The Permission We Give Ourselves
Something deeply disturbing is happening in the way Jews speak to each other.
The problem is not disagreement. Jews have always disagreed, often passionately. What should alarm us is the ferocity with which disagreements are increasingly conducted: the contempt, humiliation, hatred and readiness to attribute the worst possible motives to another Jew.
Political and religious opponents are not merely described as mistaken but as traitors, enemies, fascists, Nazis, destroyers of Judaism, destroyers of Israel.
Such language is not simply evidence of overheated politics. Something more consequential has occurred when disagreement reaches the point at which another Jew’s destruction can become an acceptable figure of speech.
This does not mean that every position, practice or political program must be regarded as legitimate. Jewish communities have always drawn boundaries, and serious moral judgment sometimes requires us to say that an idea or action is unacceptable.
The danger begins when the judgment moves from the position to the person: when what you advocate is unacceptable becomes you are unacceptable.
The opponent then ceases to be someone with whom we must argue and becomes someone we see as a threat to the Jewish people.
Once we become convinced that the other Jew represents a threat, contempt can masquerade as conviction, hatred as moral indignation, and hostility as Jewish responsibility.
This is not a new phenomenon.
Biblical, Second Temple, rabbinic, medieval and modern Jewish history periods provide ample evidence that internal Jewish conflict can easily cross the boundary from argument into exclusion and hostility.
Historical circumstances change, but the tendency to turn disagreement into hostility persists.
This forces an uncomfortable question:
Why has a civilization that made disagreement one of its characteristic intellectual practices had so much difficulty preventing disagreement from becoming delegitimization?
Or, more starkly:
Perhaps one of the unresolved problems of Jewish history is not how Jews survive their enemies, but how Jews can live with Jews.
The present State of Israel did not create this fracture, but it concentrates it and exports its intensity throughout the Jewish world.
What happens in Israel does not stay in Israel. The hostility and language of Israel’s internal conflicts spread almost instantaneously into Jewish communities elsewhere. The issues dividing Jewish groups in Israel quickly become issues dividing Jewish communities throughout the world, carrying with them much of the same language, hostility and insult.
Soon Jews throughout the world will gather for the Yamim Noraim, the solemn days of reflection that culminate in Yom Kippur, and undertake one of Judaism’s great exercises in collective moral examination.
We will recite Ashamnu, the traditional confession of wrongdoing. We will repeat Al Ḥet, the longer catalogue of offenses. We will confess arrogance, cruelty, harmful speech and offenses committed bein adam le-ḥavero—”between one person and another.” Yet one of the gravest problems presently polluting relations among Jews remains largely outside the focus of that examination.
There is something profoundly troubling about confessing these offenses together on Yom Kippur, only to return immediately to a political and communal culture in which scorn for fellow Jews has become normal.
The deeper contradiction is not that we confess wrongdoing and then return to doing wrong. Human beings have always done that. It is that we do not recognize the behavior to which we return as the wrong we have just confessed.
The person who speaks contemptuously about another Jew rarely thinks: “I am practicing hatred.” He thinks: “I am defending Israel.” Or: “I am defending democracy.” Or: “I am defending Torah.” Or: “I am defending the Jewish people.”
And here the rabbinic concept of sinat ḥinam—”baseless hatred,” which the sages identified as the cause of the destruction of the Second Temple—presents a difficulty when applied to our own time:
hatred rarely appears baseless to the person who hates.
The phrase can provide an unintended escape from the very examination it is meant to provoke.
“I search myself for hatred without cause and find none.” “My anger has causes.” “My contempt has explanations.” “I can enumerate the dangers posed by the people I despise.”
Indeed, the more serious the issue, the easier becomes its justification. If I believe that something precious is endangered—Israel, democracy, Torah, justice, Jewish survival—my hostility no longer feels like hostility. It feels like responsibility.
We do not ordinarily give ourselves permission to humiliate or despise another person merely because we disagree. We give ourselves that permission after we have persuaded ourselves that the other person represents a danger.
The hatred has not become baseless. It has become righteous.
And righteous hatred is harder to examine than baseless hatred because it arrives accompanied by arguments, evidence, history and moral conviction. It does not ask us to abandon our values. It persuades us that, in defending our values, our contempt has become justified.
That is the more dangerous form of sinat ḥinam: not hatred without reasons, but hatred for which we have found reasons that give us permission to behave in ways we would otherwise consider wrong.
Do I have good reasons for opposing the other?
That is the wrong question, because having reasons does not tell us whether our behavior is justified. The question Yom Kippur must ask is:
Does believing that I am right justify the way I treat those I believe are wrong?
Jews need not stop arguing, nor must profound differences be suppressed beneath sentimental appeals to unity.
Unity does not require consensus. It requires mutual legitimacy.
I can believe that you are profoundly wrong. I can oppose what you advocate. I can believe that your position threatens something I consider essential. But none of this grants me permission to deny your dignity.
The moral test comes precisely when I am certain that I am right. Can I oppose you without despising you? Can I call you wrong without calling you illegitimate? Can I defend what I cherish without dehumanizing you?
These are not peripheral questions for the Yamim Noraim of 5787. They concern whether profound disagreement can coexist with our responsibility for one another.
Perhaps, then, among all the words we will repeat this Yom Kippur, one question deserves to be placed at the forefront:
Have our convictions about what is best for the Jewish people begun to destroy our capacity to remain a Jewish people?
The Yamim Noraim remind us that the answer does not require us to surrender our convictions or diminish the seriousness of our disagreements. We may reject another person’s ideas, oppose them vigorously, and believe that they threaten values we hold essential. But
our judgment of an idea must never become permission to deny the dignity of the person who holds it.
That may be the principle on which Jewish unity ultimately depends. We will never all think alike, believe alike, or make the same political and religious choices. Jewish unity cannot therefore depend upon agreement.
It can only endure when respect for the person remains greater than our hostility to that person’s ideas. We do not have to agree with one another to remain one people. But we do have to respect one another to be a people.
