As a Jew

Jewish tradition insists, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it, “that God has made a covenant with a singular people, but that does not exclude the possibility of other peoples, cultures and faiths finding their own relationship with God.”

The Presbyterian minister David A. R. Clark makes an important point when he commends Christian institutions that no longer promote antisemitism but also insists that more is required of them to oppose it. As he puts it, “it’s almost like if a group assembled dangerous weapons, used them for harm, and then left them out in public for anyone to pick up, saying, ‘Well those aren’t our responsibility; we don’t use those anymore.’”

The author and Jewish educator Ben Freeman writes about the pitfalls of focusing one’s “entire Jewish identity on serving other people.” There’s certainly plenty of support in Jewish tradition for serving non-Jews in need. But when I went around insisting that “social justice is my Judaism,” was I in some way arguing that my existence as a Jew is valid because it benefits people other than Jews?

I also understand why Jews sometimes cite the Holocaust as a reason for our commitment to helping the vulnerable: we know what it’s like to be persecuted, and that’s why we stand up for other victims of persecution. But Jews don’t need a genocide to teach us that lesson. We have our sacred texts, with their repeated insistence on loving the stranger and caring for widows, orphans, and the poor—commandments that came not from the Nazis but, according to Jewish tradition, from God. I agree with the sociologist David Hirsh that “the frequently repeated idea that Jews should know better after the Holocaust is mortifying. Auschwitz was not a positive learning experience.”

Even if someone’s words or actions aren’t antisemitic in their intent, they can certainly be antisemitic in their impact. And if we’re going to insist that impact, not just intent, matters with other forms of bias, then we should do the same with antisemitism

Stripping Jews of state power seems like what the author and social commentator Rob Henderson deems a “luxury belief,” an opinion that confers status on a privileged person who holds it but has harmful consequences for less privileged people - harm from which the privileged person is protected. A classic example is the belief that we should “defund the police.” The consequences of that belief fall on less privileged neighborhoods where cutting police means more crime. If you have the luxury of living in a safe neighborhood, however, you’ll be largely protected from those consequences

People sometimes criticize religion by quoting Karl Marx’s assertion that it’s the “opiate of the masses.” But as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks pointed out, “Opium desensitizes us to pain,” while the texts I studied were doing the exact opposite. They were, as Sacks notes, sensitizing me again and again to the particular sufferings of others, urging me to really see people.

Finally, instead of the dogmatic, either-or, black-and-white thinking that characterizes so much of our current discourse, Jewish tradition tends to speak in both-and shades of gray, insisting that we balance competing claims and honor seemingly contradictory truths. It generally speaks not in dogma, but in dialogue - one in which opposing viewpoints are aired and considered and we strive to see both the truth, and untruth, in both.

I cringe whenever I think back to my days as a “social justice Jew” who said things like “My Jewish values tell me X,” and X was usually some simplistic, dogmatic statement of my own opinion on a certain policy issue. Jewish values are outlined in Jewish texts, which do indeed contain centuries’ worth of thought about social justice. But I had encountered hardly any Jewish texts, or any books summarizing their wisdom on social justice, so I’m not sure what I was talking about

Ahad Ha’am, once pointed out, the blood libel—the accusation that Jews drink the blood of Christian children—while a nightmare for Jews, taught them an important lesson. Any Jew who knows anything about Jewish tradition, he wrote, knows that Jews do not consume blood. Doing so is strictly forbidden by Jewish law. Thus the blood libel taught Jews that “everybody can be wrong, and the Jews right.”