What Kind of Brotherhood Are We Offering Our Sons?

When I saw the story out of Wisconsin, I recognized the scene before I even finished reading it.

Police responding to an anonymous tip at an Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house near the University of Wisconsin–Madison said they found roughly 30 partially clothed young men in a hot basement, covered in food, condiments and other liquids. Most were 18 years old. Several had injuries police said were consistent with physical assault. The fraternity’s president and vice president were arrested on allegations of hazing and disorderly conduct. The chapter had already been unrecognized by the university for more than a decade.

I looked at the description and thought: I know something about being that kid. I was hazed in college when I pledged a fraternity.

I remember being shirtless. I remember being mocked and yelled at. I remember being ordered around and expected to participate in disgusting and degrading behavior because somehow this was supposed to prove that I deserved brotherhood. Eventually, I left.

I told the other men in my pledge class. I told members of the pledge committee. And I can still remember one of them warning me: “Your social life is going to suffer.” I survived college just fine. I thrived, actually, and was nominated for Winter Homecoming King. What stayed with me was what that warning revealed: If you want to belong, you will have to tolerate this.

Now I am approaching the issue from another direction. I am the father of two teenage boys. One of them is getting old enough that college does not feel particularly distant anymore. He thinks about college in many of the ways teenagers are supposed to think about it: independence, sports, friends, parties, freedom and, yes, even as the son of a rabbi, Greek life.

I understand the attraction. What frightens me is that I would rather worry about the randomness of the world than worry about the friends he chooses. Parents expect to worry when their children leave home. But friendship is supposed to make the world safer. Brotherhood is supposed to make a young man less alone. I don’t want to wonder whether the people calling my son “brother” will be the people most likely to humiliate him.

And yet I also don’t think the answer is to tell our sons that fraternities are inherently toxic, that male spaces are inherently dangerous or that there is something morally suspect about young men wanting to gather together. I have spent too much of my personal life in men’s groups and professional work with FJMC International to believe that.

Since 2018 I have seen men create communities built around honesty, compassion, accountability and trust. I have watched men speak about grief they had carried silently for years, admit failures without being shamed, and find mentors and friendships strong enough to say, “I’m not doing well.”

Brotherhood can save lives. But it can also become dangerous when belonging becomes more important than conscience. The hazing alleged at AEPi in Wisconsin and the sexual-assault allegations now surrounding Chi Phi at Cornell are not the same act, but they belong on the same spectrum: a group culture in which humiliation, entitlement, silence, and loyalty can become normalized until men stop asking whether what is happening is wrong and start asking whether protecting the group matters more. At Cornell, the lawsuit alleges that a message was sent to the fraternity’s group chat before multiple men arrived, and the accuser’s attorney has argued that numerous people had opportunities to intervene and did not.

That is why even “less extreme” hazing should never be dismissed as harmless tradition. A culture that teaches young men to override another person’s dignity for the sake of belonging can also teach them to look away, stay silent, or fail to intervene when the stakes become far more serious. Jewish men are no more immune to that dynamic than anyone else. C.S. Lewis understood this remarkably well.

In his 1944 address “The Inner Ring,” Lewis described the unofficial circle inside nearly every institution: the people who are truly “in.” His concern was not that such circles exist, but what people become willing to do to enter them. The longing to be included can make an otherwise decent person participate in something he would never initiate himself. The question quietly changes from Is this right? to Will they still accept me if I refuse?

That is the moral architecture of hazing. Beneath the humiliation is a bargain: Prove you are one of us. Don’t complain. Don’t tell anyone. Everyone before you went through it. Cruelty becomes the admission price, and once someone has paid it, the temptation is to make the next generation pay it too. That is how humiliation becomes tradition.

None of this is new to Jewish fraternity life. Hazing has appeared across Greek organizations, athletic teams and other tightly bonded groups where initiation, hierarchy and loyalty can overwhelm individual judgment. The problem is much broader than any one fraternity.

That is precisely why I think Jewish fraternities have an opportunity rather than a uniquely Jewish problem. If fraternity life promises young men brotherhood, friendship and belonging, Jewish fraternities can draw upon a tradition that has spent thousands of years asking what people owe one another in community. One useful framework is the minyan.

The number ten carries an important biblical association long before it becomes a formal requirement for communal prayer. When Abraham argues with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, he bargains downward until he reaches ten righteous people. If ten can be found, he asks, will the city be spared? The implication is striking: a small group of decent people can carry moral weight far beyond its size.

That question—what kind of community a group becomes—is tested powerfully in the story of Joseph and his brothers.

Early in Genesis, the brothers are jealous, conspiratorial and violent. They turn on one of their own. Their cohesion makes them more dangerous, not more decent. It is a vivid example of what happens when loyalty to the group overwhelms responsibility to the individual. But the story does not leave them there. Years later in Egypt, Benjamin, now the youngest and most vulnerable brother, is placed in danger. This time Judah does something radically different from what the brothers once did to Joseph: he steps forward.

Judah offers himself in Benjamin’s place. He refuses to return home without his younger brother because doing so would devastate their father. The brotherhood has changed. The men who once protected themselves by sacrificing a brother now include a brother willing to sacrifice himself to protect another.

That shift matters for more than the Joseph story. We practice Judaism today in part because the kingdom and people associated with Judah survived and ultimately gave us the name by which we are known: Jews. But Judah’s defining act at the end of Genesis is not conquest, dominance or status. It is stepping forward when someone more vulnerable needs protection. We are called Jews because of Judah. But stepping forward for the vulnerable is part of what makes that name worth carrying.

That means true brotherhood sits close to the heart of Jewish identity. A group of men is not good simply because the men are close. Joseph’s brothers were close enough to cooperate in cruelty and keep one another’s secret. Cohesion by itself is morally neutral. The question is what that cohesion asks of its members.

Does belonging make a man more willing to participate in someone else’s humiliation, or more willing to step forward when somebody vulnerable needs protection?

Ten people can reinforce one another’s worst instincts. They can become an audience for cruelty, a shield for secrecy or a source of pressure that makes an individual ignore his conscience. But they can also become the people who make accountability possible and refuse to abandon one of their own.

That is a much more demanding understanding of brotherhood. The older member does not prove his status by seeing how much degradation a younger member will tolerate. His status carries responsibility for that younger man’s wellbeing. Loyalty is not demonstrated by concealing dangerous behavior but by interrupting it. The strength of the group is measured by what happens when the least powerful person in the room needs someone else to speak up.

As a father, that is the distinction I want my sons to understand before they walk onto a college campus. I cannot inspect every room they will enter or choose every friend. But I can teach them to look closely at what a community asks of the people inside it.

A healthy brotherhood does not require someone to surrender his dignity to earn membership. It does not punish questions, protect misconduct through secrecy or confuse cruelty with toughness.

The best men’s groups I have known do the opposite. They make their members more accountable to one another. They make it easier to tell the truth. They create relationships strong enough that one man can challenge another without threatening the friendship itself.

Sometimes brotherhood means staying and standing up for someone else. And sometimes it means walking out of the room. I walked out of mine decades ago. At the time, someone warned me that my social life would suffer. Today, I think I understand the choice differently. I didn’t lose a brotherhood. I learned what brotherhood should never require. And that lesson may be one of the most important things I can give my sons before they go searching for brotherhoods of their own.