Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue: The Moral Blindness of Selective Outrage

Three years after October 7, 2023, we are still struggling to understand not only what happened that day, but why the world seems unable to agree on how to judge it. The murder of civilians, the taking of hostages, and the deliberate infliction of terror ought to be matters of moral clarity. Yet even the language we use to describe atrocities has become another battlefield, with words sometimes appearing to change their meaning depending upon who committed the crime and who suffered.

In a recent Jewish Journal essay, investigative journalist Gerald Posner asks whether the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7 meet the legal definition of genocide. His argument is detailed, provocative, and grounded in an examination of international law. He contends that there is a substantial case for applying the Genocide Convention to Hamas, while acknowledging legal questions that remain unresolved. But the most important question his essay raises may extend beyond international law: What happens to justice when we apply our moral standards selectively?

As a rabbi and psychologist, I find that question especially troubling. Judaism has been wrestling with it for thousands of years, while contemporary psychology and neuroscience are discovering just how difficult impartial moral judgment can be for the human brain.

The Torah’s Uncomfortable Demand

The Torah does not merely command us to pursue justice. In Deuteronomy 16:20, it repeats the word: Tzedek, tzedek tirdof. Justice, justice shall you pursue.

Why the repetition? One traditional interpretation, associated with Ibn Ezra, suggests that justice must be pursued whether the outcome benefits us or works against our interests. It is a demanding principle because it challenges our tendency to confuse what is right with what is advantageous.

Leviticus 19:15 makes the obligation even more explicit. We are instructed not to favor the poor because they are poor or defer to the powerful because they are powerful. Both compassion and intimidation can distort judgment. The question is not whether we sympathize with someone, fear someone, or identify with someone. The question is whether we are judging fairly.

That is a remarkable psychological insight for an ancient text. The Torah recognizes that human beings are not naturally impartial. We are influenced by relationships, emotions, status, loyalty, and self-interest. Justice requires more than good intentions because good intentions are remarkably easy to confuse with our own preferences.

Applied to contemporary debates about Israel and Hamas, this principle presents an uncomfortable challenge. We cannot condemn the deliberate killing of civilians when the victims belong to one population and excuse it when they belong to another. Nor can we assume that recognizing the suffering of Israelis requires indifference to Palestinian suffering, or that concern for Palestinian civilians somehow diminishes the horror of October 7.

A moral standard that changes with the identity of the victim or perpetrator is not a standard. It is a preference dressed in moral language.

What Neuroscience Tells Us About Moral Blindness

Psychologists have long studied motivated reasoning, the tendency to evaluate information in ways that protect beliefs, loyalties, and identities we already possess. We like to imagine that we examine evidence, reach conclusions, and then develop emotional commitments to those conclusions. Often the process works in the opposite direction.

We begin with an emotional commitment, and our reasoning becomes remarkably skilled at defending it.

Social identity research helps explain why this happens. Human beings naturally organize the social world into groups, including groups to which we belong and groups we perceive as outsiders. These distinctions can promote belonging, cooperation, and mutual protection. They can also influence whose suffering attracts our attention, whose behavior we excuse, and whose motives we regard with suspicion.

Neuroscience adds another dimension. Brain systems involved in threat detection, emotional salience, and social evaluation help determine which information captures our attention and how we respond to it. The amygdala participates in processing emotionally significant and potentially threatening information, while networks involving prefrontal and other cortical regions contribute to evaluation, regulation, and decision-making. These systems do not operate as separate compartments, one emotional and the other rational. They continually influence one another.

When group identity becomes closely tied to perceived danger, emotionally charged information may receive disproportionate attention. We become especially receptive to evidence confirming what we already believe and more skeptical of evidence that challenges it. The result can be a form of moral tunnel vision in which we see the suffering of our own group clearly while viewing the suffering of others through a haze of qualification, justification, or indifference.

None of this means that moral judgments are merely neurological reflexes. Nor does neuroscience tell us which legal or political conclusion is correct. It helps explain why intelligent, educated, and otherwise compassionate people can evaluate similar conduct differently depending on who is involved.

The human brain is extraordinarily good at defending a position. That is not the same as being good at discovering the truth.

Hillel’s Test of Moral Consistency

The Talmud tells a famous story in Shabbat 31a about a prospective convert who asks to be taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot. After Shammai rejects the request, the man approaches Hillel, who responds with one of Judaism’s most enduring ethical formulations: What is hateful to you, do not do to another. The rest, he says, is commentary. Go and study.

Hillel’s teaching is often presented as a lesson in kindness. It is that, but it is also a profound exercise in moral perspective-taking. Before judging another person’s treatment, imagine receiving that treatment yourself.

Consider how differently we sometimes respond to the suffering of civilians. When a Jewish child is murdered, we rightly recognize the destruction of an innocent life and the devastation of a family. When a Palestinian child is killed, that same recognition should not disappear. The circumstances surrounding a death may matter greatly in determining legal and moral responsibility, including whether the killing was intentional, reckless, or an unintended consequence of lawful military action. But the child’s humanity does not depend upon those distinctions.

The reverse is equally important. Recognizing Palestinian suffering cannot require minimizing the deliberate massacre of Israeli civilians, rationalizing hostage-taking, or overlooking antisemitic calls for the destruction of Jews.

Moral consistency does not mean pretending that every action is equivalent. It means applying the same principles while carefully examining the facts that distinguish one action from another.

That is precisely why the legal question Posner raises deserves serious consideration. Genocide is a specific crime requiring proof of prohibited acts and an intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part. Whether that standard has been satisfied in a particular case requires evidence and legal analysis, not merely moral outrage. The atrocities of October 7 have been documented as grave international crimes. Whether genocide charges can be established is a further question, and one that should not be dismissed simply because the accused is a nonstate organization or because another party’s conduct has received greater international attention.

The same rigor must apply when examining allegations against Israel. The suffering of civilians does not become less real because a legal threshold has not been established, and a legal accusation does not become proven simply because it is repeated often enough.

The Kabbalistic Problem of Judgment Without Compassion

Jewish mystical tradition offers another way to understand the danger of selective moral judgment.

Kabbalah describes chesed, lovingkindness, and gevurah, restraint and judgment, as complementary dimensions of divine activity. Neither is sufficient by itself. Unrestrained compassion can become morally confused when it refuses to recognize responsibility, while judgment without compassion can become harsh, rigid, and destructive.

The harmonizing quality of tiferet is often associated with compassion and balance. It represents, among other things, the possibility that justice and mercy need not be enemies.

This is not neuroscience disguised as mysticism. Kabbalah and contemporary psychology speak different languages and address different kinds of questions. Yet they converge on an important practical insight: moral judgment becomes dangerous when it is severed from our capacity to recognize the humanity of those being judged.

We see this danger whenever public discussion reduces entire populations to caricatures. Israelis become symbols of political power rather than human beings. Palestinians become abstractions rather than families, children, and individuals with lives and aspirations. Jews become representatives of a government rather than members of a diverse people. Such reductions make moral judgment easier because they remove the inconvenience of human complexity.

But they also make cruelty easier to justify.

Genesis 1:27 teaches that human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. The verse does not restrict that dignity to those who share our nationality, religion, politics, or historical narrative.

The Mishnah in Sanhedrin 4:5 develops the significance of humanity’s common origin. Adam was created alone, the sages explain, so that no person could claim superior ancestry over another. The same passage teaches the immeasurable value of a single human life, comparing its destruction to the destruction of an entire world.

The moral implication is difficult to escape. Every person possesses a dignity that precedes our political disagreements. That dignity does not absolve perpetrators of responsibility, but it does prevent us from treating human beings as expendable categories.

The Psychology of Intellectual Humility

Positive psychology offers a useful concept here: intellectual humility, the recognition that our knowledge may be incomplete and our judgments mistaken. It is not indecision, moral weakness, or the refusal to take a position. It is the willingness to distinguish what we know from what we believe, and to revise a belief when credible evidence requires it.

Intellectual humility is particularly difficult when a belief has become part of our identity. Changing our minds can feel less like correcting an error and more like betraying our community. That psychological pressure helps explain why public arguments so often become exercises in defending a position rather than investigating a question.

Judaism offers an alternative through its long tradition of machloket l’shem shamayim, disagreement for the sake of Heaven. Pirkei Avot 5:17 distinguishes disputes pursued for a worthy purpose from those driven by less honorable motives. The Talmudic tradition preserves disagreements between Hillel and Shammai rather than erasing the losing arguments from the record.

This does not mean every argument deserves equal respect or that every conclusion is equally defensible. It means that disagreement can become a means of pursuing truth rather than merely defeating an opponent.

We might begin by asking ourselves questions that are surprisingly difficult to answer. Would I apply the same moral standard if the identities of the parties were reversed? What evidence would cause me to reconsider my position? Am I responding to what someone actually did, or to what I already believe about the group to which that person belongs?

These are not comfortable questions. That is precisely why they matter.

Justice Begins With the Courage to Be Consistent

Three years after October 7, Jewish communities continue to live with grief, fear, anger, and the knowledge that antisemitism can move with terrifying speed from rhetoric to violence. Palestinian families have also endured profound loss and suffering during the war that followed. Acknowledging these realities together does not require us to erase distinctions of intent, responsibility, or circumstance.

We can condemn Hamas’s deliberate atrocities without excusing every action taken in response. We can insist upon Israel’s right to protect its citizens while demanding serious scrutiny of civilian harm. We can recognize Palestinian suffering without accepting narratives that justify terrorism or deny Jewish history and identity.

What we cannot do, at least not while claiming fidelity to Jewish ethics, is insist that justice applies only when it favors our preferred side.

The Torah’s repetition of tzedek may be more psychologically sophisticated than it first appears. Perhaps justice must be pursued twice because the first pursuit is often contaminated by our loyalties, fears, and assumptions. The second requires us to examine ourselves.

Gerald Posner’s essay raises a question about international law, but the question beneath it is older and more personal. Are we willing to apply our principles even when doing so challenges our allegiances?

For a people whose sacred tradition insists that justice must be pursued, the answer should not depend upon who stands before us.

Justice that changes according to the identity of the accused is not justice. And compassion that recognizes only the suffering of those we already care about is not yet the compassion our tradition asks us to cultivate.