The Jewish Currents editorial staff is off this week to recharge, so there is no Shabbat Reading List today. But here’s this week’s parshah commentary. See you in September!

Parshat Re’eh

This week’s parshah, Re’eh, features the central textual source for the idea that Jewish unity is a concrete obligation. The verse in question prohibits the Israelites from practicing self-mutilation as a mourning ritual, a common custom among the surrounding nations. Playing on the sonic similarity between the Hebrew words for “gash” (from the root “g-d-d”) and “group” (from the root “a-g-d”), an early rabbinic midrash explains that there is also a prohibition on forming “opposing factions.” Later commentators offer a variety of reasons that such a ban is necessary: Rashi argues that it allows Jews to avoid a situation where there are contradictory accepted halachic practices, while the Rambam contends that it prevents intracommunal strife.

Approaching the commentaries on this verse, I felt wary. In my experience, calls for Jewish unity almost always function as demands for the left to give up its values and accede to the right—an attempt to stifle crucial dissent within the community. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Talmud, famous for its polyvocality, also seems uneasy with this dictum: In one discussion of the verse, the rabbis list cases in which there are a variety of customs or even laws mandating different practices in different places. The sage Abaye ultimately narrows the prohibition on forming factions to the specific case of a single city with two courts—one that follows the rulings of Hillel and one that follows those of Shammai. According to Abaye, it’s perfectly permissible for there to be Jewish courts from opposing legal schools, but only if they are in separate cities.

The Radbaz, a 15th- and 16th-century rabbi and halachic scholar, interprets Abaye’s position in a surprising and generative way: Because the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai each have a robust number of followers, he argues, “it is as if they were two courts in two different cities, which is all the more so the case because their dispute is well known”—that is, because their positions are sufficiently distinct and widely understood. The Radbaz thus allows for communal division by expanding the concept of the city from a geographic entity to a social one. His reading echoes a similar interpretation from Yosef ibn Lev, a 16th-century rabbi who taught in Salonica, who wrote that because there were so many distinct languages and communities in this port city, “each community has the status of its own city.” Rabbi David HaKohen, a 15th- and 16th-century rabbi from Corfu, on Greece’s opposite coast, agreed that in such a case, “the residents of the city are not subject to the residents of another city . . . and this is clearly not in violation of the prohibition on forming factions.”

What would it mean to apply this logic to the contemporary political question of Jewish unity? We might think of the Jewish left as its own city, with its own legal perspectives and commitments, but without any obligation to seek unity beyond those bounds. This would entail certain responsibilities. The Talmud names specific institutions a city must have and roles that must be filled for it to be a suitable place of residence for a Torah scholar, a list that functions as a set of minimum requirements for a Jewish collective; these include having its own court, charity fund, and teacher of young children. (The Shulchan Aruch, an authoritative Jewish legal code, also emphasizes education, ruling that the residents of any city that does not appoint a teacher must be boycotted—and that if this tactic does not compel the appointment of one, the city must be destroyed.) The Jewish left might benefit from being guided by the laws that bind a city, taking seriously the necessity of creating independent and sustainable institutions.

Of course, there are also limitations to this line of thinking. Taken to its logical conclusion, the idea that each group is its own city would splinter the left; camps representing divergent strategies would retreat to their own corners, precluding working together across points of reasonable disagreement toward common goals. To illustrate the risks of such internecine disputes, the second-century sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai offers an instructive analogy: “It is like one who brings together two ships and ties them together with anchors and bars and leaves them in the middle of the sea and builds a palace on top of them. As long as the ships are tied together, the palace endures. But if the ships split apart, the palace ceases to endure.” Ultimately, the question facing us is not whether we should value unity in itself, but rather what palace we are seeking to build—and whose ship we should bind to our own.

Maya Rosen is the Israel/Palestine fellow at Jewish Currents.