Consensus is Not Morality
Norway has been on my mind lately.
Recently, my daughter, who works for the Israeli branch of an international medical technology company, told me about an encounter with a potential Norwegian customer. The customer wanted a declaration that the company did not do business in what it called the “occupied territories.” The company’s Norwegian branch responded with a carefully worded assurance that the Israeli operation was not located in territory considered occupied.
There was nothing dramatic about the exchange. Perhaps that is what disturbed me. A potential customer considering a medical product from an Israeli company apparently regarded the company’s relationship to disputed territory as something requiring a formal declaration before moving forward.
Around the same time, I listened to a long debate between Norway’s deputy foreign minister, Andreas Motzfeldt Kravik, and British barrister Natasha Hausdorff over Norway’s proposed prohibition on trade connected to Israeli settlements. Hausdorff challenged Kravik on the legal premises behind Norway’s policy: the status of the territories, the relevance of the Oslo Accords, the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and whether a trade prohibition would itself conflict with Norway’s treaty obligations.
What struck me was how often Kravik returned to the breadth of international agreement. The International Court of Justice had concluded in a 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful, a position overwhelmingly accepted by European governments. Serious governments did not accept Hausdorff’s argument that the conventional description of the West Bank as occupied Palestinian territory fails to account for the territory’s unusual legal and historical status, including the absence of a prior sovereign Palestinian state. At one point, Kravik suggested that the probability that her legal analysis was sound when virtually everyone else had reached the opposite conclusion was not very great.
Perhaps none of this would have affected me quite so personally if Norway were merely another European country to me.
When our children were young, we had three Norwegian au pairs in succession. The first, Gerd, became so close to our family that the second was her best friend and the third her cousin. We loved them, and they remained part of our family’s story long after our children no longer needed au pairs. Today, in another Norwegian connection, a lovely Norwegian family is renting our home in Massachusetts.
I have always felt warmly toward Norway. That is one reason its increasingly punitive posture toward Israel leaves me with something approaching a sense of betrayal.
And it brought back something Gerd told me more than thirty years ago.
She liked America, she said, because Americans seemed more accepting of people who didn’t conform. In Norway, as she experienced it, there was tremendous pressure to think and behave as others did.
I don’t know whether Gerd’s observation was representative of Norway then, much less Norway today. And I certainly don’t believe that one former au pair’s impression explains Norwegian foreign policy. But listening to Kravik repeatedly invoke the overwhelming agreement of governments and international institutions, I found myself remembering her words.
And then I began thinking about one of my favorite books as a child, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. It was once a fixture of the children’s literary canon, familiar to generations of American schoolchildren. It is still widely read and taught, though my impression is that it no longer occupies quite the central place in children’s reading that it once did.
I don’t know whether that means anything. Children today have access to a far broader range of literature than we did, and there are good reasons for that. Still, I find myself thinking about what A Wrinkle in Time taught me.
What struck me most was the description of a world in which deviation from the collective rhythm was something to be punished. Long before I knew words like conformity or groupthink, I understood why such a world would be so horrifying, and I wonder whether we give children that message as forcefully today.
Certainly, American culture no longer looks quite like the America Gerd encountered. Social media provides extraordinary mechanisms for enforcing conformity. A wrong opinion can bring not merely disagreement but ostracism and a digital pile-on. On university campuses after October 7, I watched scores of students chant identical slogans, sometimes slogans whose history or implications were apparently not understood by many of them. Adopting the group’s vocabulary became, in some settings, a way of demonstrating that one was a good person.
That raises a question that goes well beyond Israel: What happens to conscience when agreeing with the group becomes evidence of our own goodness?
I recently listened to Gary Saul Morson discuss the frightening capacity of ideology to lead people who consider themselves good to champion murderous, totalitarian governments. He has spent a career studying Russian literature and the intellectual currents that produced revolutionary violence and totalitarianism. Morson argues that fundamentally good people can nevertheless come to support terrible things.
I understand the power of ideology and social pressure, but I am uncomfortable with the idea that they can relieve us of moral responsibility. As an observant Jew, I believe strongly in בחירה חופשית, free choice.
My friend Aaron Feuerstein embodied that commitment to individual moral responsibility in a far more ordinary setting. After a devastating fire destroyed much of Malden Mills, he became famous for continuing to pay his workers while the factory was rebuilt. At a time when American corporate culture increasingly emphasized maximizing returns to shareholders, Aaron believed that a business owner had obligations to his workers and his community as well. His choices came at considerable financial cost.
The Torah gives us an extraordinary example of בחירה חופשית almost at the beginning of the Exodus story. Pharaoh commands the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill newborn Hebrew boys—and, incredibly, they refuse!
וַתִּירֶאןָ הַמְיַלְּדֹת אֶת־הָאֱלֹהִים וְלֹא עָשׂוּ כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר אֲלֵיהֶן מֶלֶךְ מִצְרָיִם
The midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them.
They lived under Pharaoh too, and they were subject to the same authority and surrounded by the same society as everyone else. Yet the Torah shows that they could choose and defy the mightiest of rulers.
Franz Jägerstätter made that choice in a very different religious tradition and in a terrifying era. The Austrian Catholic farmer, whose story Terrence Malick told in A Hidden Life, refused to swear allegiance to Hitler and was executed. He knew his refusal could not stop the war and would not overthrow Hitler. Almost everyone around him complied with the Nazis, yet he refused.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn expressed a related idea in his 1974 essay Live Not by Lies. An individual might be powerless to bring down an entire system of falsehood. But he could at least refuse personally to participate in the lie. Elsewhere, he famously observed that the line separating good and evil does not run between nations, classes or political parties, but through every human heart.
This idea should resonate for Jews.
For much of the last two millennia, Jews were Europe’s “other”—the small minority about whom the surrounding society confidently “knew” things.
People knew that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood. They knew that Jews poisoned wells. Jews collectively bore responsibility for killing Jesus. Grotesque fantasies about Jews were repeated in sermons, literature, and art. These ideas were not restricted to cranks on society’s margins. Some were transmitted by respected authorities and embedded in the culture itself. Widespread acceptance did not make these accusations true. Therefore, Europe should have learned this lesson:
The number of people who believe something cannot establish its truth.
But I don’t think Europe has.
Germany has perhaps confronted the history of European antisemitism more seriously than any other country. In a recent Times of Israel interview, German Ambassador Steffen Seibert spoke movingly about Germany’s relationship with the Holocaust. Contemporary Germans do not inherit personal guilt, he said, but they do inherit responsibility. The memory of six million murdered Jews should serve as a “compass” for determining right and wrong.
But later, when asked why Germany regards Israeli settlements in the West Bank as unlawful, Seibert immediately invoked the “overwhelming assessment of international law” and emphasized that a “vast majority of states in the world” shares Germany’s view.
To be fair, he did not stop there. He spoke about Palestinian self-determination, settlement expansion, unequal political power, and settler violence. Those are serious arguments and deserve serious consideration.
But once again I found myself noticing what was largely absent from the moral calculus: the history of the territory before 1967; the Oslo agreements; Israel’s repeated efforts at territorial compromise and the failure or rejection of major peace proposals; the rise of Hamas; the experience following Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza; October 7; and the security consequences for Israelis of withdrawing from territory overlooking their population centers.
The same interview contained another moment that stayed with me. Asked about incidents in Gaza that he found indefensible, Seibert mentioned attacks on civilians and rescue teams and noted that they had been “publicized all over the world,” adding that the IDF had not always offered a justifiable explanation.
Again, I was struck by the appeal to the fact that these incidents had been “publicized all over the world.” Publicity is not an investigation, and repetition is not proof. What investigations established about these incidents matters far more than how widely the accusations circulated.
Europe had an almost unimaginable opportunity after the Holocaust to look in the mirror. And much of Europe did. Germany especially created institutions of remembrance, taught succeeding generations what had happened, and confronted crimes that many nations would have preferred to bury. But I wonder whether Europe has really absorbed why it morally failed so colossally.
The lesson was not simply that hatred of Jews is wrong. The lesson was also the human capacity to make prejudice respectable, to allow repetition to become evidence, to let institutions reinforce one another until propositions cease to require examination because everyone who matters already accepts them.
But even so, there were those few who still recognized wrong. Some people hid Jews. Some resisted. Some refused orders. Jägerstätter refused his oath. Individuals living inside the same cultures and exposed to the same pressures made different choices.
That is why I cannot entirely accept “brainwashing” as an explanation for human behavior. At some point there remains a human being who must choose the right path.
Jewish tradition itself contains a profound tension about how an individual should relate to the community: abide by community norms, but stand up when those norms run afoul of justice.
Hillel teaches in Pirkei Avot:
אַל תִּפְרֹשׁ מִן הַצִּבּוּר
Do not separate yourself from the community.
Judaism does not glorify contrarianism. People belong in communities and have obligations to them. But Hillel also teaches:
וּבְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
In a place where there are no people of moral stature, strive to be one.
It is important to abide by community norms, but not to surrender your conscience to them.
There is an even older Jewish image. Avraham is called Ha-Ivri, the one who is on the other side. A famous rabbinic interpretation imagines the whole world standing on one side and Avraham on the other. He is not admirable because minorities are right. He is admirable because he is willing to remain in the minority when his judgment tells him that the majority is wrong.
Which brings me back to Norway.
I do not know whether Natasha Hausdorff is correct about the disputed points of international law she raised with Andreas Kravik. I am not an international lawyer. The overwhelming disagreement of governments and international legal authorities with her interpretation is something that should be taken seriously. But their agreement does not establish that they are right and she is wrong.
Why doesn’t the history before 1967 matter? Why do the Oslo Accords figure so little in the analysis? Why are Israeli withdrawals and repeated efforts at territorial compromise so easily passed over? Why is Palestinian suffering placed at the center of the discussion while Israeli vulnerability and the security consequences of withdrawal remain at its margins? And when Israel is subjected to standards or economic penalties not applied in apparently comparable conflicts, why isn’t the disparity explained rather than dismissed? That most governments have reached a different conclusion is not, by itself, an answer to these concerns.
I think about the Norwegian women who became part of our family; the Norwegian family living in our home today; what Gerd told me, more than thirty years ago, how much she appreciated an America in which she felt freer to be different.
And I wonder whether we are still teaching our children what A Wrinkle in Time once taught me so powerfully: that there is something frightening about a world in which everyone must think the same way.
Community, expertise, and consensus matter, but they cannot substitute for our conscience.
