In the previous essay, Rabbi David Hartman begins with the fact of Jewish sovereignty and asks, What moral responsibilities accompany Jewish power?

Hartman’s central conviction is that Jewish sovereignty should become an arena for covenantal responsibility. The horror of Auschwitz explains why Jews need power; The revelation at Sinai asks what moral obligations govern its exercise.

In this essay, Haviv Rettig Gur beckons us to go back one step further. Before debating what Jewish power should accomplish, we need to understand why Jews sought power at all.

Hartman asks what Jews should do with power. Rettig Gur asks why Jews came to believe they could no longer survive without it.

To that question, his answer is direct: “Zionism is a rescue project.”

Rettig Gur rejects the philosophical proposition that somehow Jews deserved a nation-state. Rettig Gur asks us instead to see a historical process: Jews were running out of places where they could live.

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Zionism articulated the vision of a rebuilt Jewish nation. Yet, when it came to leaving increasingly inhospitable homelands, the early Zionists were a decided minority. When Eastern European Jews had choices, for example, most did not choose Palestine. The overwhelming majority fleeing Europe chose America and other places where they believed they could build secure lives.

Rettig Gur makes an important assertion: Zionism did not triumph because Herzl won an intellectual debate with assimilationists. It triumphed because history eventually eliminated the alternatives. As he wrote in 2016. “The early Zionists weren’t proven right in intellectual debates, but by the destruction of the remaining options.”

And what became the narrative of Eastern European Jewry would soon be shared by the Jews of North Africa and the Arab world.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews lived by the permission of local rulers. Forbidden to own land or join guilds, their livelihoods were limited, and they lived at the sufferance of their hosts.

In Western Europe, the Enlightenment (1685–1789) was followed by emancipation (1791 and following), through which Jews became full citizens. As German historian Fritz Bamberger wrote, “when the doors of the ghetto opened, the Jews didn’t walk out, they ran,” and assimilated among their fellow citizens.

When Eastern European Jews began to arrive in large numbers to America (1881-1924), they assimilated at a rapid pace. They brought with them the political developments of Eastern Europe, such as Socialist and Bundist movements. Religious communities that arrived on America’s shores expected their lives to continue in the diaspora as they had at home. Among the varied ideologies was Zionism.

Zionism was not initially popular. Assimilation tended to strip groups of any national identity, let alone permit the idea of returning to a homeland.

Then the twentieth century saw doors begin to close. The US Immigration Act of 1924 set severe limits on the number of immigrants.

While America didn’t replicate the pogroms, discriminatory laws, and revolutionary violence of Eastern Europe, it dramatically reduced the great escape route that had absorbed millions of European Jews.

As Europe lurched from the Great War to World War II, the emerging Nazi Party destroyed the possibility that emancipation and assimilation would guarantee Jewish safety.

As the Nazis made life increasingly intolerable for Jews in Germany, many tried to emigrate. Some, particularly before the war, succeeded. Others encountered closed borders. Once the war began, there was no escape.

Those who survived the war found themselves refugees, in displaced-persons camps. Rettig Gur describes the plight of the displaced-person. “A DP is someone with nowhere to go.” Few countries were prepared to absorb Jewish immigrants leading up to WW II. After the war, very few were inclined to receive them.

Going home was even more complicated. To go home was to see how one’s neighbors, some of whom had collaborated with the Nazis, had appropriated their property and were living in their homes. Returning was untenable.

The DPs were not theoretical Zionists debating the merits of Ahad Ha’am and Jabotinsky. They were survivors sitting behind barbed wire asking: Where can I go?

Increasingly, the answer was: Palestine.

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Accordingly, Israel was populated mainly not by ideological pioneers but by homeless refugees.

They were joined by ancient Jewish communities from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Morocco, whose governments expelled them, most often with just the clothes on their backs. Despite those who paint Zionism as the solution to a European problem, the truth is that the experience of North African and Middle Eastern Jews was marred by persecution and, at times, extreme violence. When it became possible, Mizrachi Jews made their way to Israel in enormous numbers, as did the communities in Ethiopia.

Rettig Gur puts it succinctly: “The Iraqis, not the Zionists, caused very nearly every Jewish man, woman and child to flee Baghdad.”1

In fact, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Zionism did not persuade Jews to move to Israel. Instead, the surrounding world made continued Jewish existence elsewhere impossible.

Given the persecution experienced by Jews in Europe and North Africa and the Middle East, Rettig Gur puts the question to critics of Zionism: Where exactly were these people supposed to go instead?

Rettig Gur recognizes that waves of Jewish immigration to Israel led in some cases to displacement, injustice and conflict. However, he maintains that the settler-colonial model badly misconstrues the Jewish actors themselves.

By definition, colonialism usually has:

• a mother country;

• an imperial sponsor;

• settlers who can return home;

• an economic or strategic relationship between colony and home country.

Jewish refugees had none of those things.

As Rettig Gur notes, even scholarly attempts to describe Zionism as colonial must acknowledge that it was a national rather than economic movement, that many immigrants were refugees, that lands of their births were no longer hospitable, and that Jewish attachment to the land of Israel long preceded modern Zionism.

In other words, a refugee may arrive from somewhere else without being a colonist.

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And this connects directly to the present conflict. If Palestinians or their supporters imagine Israeli Jews as Europeans who can eventually be induced to “go home,” Rettig Gur argues that they fundamentally misunderstand the people they are fighting.

For most Israeli Jews, there is no home in Paris, Warsaw, Baghdad, or Teheran, to which they can return.

The experience of European and Mizrachi refugees gave them an Israeli political consciousness: the knowledge that dependence upon the goodwill of others is ultimately unsafe.

As Rettig Gur writes: “Nothing is anything but precarious, except being on our own terms, self-reliant in our own land.”

This consciousness is miles afield from that of American Jews. For American Jews, Liberal democracy works. It built societies in which protecting minorities is an important goal.

In contrast, Israeli Jews learned: Minorities cannot assume that protection will last. Jews must ultimately possess the capacity to protect themselves.

Neither lesson is irrational. They arise from radically different Jewish experiences of the twentieth century.

October 7 powerfully reinforced the Israeli conviction that the need for Jewish self-defense did not disappear in 1948.

Even so, October 7 did not prove that every Israeli policy is justified, nor did it settle the Palestinian question. It certainly does not relieve Israel of Hartman’s demand that Jewish power remain morally accountable.

Rettig Gur’s asks an important argument about Zionism’s continuing relevance:

How does a rescue movement behave once the rescue has succeeded?

This is where Rettig Gur and Hartman intersect.

Rettig Gur points out that necessity does not answer every question about what sovereignty should do.

The fact that Jews needed a refuge does not resolve:

• Palestinian national claims;

• occupation;

• borders;

• settlements;

• use of the military;

• democratic equality;

• the moral obligations of a powerful state.

Haviv Rettig Gur explains why Auschwitz made Jewish power necessary. Hartman reminds us that Sinai insists we ask how that power is to be used.

Rettig Gur’s Zionism begins with an unlocked door. Jews had discovered that doors could close, governments could turn against them, neighbors could become enemies, and refugees could discover that no one was obliged or willing to admit them. Zionism’s first promise was therefore modest and enormous at once: when a Jew needed somewhere to go, there would be one place whose answer would always be yes.

That may explain why Israel exists. It does not tell us everything Israel ought to become. That is why Zionism is an ongoing process, one that didn’t conclude with the creation of the Jewish State.

The four thinkers under consideration represent not four competing definitions of Zionism, but rather four key aspects of Zionism. Haviv Rettig Gur presents the historical necessity of Miklat, a place of refuge. Rabbi David Hartman supplies the moral challenge as Jews moved from two millennia of powerlessness to a powerful modern nation-state.

In our next essay, we will turn to Micah Goodman, Israeli philosopher and public thought leader, who will address what happens when those moral aspirations collide with security and political reality.

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Years ago, I received a most unsettling publication from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

It was a calendar entitled Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom. Each day of the year listed horrific acts of persecution or violence committed against Jews: expulsions, pogroms, blood libels, massacres.

It was a calendar of woe.

It was difficult to look at it without absorbing its implicit message.

The great Jewish historian Salo Baron gave this way of telling the story a name: the lachrymose conception of Jewish history, literally, Jewish history told through tears.

Jewish history understood primarily as unrelenting suffering.

And, of course, there is plenty of evidence for it.

Jews were expelled from England and Spain. Massacred during the Crusades. Accused of poisoning wells and murdering Christian children. Confined to ghettos. Subjected to pogroms. Denied citizenship, occupations, land ownership, political participation and, in much of Europe, the most basic rights of ordinary people.

Then came the terrible culmination of the lachrymose view: the Shoah.

Six million Jews murdered, not by some primitive society at the margins of civilization, but by Germany, one of the most educated, culturally sophisticated and technologically advanced nations on earth.

For Jews who lived through the twentieth century, it was not difficult to draw a lesson from that history.

They were utterly powerless.

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For almost two thousand years, Jews lacked political and military power and, despite the later fantasies of antisemites, significant economic power. We lived at the pleasure of others. Sometimes those others treated us well. Sometimes they did not.

But ultimately, someone else set the terms of Jewish existence.

Zionism changed that.

And that change is at the heart of Rabbi David Hartman's Zionism.

Hartman, a Canadian rabbi who moved to Israel in 1971 and became one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the modern era, understood that two thousand years of political powerlessness had done more than make Jews vulnerable.

It had shaped Judaism itself.

Jews became exquisitely adept at living without power.

They built religious institutions that could survive without sovereignty, a Temple or an army. The local synagogue replaced the national shrine. Study replaced sacrifice. Law entered virtually every corner of private and communal life. Jewish existence became portable.[1]

Jewish moral language developed under those same conditions.

The prophets could declare, “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit.” Jewish tradition could place extraordinary emphasis on justice, mercy, restraint, care for the stranger and protection of the vulnerable.

Those were profound moral achievements.

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But moral ideals look different when you are no longer judging the exercise of power from the outside, but responsible for exercising it yourself.

That, for Hartman, was one of the great religious questions created by Zionism.

The Zionism of Herzl had necessarily begun with a more urgent question:

How can Jews live safely in a world that has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity for hatred and murder?

Herzl’s answer was sovereignty.

If Jews possessed a country, a government and an army of their own, they would no longer be entirely dependent upon the goodwill of others. Jews would have someplace to flee. More importantly, they would acquire the capacity to defend themselves.

After the Shoah and the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, it was difficult to imagine a more compelling argument.

But Hartman believed that the creation of Israel in 1948 answered one question yet raised another:

The question could no longer be only:

How will Jews survive?

The second question was:

How should Jews live once they possess power?

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For Hartman, this moment represented an extraordinary transformation in Jewish history.

The Jew was no longer only the object of history.

The Jew had once again become its subject, acquiring agency and responsibility.

Jews could make decisions about war and peace, immigration and poverty, minorities and borders. They could raise an army, police a city and govern a state.

And because Jews could now make those decisions, Judaism could once again be tested against the realities of political life.

That possibility excited Hartman. For him, this was the Zionist Project.

Israel was not merely a refuge for Jews. It was the arena in which Judaism would once again have to confront the responsibilities of power.

Could the ethical ideals developed during centuries of powerlessness survive the acquisition of power in the present?

Could a society actually come to embody them?

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Hartman illustrated the challenge through two great symbols of modern Jewish consciousness:

Auschwitz and Sinai.

Auschwitz represents the memory of what the world has done to the Jews.

Sinai represents the memory of what Jews have pledged to do for the world.

Hartman did not suggest forgetting Auschwitz.

The memory of Jewish vulnerability is an essential part of Jewish consciousness, and a Jewish state that forgot the dangers of Jewish history would not remain a Jewish state for very long.

Auschwitz teaches vigilance.

Auschwitz teaches us that enemies can be real.

Auschwitz teaches us that powerlessness can be fatal.

Those are lessons Jews ignore at their peril.

Sinai, in turn, represents the body of Jewish tradition and ethics that evolved in the diaspora. God’s request that we build a world founded on justice and compassion.

But the distinction between Auschwitz and Sinai is more difficult than it first appears.

What happens when Auschwitz and Sinai appear to demand different things at the same moment?

October 7 made that question painfully concrete.

Auschwitz says that Jewish power must be exercised decisively against people who actually seek to murder Jews. It warns against mistaking murderous intent for rhetoric and against allowing moral hesitation to become political helplessness.

Sinai imposes another discipline.

Even when the enemy is real, even when Jewish lives are genuinely at stake, power remains morally bounded. The existence of an enemy does not erase the humanity of everyone who lives among them. The right of self-defense does not make every means of self-defense permissible.

Hartman becomes most interesting precisely here, because he refuses to permit either memory to cancel the other.

Auschwitz without Sinai leaves survival the only Jewish value.

Sinai without Auschwitz can become a morality made possible only by forgetting what happens when Jews cannot defend themselves.

Hartman’s Zionism demands both.

Auschwitz creates an obligation to Jewish self-defense.

Sinai creates obligations within Jewish self-defense.

Sinai represents covenant: the moment Jewish tradition imagines a people accepting obligations governing how they will use their freedom.

The Israelites leave Egypt, but liberation itself is not the culmination of the biblical story.

Freedom is followed almost immediately by law.

Do not murder.

Do not steal.

Do not oppress the stranger.

Create courts.

Protect the vulnerable.

Limit the power of kings.

Possession of power does not release you from moral obligation.

It increases it.

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That is why Hartman could see the establishment of Israel not as the culmination of Jewish history, but as the beginning of a new and demanding chapter within it.

The State was redemption, but only in part. Creating a state came with responsibilities.

For two thousand years, Jews could imagine what a Jewish society ought to look like without having much opportunity to discover whether they could actually create one.

Now they could.

And that meant that the creation of Israel placed Judaism itself on trial.

Could Jewish values function not merely as the ethics of a minority but as the ethics of a majority?

Could they govern an army rather than merely judge armies from afar?

These were not questions Zionism had answered.

They were questions Zionism had made possible.

That is the crucial movement in Hartman’s thought.

Zionism begins by restoring Jewish power.

But Jewish power is not its ultimate purpose.

Power first makes Jewish survival possible.
Then it makes Jewish moral agency possible.

Before sovereignty, Jews could protest injustice.
With sovereignty, Jews could also commit it or prevent it.

Before sovereignty, Jews could imagine the society Torah demanded.
Attaining sovereignty, they had to decide whether to build it.

That is the movement from Herzl’s Zionism of safety to Hartman’s Zionism of responsibility.

And perhaps that is why Hartman’s Zionism remains so demanding.

He never denied the necessity of Jewish strength. He had little patience for a romanticism that imagined Jews could entrust their survival entirely to the goodwill of the world.

But neither would he allow Jewish vulnerability to become a permanent exemption from Jewish moral responsibility.

Since October 7, those two convictions have become extraordinarily difficult to hold together.

One temptation is to conclude that Auschwitz has rendered Sinai naïve: when Jewish survival is at stake, moral hesitation is a luxury.

The opposite temptation is to conclude that Sinai has rendered Auschwitz irrelevant: Jewish vulnerability cannot be permitted to shape our judgments about Jewish power.

Hartman’s answer, I think, is that a mature Zionism must resist both temptations.

October 7 makes it impossible to dismiss the first claim.

The war that followed makes it impossible, or ought to make it impossible, to dismiss the second.

Auschwitz explains why Jews cannot relinquish power.

Sinai explains why Jews cannot worship it.

Zionism gave Jews the capacity to act in history again.

Hartman’s question is whether, in the most frightening moments of that history, we can remember both places at once.

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I was introduced to Zionism not through Theodor Herzl, nor through the Bible, nor through Jewish history.

I was introduced to Zionism by Yasser Arafat.

In 1975, I watched him address the United Nations General Assembly. Wearing his trademark pistol and the black-and-white keffiyeh strategically folded to suggest the outline of Israel, he embodied a movement that had already begun to substantially reshape the world’s understanding of the Jewish national movement.

But what struck me most deeply were not his clothes or even his appearance.

It was a phrase.

“Zionism is Racism.”

Those words echoed a resolution the United Nations had adopted the previous year, supported by the Soviet Union and a coalition of newly independent nations, many emerging from the experience of colonialism.

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Thus was I introduced to Zionism, not as an idea, but as an accusation.

In the decades that followed, I lived in Israel during high school and again after college. I studied the writings of the earliest Zionists. I worked in Jerusalem during the early 1980s and experienced Israeli society from the inside.

Those years transformed my understanding of Zionism.

Yet nothing ever struck me with the force of those three words:

“Zionism is Racism.”

In my previous series of essays, I argued that antisemitism is not simply a collection of false beliefs about Jews. It is something deeper. It is one of the ways societies explain themselves.

For two thousand years, antisemitism has continually changed its language while preserving its underlying structure. Every generation has believed it discovered an entirely new reason to oppose Jews. In reality, each inherited an older pattern and adapted it to its own fears and preoccupations.

Increasingly, however, the symbolic burden once carried by individual Jews has shifted to the Jewish state.

Zionism has become the collective Jew.

Just as Jews were once portrayed as capitalists and communists, too religious and too secular, rootless cosmopolitans and dangerous nationalists, Zionism now serves as a vessel into which people pour the anxieties of the present age.

To some, it represents colonialism. To others, racism. To still others, white privilege, militarism, nationalism, or global oppression.

The language has changed.

The symbolic function has not.

That brings us to the first guiding question of this series.

What problem was Zionism trying to solve?

That question matters because no political movement can be understood apart from the problem it was attempting to answer.

We misunderstand communism if we ignore the exploitation produced by industrial capitalism. We misunderstand feminism if we forget the legal and social inequality faced by women. We misunderstand the American Revolution if we forget the rapacious appetites of monarchy.

Likewise, we cannot understand Zionism unless we first understand the historical reality that produced it.

Only then can we ask whether its answers were wise, successful, incomplete, or in need of revision.

For now, before we turn to Zionism’s roots, a bare-bones definition is sufficient.

Simple as that definition appears, it has proven remarkably difficult to discuss.

Part of the difficulty is that Zionism has never been just one thing. It has been a liberation movement, a national movement, a refugee movement, a return movement, a political movement, and for many, a religious aspiration. Different generations have emphasized different aspects, often talking past one another while believing they were talking about the same idea.

Today, American Jews often find themselves faced with one set of questions:

• Is Zionism colonialism?

• Is Zionism racism?

• Is Zionism triumphant nationalism?

These are understandable questions. They arise from the political vocabulary of modern America.

Israelis, however, begin somewhere entirely different.

Their questions are less likely to concern abstract political categories than the practical responsibilities of sovereignty: security, power, morality, military service, democracy, and the ethical burdens of governing oneself. History has asked different things of Israelis than it has of American Jews.

Understanding those different starting points will become an important part of this series.

The essays that follow will provide frameworks through which to understand Zionism today.

But for now, an observation that will bridge between this opening essay and the next:

The story of Zionism does not begin with Theodor Herzl.

It does not even begin in nineteenth-century Europe.

It begins much earlier.

It begins with Jewish history.

This series of essays rests on a single premise: antisemitism has never been primarily about Jews.

It is the ongoing need for Jews to symbolize something larger, to absorb a society’s fears, contradictions, and moral anxieties. The Jew became a screen onto which every age projected its deepest insecurities.

Over the centuries, that dynamic has remained remarkably consistent. What has changed is not the mechanism but the content of the projection.

The first essay explored the Jew as symbol and argued that antisemitism survives precisely because it continually reinvents itself while preserving its underlying mechanism.

The second essay traced those reinventions. Jews were first condemned as religious heretics and enemies of God. With the rise of modern nationalism and racial theory, they became an alien race, unable to renounce their genetic history, incapable of belonging. Later, they emerged as the hidden conspirator, the imagined force behind ideological opposites: capitalism and communism, finance and revolution, simultaneously weak and all-powerful.

The third essay turned to what seemed to be the great exception. America offered Jews something history had rarely provided: the possibility of remaining Jewish while becoming fully accepted as citizens. The United States became, by almost every measure, the most successful Jewish diaspora in history.

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This final essay asks a different question.

If America was the exception, why does that exception suddenly feel so fragile?

The answer, I believe, is not simply that antisemitism has returned. It never entirely disappeared. What has changed is the symbolic role that Jews now play in America’s moral imagination.

For centuries, the individual Jew bore the symbolic burden. Today, increasingly, that burden has shifted from the individual to the collective Jew. The modern state of Israel has become, in much contemporary discourse, what “the Jew” once was: the vessel into which societies pour their anxieties and their judgments about power, colonialism, race, capitalism, nationalism, militarism, and the failures of the modern West.

This observation requires careful qualification. Israel is a sovereign nation. Like every nation, it makes decisions that are worthy of debate, criticism, and sometimes condemnation. To assert that is not antisemitic;1 it is justifiable political discourse.

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But there is a profound difference between criticizing Israel and assigning it a symbolic role unlike that assigned to any other nation.

Throughout history, Jews were never hated only for what they actually did. They were hated for what they represented. They became Christianity’s rejection, Europe’s racial contamination, capitalism’s greed, communism’s revolution, modernity’s dislocation. Whatever frightened a civilization eventually found its way into the figure of “the Jew.”

Today, something remarkably similar is occurring.

Israel increasingly functions not merely as another country but as the explanatory symbol for an astonishing range of global grievances. Colonialism. White supremacy. Militarism. Nationalism. Apartheid. Genocide. The failures of liberal democracy. Even the persistence of Western power itself.

No nation should be immune from criticism.

But no nation should be expected to explain the moral failures of an entire civilization.

That expectation arises from symbolism rather than analysis.

The irony is striking. For centuries, Jews were condemned as rootless outsiders who belonged nowhere. Today they are often portrayed as the quintessential insiders, i.e., privileged, white, colonial, embodiments of Western power. The content of the accusation has inverted. The underlying structure has not.

This transformation helps explain why so many American Jews experienced October 7, 2023, not only as a terrorist attack against Israelis but as a turning point in their own understanding of America.

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The horror of the massacre was devastating enough.

What followed proved equally unsettling.

Many Jews expected sympathy for a nation that had experienced the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Instead, they encountered celebrations on some campuses before Israel had even begun its military response. They watched old friendships strain under the weight of ideological certainty. They discovered that organizations they had long considered allies suddenly regarded Jewish concerns as secondary—or worse, as obstacles to larger political narratives.

Many had believed that antisemitism belonged to history, that America had largely escaped Europe’s oldest pathology, and that Jews had become securely woven into the fabric of American life.

Those assumptions now feel far less certain.

Yet history offers another lesson.

The persistence of antisemitism has never determined the future of the Jewish people.

Jews have repeatedly outlived the stories others have told about them.

Every age has imagined that it finally understood the Jew. Every age has been wrong.

That brings us, perhaps, to the question that lies beyond antisemitism itself.

If the world continually reinvents the meaning of the Jew, how should Jews understand themselves?

That is not a question antisemites can answer.

It is one that Jews must answer for themselves.

And that answer, ultimately, leads us to the story of Zionism.

Our next series will turn to the Jewish people’s quest for self-determination.

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The Torah, composed more than three thousand years ago, described the existential reality Jews have so often faced:

“…There is a people that dwells apart, Not reckoned among the nations.” Numbers 23:9

Whether understood as blessing, curse, or simple observation, the verse proved remarkably durable. Wherever Jews settled, they became part of society without ever becoming entirely of it.

Our migrations eventually brought us to America.

For millions of Jews fleeing poverty, persecution, and episodic violence in Eastern Europe, the United States represented something history had rarely offered: the possibility that one could remain Jewish while becoming fully accepted as a member of society.

Reality, of course, proved more complicated.

This essay traces the American Jewish experience from the great wave of Eastern European immigration through the early twenty-first century. The final two essays will examine how the events of recent years have transformed that story.

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One of my favorite immigrant stories captures both the promise of that Eastern European migration and the disappointment of those who came to America during the greatest immigration, from 1881 through the early 1920s. It has been attributed to everyone from Sam Levenson to Leo Rosten, though it almost certainly belongs to no one in particular:

“When Jews first came to America, they had been told the streets were paved with gold. When they got here, they discovered three things: first, the streets weren’t paved with gold; second, they weren’t paved at all; and third, they were expected to do the paving.”

In a few words, that is the immigrant story of Eastern European Jewry.

Jews arrived not as rulers but as newcomers. America did not ask them to disappear. It asked them to get to work.

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And they did.

Unlike much of Europe, America gradually dismantled many of the legal and social barriers that had confined Jews for centuries. Universities slowly opened their doors. Professional guilds gave way to merit-based professions. Business, science, medicine, law, journalism, and eventually public service became accessible in ways unimaginable to previous generations.

The explanation for Jewish success was never mysterious.

For centuries, Jews had cultivated literacy because every child was expected to study Torah.1 They valued education because books were often the only property that rulers would not confiscate. They built voluntary institutions because governments could seldom be trusted to protect them. They learned to postpone immediate gratification because survival often depended upon thinking beyond the present generation.

The very qualities that enabled Jews to flourish also made their success unusually visible. What many Americans admired, others increasingly sought to explain.But success has consequences. Success creates visibility. Visibility invites explanation.

Once Jews became disproportionately represented in certain professions (from others they were excluded), old suspicions acquired new vocabulary.

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The accusations changed. The underlying story did not.

The medieval Jew who poisoned wells became the modern banker exploiting financial systems. The Christ-killer became the Hollywood producer debasing Christian ethics. The ritual murderer became the media executive warping public opinion. The outsider became the globalist. Those who shed their distinctive clothing and folkways became members of the “coastal elites.”

The symbolic role, manipulating non-Jews to gain Jewish advantage, remained.

Only the language changed.

And yet, for much of the twentieth century, something remarkable occurred.

Postwar America increasingly rejected overt antisemitism that had devastated so many prior Jewish communities.

The Holocaust, in which paroxysms of anti-Jewish violence were amplified by the mechanized, industrial efficiency of Germany, exposed where racial hatred could lead.

In the Shoah’s wake, overt antisemitism became socially unacceptable. Universities gradually abandoned Jewish quotas. Neighborhood restrictions slowly disappeared. Jews entered every level of American life.

For perhaps the only extended period in Jewish history, many Jews wondered whether antisemitism itself might finally be dying.

Looking back, it is understandable why they believed that.

It was an extraordinary moment.

Yet in retrospect, it now appears to have been something else: an intermission.

Antisemitism did not disappear because humanity outgrew the need for symbolic enemies. It receded because the particular symbolic role Jews had long occupied temporarily lost its cultural usefulness.

When new social anxieties emerged, the old structure quietly returned.

Today it arrives from multiple directions at once.

White nationalists recycle racial fantasies that would have been instantly recognizable in nineteenth-century Europe.

Some progressive movements increasingly cast Jews as the embodiment of colonialism, whiteness, and inherited privilege.

Islamist ideologues revive religious themes that long predate the modern Middle East.

These movements disagree about almost everything else.

Yet they converge upon remarkably similar symbolic uses for Jews.

How do such different ideologies find utility in the same symbolic function?

That is the new American paradox.

American Jews are demonstrably the most integrated Jewish community in history. They have flourished in virtually every field of American life. Yet rather than dissolving antisemitism, integration has supplied new material from which it can be constructed, particularly during periods of social anxiety and political instability.

Success becomes evidence of conspiracy.

Acceptance becomes proof of hidden influence.

Visibility becomes mistaken for domination.

The contradictions that opened this series return once again.

Jews are portrayed as both insiders and outsiders.

Both powerless and omnipotent.

Both fully assimilated and fundamentally alien.

The facts no longer matter because the symbolic role remains intact.

If antisemitism can survive emancipation...

If it can survive equality...

If it can survive unprecedented Jewish success...

...then perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking what Jews have done to provoke antisemitism, we should ask what social and political work antisemitism performs for those who embrace it.

For roughly seventy-five years, from the end of the Second World War until quite recently, it appeared that America had escaped history.

It had not.

While prosperity and upward mobility had reduced the need for a scapegoat, it turns out history was simply waiting for a new vocabulary.

The illusion finally shattered after October 7, 2023, when many American Jews discovered with shock that ideas they believed had been buried with the twentieth century had merely been resting beneath the surface.

Antisemitism had not disappeared.

As before, it had adapted.

That raises one final question.

Why does this particular hatred prove so endlessly renewable?

What purpose does it continue to serve in societies separated by centuries, ideologies, and cultures?

And what has led to its recent resurgence?

How have Zionism and the creation of a Jewish nation-state become embedded in American Jewish identity, and how has that changed the equation?

Those are the questions we turn to next.

In this series’ first essay, I suggested that antisemitism is not simply a collection of false beliefs about Jews. It is a way societies explain themselves. As cultures change, so do the accusations. The symbol remains the same; only what’s projected onto it changes.

Each era projected its deepest fears onto the Jew, reshaping the stereotype to fit its own anxieties.

The history of antisemitism is often presented as a series of disconnected episodes: Christian anti-Judaism, medieval persecution, Enlightenment prejudice, racial antisemitism, Nazism. In reality, they are successive versions of the same story. Each era projected its deepest fears onto the Jew, reshaping the stereotype to fit its own anxieties.

The story begins with the New Testament.

The earliest Christian writings emerged while the Roman Empire still ruled Judea. As Christianity gradually separated from Judaism and spread throughout the Roman world, responsibility for Jesus’s death increasingly moved away from Roman authorities and toward Jewish leaders. This shift reflected the politics of the time. The theological consequences would endure for nearly two thousand years.

The early Church Fathers built upon this foundation. They taught that God had established a new covenant with the Church that superseded the covenant with the Jewish people. Yet Jews stubbornly refused to disappear. Their continued existence posed a theological problem. Rather than viewing the survival of the Jewish people as evidence that God’s covenant endured, many Christian theologians concluded that Jews should survive only as a degraded witness to Christianity’s truth.

One verse from the Gospel of Matthew became especially consequential. Standing before Pontius Pilate, the gathered crowd declares, “(May) His blood be on us and on our children.” Over time, those words became the doctrine of collective Jewish guilt. Every Jew, in every generation, was held responsible for the death of Jesus.

That teaching remained official Catholic doctrine until 1965, when the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate explicitly rejected the idea that Jews living today bear responsibility for the crucifixion.

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For centuries, theology shaped everyday life. Jews were barred from owning land and excluded from many occupations and guilds. As a result, many turned to commerce, moneylending, and finance—occupations that Christians themselves often avoided or prohibited. Ironically, professions forced upon Jews later became evidence against them, reinforcing stereotypes about Jewish greed and financial manipulation.

When disaster struck, like a plague, a famine, or the unexplained death of a child, it was often the Jews who were blamed.

Among the most grotesque accusations was the blood libel: the claim that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian children in order to use their blood in the preparation of Passover matzah. The accusation was absurd. Jewish law explicitly forbids the consumption of blood. Yet the story spread throughout Europe, provoking massacres, expulsions, and waves of violence.

Closely related were accusations that Jews desecrated the consecrated communion host. Even centuries after the crucifixion, Jews were portrayed as continuing their assault on Christ himself. Each Easter season brought unimaginable violence.

Yet Jewish life was not an uninterrupted story of persecution. There were periods of remarkable coexistence, especially in medieval Spain, when Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared in a vibrant intellectual and cultural life, known as the Coexistence, or Convivencia. Historians debate how harmonious that coexistence truly was, but there is little dispute about how it ended. With the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of Spain’s Jews in 1492, centuries of relative stability came to an abrupt close.

The Enlightenment promised something radically new. If reason replaced religious dogma, perhaps ancient prejudices would finally disappear.

Instead, antisemitism adapted.

The Enlightenment did not eliminate antisemitism. It translated it.

Religious accusations gave way to cultural and social ones. Jews were increasingly criticized not because they rejected Christ but because they were portrayed as greedy, clannish, parasitic, or incapable of becoming loyal citizens. Voltaire, despite his criticism of organized religion, repeated many of these secularized Jewish stereotypes.

Not every Enlightenment thinker followed this path. John Toland argued that Jews should be granted full civil equality. Napoleon’s emancipation of French Jews reflected this new vision of citizenship, and other European nations gradually followed.

For the first time in centuries, many Jews believed they could finally become accepted as equal citizens.

Yet another transformation was already underway.

The Enlightenment unleashed extraordinary scientific advances that transformed the modern world. But alongside genuine science emerged pseudoscientific theories that clothed ancient prejudice in the language of biology. Social Darwinism and eugenics replaced theology with race.

This marked a profound turning point.

Under medieval Christianity, however brutally, conversion at least offered a theoretical escape. A Jew who accepted Christianity could, in principle, leave Jewish identity behind.

Race hatred offered no such possibility.

If Jewishness were defined by blood rather than belief, baptism would change nothing. One could alter one’s religion, but not one’s ancestry.

The implications would prove catastrophic.

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The persistence of antisemitism became unmistakable in the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a loyal Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely convicted of treason. The torrent of antisemitic hatred unleashed by the case shocked many Europeans who had believed that emancipation had solved the “Jewish Question.” Dreyfus was eventually exonerated, but the illusion that reason alone had defeated antisemitism was shattered.

Another development soon followed. In 1903, a Russian forgery titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion purported to reveal the minutes of a secret Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Although repeatedly exposed as fraudulent, it became one of the most influential antisemitic texts ever published. It was translated into dozens of languages, circulated across Europe and the Middle East, and later assigned as authentic history in Nazi classrooms. Even today, it continues to find readers around the world.

The pattern should now be familiar.

Christian Europe accused Jews of killing Christ.

Medieval Europe accused them of poisoning wells and murdering children.

The Enlightenment accused them of corrupting society.

Pseudo-science accused them of polluting the human race.

The accusations changed because Europe’s fears changed. The symbolic role assigned to Jews remained remarkably constant.

That transformation from religious anti-Judaism to racial antisemitism changed everything. Once Jews were defined by race rather than religion, there was no escape. Hatred no longer sought to convert Jews. It sought to eliminate them.

That new reality would define the twentieth century.

It is to that story, to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, that we now turn.

Have you ever noticed something peculiar about antisemitism?

In the eyes of their critics, Jews seem capable of embodying completely contradictory qualities.

They have been accused of being capitalists and communists. Too religious and too secular. Rootless cosmopolitans and dangerous nationalists. Cowardly and bloodthirsty. Weak and all-powerful.

It is a long list.

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Under most circumstances, contradictions weaken an argument. Here, they seem to strengthen it.

How can the same people be charged with promoting both capitalism and communism? How can they be denounced for refusing to assimilate while simultaneously being condemned for blending in too well? How can they be portrayed as a powerless minority and as the hidden force controlling governments, banks, and the media?

The answer is that antisemitism is not simply a collection of false beliefs about Jews. It is something deeper. It is one of the ways societies explain themselves.

For two thousand years, antisemitism has continually changed its language while preserving its underlying structure. Each age has believed it discovered an entirely new reason to oppose Jews. In reality, each inherited an older pattern and adapted it to its own fears and preoccupations.

Put simply, Jews are often hated not only because of who they are, but because of what they have been made to represent.

This insight comes from an unexpected place: the field of semiotics,1 the study of signs and symbols. Semiotics asks a deceptively simple question: How do symbols acquire meaning? More importantly, how do those meanings change over time?

One of its central insights is that a symbol can remain remarkably stable even as its meaning changes. The sign stays the same. The cultural story attached to it evolves.

Think of a movie screen. The screen itself never changes. What changes are the images projected onto it.

For centuries, “the Jew” has too often functioned like that screen.

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In antiquity and the Middle Ages, Christians projected onto Jews the charge of deicide. During times of plague, Jews were accused of poisoning wells. In the nineteenth century, they became the embodiment of racial contamination. To some, they represented predatory capitalism; to others, revolutionary communism. Today, in many circles, “the Zionist” or “the Jew” has become a symbol of colonialism, white privilege, or global oppression.

The projections change. The screen remains.

The remarkable continuity lies not in the accusations but in the symbolic role. Each civilization projects onto Jews the anxieties, fears, and unresolved conflicts that most trouble it. The content changes. The function remains surprisingly constant.

The French literary theorist Roland Barthes observed that cultures often transform historical realities into myths, filling familiar symbols with new ideological meaning. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described symbols whose meanings “float,” changing according to the needs of the surrounding culture. The novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco noted that conspiracy theories possess a peculiar resilience: contradictory evidence rarely weakens them because they are built to absorb contradictions rather than resolve them.

These analyses point to a common thought: antisemitism is not one ideology but a shape-shifting framework that explains society’s problems by making Jews uniquely guilty.

Antisemitism is not one ideology but a shape-shifting framework that explains society’s problems by making Jews uniquely guilty.

None of this means that every criticism of Jews, Jewish communities, or Israel is antisemitic, nor does it suggest that history, economics, politics, or human agency play no role. Symbols never explain everything. They help explain why certain accusations prove so remarkably durable even as the surrounding circumstances change.

Even so, this theory regarding the Jews’ symbolic role helps illuminate one of antisemitism’s most enduring features: its ability to reinvent itself without ever disappearing.

This series is an attempt to recognize and understand that reinvention.

This first essay begins the series by introducing an interpretive framework for understanding antisemitism. The second will discuss the religious anti-Judaism of early Christianity, in which Judaism became the faith that Christianity believed it had superseded, yet which stubbornly refused to disappear. The third essay will follow the transformation of religious hostility into modern racial antisemitism, where pseudoscience replaced theology and conversion no longer offered escape. From there, the fourth essay will turn to the American Jewish experience, a remarkable period in which the United States became, for millions of Jews, a true Goldene Medina, a golden land whose openness and opportunities seemed to break with centuries of history. Finally, the fifth essay will examine the emergence of anti-Zionism as the principal arena in which many of the older symbolic patterns now reappear.

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This is not simply a history of prejudice.

It is the history of a nearly universal symbol. And the place of that symbol in respective cultural narratives, particular to time and place.

For if there is one lesson history teaches, it is this: every civilization eventually reveals itself by the stories it tells about its Jews. And while those stories tell us something about Jews, they reveal even more about the civilization telling them.

**********

Author’s note: Three weeks ago I retired after thirty-eight years in the rabbinate. This essay grows out of my farewell sermon, but it is really about something larger: what a lifetime of accompanying people through joy, grief, disagreement, and hope taught me about the work of being a rabbi, and, perhaps, about being human.

Three weeks ago, after thirty-eight years in the rabbinate, the last thirty in Milwaukee, I retired. Some people were surprised. At sixty-five, many assume a rabbi is only beginning to reach his stride.

The truth is, I almost didn’t make it to retirement.

As I prepared to retire, I came across a short poem by the Swedish writer Jörgen Löwenfeldt. It goes like this:

I am in a dream. Someone says that I am thirty-five years old.
I panic, before realizing that I am only twenty-five.
There is plenty of time.
Then I wake up and realize that I am eighty-five.

The poem speaks to me because it captures one of our deepest illusions: that there is plenty of time.

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Most of us live with the quiet assumption that there will always be more time: to repair relationships, pursue dreams, deepen commitments, say what needs to be said, to become the people we hope to be.

And then, for most of us, there comes a moment when that assumption falters.

For me, that moment came almost two years ago, when for a month I was confronted with the very real possibility that I had inoperable lung cancer. It was the month leading up to the High Holy Days, the holy days intended to remind us that life is a line that has a beginning and, at a time not yet determined, an end. We are prompted to confront our own mortality in the hope of becoming the people we hope to be.

The effect of that medical saga was as if I woke from a dream to find I was suddenly eighty-five.

After four weeks of countless tests, scans, and invasive procedures, I received word, literally the day before Rosh Hashanah, that it was a false alarm.

The relief was immense.

But existential uncertainty had already taken root.

Once those questions arrive, they refuse to leave. And that experience, more than anything else, brought me to deciding to retire, not out of fear, but out of clarity.

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As I thought about what those thirty years had meant, I kept returning to a passage in the Torah, the first verse of the portion called Emor. “Say to the priests, the Kohanim, the sons of Aaron…”

It doesn’t say “command them,” or “write to them.” It reads: say to them.

Judaism, at its heart, is not only a system of ideas. It is a living conversation, carried from generation to generation, from person to person, from soul to soul.

And the Torah then instructs the Kohanim: maintain your distance from death. Do not come into contact with the dead, except for your closest relatives.

It is a striking paradox.

On the one hand: maintain distance. Protect a sacred boundary.

On the other: draw near, especially when your presence matters most.

That tension, it seems to me, describes the life of a rabbi.

“For thirty years,” I told the congregation, “I have lived in that tension with you.”

Between the moments when a rabbi must stand slightly apart, to teach, to guide, to challenge, to insist, to hold the tradition, to take on, even briefly, the role of prophet.

And the moments when a rabbi must come as close as possible:

· Standing at graveside, when words fail, and presence must be enough.

· Naming a newborn, and feeling that fragile, stubborn hope for the future.

· Watching young people step into Jewish adulthood and find their voice in our ancient story.

I have come to think of this as the privilege and the paradox of proximity.

A privilege to be invited into the most sacred and vulnerable moments of your lives.

A paradox, because serving as a rabbi requires proximity and distance, at times simultaneously.

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How so? Every service ends with the mourners’ Kaddish. Before we recite it, we read the names of those who have recently died or whose yahrtzeit (the yearly anniversary of death) falls during that week.

A year ago, I stood here reading the names, and was struck with a sudden realization:

I had buried more than half the people on the list.

In that moment, something shifted.

The list stopped being a list.

Each name became a vivid memory.

Each became a face.

A conversation.

A family.

A funeral.

It was like watching home movies, grainy, imperfect, but filled with memories and meaning.

· An older gentleman who became a mentor.

· Children whose tragic deaths left wounds that never heal.

· Friends whose deaths came far too early.

· People whose most precious and intimate moments I was privileged to share.

Now, at every Kaddish list, the movie begins again. And sometimes I think to myself: You’re smiling while reading the Yahrtzeit list... Inappropriate affect, no? But the memories are often so sweet, or sometimes bittersweet, a smile is inescapable.

These vivid memories have taught me something I did not understand when I first arrived thirty years ago:

The foundation of this work is not sermons.

It is not praying.

It is not programs.

It is not even teaching.

It is relationship.
It is presence.
It is proximity.

Together, our relationships define our community’s character.

My first impression of the congregation took form at my first interview. I was young. Very young. One could argue that, like a fine wine, I’ve aged well, but back then I was… rough around the edges.

After a dinner with the search committee and board of trustees, I took out my guitar and led a few songs. When I finished, I realized my wedding ring was gone.

I scanned my immediate surroundings. Gone.

And I will never forget what happened next.

Every member of the search committee got down on their hands and knees and began searching the carpet.

Eventually, the ring was found.

I was embarrassed, mortified actually, but I was also deeply moved. Here was a community willing, quite literally, to go to the mat for one another. As one rabbinic sage, Renee Zellwenger, once said, “You had me at hello.”

^ ^ ^ ^ ^

Ancient Judaism understood two very different models of leadership.

Priests sanctified ordinary life through ritual and presence.

Prophets stood apart, challenging the moral complacency of their generation.

Through their proximity, priests minister to the needs of the people.

Through the chutzpah of daring to stand apart, prophets deliver an ethical challenge.

Rabbis, in a sense, inherit both callings.

Prophets win no popularity contests. But their work, their message, is essential.

What does this look like? Perhaps like the Rosh Hashanah when I spoke about domestic abuse in the Jewish community.

Some people said: “How could you speak about such a topic, today of all days?”

Others leaned in quietly and whispered: “Thank you.”

Or when I stood on both sides of our nation’s southern border and then spoke out against immigrant policies that violate our deepest Jewish values.

Or when I asserted that our lives’ relative ease and comfort exist just blocks away from deep and persistent poverty. And that, now, racial injustice is back with a vengeance, not that it had ever gone away.

So that is the paradox of being a rabbi, to bring both:

Distance and closeness.
Truth and tenderness.
Challenge and care.

To be both Prophet and priest.

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^ ^ ^ ^ ^

In the middle of Emor, the Torah stops talking about priests and starts talking about time. Specifically, the cycle of sacred time.

Shabbat.

Passover.

Shavuot.

Rosh Hashanah.

Yom Kippur.

Sukkot.

As though to remind us that Judaism ultimately does not belong to one leader. It belongs to sacred time, renewed year after year by communities of individuals. And it is that rhythm of sacred time that continues beyond any one of us.

For thirty years, I have walked that calendar with you.

Rosh Hashanahs and Yom Kippurs. Pesachs and Shavuots.
Moments of joy.
Moments of grief.
Moments of transition.
Moments of transformation.

And now, that rhythm will continue.

As it should.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^

So what at Sinai do I hope endures?

I hope that Sinai remains inclusive, where people are seen and welcomed.

That Sinai remains intimate, where relationships matter.

That Sinai remains innovative, always willing to reimagine Jewish life.

And that Sinai remains intentional, asking not just what we do, but why it matters.

Beyond our community’s character, the second enduring quality of Sinai, I pray, is how we see each other.

When the Mishkan, the desert sanctuary, was completed, our tradition teaches, “the Mishkan became one.”

At first, each person believed their own contribution mattered most. Only later did they see how every piece fit together.

Every beam. Every curtain. Every ring. Every wooden tent peg.

No one was expendable. Every contribution was necessary.

That is what it means to build a sacred community, a Kehillah Kedosha, in which every person matters.

Third, in addition to Sinai’s character and how its members treat one another, is what I have learned about disagreement. How can one turn disagreement into a machloket l’shem shmayim, a dispute for the sake of heaven?

If we are doing Judaism seriously, we will not always agree. But disagreement must never come at the expense of relationship.

We hold onto each other, even when we hold different views.

And finally, what I have learned from all of you about hope:

To follow the teaching of Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, alav hashalom, the late rabbi of Great Britain, who taught:

Hope is not optimism. It is not the belief that things will turn out well.

Instead, he wrote, “Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that together we can make things better.

^ ^.^ ^ ^

And one final thought.

Soon, there will be a new rabbi here, with new energy, new ideas, ready to forge new relationships.

As there should be.

But the future of any synagogue will not be determined by those standing on the bimah.

It will be determined by how its members stand with one another.

Will you draw near when it matters most?

Will you build a community where every person is seen as essential?

Will you hold onto each other, even in disagreement?

Will you choose hope, even when it is hard?

Because Judaism was never meant to reside in its clergy.

It lives in a people.

It lives in you.

And if that is true, then what we have built together does not end here.

It continues,

in your hands,
in your lives,
and in the sacred rhythm of time that will outlast us all.

Of the three pilgrimage festivals, the Shalosh Regalim, Shavuot, may be the most important and the least understood.

Pesach tells the story of liberation. Sukkot celebrates gratitude and fragility. But Shavuot commemorates something even more ambitious: the giving of Torah at Mount Sinai.

You would think, given Torah’s centrality to Jewish life, Shavuot would command our attention.

But often it does not.

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Perhaps that is because Shavuot raises uncomfortable questions. Like:

• What exactly happened at Mount Sinai?

• Did God literally dictate every word?

• Were the tablets physically carved by the finger of God?

• Did an entire nation stand together and hear one divine voice?

For many modern Jews, such questions reveal our uncertainty.

We approach sacred texts with modern tools our ancestors did not possess: history, archaeology, literary criticism, and science.

We recognize layers of narrative and multiple voices. We understand the Torah bears signs of centuries of religious development.

For many, revelation no longer feels like divine dictation.

But once we acknowledge that, another question appears.

If Torah was not dictated word for word by God…

Why should it matter?

Why mitzvah? Why covenant? Why obligation?

Why not simply say Judaism contains wisdom and inspiration and leave it at that?

This is hardly a new question. But for many non-Orthodox Jews today, it may be the defining theological question.

My own thinking has been shaped by three modern Jewish voices. Not because they solved the mystery of Sinai, but because they suggest we may need to tweak the questions we’re asking.

Martin Buber: Revelation as Encounter

Martin Buber suggested that revelation is not primarily about information.

It is about encounter.

Buber famously described human life as oscillating between two kinds of relationship: I–It and I–Thou.

Most of life is I–It, relationships that are utilitarian in nature.

We analyze. Categorize. Understand. Use.

But occasionally something breaks through.

Another person. A work of art. Nature. Prayer.

A moment that refuses to become an object. or to be reduced,

A moment in which we no longer stand over reality but stand before it.

That, Buber says, is where God appears.

Sinai, then, was not primarily the delivery of a text.

It was humanity encountering an Eternal Thou.

Torah emerged afterward as Israel’s attempt to preserve and transmit that encounter.

Franz Rosenzweig: Revelation as Being Addressed

Franz Rosenzweig pushes even further.

He suggests revelation is not God saying: “Here are the rules.”

Revelation begins with God saying: “You.”

Before there is mitzvah, there is relationship.

Before there is command, there is recognition.

You are seen. You are addressed. You matter.

And once someone truly encounters and experiences being loved and called, obligation follows naturally.

Think of the people we love.

We do not experience obligations toward them as burdens.

We show up. We call. We care.

Not because a law demanded it. But because relationship creates responsibility.

Rosenzweig says covenant works that way. Mitzvah is not obedience to authority. It is response to encounter.

Abraham Joshua Heschel: Revelation as Ongoing

And then comes Abraham Joshua Heschel, perhaps my favorite guide for Shavuot.

Heschel wrote: “The Bible is not humanity’s theology but God’s anthropology.”

Meaning: Torah is less about human beings searching for God than about God searching for human beings.

Heschel did not imagine revelation as a moment trapped in the past.

He imagined revelation as ongoing. Not because God continues dictating new books. But because the encounter continues.

Heschel once suggested that what happened at Sinai cannot ultimately be translated into propositions. Only into response.

Which may explain one of the Torah’s most surprising moments.

When the Israelites stand at Sinai, they do not say: “We understand.” They do not say: “We agree.” They say: Na’aseh v’nishma. “We will do and we will hear.”

But wait. Shouldn’t hearing come first? Shouldn’t understanding precede commitment?

Perhaps Torah understands something profound about human life.

Meaning often follows practice. Sometimes we act our way into understanding.

Parents know this. Marriage knows this. Friendship knows this.

You do not wait until you fully understand love before showing up for someone.

You show up. And understanding grows.

Perhaps covenant works that way too.

You light candles. You give tzedakah. You comfort mourners.

You study. You argue. You keep showing up.

And over time, the doing itself becomes a language.

Not proving God. Not proving Sinai. But making encounter possible.

Why This Matters Now

This feels especially relevant right now.

We live in an age suspicious of obligation.

Everything is curated, customized, chosen to satisfy but not necessarily to challenge.

If an institution disappoints us, we leave. If a commitment becomes difficult, we revise it.

We have become fluent in preference.Less fluent in covenant.

But covenant asks different questions.

What has a claim upon me? Who calls me? To whom am I responsible?

Judaism’s deepest answer was never simply: Because God dictated a text.

It was: Because somewhere along the way, individually or collectively, we encountered something holy and discovered that holiness makes claims upon us.

That is covenant. Not certainty, but Response. Not proof, but Presence. Not possession of truth, but Commitment to relationship.

So perhaps Shavuot asks less: What happened at Sinai?

And more: What happens when you stand at Sinai?

Do you feel addressed? Do you hear your name?

Do you allow yourself to become obligated by something larger than yourself?

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We may never know precisely what occurred at the mountain.

But Judaism offers a daring possibility:

Meaning does not always precede commitment.

Sometimes we do. And then we understand.

Na’aseh v’nishma.

We act. We listen. We keep showing up.

Every mitzvah becomes an answer to a question still being asked.

Will you live as though nothing calls to you?

Or will you answer?

Revelation may not belong only to the past.

It happens whenever wonder interrupts us.

Whenever responsibility unsettles us.

Whenever love asks something of us.

Whenever holiness refuses to leave us alone.

And covenant may simply be our way of replying:

Hineni.

Here I am.

Ready to listen.

Ready to respond.

Ready to begin again.

APR 20

Please read the following essay by Judge J Michael Luttig, a respected conservative Attorney and former Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. His analysis of Justice Clarence Thomas's recent speech should be read by anyone seeking to understand the theory and ideology of the MAGA movement. (David B Cohen)

The speech that Justice Clarence Thomas gave last week at the University of Texas could prove to be the single most important speech of political and constitutional philosophy that never should have been given.

As a conservative my entire life, I certainly wish Justice Thomas had not written and given the insidious speech.

Though his unmistakable targets were Progressives and progressivism, his speech is far more injurious to Republicans, conservatives, and conservatism than it is for progressivism because it is demonstrably and inarguably wrong as to Progressives, but it is a siren song to today’s Republicans and conservatives. Webster’s Dictionary defines “siren song” as “: an alluring utterance or appeal, especially one that is seductive or deceptive.”

Justice Thomas intended his speech as a Republican and conservative manifesto for our times — and for all times. But the political and constitutional philosophies he described and embraced are neither doctrinal conservatism nor Republican nor political conservatism, and they are manifestly not constitutional conservatism.

No one should mistake for true conservatism, or even Republicanism, much less constitutional conservatism, the political and constitutional philosophies that Justice Thomas has embraced his entire life and spoke about last week. His philosophies represent anything but true conservatism.

Rather, together, they constitute a bastard strand of conservatism that lingered and languished in the faculty lounges of the conservative academy from around the mid-1960s until it was summoned forth from the academy by acolytes of Clairmont McKenna College’s natural law philosopher Harry V. Jaffa to fuel Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2016. Those acolytes included Justice Thomas and his, and my, former law clerk John Eastman.

Thus, the overarching significance of Justice Thomas’ speech last week is that it represents the intellectual political and constitutional philosophies for Donald Trump’s two presidencies and his entire MAGA movement.

It was these political and constitutional philosophies that underlaid and justified Donald Trump’s failed plan to cling to power on January 6, 2021, the architect of which was John Eastman.

The political and constitutional philosophies that Justice Thomas embraces are as certainly wrong for America, whose preeminent law is the Constitution of the United States, not the Declaration of Independence’s admittedly majestic and inspirational Preamble,” as Justice Thomas believes they are certainly right for America under that Constitution. His twin philosophies are, simply and demonstrably, wrong as a matter of historical fact, political fact, and both constitutional fact and law. Together, they are a shockingly and reprehensibly ahistorical characterization of liberals and progressives and progressivism, as well as an ahistorical characterization of Republicans, Republicanism, and conservativism.

These philosophies are a radical understanding of American and world history over the past century and a quarter, a radical way of thinking about American political history, and a decidedly radical way of thinking about the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

This is emphatically not what the Founders of this nation and the Framers of the Constitution of the United States contemplated, envisioned, or ever intended.

The historical flaws in Justice Thomas’ speech are many and every one of them has already been identified and authoritatively denounced by experts and scholars across the political, philosophical, and ideological spectrum.

Justice Thomas purports to trace progressivism in America back to Democrat President Woodrow Wilson, when in fact progressivism for the past century and a half is actually traceable directly back to Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Astonishingly, Thomas then blames all progressives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – including progressives in the United States over this period – and charges them with responsibility for the profound failures of societies worldwide during those one hundred and twenty-five years, including Stalinism, Maoism, Mussolini’s fascism, Naziism, and worse.

Oblivious to the actual history, but supremely confident in his ahistorical understanding of that history, Justice Thomas intoned as if reading from the Gospel that “Progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever…. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based. Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.”

Justice Thomas’ invidious accusation that progressives in America for the past century and a half up to this very day have been pursuing the same anti-democratic and anti-constitutional regimes as Stalinism, Maoism, Mussolini’s fascism, Naziism, and the like, is frightening, risible, and reprehensible.

While it can fairly be said that Woodrow Wilson was critical of the Declaration’s Preamble, virtually no other Progressive or Democrat since Woodrow Wilson has so much as criticized the Preamble, much less rejected it. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., famously regarded the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as the “promissory notes” to which all Americans were heir and he called upon the nation to fulfill the pledges of these two Founding documents.

Jeffrey Rosen, one of the greatest constitutional scholars and historians of our times and indisputably the foremost constitutional scholar of America’s Founding, writes in his recent book The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America that Thomas Jefferson was, after all, the founder of the progressive Democratic Party and most Democrats in 19th and 20th centuries revered Jefferson.

Mr. Rosen goes on to explain that when he was President Wilson’s closest advisor, progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis handed out biographies of Thomas Jefferson to Kentucky schoolchildren, quoted Jefferson in the greatest free speech opinion Brandeis ever wrote on the Supreme Court, and took his famous criticism of the “curse of bigness” from Thomas Jefferson.

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, a liberal originalist, worshiped and frequently quoted Thomas Jefferson. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt built the Jefferson Memorial on the Mall in Washington D.C. and had Jefferson’s portrait permanently engraved on the obverse of the nickel and his Virginia home, Monticello, engraved on the reverse. Mr. Rosen writes that President Roosevelt died the day before Thomas Jefferson’s birthday with an undelivered speech in hand, in which he called Thomas Jefferson the prophet of the post-war order.

And of course, President William Jefferson Clinton began his inauguration with a pilgrimage to his namesake’s Monticello home in Charlottesville, Virginia, symbolically traveling from Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home to the Nation’s Capital, to be sworn in as the 42^nd President of the United States.

As a matter of historical fact, every single progressive president since Theodore Roosevelt, with the arguable exception of Woodrow Wilson has unhesitatingly embraced the Declaration’s Preamble, the Declaration itself, and indeed, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence.

For 250 years, it has never been the case that either of America’s two political parties has been anti-Preamble, anti-Declaration of Independence, or anti-Constitution . . . until, that is, the past 10 years, when the Republican Party led by Donald Trump has acted as if it were all three.

As a matter of historical, political, and constitutional fact, it is the 47^th President and today’s Republicans and conservatives who, every day of the week, act in denial of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, all the while professing to revere these two Founding and foundational documents of the United States of America.

There are moments when our principles feel less like convictions and more like tests.

This is one of them.

In recent days, questions have been raised about Salah Sarsour, a Milwaukee resident who has lived here for more than thirty years and holds a green card. He currently serves as the interim president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee.

Last week, he was arrested by federal immigration agents and is now being held in Indiana pending possible deportation.

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The stated reason for his detention is that he allegedly failed to disclose past arrests on his immigration application decades ago. Those arrests took place in Israel, where he was convicted in connection with throwing a Molotov cocktail at a residence. He served time in jail. Authorities now claim that omission constitutes grounds for removal.

Sarsour, for his part, maintains that these matters were disclosed and discussed extensively when he received his green card, twenty years ago.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offers a different justification: that Sarsour represents a “serious adverse foreign policy threat.”

These are not the same claims.

And they raise different questions.

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Recently, I was asked to sign a public letter calling for Sarsour’s release. I wasn’t sure what to do. No local rabbis had signed it, nor had others in the Jewish community with whom I share a deep commitment to Israel, despite its current policies.

This is complicated.

Because the question is not only about the fate of one individual.
It is about who we are and who we want to be.

The Constitution’s Bill of Rights affords all, citizens and immigrants alike, the right to due process.

Was Sarsour spirited out of the country on a midnight flight to El Salvador?

No. But it remains difficult to verify whether due process is being followed.

And Rubio’s claim that Sarsour is a threat to foreign policy raises a First Amendment free-speech issue.

The First Amendment does not ask whether speech is comfortable.
It does not ask whether the speaker is admirable.
It does not ask whether we agree.

It asks something far more demanding:
whether we are willing to protect expression even when it unsettles us.

This is not a flaw in the system.
It is the system.

And yet there is a second truth.

The First Amendment protects speech.
It does not require us to suspend moral judgment.

We live, therefore, in a tension that does not resolve neatly.
It is intensified by the moment we are living in, a time of heightened anxiety, locally and globally.

The war in the Middle East and Iran has intensified fears, hardened identities, and amplified suspicion. For many in the Jewish community, the threat posed by Iran’s proxy groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, is not abstract. It is immediate, existential, and deeply personal. The memory of violence, both recent and historical, shapes how such allegations are heard.

At the same time, for many Muslim Americans, there is a parallel fear: that political winds can shift quickly, that old accusations can be resurrected, and that belonging can suddenly feel conditional.

These fears do not cancel each other out.

They coexist.

And they complicate everything.

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We begin to sort the world more quickly: ally or enemy, safe or dangerous, with us or against us. Speech that might once have been tolerated now feels threatening. Association feels like endorsement. Criticism feels like betrayal.

And yet, this is precisely the moment when clarity of principle matters most.

It is tempting, especially in moments like this, to treat due process as a procedural hurdle, a box to be checked on the way to a foregone conclusion.

But due process is not a technicality.

It is the mechanism by which we ensure that power is exercised with appropriate restraint, that evidence is weighed rather than assumed, and that outcomes are determined by law rather than by pressure, fear, or politics.

Without it, the system becomes something else entirely.

And history is littered with the downfall of those who elected to dispense with such mechanisms.

Free speech is the linchpin of democracy.

If we abandon our commitment to free expression when we are afraid, then it was never a principled commitment. It was a convenience.

At the same time, if we abandon moral discernment in the name of free expression, we risk something else: the erosion of trust, the normalization of what should never be normalized, the dulling of our ethical instincts.

We are not asked to choose between liberty and responsibility.

We are asked to hold both.

So what do we do with a figure like Salah Sarsour?

We begin by telling the truth as best we can, without exaggeration and without omission. We acknowledge what is known, and we are honest about what is not. We resist the urge to turn allegation into certainty or discomfort into disqualification.

We defend the constitutional right to speak, not because we are indifferent, but because we understand what is at stake if that right erodes.

And at the same time, we do not suspend our judgment. We ask whether a platform confers legitimacy. We consider context. We weigh the impact of words, especially in a moment already charged with fear.

A free society depends on laws and rights.
But it survives on something deeper:

The moral seriousness of its citizens.
The ability to hold complexity without collapsing into certainty.
The willingness to defend principles when they are tested.
The discipline to exercise judgment without abandoning restraint.

In a time of war, finding the point of balance becomes harder.

And more necessary.

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Not every voice deserves amplification.
Not every past can be set aside.
And not every invocation of “free speech” is made in good faith.

We do ourselves no favors when we pretend otherwise.

In the end, I decided to sign the letter.

Because First Amendment rights are either meaningful in the hardest cases, or they are not meaningful at all.

If I cannot apply those rights to speech with which I deeply disagree, then they are empty.

And the First Amendment does not leave us powerless. It gives us the righteous power to respond.

In 1977, when the American Nazi Party sought to march in Skokie, Illinois, a town populated with many Jews and Holocaust survivors. A great debate followed. In the end, the courts allowed it to proceed in an adjacent community. But they did not march unopposed. They were met, overwhelmingly, by those who stood against them.

That is the other half of free speech.

Free speech does not silence opposition; it empowers it.

If someone says something you believe is wrong, you answer them.
Publicly. Clearly. Without fear.

A free society does not collapse all distinctions.
But it demands that we make them carefully.

And that we do with conviction,
and with the courage of conscience.

What if one of the most important stories Jews tell about ourselves isn’t history in the way we usually think of history?

What if the story of Egypt, slavery, liberation, wandering, and redemption is less about where we were and more about who we are supposed to be?

That is the provocative argument of the biblical scholar S. David Sperling. For some, it’s an idea not far from blasphemy. It pushes against memory, ritual, even identity. But it doesn’t ask us to give up the story. It asks us to understand it more deeply.

Sperling begins with a simple observation: there is no archaeological evidence that the Israelites lived in Egypt as the Torah describes. A people enslaved for generations, leaving all at once, wandering for decades; such a migration should have left traces. And yet, in the earliest Israelite settlements in the land of Israel, we don’t find the expected Egyptian footprint.

From that absence, Sperling draws a bold conclusion: the Exodus story is not history in the modern sense. It is a carefully shaped narrative, an allegory, created by ancient writers.

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But that raises an even more interesting question.

Why would those writers tell a story that makes their own people sound like outsiders? Wouldn’t it strengthen their claim to the land to say, “We’ve always been here”?

Sperling’s answer rethinks that saga’s purpose.

The story of Egypt, he suggests, was never meant to tell us where we came from geographically. It was meant to define who we are, morally and spiritually, as a people.

In the ancient world, Israel was not the only society that valued justice. Other cultures also emphasized caring for the vulnerable, honesty in business, and honoring the divine. Ethics were not unique to Israel.

So what made Israel different?

According to Sperling, the Torah answers: we came from somewhere else.

Our laws, our covenant, our sense of purpose, these were not simply products of the surrounding culture. They came from outside. From Egypt. From the wilderness. From a place beyond the norms of society.

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And that idea serves a purpose.

If you believe your identity was formed somewhere else, you are less likely to simply blend in. You are more able to resist the surrounding culture when it conflicts with your values.

The Torah even says it explicitly: do not imitate Egypt, and do not imitate Canaan.

In other words, don’t simply become like everyone else.

The wilderness, the liminal, in-between place, becomes the birthplace of identity precisely because it belongs to no one. It is there, outside of normal life, that a people can be reshaped.

In this reading, the Exodus is not really about leaving one country for another.

It is about learning how to be different.

At the same time, Sperling doesn’t say the story is entirely invented out of thin air. He reframes it.

The people who became Israel did experience oppression under the Egyptians, but not as slaves in Egypt. Rather, they lived in the land of Canaan when it was under Egyptian control. Local populations were forced into labor, taxed, and ruled from afar.

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Ancient records from that period describe people being conscripted for labor and pulled away from their own fields to serve the Pharaoh’s needs. The experience of being dominated, of being used, of being powerless, that part was real.

But it happened at home.

In this light, the Torah’s language about forced labor reflects something true, but expressed in a different form. The memory becomes sharper, more dramatic: not just domination, but slavery; not just control, but captivity.

And then comes the most important piece.

Why tell the story this way?

Because it creates a claim.

“I am the Eternal your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

That opening line of the Ten Commandments is not just information. It is an argument.

If God liberated you, then your life belongs, in some sense, to that relationship. Freedom is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of responsibility.

This is one of the Torah’s most counterintuitive ideas.

Freedom is not simply the ability to do whatever we want.

It is the call to live in a certain way.

The God who frees is also the God who asks something of us.

And the story, whether literal history or not, does its work.

“You were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

That line appears again and again, not as a history lesson, but as a moral demand.

Remember what it feels like to be vulnerable.
Remember what it feels like to be dependent.
Remember what it feels like to be on the outside.

And build a society shaped by that memory.

Here is the paradox.

The story may not be literally true in the way we once assumed.

And yet it is deeply, powerfully true.

It may not tell us where we were.

But it tells us who we are meant to become.

Every year at Passover, we step into the story. We say: “We were slaves. We were freed.”

In a sense, we are making a historical claim.

But more significantly, we say it because we are making a moral commitment.

We call ourselves freed slaves so that we will not become oppressors.

We tell a story of coming from elsewhere so that we will not disappear into the surrounding culture.

We remember redemption so that we will take seriously the responsibility that comes with it.

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Sperling’s reading does not take anything away from the Exodus.

It sharpens it.

It reminds us that the Torah is less interested in proving what happened than in shaping what will happen, what kind of people we will be.

And so the question the Exodus finally asks is not:

Were you there?

But:

Who are you now, because of this story? And who do you hope to become?

Before the 18th and 19th centuries, rabbis did not regularly give sermons. They taught. They decided matters of law. They answered questions. They counseled.

But there were two exceptions.

On the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Shabbat Shuvah (the Sabbath of return), rabbis would speak about repentance.

And on the Shabbat just before Passover, Shabbat HaGadol (the great Sabbath), they would rise and teach the laws of the holiday: how to clean, how to kasher a kitchen, how to prepare.

It was practical. Granular. Detailed. By all accounts, often quite long.

But beneath all of that instruction was a deeper assumption:

Freedom requires preparation.

Not just the home. Not just the kitchen.

The self.

And so the question for us as Passover approaches, though it is rarely asked directly, is a deceptively simple one:

Are we truly ready to be free?

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We tend to think of freedom as a moment.

The sea splits. The people cross. The oppressor is gone. Freedom.

But the Torah tells a more complicated story.

The Israelites leave Egypt quickly, but they do not become free overnight. Again and again in the wilderness, they look backward. They complain. They long for the familiarity of Egypt, even with its brutality.

“At least there we had food,” they say.
“At least there we knew what to expect.”

It is one of the Torah’s most unsettling insights:

It is possible to leave slavery behind and still not be ready for freedom.

Our tradition names this paradox in a striking way.

The Exodus is not a journey from yoke to no yoke.

It is an exchange of one yoke for another.

From the yoke of Egypt to the yoke of mitzvot–the commandments given at Mount Sinai, the obligations of covenant.

At first glance, that sounds like a contradiction. If freedom means anything, doesn’t it mean the removal of all constraints?

In part, it does. But Judaism suggests something more demanding, and ultimately more sustaining.

Freedom is not the absence of obligation.
Freedom is the embrace of the right obligation.

Not the yoke imposed by a tyrant.
But the yoke chosen in response to covenant.

Not control from the outside.
But responsibility from within.

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Which brings us back to Passover.

In just a few days, Jews will sit at our seder tables and project ourselves back to the time of the Exodus. We will read from the Haggadah (the telling) and say the words we have said for generations:

We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.

But the Haggadah text insists on something more:

“In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as though they personally went out of Egypt.”

Not they.

We.

Which means the question is not only: Can we appreciate that we are free?

The question is: What are we doing with that freedom?

Because there is a truth we do not always say out loud:

Freedom can be misused.

Freedom of speech can become permission to wound.
Freedom of opinion can become rigid, fundamentalist certainty that brooks no challenge.
Freedom of identity can undercut empathy for those outside our circle.

And on a larger scale, the exercise of power, whether national, political, or even communal, can drift away from the ethical commitments meant to guide it.

This is not new. The Torah anticipates it.

“When you come into the land,” it says, “and you establish a king…”, there will be great, concentrated power. And immediately, the Torah places limits on that power. Most striking is the commandment that the king must write a Torah scroll and carry it with him, and be constantly reminded of his responsibilities toward, and the shared ethical expectations with, the people.

Because the Torah understands something fundamental:

Power without restraint is not freedom.
It is simply a new form of Egypt.

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This is where the image of the yoke, the kind that harnesses working animals like oxen, becomes so important.

It is not a pleasant word. A yoke is heavy. It constrains. It limits movement.

But not all yokes are the same.

The yoke of Egypt crushes our bodies and spirits.
The yoke of mitzvot forms and directs us to higher aims.

The yoke of Egypt reduces human beings to cogs in a machine.
The yoke of mitzvot elevates human beings into moral agents.

To accept the yoke of mitzvot is not to surrender freedom.

It is to give freedom a shape.

What does that shape look like?

Our tradition offers three remarkably concrete images:

1.) Real freedom looks like the ability to discipline our speech.

The tradition of guarding our words is not incidental. It is foundational. Because speech is one of the first places where freedom is tested.

We can say almost anything.

The question is: should we?

In a moment when language is so quick to divide, so ready to assume the worst, what would it mean to bring the discipline of mitzvah into our speech?

To ask not only: Is it true?
But: Is it necessary?
Is it constructive?
Does it honor the humanity of the person on the other side?

If we cannot bring freedom under the discipline of ethical speech, then freedom itself begins to erode.

2.) Real freedom looks like restraint in the use of power.

The Torah does not imagine a world without power. It imagines a world in which power is accountable.

Which means that even when the cause is just, and sometimes especially when the cause is just, we are called to ask:

How is that power being exercised?
What are its limits?
What are its consequences?

These are not easy questions. They resist slogans. They demand nuance.

Which is precisely the point.

Freedom that cannot tolerate nuance is not freedom.
It is rigidity in disguise.

3.) And true freedom looks like taking responsibility for others.

Before Passover, a community traditionally creates a fund to ensure that those who cannot afford the holiday are provided for. Even the poorest member of the community, someone who is entirely supported by the community, must contribute to the fund.

Why? The message is profound:

Your freedom is not complete if it is only yours.

To be free, in the Jewish sense, is to be bound to the well-being of others.

Not only as charity.

But as a sacred obligation.

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In the days ahead, we will clean, shop, and cook. We will set a festive table.

We should also engage in deeper preparation.

To ask ourselves, honestly:

What kind of freedom are we preparing for?

A freedom that does whatever it wants?

Or a freedom that knows what it is for?

At the seder, we will begin by opening the door and holding up a piece of Matzah, the bread of affliction.

Then we will issue an invitation: “Let all who are hungry come and eat.”

That movement, from memory to responsibility, is the essence of Jewish freedom.

This year, as we remember leaving Egypt, let’s rethink what it means to live as free people today.

Every year at the Passover table, we tell a story we think we know.

A new Pharaoh arises, one who “did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8).
But that’s not quite right.

Pharaoh knew exactly who Joseph was.

And he knew that, unlike his Pharaonic predecessors, the foreign-born Hyksos, he was a native born Egyptian. The Hyksos were outsiders, which made them natural allies of the Israelites from the time of Joseph onward.

The new Pharaoh feared his predecessors’ allies. And, like so many leaders throughout history, he made a list and set out to exact retribution.

“And he said to his people: Look, the Israelites have become too many for us.” (Exodus, 1:9)

That is how it always begins.

Not with chains, but with fear.
Not with slavery, but with a story told about a certain people.

We tend to imagine slavery as something ancient, brickmaking pits, pyramids, and whips. Or the sixteenth-century variation: the Middle Passage, plantations, and violence.

Slavery did not end.

It evolves.

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Today, we call it by different names: human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage (indentured servitude), domestic servitude, but the Torah would recognize it instantly.

Slavery is with us still. And the numbers are staggering.

• 50 million people are living in modern slavery today

• 28 million in forced labor; 22 million in forced marriage

• Nearly 1 in 4 victims are children

• The majority of forced labor, over 60%, happens in the private economy, hidden in homes, factories, and supply chains.1

More people are enslaved today than at any other point in human history.

Not despite modernity. In part because of it.

And sometimes, it happens closer than we would like to admit.

Some years ago, in Brookfield, Wisconsin, two respected physicians, a married couple, were convicted of holding a woman in domestic servitude for nearly two decades. They had brought her to the United States as a teenager. She worked in their home, isolated, controlled, threatened, unable to leave.

A thoroughly modern Egyptian household.

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No pyramids. Just a suburban home in the “right” part of town.

We’d like to think that slavery happens “elsewhere.”
But it happens everywhere, in every age. Which is why the Haggadah insists: “In every generation, one must see oneself as if one personally came out of Egypt.”

Not as an observer. As a participant. As if we were there.

Here is a cruel irony in the history of slavery.

In the 19th century, enslaved people in the British Caribbean were given a carefully edited Bible, the so-called Slave Bible. Nearly 90% of the Hebrew Bible was removed. The Book of Exodus, the foundational story of liberation, was gone.

Too dangerous.

Too inspiring.

Too likely to make a slave imagine freedom.

Because Pharaoh’s greatest tool is not the whip.

It is the control of the story.

Judaism refuses to let Pharaoh control the narrative.

At the center of Jewish consciousness is a single memory, repeated again and again:

“You were slaves in the land of Egypt.”

Not “they were.” You were.

From that memory flows an entire moral universe:

• The stranger must be protected, because you were once the stranger

• Workers must be treated with dignity, because you remember degradation

• Power must be restrained, because you remember what it felt like when it was not

The Torah does not merely recount slavery. It weaponizes memory against it.

And then there is that line, etched not only in our sacred text, but in American history itself.2

“Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all its inhabitants.” (Leviticus 25:10)

Those words were engraved on the Liberty Bell.

An ancient verse, repurposed as a national aspiration.

But aspiration is not accomplishment.

Because even here, in the land that claims liberty, slavery persists, in hidden rooms, in coerced labor, in the exploitation of the vulnerable. An example: Agriprocessors, the kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, owned by the Hasidic Rubashkin family. It was the site of a massive 2008 federal immigration raid, and nearly 400 undocumented workers, primarily from Guatemala and Mexico, were arrested. The plant’s leadership, which was the nation’s largest kosher producer, faced charges of labor violations, including child labor and exploitation of immigrant workers.

How were they exploited? Better to ask, how were they not exploited? They were virtually imprisoned. Their identity papers were confiscated, and they were charged a monthly housing fee that made it impossible to save enough to ever leave.

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This year’s elephant in the room?

Jeffrey Epstein has been called the Devil.

He’s more like Pharaoh.

Entrapping. Abusing. Discarding.

Servicing the richest, most powerful men alive. They should all be called to account.

Pharaoh is dead.

But his underlings and his clients still scurry about.

Each one must each be punished.

At the burning bush, Moses asks a question that feels quite of this moment:

“Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?”

Who am I?

What difference can I make against systems this vast, this entrenched?

It is the question we ask when confronted with global injustice.
It is the question that allows us to remain seated.

And yet Moses does not remain seated.

When the voice calls, “Moses, Moses”, he answers: Hineni. Here I am. The same words Abraham spoke when called upon by God. Hineini. Here I am. Present. Available. Ready to respond to Your divine call. Ready to do Your divine work.

Perhaps that is the real message of Passover.

Not that liberation once happened.

But that it is never finished.

This year, when we tell the story, we will lift the matzah, the bread of affliction.

We will speak of bitterness.

We will try to remember what it feels like to have no control over one’s own life, one’s own labor, one’s own future.

And if we are honest, truly honest, we will know that somewhere, right now, someone is still living that story.

Waiting.

The question is not whether Pharaoh still exists.

He does.

The question is whether Moses does.

And whether, when the moment comes,
will we have the courage to say:

Hineni.

In recent weeks, many of us have been watching events in Israel and across the Middle East with a heavy heart and an anxious mind. The conflict with Iran has intensified, and its consequences are being felt far beyond the battlefield.

For Israelis, the experience is immediate, visceral, and unrelenting.

When missiles are launched from Iran or Lebanon, there are seconds to respond. From Iran, a phone alert, followed by a siren. From Lebanon, no time for a warning; straight to a siren. Either way, conversations stop mid-sentence. Parents grab children. People move quickly, to stairwells, shelters, reinforced rooms. They wait together, listening for the dull thud of an interception, or the far more frightening sound of impact.

Then, the all-clear.

And life resumes. Until the next siren.

This rhythm of interruption, of fear punctuating the ordinary, has become part of daily life for millions of Israelis. It is not dramatic in the cinematic sense. It is repetitive. Wearing. Relentless. And it may continue for weeks. Or longer.

The roots of this conflict run deep.

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic has repeatedly called for the destruction of both Israel and the United States. These have not been idle words. Over decades, Iran and its proxies have carried out attacks across the globe, from Beirut to Buenos Aires, from bus bombings to the sustained arming and support of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.

For Israel, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is not an abstract geopolitical concern. It is a direct existential threat.

One need not agree with every tactical decision to understand the strategic fear. A regime that has long declared its desire to eliminate a nation cannot be treated as a routine adversary when it approaches nuclear capability.

That is the background against which the current war is being fought.

And yet, even as the conflict unfolds thousands of miles away, its reverberations are felt much closer to home.

In recent days, a synagogue in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, was the target of a violent attack. A pickup truck was driven into the building and down a hallway. It then burst into flames.

It could have been catastrophic. It was not, thanks to the rapid response of trained personnel on site. No one was killed. Children in a large preschool were sent home early in anticipation of parent-teacher conferences.

A moment of gratitude. And a moment of sobering reality.

Because what happened there is not entirely distant from what is happening in Jewish communities across America.

There is a particular kind of disquiet that comes when global conflict begins to echo locally, when events overseas blur into vulnerability here. The lines between foreign policy and personal safety feel thinner than we might like to admit.

In moments like this, it is natural for people to ask the chilling question: Are we safe?

The answer is that Jewish communities today take that question with the utmost seriousness.

Across the country, synagogues and Jewish institutions have invested deeply in security, not as a reaction to any single incident, but as an ongoing commitment. We work closely with law enforcement and security professionals, conduct ongoing risk assessments, and continue to support our local Jewish Federation to ensure Jewish life spaces remain protected.

That work is, by design, mostly invisible and not discussed in detail. As it must be.

Because the goal is not to live in fear, but to make it possible to live at all, to gather, to learn, to celebrate, to mourn, to pray.

A synagogue is not simply a building. It is a place where a child sounds out Hebrew letters for the first time. Where families stand under a chuppah. Where mourners say Kaddish. Where a community gathers to mark time, to wrestle with meaning, to bind itself to something larger and more eternal than the moment.

Security, then, is not only about preventing harm. It is about preserving the conditions under which Jewish life can flourish.

That is why the work continues, quietly, steadily, without fanfare.

There is a temptation, in times like these, to narrow our vision, to focus only on threat, only on fear.

Judaism asks something more of us.

We are commanded not only to guard life, but to choose life. To build, even when the world feels unstable. To gather, even when gathering carries risk. To insist that community, learning, and prayer remain possible.

That insistence is not naïve. It is defiant.

Tonight, in Israel, families will hear the siren and run once again to shelter.

And here, thousands of miles away, there will be Jewish communities who gather as they always have, welcoming Shabbat, lighting candles, singing ancient words into a very modern uncertainty.

These two realities now exist side by side: the siren and the song.

Both are part of the Jewish story in this moment. And so we hold them together.

We pray for the safety of those under fire. We remain vigilant in protecting our own communities. And we continue, stubbornly and faithfully, to build lives of meaning and purpose in the midst of it all.

War produces terrible outcomes. But not all terrible outcomes are the same.

Some tragedies emerge from the fog of war, errors born of bad intelligence, outdated maps, or the proximity of civilians to military targets. Others appear deliberate, calculated, lawless.

In recent days, we may have seen both.

We first learned about the two Tomahawk cruise missiles that demolished a girls’ school in Iran, killing 175, most of them children. The outrage is understandable. Schools are not legitimate targets, even when the enemy uses them as bases or for weapons storage. The death of children violates something elemental in our moral imagination and is simply off-limits.

Some reports suggest the strike may have relied on outdated targeting information from before the school was established. The school abutted an Iranian Revolutionary Guard facility, which was likely the intended target. If that proves to be the case, the tragedy would belong to a category as old as warfare itself: a catastrophic mistake.

War is full of such mistakes. That does not make them less horrifying. But it does make them tragically familiar.

The second incident is categorically different.

In the Indian Ocean, off of Sri Lanka, an American submarine torpedoed and sank the Iranian frigate Dena as it sailed home from an international naval parade event hosted by India. The ship went down quickly. Between 185 and 205 sailors reportedly died. Twenty-five others were left floating among oil slicks and wreckage before rescuers from Sri Lanka finally came.

The Dena had not been engaged in combat operations at the time. It had participated in a multinational fleet review, essentially a ceremonial gathering of naval vessels meant to display maritime cooperation. Ships from many countries attended. Some reports suggest that participating vessels were expected to be unarmed.

After the event, the Iranian ship began the long journey home.

That was when it was struck by a torpedo fired from a U.S. submarine.

The attack reportedly marked the first time since the Second World War that an American submarine had sunk an enemy warship in combat.

That fact should not be celebrated lightly. If anything, it should give policymakers pause.

For more than seventy years, despite Cold War confrontations and regional conflicts, American leaders avoided exactly this kind of escalation on the open seas.

The question, therefore, becomes unavoidable.

What towering necessity required sinking an Iranian warship halfway across the world?

No clear answer has been offered.

The statements coming from Washington have been vague at best. Officials have spoken about strength, deterrence, and the projection of power. But none of these explanations address the central issue.

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Was the attack necessary? Was the ship an imminent threat?

Or was the strike meant primarily to demonstrate capability, to prove that American submarines can reach and destroy an adversary anywhere on the globe?

Modern military technology carries a particular temptation. It makes certain acts of violence extraordinarily easy. Submarines are a prime example: invisible platforms capable of delivering sudden and overwhelming destruction to an enemy 2000 yards away or, through ballistic missiles, 2000 miles away.

But, as the saying goes, just because one can do something doesn’t mean one should do it.

The aftermath of the torpedo attack raises equally troubling questions.

When the Dena sank, surviving sailors reportedly issued distress calls. They floated in the water for hours among burning fuel and debris.

Rescue eventually came, not from the United States or India, whose event the ship had just attended, but from a far less powerful navy, that of Sri Lanka. A Sri Lankan vessel responded to the mayday and began pulling survivors from the sea.

When asked why his navy intervened, the Sri Lankan admiral reportedly gave a simple answer.

Because you do not ignore a distress call from a sinking ship.

It is, he explained, the unwritten law of the sea.

That phrase carries centuries of maritime tradition. Long before modern international conventions, sailors understood that the ocean imposes a kind of shared humanity. When a ship goes down, the political categories of enemy and ally give way to something more basic.

Drowning men are simply human beings struggling to live.

Naval warfare in the twentieth century was brutal beyond description. Yet even during the Second World War, there were instances in which enemy sailors were pulled from the water after a battle. The practice was not universal, but the instinct was widely recognized.

The sea itself encourages a certain humility.

Out there, every sailor understands that tomorrow it might be his own ship sinking beneath him.

That is why the unwritten law matters.

It is not merely a sentimental tradition. It is a recognition of shared vulnerability in a place where survival is never guaranteed.

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The torpedo that sank the Dena may prove to be strategically insignificant in the long run. One ship, one incident, one moment in a much larger geopolitical struggle.

But combine it with the bombing of people clinging to what was left of a suspected drug smuggler’s boat, and a larger pattern emerges.

Moments like these reveal how a nation understands power and whether restraint still plays a role in its exercise.

Jewish tradition has always been suspicious of power that congratulates itself. We should be humbled by the power we wield. For example, a king is expected to carry a Torah scroll with him at all times, not as decoration, but as a reminder of restraint. “So that his heart not be lifted above his brothers.”1 Power, in the Jewish imagination, is always meant to be tempered by humility.

The rabbis push the point further. The Mishnah teaches that if someone is drowning, one may not stand idly by. Lo ta’amod al dam re’echa—do not stand by the blood of your neighbor.2

Notice the language. Not your friend. Not your ally. Your neighbor. The commandment does not wait for us to decide whether the person struggling in the water shares our politics, our nationality, or our side in a conflict.

A drowning person is simply a human being, just like you, whose life hangs in the balance.

Sailors have long understood this instinctively. Which is why the admiral of the small Sri Lankan navy did what the great powers apparently would not. He heard a distress call and responded.

You simply do not ignore a call for help from a sinking ship.

It is the unwritten law of the sea.

War reveals many things.

It reveals courage and sacrifice. It reveals fear and hatred. But it also reveals something quieter and more unsettling: the character of those who speak about it.

In the last few days, as the conflict with Iran widened and missiles flew across the Middle East, I found myself thinking about a very old story, one that appears in the Book of Exodus.

But before we get to that story, it is worth remembering how societies speak about their fallen.

Abraham Lincoln once described soldiers who died in battle as having given “the last full measure of devotion.” The Gettysburg Address has become part of the American civic canon, and it remains one of the most solemn phrases in our national story.

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In Jewish tradition, we speak more quietly.

When a life is lost, we simply say: zichrono livrachah - may their memory be a blessing.

When the death occurred in battle, there is no triumphal language. No boasting. Only memory, grief, and the fragile hope that the sacrifice was not in vain.

War demands such devotion. And war produces such loss.

Which is why cavalier language about war should make us uneasy.

Those who speak lightly about war are rarely the ones who have to bury the dead.

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War demands such devotion. And war produces such loss.

Which is why cavalier language about war should make us uneasy. Those who speak lightly about war are rarely the ones who have to bury the dead.

I grew up during the Vietnam War. I remember the evening news announcing the body count: how many of theirs had died, how many of ours. The number of lives lost was delivered with a kind of grim ritual, a dirge, reduced to simple arithmetic.

And I remember when Walter Cronkite concluded that the war could not be won. President Nixon reportedly said privately, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

My own bar mitzvah took place in October 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, just as President Nixon placed American forces on nuclear high alert.

After graduating from college, I moved to Jerusalem for work. The week I arrived, in June 1982, the Lebanon War broke out.

Like many Jews of my generation, the rhythm of my life has been punctuated by wars: Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Hamas terror attacks, and now the unfolding conflict with Iran.

War is not theoretical for us.

It is deadly serious.

War and Its Rhetoric

This past week, Israel and the United States struck Iranian military targets in an effort to degrade their nuclear program and ballistic missile capabilities. Iran has retaliated with missile barrages against Israel, the Gulf states, and American bases. The conflict is spreading across the region.

I recently watched a televised press conference with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, or, as he prefers to call himself, Secretary of War.

What struck me immediately was the tone.

At times, he sounded belligerent, even gleeful, immature, and enthusiastic. Iran, he said, was “toast.”

At one point, he declared:

“Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly… Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it.”

When he spoke about American casualties, he turned it into a political accusation, suggesting critics were exploiting the deaths of soldiers to damage the president.

Standing beside him was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Kaine, who, in contrast, spoke solemnly about the fallen soldiers and their sacrifice.

Thank goodness there was an adult in the room.

A Much Older Story About Power

Watching that moment, I found myself thinking about an ancient story.

The Book of Exodus tells the story of the Golden Calf.

The Israelites have just experienced the most dramatic moments in their history: liberation from Egypt and revelation at Mount Sinai.

Moses ascends the mountain.

Forty days pass.

Soon, the people begin to panic.

They turn to Aaron and say:

קוּם עֲשֵׂה־לָנוּ אֱלֹהים אֲשֶׁר יֵלְכוּ לְפָנֵינוּ
“Come, make us a god who will go before us.”
(Exodus 32:1)

That is all it takes.

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Despite witnessing the plagues of Egypt, the splitting of the sea, and hearing the voice of God at Sinai, just a few weeks without Moses is enough for them to melt down their jewelry and build an idol.

The rabbis do not portray them as monsters.

They portray them as children.

Afraid. Impatient. Unable to tolerate ambiguity.

And that psychological combination, fear mixed with impatience, is exactly the condition that produces catastrophe.

Aaron’s failure

Moses’ brother Aaron tries to manage the situation.

When the crowd demands an idol, he does not confront them directly. He stalls. He improvises. He hopes the moment will pass.

Instead, he ends up facilitating disaster.

The Torah offers a quiet but devastating warning:

Weak leadership can be as dangerous as wicked leadership.

Aaron’s failure is not cruelty.

It is immaturity under pressure.

Moses: The Adult in the Room

Then Moses descends the mountain.

Hearing the celebration around the Golden Calf, he does three things.

First, he smashes the tablets, acknowledging that the covenant has been broken.

Second, he destroys the idol, burning it, grinding it into powder, forcing the people to confront what they have done.

Finally, he turns to God and argues for the people’s survival.

In those three responses, Moses embodies something rare: he holds fury and restraint at the same time.

He understands something essential about leadership:

Power without moral gravity is dangerous.

This is the real lesson of the Golden Calf.

Civilizations are not destroyed only by enemies.

They are also weakened when power falls into the hands of people who are not mature enough to wield it.

When power becomes spectacle, something ancient is happening.

Those words begin to resemble offerings placed before the Golden Calf.

The idol of power.

Panic and Triumph

The Golden Calf story reveals two recurring human temptations.

The first is panic. When uncertainty becomes unbearable, people reach for idols, strongmen, or simple answers.

The second temptation is triumph.

When power seems overwhelming, leaders begin speaking in the language of domination rather than responsibility.

That is why rhetoric matters.

In describing the war, Secretary Hegseth spoke of B-2 bombers, Predator drones, and fighters controlling the skies, promising what he called “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” He declared the war was “never meant to be a fair fight,” and that American forces were now “punching them while they’re down.”

The problem is not that war is hard.

War is hard.

The problem is when the language of war begins to sound less like the burden of power and more like the thrill of exercising it.

When that happens, something ancient and distressing is taking place.

Those words begin to resemble offerings placed before the Golden Calf of power.

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The Torah’s Warning

The Hebrew Bible never romanticizes war.

King David is forbidden to build the Temple because he has shed too much blood.

The prophets envision a world where swords are beaten into plowshares.

Even victory is treated with restraint. The rabbis imagined the angels celebrating when the Egyptians drowned in the sea. God rebukes them:

“My creatures are drowning, and you sing?”

The point is not pacifism.

The point is moral adulthood.

War may sometimes be necessary.

But triumphalism is always dangerous.

The Challenge for Our Moment

Civilization ultimately depends on grown-ups.

Not merely powerful people. Not merely loud people. But people capable of restraint, moral imagination, and humility in the face of catastrophe.

The Israelites fail this test.

Aaron fails this test.

Only Moses passes.

And even Moses must smash the tablets before beginning again.

The war with Iran will eventually end. All wars do.

But the deeper question remains:

When power comes into our hands, will we wield it with wisdom, or will we worship it?

Because the Golden Calf was not only an idol of metal.

It was an idol of power, borne of impatience and fear.

And the most dangerous idols

are the ones we build

while telling ourselves

we are being strong.

David B. Cohen is a rabbi and writer. He publishes reflections on history, politics, and Jewish thought at Conical Boundaries.

War has a way of sidelining nuance.

Yesterday, Israeli and American forces struck Iranian military and government targets. It is reported that Ayatollah Khamenei and many senior military leaders were killed. Iran is retaliating with ballistic missiles, some penetrating layered anti-missile defenses, destroying Israeli neighborhoods, and leaving many casualties. The Gulf States have also been hit. Hizb’Allah just began to unleash missiles toward Israel from the North. The world holds its breath.

For Israelis, this is existential terrain. For Americans, a foreign-policy quagmire.
For American Jews, something else: a moment when old suspicions stir, and our civic footing grows uncertain.

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In the United States, voices on the far right already suggest that Israel “forced” America into war. Conspiracy theories abound. On parts of the left, Israel is condemned outright, and American involvement is framed as imperial overreach. The populist right is splintering. The liberal coalition strains. And Jews once again watch the political winds shift around us.

We have seen this before.

The Long Memory Behind the Present

Iran and Israel were not always enemies. Before 1979, under the Shah, they were strategic partners. Intelligence was shared. Trade flowed. My American-Israeli uncle flew to Tehran monthly for business.

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The Islamic Revolution changed everything. The new regime made opposition to Israel a pillar of its identity. Since then, hostility has layered itself through ideology, proxy warfare (through Hamas and Hizb’Allah), and nuclear brinkmanship. Israel sees an existential threat; Iran sees encirclement. A security dilemma spirals.

That is the geopolitical frame. But geopolitics never stays contained.

The American Jewish Double Bind

When Israel goes to war, American Jews do not become Israeli soldiers. We do not make Pentagon decisions. While we care deeply about Israel and Israelis, we are citizens of the United States.

And yet history teaches that in moments of Middle Eastern conflict, Jews are sometimes treated as though we manipulate hidden controls.

The language begins subtly: “Israel dragged us into this.” Or, “Whose interests are really being served?”

The trope of dual loyalty is among the oldest accusations leveled against Jews. It has never required evidence, only atmosphere. These calumnies echo through history.

So here is the paradox of this moment:

Some conservatives speak of defending Jews and fighting antisemitism on campus and elsewhere through codifying the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism and advancing what they call Project Esther. Yet elements within that same coalition now flirt with narratives that suggest Israel manipulates American power.

Protection and suspicion appearing in the same breath? That should worry us.

IHRA in a Wartime Climate

Codifying the IHRA definition into law is one of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025's objectives. Last week, in conversation with Governor Evers’s staff, I argued against codifying the (IHRA) definition into Wisconsin law.

Not because antisemitism is imaginary. But because the IHRA was never intended to become law or to be incorporated into campus codes of conduct. It was created as a tool for researchers to identify antisemitic language and behavior.

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It was expressly not created, however, to be an instrument to police political speech and activities on university campuses or in civic life. Its unsuitability for legal settings stems from the bill’s specific language, which is intended for social science research rather than for legal settings, where the pursuit of justice necessitates precise legal phrasing.

The desire to include the IHRA definition in State law belies many of its supporters’ true intent: to police political speech, in particular curtail legitimate disagreement about social policy, which, under the IHRA, now risks being labeled as bigotry. Demonstrations on college campuses and in public venues tempt some to police speech aggressively. To permit a definition of anti-Semitism to become a cudgel to police political speech will, in a most ironic fashion, allow hatred of Jews to multiply.

Project Esther and the Politics of Fear

The Heritage Foundation’s decision to name its initiative “Project Esther” was never neutral.

Esther is the Persian queen who reveals her Jewish status to prevent the annihilation of her people. But her courage unfolds within vulnerability. She acts strategically, patiently, within constrained power. It is not a story of majoritarian dominance; it is a story of minority survival.

When Jewish safety becomes embedded within a broader partisan blueprint, especially one that expands executive authority or aligns closely with a single ideological faction, we must ask whether we are protecting Jews or politicizing Jewish fear.

And the advent of war sharpens that question.

If Jewish security fuses too tightly to one camp’s agenda, then when that camp fractures, as parts of the populist right now are, Jews may find themselves collateral in someone else’s intra-party struggle.

We owe it to future generations to note that, historically, Jewish safety in America has depended not on partisan capture but on durable institutions: independent courts, civil liberties, constitutional restraint, and broad coalitions.

We weaken those at our peril.

What This Moment Requires

This moment requires clarity:

• Iran’s regime has funded violence and destabilized the region.

• War carries a grave moral cost.

• American Jews are not agents of American or Israeli policy.

• Antisemitic tropes must be confronted wherever they emerge.

• Democratic norms must not be suspended in the name of defending democracy.

This moment also requires restraint.

• We can support Israel’s right to defend itself without declaring every critic a bigot.

• We can confront antisemitism without expanding state authority beyond constitutional bounds.

• We can grieve civilian suffering without abandoning solidarity.

Above all, we can refuse the false choice between Jewish safety and civic principle.

Esther, Properly Understood

The Scroll of Esther contains no mention of God. Salvation comes through human courage and careful timing. Esther does not lash out. She fasts. She consults. She chooses her moment.

If we invoke her name in our politics, we might emulate her discipline, as well as her bravery.

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War inflames rhetoric. It tests alliances. It surfaces old suspicions about Jewish power and loyalty. It tempts us to trade liberty for security.

But Jewish life in America has flourished precisely because we have been protected by a constitutional order that safeguards minority rights and constrains state power.

To defend that order, even when afraid, is not naïveté. It is principled prudence.

In a moment when bombs fall and words harden, moral steadiness becomes more difficult.

And more necessary.

The Talmud records a strange instruction about Purim:

“Rava said: It is one’s duty to make oneself fragrant with wine on Purim – ad lo yada – until one cannot distinguish between ‘arur Haman’ (cursed be Haman) and ‘barukh Mordekhai’ (blessed be Mordecai)” (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 7b).

Most of us hear this as permission to party to the point of inebriation. To reach a carnival–like moment when ethics erode, and moral distinctions dissolve.

But perhaps ad lo yada, “until one does not know”, is not about getting so altered that we can no longer tell who is the hero and who is the villain.

Perhaps it is about discovering how thin the line can become between hero and villain.1

Because if we read the Megillah carefully, not as comedians staging a spiel or pageant, but as adults who sense the ethical issues of wielding power, the moral distance between Mordecai and Haman narrows as the story unfolds.

And that narrowing is not accidental.

At the beginning of the scroll, Haman is easy to despise.

He is insecure, consumed by status, and unable to tolerate insult. Mordecai’s refusal to bow becomes, in Haman’s imagination, a brutal humiliation. His wounded pride metastasizes into genocidal fury. With cold, administrative efficiency, he persuades King Ahasuerus to authorize the destruction of the Jews, “to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate” everyone, including women and children.

Haman is grievance armed with empire.

The story delights in his undoing. He is paraded in humiliation. He turns to the queen in desperation. He is hanged on the very gallows he constructed for Mordecai.

In short: They tried to kill us; we won; let’s eat.

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But the Megillah does not end there.

After Haman’s execution, Mordecai ascends to power.

He leaves the palace clothed in royal blue and white, wearing a great golden crown. The king removes his signet ring, the instrument of imperial authority, and places it on Mordecai’s hand.

A reversal of fortune. The persecuted outsider becomes second only to the king.

And then a new decree is issued.

Persian law makes it difficult to revoke the first edict, but it can still be counteracted. The new edict states the Jews are authorized to defend themselves. The language of this decree is deliberately familiar. It echoes the earlier one: they may “destroy, kill, and annihilate” those who threaten them.

We know that self-defense is not genocide. Context matters.

But the symmetry is unmistakable.

The machinery of annihilation has changed hands. The balance of power has shifted.

The Megillah records the result with calm restraint. Seventy-five thousand enemies are killed throughout the provinces. In Shushan alone, hundreds perish. At Esther’s request, the violence continues into a second day.

There is no heavenly retinue admonished for celebrating. No prophetic voice condemning homicidal excess. No moral summation.

Only celebration.

At this point, an unexpected understanding of the Talmud’s instruction begins to take form. It solidifies into a pointed commentary.

It is noted that the two phrases, “arur Haman” and “barukh Mordekhai”, share the same numerical value in gematria: 502.

According to one traditional reckoning, the blessing and the curse are somehow equivalent.

What might that mean?

Are we to imagine someone sober enough to calculate Hebrew letter values yet drunk enough to confuse the phrases’ meaning? That, puzzlingly, seems to have been the view of the seventeenth-century halachist R. Abraham Gombiner.

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But perhaps the Talmud is not describing confusion.

Perhaps it is offering moral arithmetic.

At the beginning of the story, the difference between Haman and Mordecai could not be clearer. One seeks annihilation; the other resists it. One weaponizes grievance; the other represents threatened survival.

And yet by the end, when Mordecai wields the king’s ring and oversees a campaign that leaves more than seventy-five thousand Persians dead, the moral calculus feels less clear.

The blessing and the curse add up to the same number.

The words echo. The ring changes hands.

The Megillah is a book of masks. God’s name never appears. Motives are hidden. Reversals multiply.

Perhaps the most dangerous mask is the one worn by the righteous when they acquire authority.

Does having suffered prevent us from causing suffering? History suggests otherwise.

Power does not ask whether you were once vulnerable.

Power asks only how you will use it now.

Yes, Mordecai is not Haman. His motives differ. His context differs. Self-defense is not genocidal ambition.

And yet he emerges from the story clothed in the same imperial splendor, issuing decrees through the same machinery, commanding violence in language that echoes those who once threatened his people.

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The Megillah does not condemn Mordecai. But neither does it valorize him.

Instead, it gives us ad lo yada, a ritual in which moral clarity begins to blur.

Which suggests the most dangerous moment in any political story is not when the villain rises.

It is when the hero does, and no one thinks to ask what power is doing to his soul.

“Blessed is Mordecai.” “Cursed is Haman.”

At the beginning, the difference is obvious.

By the end, it is more fragile than we might wish.

Ad lo yada may not mean forgetting who the villain was.

It may mean recognizing how quickly righteousness can inherit the tools of its enemy,

and how intoxicating it feels when the ring finally fits our own finger.

The question Purim leaves hanging is not whether we can tell them apart when we are drunk.

It is whether we can tell them apart when we are sober and in power.

For nearly a century, two writers have shaped our dystopian visions.

George Orwell warned that we would be crushed by power. In 1984, truth collapses under surveillance, language decays into doublespeak, and fear becomes the governing principle.

Aldous Huxley feared something more gentle. In Brave New World, we are not terrorized into submission. We are entertained into it. The pursuit of pleasure replaces purpose. Yearning for comfort replaces conscience.

For years, the debate has been: Which world are we living in?

The answer is both. And neither, entirely.

A more accurate answer requires the voice of a third dystopian prophet.

Kurt Vonnegut saw a danger that was neither purely authoritarian nor purely anesthetic. He feared what happens when systems, efficient or chaotic, lose their moral center.

Not tyranny.

Not sedation.

Administrative efficiency to the point of absurdity.

When Systems Become Grotesque

Consider the short story, “Harrison Bergeron.”

The year is 2081. Equality is enforced so rigorously that excellence is illegal. The intelligent wear headphone radios that shatter their thoughts. The strong are weighted down. The beautiful are masked.

The goal is fairness. The result is a flattening that leads to universal mediocrity.

And the climax is not a secret arrest or a shadowy disappearance. It is a televised execution. In the spectacle, the grotesque becomes normal.

In “2 B R 0 2 B” (to decode, think Shakespeare), the crisis of overpopulation has been solved. Birth is permitted only if someone volunteers to die. Equilibrium is preserved. The euthanasia hostess is polite. The forms are in order.

In “Welcome to the Monkey House,” sexual desire is chemically suppressed in the name of social stability, not with the bliss of Huxley’s drug Soma, but with a kind of bureaucratic sterility.

Everything functions. And yet something essential has gone missing.

Vonnegut understood that a society does not have to be overtly cruel to subvert human dignity. It only has to become distorted and elevate one value so completely that other values disappear.

Beyond Efficiency, Toward Moral Perversion

It is tempting to say that Vonnegut warned against overconfident administration. That is partly true.

But what he really dramatized was something broader: the moral perversion that results when institutions detach from their human purpose.

Sometimes that perversion looks like efficiency taken too far, as in the arithmetic neatness of “2 B R 0 2 B.”

Sometimes it looks like absurd spectacle, as in the exaggerated handicaps and televised violence of “Harrison Bergeron.”

Sometimes it looks like policy so rational that it becomes inhuman.

And sometimes it looks chaotic, institutions destroyed from within, where principle has been replaced by theater.

Vonnegut’s worlds are not always sleek and shiny. They are often ridiculous.

That is the point.

Absurdity is not intended as comic relief. It is a diagnostic tool. When public life becomes exaggerated, incoherent, or surreal, it reveals that something deeper has been unmoored.

A Civic Warning

We often frame our anxieties in Orwellian terms: censorship, propaganda, the manipulation of truth. Those dangers are real.

We also recognize Huxley’s warning about the dangers of constant distraction and curated comfort.

But Vonnegut’s insight may be particularly of this moment, when public life feels unstable, when institutions wobble between overreach and incoherence, when spectacle substitutes for substance, when policies appear untethered from lived human consequences.

His warning is not that systems fail.

It is that they can function, or malfunction, without reference to human dignity.

Which means: A society can be efficient and unjust.

It can be chaotic and still deeply structured in its distortions.

It can be loud and theatrical while quietly erasing the individual.

The Tower and the Person

It is hardly a new problem.

The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is not merely about ambition. It is about reduction. One language. One project. One defining goal: “Let us make a name for ourselves.”

The ancient rabbinic imagination of Midrash adds a chilling detail: if a brick fell from the tower, the builders wept. If a person fell, they kept building.

The project mattered more than the human being.

That is the civic danger.

Societal structure itself is not inherently problematic. Judaism builds courts, enacts laws, and establishes just procedures. It values order.

But it also embeds a radical interruption: pikuach nefesh, the demand that the preservation of a single life overrides almost everything else.

In short: The system exists for the person, not the other way around.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in The Lonely Man of Faith, described two dimensions of humanity. One builds and masters. The other stands vulnerable, seeking dignity and relationship. A healthy society makes room for both.

When institutions forget Soloveitchik’s second dimension, the human being is reduced to a function, a case file, a demographic category, a prop in a larger drama.

That is not so much tyranny as it is utility.

The Third Prophet

Orwell feared power without truth.

Huxley feared pleasure without purpose.

Vonnegut feared the hollowing out of meaning, the moment when systems, whether orderly or chaotic, cease to serve the human being.

And he feared forgetting.

Forgetting that amid the chaos, each person stands before us not as a data point, not as a category, not as a prop in a national drama, but as a bearer of dignity.

If we can hold on to that, even imperfectly, dystopia remains fiction.

If we lose it, dystopia will not need to announce itself.

It will simply feel normal.