We’re Part of the Problem

I’m always wary of people who claim to know the mind of God. However, when many Jews, religious and secular, right-wing and left-wing, Israeli and outside Israel, decided spontaneously in the wake of 7 October that a lack of Jewish unity was, if not the only cause, then certainly a factor in the attacks, then I sat up and took notice. I would have done so even if it hadn’t chimed with the essential Jewish sin identified by the rabbis as the source of our current exile (yes, we are still in exile), baseless hatred, because “If they [the Jews] are not prophets, they are at least the sons of prophets.”

The conclusion that I have reached much more slowly, and with real guilt and fear, is this: we, the Orthodox, are part of the problem. Very much part of the problem.

The Haredi draft deferral and the shocking ingratitude of some (not all) in the Haredi world to the IDF and the sacrifices they have made, including the ultimate sacrifice, is a symptom of this problem, not the whole problem.

Even in the Religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox worlds, too often we keep our non-frum brothers and sisters at arm’s length. We do it from fear that they will challenge our beliefs and expose us to the “contagion” of secularism and we do it simply because we assume we have nothing in common with them.

However, it is 2024/5784. We are not living in the era of Classical Reform when Reform Jews were trying to make Judaism more like Christianity. Nor are we living in the 1950s, when the secular Zionist establishment sought to assimilate frum Jews from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa into a strongly secular state. Non-Orthodox Jews, at least the ones who still identify as Jews, are probably more open to discovering Jewish texts and mitzvot than they have been for decades or even centuries. Since 7 October, many more or less secular Jews have discovered that, actually, Judaism does mean something to them and they would like help in exploring what exactly it means, even if it doesn’t mean full observance.

In the last ten months, I have heard of a person at the Nova rave who spent 7 October in hiding, reciting Tehillim/Psalm 23 endlessly; of another person at the rave who said the shema when she thought she was about to die; of a hostage who started saying modeh ani every morning in captivity to thank G-d for another day of life; of so many soldiers wanting to wear tzitzit that they ran out of regulation green tzitzit. These Jews are not hostile to Judaism, even if their engagement with it is not conventional or Orthodox.

In recent decades, we focused on the numbers opting out of Judaism, assimilating and intermarrying and those are indeed troublingly large. But we largely ignored those still identifying as Jews, except when we tried to be mekarev, to engage in outreach to make them frum. We largely do not simply engage with them as fellow Jews who might never behave or believe exactly like us, but who are still our brothers and sisters.

If you want to play the kiruv (outreach) game, then showing less-frum Jews that frum Jews can be normal and friendly is probably a better way to go about it than shunning them, but my point is that we should love other Jews, for their own sakes, not because we hope to make them frum and we should show our love through our deeds.

Every year on Tisha B’Av, we talk about the need to end baseless hatred, but we only focus within our communities. We don’t try to build bridges to other Jews outside the frum world. “We have a reason to hate, or at least be indifferent, to them,” we tell ourselves. “They’re not frum. They’re not real Jews.”

The baseless hatred that destroyed the Temple wasn’t the baseless hatred for someone who stole my parking spot or who got to lein haftarah instead of me. It was the hatred of Pharisees for Saducees and vice versa, of zealots for moderates. In other words, the hatred of Jews across religious and political boundaries. This is the context of the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. This is the type of hatred that we tell ourselves is justified and not baseless. But it is. There is no reason for Jews to hate other Jews who still identify as part of the Jewish people (I’m not talking about misguided Jews who side with those who want to kill us, although I feel despair for them rather than hate).

Rabbi Akiva said that loving your neighbour as your self (which he seems to have defined as your Jewish neighbour, although other rabbis differed) is the fundamental mitzvah of the Torah. As we move on from Tisha B’Av this year towards the Yamim Noraim and the first yortzeit for those murdered on 7 October, maybe we should try to follow his advice.