How Should We Engage in Communal Rebuke?

Aron Wander: Nathan, what’s bringing you to this conversation?

Nathan Goldman: I’ve been interested in questions about how to relate to the Jewish community around Zionism for a long time. These questions first really surfaced for me almost a decade ago, when I started organizing with IfNotNow, whose theory of change is about moving Jews. But I’ve confronted them in a new way since October 7th and the beginning of the genocide, when I first got involved in conversations around Israel/Palestine at my synagogue. As the constituency there that’s confused or conflicted about Zionism has grown—and as others have clung to liberal Zionism—it has seemed important to me to show up as an anti-Zionist voice and try to pull the community to the left.

I’ve felt really ambivalent about this work. On the one hand, I feel a responsibility to create the kind of community I want, in this place where my wife and I are building our Jewish life, where we take our kids to services and where they will go to religious school. And in a more brass tacks political sense, it feels like this is the way I can make the most of my positionality, pushing people within my particular community—especially because it’s a progressive Jewish space that’s very unusually welcoming of my perspective, so it feels like there’s a real possibility of reaching people. On the other hand, I often find the work very challenging and draining. And I find myself wondering whether it’s effective. Am I actually changing anyone’s mind? Are the rhetorical compromises that I end up having to make corrosive to my own politics? What impact does doing this work have on the synagogue being a spiritual home for me? I also struggle with what posture I should have toward those I’m working to move, and wonder how my orientation and affect shape what’s politically possible.

Aron: For me, too, this question feels urgent both personally and politically. I graduated from rabbinical school in May. I trained for five years to be a rabbi, and felt really called to and excited about that work. And I also felt really clear I didn’t want to be in a context in which I felt like I was going to have to lie about Israel/Palestine. I had to be able to speak with moral clarity about occupation, apartheid, genocide. Even if I didn’t use those particular terms at every moment, I had to be able to be honest about what’s happening on the ground and my opposition to nationalism and domination. At the same time, I was trying to figure out whether I was concerned with the purity of my own politics over the efficacy of the political project of advancing justice in Israel/Palestine.

Both of the sources we’re looking at today deal with the obligation of “tochecha,” or “rebuke.” This mitzvah comes from Vayikra, where the Torah says, “Do not hate your sibling in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your fellow and do not bear sin on their account.”^[1] The way in which these three elements—not hating your sibling, rebuking your fellow, and not bearing sin on their account—relate to each other is itself complicated, and there are rabbinic traditions of both constraining the mitzvah and expanding it. There’s a rabbinic text that focuses on the word “fellow” and says that this means that your obligation is only to rebuke your fellow Jew who is bought into the rabbinic system.^[2] Similarly, there’s a rabbinic text that says that just as it’s a mitzvah to say that which will be heard—meaning that you have an obligation to rebuke if it’ll work—so too, it is a mitzvah not to say that which will not be heard, meaning that if you think your rebuke will go unheard, it’s actually forbidden to state it.^[3] On the other hand, one rabbinic tradition says you’re obligated to rebuke someone until the point at which they physically strike you.^[4] Perhaps even more well known is a text that says that if you don’t protest against something for which you are able to protest, you’re responsible for it. This same text suggests that because we can never know whether or not our protest will work, we are always responsible for the attempt.^[5] So there’s a vast tradition on this mitzvah.

With that in mind, we’ll turn to the first source by Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tamares. He was a Lithuanian anarchist, pacifist, and Orthodox rabbi in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He’s actually come slightly into vogue in the last few years, particularly because of his very trenchant critique of Zionism, on anti-nationalist and pacifist principles.

Nathan reads.

Aron: If you were to translate this into your own terms, what’s Rabbi Tamares saying?

Nathan: He’s saying that to rebuke is a gesture of relationship with a particular community that creates or shores up the connection. And so the very grounds on which I’m able to sway the collective in the way that I’d like to is also a way for me to be carried along with them, meaning there’s a kind of riskiness in rebuke. There’s an opportunity where you can move people, but the same thing that allows for that opportunity creates a risk that you will be carried along with their wickedness.

Aron: I’m curious if that resonates. It reminded me of what you were sharing about your moral calculus around organizing your synagogue: on the one hand, the importance of that work, and on the other hand, the fear or danger of some sort of corrosiveness of being engaged in those politics.

Nathan: In one sense, it does not resonate, because when I engage with liberal Zionists whom I hope to move toward my politics, I just never worry that I’m going to come out of a conversation having become a liberal Zionist. But in another sense it does resonate. In order to be in community and have these kinds of conversations, I do contort myself in particular strategic ways. I speak in a very different register about Israel/Palestine and Zionism with the staff at Jewish Currents, or with other people who I know share a certain baseline, than I do with people at my synagogue who don’t, or who I’m not sure about. I’m sometimes more pragmatic about how I deploy words like “genocide” or “apartheid.” I’ve definitely had many instances of choosing to censor myself. And to some degree, I don’t find that inherently problematic—that’s just part of doing political work. But I also worry about it: Does the habit of speaking in this way somehow change my politics, or my relation to the world, or my solidarities?

Aron: With some of those questions in mind, let’s turn to the last part of his essay.

Nathan reads.

Nathan: I am kind of repelled by the focus on one’s own moral purity. Because “the spiritual prowess of the early prophets” seems like a really high bar—an actually unreachable standard—it sounds like his broad prescription is to withdraw. That doesn’t sit well with me because it’s so focused on one’s own righteousness, rather than the well-being of others, or the political effect in the world, which I think is much more important than whether I’m corrupting myself. At the same time, I think that the idea of “a bill of divorce regarding spiritual matters” is very interesting, though I don’t know what he means practically.

Aron: I think in this context, when he says “spiritual,” he means “ethical.”

Nathan: In that sense, I guess I already feel spiritually divorced from my synagogue community. When it comes to Israel/Palestine, at least, it’s not where I turn for ethical guidance. And yet I do worry there’s something untenable in that for my own context, which is quite different from the one Tamares is talking about, because I go to synagogue to fill needs that are fundamentally spiritual rather than practical—nothing is about planting, harvesting, or building railways.

Aron: I also don’t find this so appealing politically. Tamares is saying, “If I can’t have a guarantee that rebuke will work, then I’m not going to do it.” Out of an inability to deal with or accept that fundamental unknowability about politics, he ends up with a deep fatalism, where the only thing he can do is withdraw. I also think the distinction he draws between material connection to a community and ethical implication doesn’t make much sense. I can’t say: “I materially live in capitalism, but ethically I have nothing to do with it.” Our material implications carry ethical consequences. But what speaks to me is the deep degree of despair. He’s writing after World War I, which, in some ways, feels really resonant with our moment. After the horrors of the war, Tamares believes that surely everyone will have learned the lesson that nationalism is bad, war is bad. But instead, the lesson people drew from World War I is that everybody should have a nation-state. And if everybody is going to continue this horrific thing, what hope is there? All he can do is withdraw. And he turns out to be right in a certain sense, that World War II follows on its heels, and we don’t seem to have learned much from the horrific evils of nationalism and militarism.

Nathan: When he says, “All that is incumbent upon me is to struggle against being dragged along by the collective”—I read that at first as giving up. But I think there’s a way of reading it instead as a real challenge and responsibility: It is incumbent on me to struggle against being dragged along. Ultimately, what feels like the biggest question here is: Do you have to put yourself on the line ethically in order to rebuke or sway or organize? One premise of some of the work I have found myself doing is that it is possible to move people around an issue on which I myself have no intention of moving. But Tamares proposes that that depends upon “an extreme spiritual prowess,” where no matter what people around you are doing, you’re going to do the right thing. I certainly don’t think of my steadfastness as reliant on my own wisdom or skill. I think it relies on having relationships with people and other political communities, with friends and loved ones and comrades whom I learn from, with whom I disagree, and who might rebuke me and whose rebuke I take seriously. I see that as the ground of being able to hold fast to my ethical commitments, which strengthens my ability to enter into spaces where there’s much more disagreement. That feels like a real possibility for me that wasn’t true for him, or that he didn’t see. Still, I do worry about having an alienated, instrumental relationship to my own spiritual community. That’s small potatoes in the context of the violence we’re talking about. But there is a possible loss, I think, in treating that space as a terrain of struggle.

Aron: So much of what you raise is really about the question of relationship. It’s not a particularly compelling rebuke to say, “I actually am totally independent of you guys. I have no ethical relationship to you, but you’re doing the wrong thing.” Strategically, it’s not going to work, both because the person being rebuked won’t actually feel any stakes, and also because it comes off as condescending and obnoxious. But I think the fundamental question Tamares doesn’t really deal with is whether I should act even if I don’t have a guarantee of the effectiveness of rebuke. This question gets picked up in the next source, which is by Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, a Jerusalemite rabbi and a major halachic authority who died in 2006. He has a 21-volume set of responsa called the Tzitz Eliezer, and he’s wrestling in this responsum with the question of rebuke.

Nathan reads.

Aron: The obligation to rebuke someone outside of the system who is still Jewish is, for him, contingent upon the degree of coercive power the community has over them. If we can punish them in a way that would stop them from doing what they’re doing, we’re responsible. But if they are outside of our power such that there’s not actually anything we can do about them, then we do not have that obligation.

Nathan: In one sense, he seems more optimistic about rebuke. But he lands by saying, “If these clear things don’t apply, then you shouldn’t try.” There is something nicely pragmatic about it: Do you have the ability to hold people accountable? Then you have a responsibility. If you don’t have the ability to do that, then what are we doing here?

Aron: In some ways, it offers us a challenge on the Jewish left: Am I really responsible for Jews whose behavior I can’t change, for communities I have no connection to? The separatism he advocates for at the end strikes me as different from Tamares, because it’s actually taken from a clear sense of recognizing when you don’t have any kind of political path, as opposed to a preservation of purity.

Nathan: That’s helpful, and, if you take a step back from the question of punishment, it speaks to some of the ways I think about my calculation in terms of synagogue organizing.

Aron: Right. And I think here, “punishment” is a stand-in for: Do I have power?

Nathan: In my case, I think I do have at least some power, because I participate in the community, and so I’m taken seriously as someone who’s part of it.

Aron: Let’s move along. In the next part of this responsum, Waldenberg is going to turn to the question of our affective relationship to those we’re rebuking. He will first quote a statement by the Beit Yosef, Rabbi Joseph Caro, a 16th-century rabbi who lived in Spain and the Land of Israel, that says that you shouldn’t quarrel with people who mock religious Jews. Then he’ll cite a later critique of that statement by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan^[8]—who we’ll refer to by the name of one of his works, the Biur Halachah—which complicates this injunction.

Nathan reads.

Nathan: So in a literal sense, he’s saying: “There is this idea to not fight with people who are mocking observant Jews. But if this is happening in public, and it’s going to have a wider effect, then you should escalate. In fact, you should hate them, and you should fight as hard as you can against them.” That latter posture feels distinct from rebuke to me, because it’s an appeal to undermine their efforts. It seems like these are not people we’re trying to get on the right path. But I think it’s really interesting that he thinks you should also hate them, because intuitively that seems outside the realm of the practical. The rest of the concern seems so pragmatic, which makes me wonder whether he understands the hatred as also being pragmatic.

Aron: It might be helpful to read further in the Tzitz Eliezer. He’s again quoting the Biur Halachah, and pointing out that, in other places, its author, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, actually seems to note the dangers of this kind of affective response. And so he’s asking: How could the same person have said these two things?

Nathan reads.

Nathan: So the back-and-forth is that the same person has said, in one context, you should hate these people, but elsewhere, has quoted the Talmud, which says that you shouldn’t hate the wicked until you’ve sufficiently rebuked them. But there is an uncertainty about whether you can ever sufficiently rebuke them, which means you shouldn’t hate them. And so how do we square “it’s good to hate” and “you shouldn’t hate”? The resolution proposes that you should not hate people who are just themselves wicked, but you should hate people who are trying to get other people on board. There can be a kind of jouissance in hating random individuals with bad politics, but there’s no political use to that, except me feeling superior. But for people who are having a broader effect in the world, maybe there is a possible political utility: It could support my organizing against them, if that work involves getting others to view them unfavorably—to join me in hatred—as a way of curbing their influence.

Aron: With that in mind, let’s move toward the end of this long responsum. The text quotes a rabbinic principle called “moridin”—causing someone to descend or putting someone down—which is the idea that for certain kinds of sinners, you can literally, but in this case also figuratively, lower them into a pit, causing conditions that lead to their physical harm. Even if you yourself are not permitted to cause them physical harm, you can set up scenarios that would harm them.

Nathan reads.