Dana Nessel Is Wrong About What Judaism Asks of Us

There is something deeply Jewish about being asked to look beyond ourselves. Our tradition commands us to care for the stranger, the widow, the orphan and the vulnerable. Jewish history has taught us what happens when people avert their eyes from the suffering of others. But there is something profoundly unsettling about telling Jews that fulfilling those obligations may require us to put aside concern for our own protection, or even our own survival.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently argued that Jews have “a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.” Invoking Esther, she suggested that Jews might be called upon to “sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people” for the sake of humanity.

I reject that premise because Jewish ethics does not demand Jewish self-erasure.

What makes Nessel’s argument particularly difficult to understand is that she knows what it feels like when Jewish safety and belonging are treated as secondary concerns.

Just weeks earlier, Nessel refused to attend her own state Democratic convention because she did not feel safe or welcome. “I don’t feel safe going,” she said, describing fears of being chased, harassed, screamed at or booed. After a party official reportedly called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs, Nessel asked: “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” Then, in August, when asked whether Democrats were doing enough to address antisemitism, she answered unequivocally: “Absolutely they’re not.”

That is precisely why her subsequent argument is so troubling. The lesson of feeling unsafe at a Democratic convention should not be that Jews must become more willing to subordinate our own safety. No political movement committed to justice should ask a minority to accept intimidation or danger as the price of belonging.

Jewish tradition has quite a lot to say about when we are, and are not, called upon to sacrifice our lives. Jewish law recognizes the principle of “be killed rather than transgress.” The Talmud identifies three cardinal prohibitions for which a Jew must accept death rather than commit the transgression: idolatry, murder and certain forbidden sexual relations.

But what is striking about that list is not only what it includes. It is what it excludes.

The overwhelming presumption of Jewish law is pikuach nefesh: we preserve life. We violate Shabbat to save a life and eat on Yom Kippur when fasting threatens life. Nearly every commandment yields when a human life is genuinely at stake. Judaism does not treat self-sacrifice casually.

That makes Nessel’s suggestion that Jews have a “moral imperative” to place “the needs of the world” above “even our own survival” particularly jarring. That is not the hierarchy Jewish tradition gives us. There is no general Jewish principle that universal concern supersedes the obligation to preserve Jewish life, much less that an entire people should regard its survival as expendable.

There is a profound moral difference between an individual choosing to sacrifice herself for her people and asking a vulnerable people to regard its continued existence as negotiable.

Her invocation of Esther is similarly misplaced. Esther does not decide that Jewish survival matters less than some greater universal cause. She risks her own life precisely because Jewish survival is at stake. When she declares, “If I perish, I perish,” she accepts the possibility of her own death so that her people might live. Her courage lies not in subordinating Jewish survival, but in putting herself at risk to protect it. There is a profound moral difference between an individual choosing to sacrifice herself for her people and asking a vulnerable people to regard its continued existence as negotiable.

Hillel captures this tension in one of Judaism’s most famous teachings: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?” We often emphasize the second half as a warning against parochialism and indifference to others. And rightly so. But Hillel begins by insisting on our obligation to ourselves. The second half does not erase the first. Judaism rejects both isolationism and self-negation. The moral challenge is not to choose between our responsibility to ourselves and our responsibility to others, but to hold them simultaneously.

That challenge feels particularly urgent now, when Jews have been forced to think about our safety in ways many of us hoped belonged to another era. Synagogues require security guards. Jewish institutions conduct active-shooter trainings. Jewish students have learned that displaying a Star of David can invite confrontation. Antisemitic threats come from multiple ideological directions.

Nessel herself has warned about precisely this problem. She has challenged her party over antisemitism and questioned whether there remains room in the Democratic Party for Jews who believe Israel has a right to exist. She recently put the principle even more starkly: “I was Jewish before I was ever a member of the Democratic Party, and if I have to, I’ll be Jewish afterwards too.”

She was right. Our Jewish identity, safety and survival cannot be contingent on satisfying the ideological demands of any political party. But caring for our own does not diminish our capacity to care for others. We do not need to minimize antisemitism to stand against hatred directed at other vulnerable communities. We do not need to make Jewish safety less important to take seriously the safety and dignity of our neighbors. Our responsibility to the wider world should expand our circle of concern, not require us to remove ourselves from it.

“Our particular memory creates universal obligation. It does not require particular extinction.”

Indeed, Jewish particularism has always been one source of our universalism. We remember that we were strangers in Egypt, and therefore we are commanded to love the stranger. The Torah does not tell us to forget our story so that we can care about someone else’s. It asks us to remember our story so deeply that it enlarges our capacity to recognize the suffering of others.

Our particular memory creates universal obligation. It does not require particular extinction.

There is a danger in asking minorities to demonstrate their moral worth by showing how little they require for themselves. Jews should not accept that bargain. We should stand with people whose rights are threatened and challenge injustice even when doing so is uncomfortable. But solidarity should not require disappearance.

Dana Nessel knows what it feels like to wonder whether there is still a place for a Jewish leader in her own political home. She was right to demand better from her party, and she was right when she insisted that she was Jewish before she was a Democrat.

“Jewish tradition knows the difference between sacrifice and self-erasure. At this terrifying moment in Jewish history, we should too.”

Being Jewish demands that we care about the world. It demands that we refuse to be indifferent to the suffering of others. But it does not demand that we regard our own lives, our own safety or the future of the Jewish people as expendable.

Jewish tradition knows the difference between sacrifice and self-erasure. At this terrifying moment in Jewish history, we should too.