Cancel Culture and the Cancelled Culture
A new argument has taken hold in contemporary discourse: because “cancel culture” is corrosive, public denunciations—including that of antisemitism and other forms of bigotry—should be avoided altogether, even as those hatreds grow more visible and brazen across campuses, streets, and social media. This confuses categories. The problem with cancel culture is the culture—its arbitrariness, disproportionality, and refusal to allow sincere repentance and repair—not the mere existence of consequences. Cancellation is an extreme and never ideal measure, but at times it is necessary when conduct or attitudes pose extreme danger to the social fabric. What corrodes us is a culture that reaches for that tool too readily—turning punishment into theater and cruelty into virtue.
Parashat Vayera displays the difference. The narrative does not flinch from the reality that a society can forfeit its claim to endure. Sodom is not merely punished; it is undone. It is a cautionary tale that the culture of judgment can either sustain or doom a society. Lot sits at the gate as judge; institutions exist, but justice does not. The city displays the veneer of adjudication while hollowing out its substance. The appearance of fairness is deployed as an instrument of harm. That is the indictment.
The contrast with Abraham is undeniable. His question posed in his plea to God—whether the Judge of all the earth will act with justice—is not a rejection of judgment but a defense of it. The issue is not whether severe outcomes can ever be warranted; it is whether the process is recognizably just: consistent rather than capricious, proportionate rather than punitive for its own sake, open to education and repair rather than organized around permanent exclusion. A society shaped by that measure may at times impose grave consequences, not as performance and not as delight in erasure—and, where possible, with a path back for those who can learn and change. Abraham himself hopes to find such a foothold; his plea seeks a remnant that would justify mercy. That the story ends in destruction does not negate the ideal; it records the tragic outcome when no remediable core can be found.
The parashah’s paired scenes of hospitality sharpen the point. Abraham’s tent is open to everyone; Sodom bars hospitality altogether. Rav Zalman Sorotzkin, in Oznaim LaTorah and, at greater length, in HaDeah VehaDibur, reads the Sodom episode as a final test: if ever there were guests beyond suspicion—distinguished, even angelic—would the city muster the elementary decency it denies ordinary travelers? The framing is illuminating. A just society looks for a person’s best moment to see whether there is a foothold for growth; a canceling society hunts for a worst phrasing to foreclose it. Rav Sorotzkin also notes the irony in Sodom’s optics: placing Lot in the judge’s seat to burnish legitimacy while the culture itself makes justice impossible. The critique is not about the presence of “courts” but about whether the culture in which those courts operate permits justice to prevail.
What, then, is wrong with cancel culture as a culture? First, it is arbitrary: enforcement follows fashion more than fact, making like cases unlike in their outcomes. Second, it is disproportionate: penalties routinely exceed the offense, sometimes punishing nothing more than dissent from the moment’s orthodoxy. Third, it is unforgiving: even sincere apology and demonstrated growth are discounted, closing the door to return and turning cruelty into method. Fourth, it is performative: procedures and optics replace substance, with public shaming mistaken for protection and theater for justice. Fifth, it is anti-educational: where the failure is ignorance or insensitivity, annihilation replaces the slower, necessary work of teaching and repair. A system marked by those traits cannot plausibly claim to be just.
Further, a regime that spurns sincere apology and rejects reasonable avenues for repair substitutes domination for justice. It abandons victims by preferring symbolic annihilations to the slower work of education and communal mending. And it abandons truth, which depends on distinctions: error versus malice, clumsiness versus contempt, what can be mended and what must be kept from authority.
None of this licenses silence about antisemitism or other bigotries. On the contrary, refusing to name the wrong and set boundaries in the name of opposing cancel culture compounds the confusion. Jew-hatred is not a “bad take” or “just asking questions”; it is a shape-shifting ideology that endangers lives and tears at the civic fabric. When it appears—in slogans, in threats costumed as virtue, in conspiratorial rhetoric—it must be identified plainly. Sometimes that requires consequences: removal from positions that confer endorsement; refusal to constantly platform and mainstream such views; withdrawal of honors that imply communal approval; boundaries around participation until genuine repair is effected. Enacted within a culture of justice—fact-finding, proportionality, and the possibility of return—such measures are not instances of cancel culture at all. They are the sober duties of a humane community.
The alternative is untenable. If society declines to judge because it fears the judgmental, it rewards aggressors. If it judges by adopting Sodom’s habits—performative severity, delight in exclusion, adjudication as theater—it earns Sodom’s condemnation. The lesson is not that cancellation is a triumph; it is that a culture that destroys the preconditions of justice will eventually destroy itself.
What is needed is the architecture Abraham models: scrutiny without zeal, penalties that fit, a hearing for intent and impact, and real avenues for return.
Use consequences when necessary to protect the vulnerable and uphold the norms that make common life possible. Educate wherever education can work. Name the wrong and set boundaries when antisemitism and bigotry appear. Refuse the culture that cheapens justice by reaching too quickly for erasure. Reserve true cancellation for the rare, truly extreme cases that endanger the community in the extreme—so that public life remains both just and humane, the innocent and vulnerable are protected, and our society remains what it needs to be.
