When Niceness Is Not Enough

Jews like to joke that wherever there are two Jews, there are three opinions. We tell the joke proudly. Disagreement, we believe, is one of our great strengths.

But I am beginning to wonder whether we are better at celebrating disagreement than actually living with it.

We admire disagreement when it appears safely on a page of Talmud, between rabbis who died centuries ago. It becomes harder when the person sitting beside us at Kiddush says something about Israel, Gaza, Trump, or antisemitism that we find deeply wrong.

Then two Jews with three opinions sometimes leave with one less relationship.

The problem is not that we disagree. The problem is that many of our relationships were built on niceness, and niceness is not strong enough to hold serious disagreement.

We often use “nice” and “kind” as though they mean the same thing. They do not.

Niceness tries to keep an interaction smooth. I will avoid making you uncomfortable, and you will do the same for me. This works reasonably well when the stakes are low and everyone mostly agrees.

But niceness is fragile. Kindness can survive tension.

The Jewish word chesed is usually translated as kindness or lovingkindness. But chesed is more than warmth. It is a commitment to another person’s well-being. Sometimes that commitment feels gentle. Sometimes it requires courage, boundaries, or an uncomfortable conversation.

Niceness asks, “How can we avoid tension?”

Chesed asks, “What does this person, and this relationship, require from me now?”

That distinction feels especially important in Jewish life today. We are divided over questions of security, justice, politics, religion, and Jewish responsibility. These are not small disagreements, and pretending otherwise will not make them disappear.

Yet we have begun making kindness conditional upon agreement.

We offer warmth to people who confirm our view of the world. We grow suspicious of those who challenge it. We listen for the wrong phrase, the missing condemnation, or the insufficient declaration of loyalty. Once someone fails the test, we feel released from the ordinary obligations of kindness.

What if this is not only a personal failing? What if it has become a communal habit?

Maimonides writes that Yom Kippur is the time of teshuvah “for the individual and for the community.” A community can develop patterns that no single person created but everyone helps sustain. It can reward certain behavior, excuse other behavior, and slowly learn to call something normal that should never have become normal.

While individual teshuvah asks, “What did I do?”

Communal teshuvah asks, “What have we permitted? What have we rewarded? What have we become?”

Perhaps we have confused chesed with niceness.

Because we wanted harmony, we avoided difficult conversations until resentment hardened beneath the surface. Because we wanted to appear welcoming, we remained silent when someone was treated poorly. Because we wanted to belong, we hid questions that might make others doubt our loyalty.

Then, when disagreement finally arrived, we discovered that our relationships were not strong enough to hold it.

A community built on niceness can survive only as long as everyone avoids the real disagreements. A community built on chesed can withstand disagreement because the relationship does not depend on agreement.

This does not mean treating every position as equally valid. Kindness does not require moral confusion. Sometimes we must say clearly that we believe another person is wrong. We may need to protest, vote differently, establish a boundary, or refuse to participate.

But chesed asks us to hold two convictions at once:

I believe you are wrong.

And I refuse to reduce you to what I believe you are wrong about.

That is harder than polite avoidance, but it is also harder than outrage. It means listening without surrendering judgment, speaking honestly without humiliating, and remaining connected without pretending the disagreement has disappeared.

Psalm 89 says, עוֹלָם חֶסֶד יִבָּנֶה, “A world is ‘built’ through chesed.”

Building something is an unexpected metaphor for kindness. We tend to think of kindness as soft: a warm smile, a reassuring word, a hand on someone’s shoulder.

But a building must bear weight. It proves its strength when pressure is applied.

So does a community.

The strength of a community is not revealed when everyone is singing the same melody. It is revealed when people who profoundly disagree can still visit one another in the hospital, comfort one another at a funeral, celebrate one another’s children, and sit together the following week.

Leaders have a special responsibility here. They cannot repent on behalf of a community, but they can make communal repentance possible. They can refuse to reward humiliation, create room for honest conversation, and remind us that disagreement does not cancel responsibility.

The rest belongs to all of us.

As Elul begins, the question is not whether we have been nice enough. Most of us know how to be nice when nothing important is at stake.

The harder question is whether our kindness can bear the weight of disagreement.

We do not need to repent for disagreeing.

We need to repent for the moments when disagreement became permission to withdraw our kindness.