Ed Sheeran, Bill Maher, and the People Who Know Everything Except the History
Of all the people I expected to find myself quoting during the Days of Awe, Ed Sheeran and Bill Maher were nowhere on the list. Yet here we are.
According to the BBC report, the remaining opening acts on Ed Sheeran’s American tour quit after Macklemore was removed from the lineup following his pro-Palestinian performance. Finneas declared that “artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.” Others followed, invoking Palestinian suffering and the moral obligation to speak.
Ed Sheeran did something considerably less fashionable.
He refused to turn his concert into a political rally.
Sheeran said that removing Macklemore had been the promoter’s decision, not his. He described the suffering on both sides as a human tragedy and explained that he deliberately does not use his professional platform as a political forum. His audience includes children and people of many backgrounds, he said, and he wants his concerts to provide “safety and sanctuary.”
For this, apparently, he was insufficiently righteous.
I think he deserves our respect.
Because we have entered a peculiar moment in which certainty has become a substitute for knowledge and volume a substitute for wisdom.
When Certainty Becomes a Moral Credential
There is no question that Palestinian civilians have suffered terribly in this war. Recognizing that suffering is not anti-Israel. Mourning a Palestinian child does not diminish our mourning for an Israeli child.
Judaism should make us especially sensitive to suffering.
The Torah commands, “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). The repetition matters. Justice cannot mean justice only for people on our side.
But justice also requires truth.
The current war did not begin in a historical vacuum. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers killed approximately 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251 hostages. The war that followed has produced catastrophic Palestinian suffering and enormous controversy over Israel’s conduct. Those facts have to coexist in any intellectually serious account of what happened.
What troubles me is the increasingly fashionable reduction of this enormously complicated history into a morality play containing only two characters: oppressor and oppressed.
Once those roles have been assigned, apparently nothing else needs to be learned.
History becomes optional.
Context becomes suspicious.
And asking an inconvenient question can itself become evidence that you are on the wrong side.
Bill Maher Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
Bill Maher recently expressed this frustration much less delicately than I would.
On the September 11 episode of Real Time, Maher attacked what he regards as historical amnesia surrounding Israel and Gaza. He argued that Jews are not foreign interlopers without historical connection to the land. His wonderfully provocative formulation was:
“They’re the Indians in this scenario.”
Maher’s point was not invented for this monologue. He has made essentially the same argument before: if contemporary progressives take indigeneity seriously, why does that principle suddenly become complicated when the indigenous people under discussion are Jews?
One need not accept every part of Maher’s argument to recognize the historical fact underneath it.
Jewish civilization did not originate in Brooklyn, Warsaw, or Berlin. Jerusalem was central to Jewish political and religious life in antiquity. Jewish connection to the Land of Israel persisted through centuries of exile, persecution, migration, prayer, pilgrimage, and continuous Jewish presence in the region.
That history does not erase Palestinian history or Palestinian attachment to the same land.
That is precisely the tragedy.
Two peoples have profound attachments to the same small piece of earth.
History becomes dangerous when we pretend only one of them exists.
The Talmud Distrusted People Who Were Too Certain
The rabbis understood something that social media seems to have forgotten.
The Talmud is filled with disagreement.
Hillel and Shammai disagree. Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael disagree. Majority and minority opinions are preserved beside one another, sometimes for centuries.
Why preserve the losing argument?
Because intellectual humility matters.
In Eruvin 13b, the school of Hillel ultimately prevailed in its disputes with the school of Shammai, but the Talmud explains that the students of Hillel were worthy partly because they studied and taught the opposing view, even mentioning Shammai’s position before their own.
Imagine trying that on social media.
Before posting your condemnation, accurately state the strongest argument of the people with whom you disagree.
Half the internet would collapse by lunchtime.
Your Brain Likes Simple Stories
There is a psychological reason that “oppressor versus oppressed” is so seductive.
The human brain is a prediction machine that constantly simplifies an overwhelmingly complicated environment. Under emotional arousal, our attention becomes increasingly selective. Threat captures attention. Information consistent with what we already believe becomes easier to notice. Contradictory information becomes easier to dismiss.
Social identity intensifies the process.
Once an issue becomes part of who we believe ourselves to be, contrary evidence no longer feels like information. It can feel like an attack.
Then comes social reinforcement.
Post the approved slogan and receive likes, affirmation, belonging, and moral validation. Introduce historical complexity and discover how quickly nuance performs on Instagram.
Behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated.
You do not need a conspiracy to explain much of this.
You need a nervous system, a smartphone, and an audience.
Kabbalah Has a Word for This
Kabbalah repeatedly struggles with the relationship between fragmentation and wholeness.
We might borrow that insight cautiously here.
A fragment can be true and still produce a false picture when mistaken for the whole.
Palestinian suffering is real.
That does not make Hamas imaginary.
Jewish suffering is real.
That does not make every Israeli policy just.
October 7 happened.
So has devastating suffering in Gaza since October 7.
Moral seriousness requires us to hold realities together even when slogans demand that we choose only one.
In Kabbalistic language, tikkun means repair. But repair begins by recognizing that the world is fractured. It does not begin by selecting the fragment we prefer and calling it the whole.
The Indigenous People We Forgot Were Indigenous
This is why Maher’s analogy is so uncomfortable.
Many of the same people who rightly insist that we acknowledge indigenous peoples and their ancestral relationship to land suddenly describe Jews exclusively through the language of European colonialism.
But Jews did not choose Jerusalem because some nineteenth-century marketing department thought it had good weather.
For approximately two millennia, Jews prayed toward Jerusalem.
At the conclusion of the Passover seder we said, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
At Jewish weddings we remembered Jerusalem.
We mourned the destruction of Jerusalem.
Our sacred literature was saturated with Zion long before modern Zionism existed.
None of that proves that Palestinians have no rights.
It proves something much simpler:
Jews are not strangers to Jewish history.
You cannot make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict morally easier by deleting half of its history.
A Chassidic Lesson About Seeing
A recurring Chassidic teaching asks us to consider what our encounters with other people reveal about ourselves.
That is a dangerous teaching if abused. It should never mean that victims are responsible for what is done to them.
But as a teaching about perception, it remains powerful.
Before asking only, “What does this situation prove about them?” we might occasionally ask:
Why am I so eager for this particular interpretation to be true?
That is a psychological question as much as a spiritual one.
Am I seeking truth?
Or am I seeking confirmation?
Am I trying to understand?
Or am I trying to belong?
Give Ed Sheeran Some Credit
That brings me back to Ed Sheeran.
He did not declare that Palestinian suffering does not matter. He said precisely the opposite. He called the suffering and pain a human tragedy.
But he also refused the increasingly popular demand that every public figure turn every available platform into a political tribunal.
There is something almost countercultural about that.
Sheeran said there are different ways to advocate for peace. He chose diplomacy, conversation, and a space in which people who disagree politically can still stand beside one another and listen to music.
Maybe that is cowardice.
Or maybe, in an age addicted to outrage, refusing to shout can sometimes require courage.
The Torah does not command us merely to speak.
It commands us to listen.
Shema Yisrael.
Hear.
Perhaps before another celebrity explains several thousand years of Jewish and Middle Eastern history between songs, we could try a little more of that.
Read.
Listen.
Ask questions.
Learn some history.
Grieve for Palestinian children.
Grieve for Israeli children.
Condemn terrorism.
Question governments.
Defend human dignity.
And resist the intoxicating temptation to believe that because a moral story fits comfortably into a slogan, it must contain the whole truth.
The Talmud survived because Jews kept arguing.
We survived because we kept remembering.
And perhaps our increasingly angry world could use a little less certainty from people who know very little, and a little more humility from all of us.
