages say at Sanhedrin 72a, “if someone comes to kill you, arise and kill him first.” But this principle is not absolute; it is part of a larger matrix of ethical precepts that interact with, and are inseparable from, each other.

In fact, the Torah explicitly imposes limitations on what the Jewish nation can do—even to ensure its own survival.

Consider, for example, the laws of war codified by Maimonides (Mishneh Torah, M’lakhim 6): a Jewish army besieging an enemy city must leave an escape route for inhabitants to flee; the army may not deprive the city of food and water by cutting down fruit trees or blockading irrigation systems; and wanton destruction of the enemy’s property is forbidden. We might have a greater chance of victory if we simply show the enemy no mercy, but the Torah forbids such cruelty because the ethical treatment of other human beings also matters.

Liberal Jews agree with Dr. Bitton that the survival of the Jewish people is a moral value. We insist, however, on rigorous accountability to the ethical laws of the Torah, whose concern includes and extends beyond the people itself. This is what distinguishes Judaism from nativist ideologies that place the good of the tribe or nation at the center of the moral universe.

Perhaps the strongest modern advocate for the primacy of Torah over nation was the Orthodox Israeli Zionist philosopher Dr. Yeshayahu Leibowitz—hardly a liberal Jew. Known as “the conscience of Israel,” Dr. Leibowitz decried the occupation of the West Bank as a moral catastrophe for the Jewish people. In 1988, he wrote:

“When nation, country, and state are presented as absolute values, anything goes. For their sake anything may even become one’s duty. It is therefore incumbent upon every teacher, educator, counsellor, and every intellectual who is not a fascist to reiterate insistently that nation, country, and state are not absolute values. They are subject to criticism.”
(Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 247)

That criticism, said Dr. Leibowitz, must come from the Jewish religion. He called for separation of religion and state in Israel precisely so the Jewish people would be able to “pass judgment on the ruling power” by evaluating its actions against the Torah’s moral standards. (See the documentary A Philosopher for All Seasons, available on YouTube.)

The vision Dr. Bitton proposes is the opposite of Dr. Leibowitz’s. She implies that the value of Jewish survival is more important than Torah morality writ large.

This reasoning is dangerous because it provides moral cover for any and every action taken to preserve the Jewish “family.” While it may inspire fierce loyalty to the tribe and strengthen group solidarity, it can also be used to justify subjugation, brutality, and abuse of power over and against others.

Indeed, the elevation of people, tribe, nation, family—whatever one chooses to call it—as the supreme moral good is not Judaism.

It is idolatry.

In 1951, in the wake of the Holocaust, the Jewish philosopher Will Herberg warned that “nation…represents a significant and valuable aspect of human life [but it] becomes delusive and demonic once it is absolutized and exalted into the god of our existence.” (Judaism and Modern Man, 95)

Dr. Bitton seeks to tap into our innate tribalist impulse by exploiting the fear American Jews understandably feel today amidst increasing antisemitic violence. By deriding liberal Jews’ moral philosophy as “the soil Nessel’s speech grew in,” she has decided to cast us as the enemy within.

But as a proud Reform Jew, I see liberal Judaism as a bulwark against a narrow tribalist morality that could lead us—as all idolatries eventually do—to total ruin.