Safe Enough?
Rabbi Yehoram Ulman’s recent address in Australia deserves to be read with unusual seriousness: https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-at-closing-of-commission-rabbi-urges-an-australia-where-jews-can-be-safe/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=user%2FTimesofIsrael. His distinction between security and safety reaches far beyond the immediate question of how Jewish communities should be protected. It asks whether a community can remain itself without allowing danger to determine the meaning of every difference it encounters.
Ulman speaks from personal loss, not theoretical distance. When he says that a police officer outside a synagogue represents security, while safety would mean not needing that officer, he names two different ways of inhabiting a world. One builds protection around life. The other asks whether life can be organized so that protection does not become its permanent form.
Protection and safety are not simply different degrees of the same thing. Protection answers an existing threat. Safety concerns the relation within which threat becomes possible, durable or recurrent. A synagogue guarded by police may be better protected, but the officer also tells us something about the world outside the synagogue: Jewish presence has become something that requires defense before ordinary life can begin.
This is not an argument against protection. Where danger exists, protection is an obligation. A threatened school must be protected, an attack must be prevented, and those who choose violence remain responsible for their actions. The problem begins when protection becomes the only language through which we know how to think about safety.
A community can become increasingly well protected while becoming less able to inhabit the surrounding world without the mediation of anticipated danger. Doors become stronger, intelligence more precise, warning systems faster and guards more visible, yet ordinary presence changes. One is present, but under protection. One belongs, but belonging acquires a defensive architecture.
This becomes especially visible in proposals to extend Israeli security capacity to Jewish communities abroad. A recent argument suggested that Mossad should, if necessary, help create a parallel warning and protection architecture for Jews in the United Kingdom. The impulse is understandable. If a local state cannot adequately protect Jews, why should Jews remain entirely dependent upon that failure?
Yet this is exactly where Ulman’s distinction reveals its force. A Jewish community in Britain could become extraordinarily well protected by Israeli intelligence, private guards, fortified schools and permanent threat assessment while simultaneously demonstrating that Jewish life in Britain had become less safe. The sophistication of the protective system would not disprove the failure of the surrounding society. It might become its most precise measure.
Jewish existence has never been only a problem of surviving danger. It has also been a problem of remaining in relation without allowing the threat of annihilation to become the sole grammar of existence. Memory is necessary because forgetting danger would be irresponsible. But memory can also become dangerous when it ceases to warn and begins instead to determine in advance what every future relation means.
Jewish history gives abundant reasons for distrust, and October 7 again showed how dangerous it can be to assume that threat has disappeared. Vigilance remains necessary. But vigilance is not ontology. A danger can be real without becoming the meaning of the world.
This question has particular force in Israel. Israel was created partly as an answer to Jewish helplessness in the face of violence, so security could never be merely another administrative field. Borders, armies, intelligence, shelters and military readiness became forms through which historical vulnerability was transformed into political capacity.
There is a profound achievement in this transformation. A people radically exposed to violence acquired the capacity to defend itself and refuse helplessness. But every historical achievement contains the possibility of inversion. The capacity to defend against danger can gradually become a dependence upon danger as the category through which collective identity remains intelligible.
Then the question is no longer only whether the wall is high enough, intelligence effective enough or the adversary sufficiently deterred. The deeper question is whether a community can still imagine itself when danger is no longer at the center.
This is not pacifism, nor an argument for trusting those who want to kill Jews. The issue concerns the meaning assigned to difference. A society is not safe because it has eliminated every threat, because no society can do that. It is safe when threat no longer determines in advance what difference means.
Safety begins where difference no longer requires an enemy.
Not every difference is innocent and not every adversary is misunderstood. Some people genuinely choose enmity. Some organizations organize murder. Some ideologies cultivate hatred. The problem begins when the category of enemy spreads beyond those who actually act as enemies and becomes a general way of interpreting difference.
Then dissent begins to resemble disloyalty, the stranger begins to resemble risk, the neighbor a potential threat, and security becomes less a response to specific dangers than a structure of perception. Protection ceases to serve life, and life begins to organize itself around protection.
This is where Ulman’s intuition becomes most powerful. The police officer outside the synagogue should not merely reassure us that the state is functioning. His presence should also disturb us. He may be necessary today, but a society that accepts his permanent necessity as normal has accepted something that should never become normal.
The same is true of Israel. A checkpoint may prevent an attack and still belong to a reality that no one should want to reproduce indefinitely. Intelligence may save lives while becoming part of a world in which more and more relations are interpreted through suspicion. A wall may be necessary and still signify a failure that should not be transformed into metaphysics.
The crucial question is whether we still know how to distinguish necessity from destination. A community loses something essential when what it must do in order to survive becomes indistinguishable from what it hopes life will ultimately be.
A mature security order should therefore not be measured only by how effectively it protects. It should also be measured by whether it reduces the conditions of its own permanent necessity. If it does not, protection begins to confirm itself: threat justifies more protection, more protection makes threat increasingly central to collective perception, and that centrality makes any alternative appear naive.
Rabbi Ulman asks what kind of Australia his grandson will inherit. That question should remain exactly where he placed it. But precisely because his distinction is so serious, another question can be placed beside it: what kind of Jewish future are we creating if our greatest political achievement becomes the capacity to protect ourselves indefinitely from a world whose difference we increasingly experience as danger?
Security can defeat an enemy. Safety begins when the enemy is no longer required to organize the meaning of the world.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
