Parshah Commentary

The Facebook comments and WhatsApp diatribes I have written and deleted over the past several years, if compiled, would fill a book. Thank God they will not be. It would be a chronicle of aggravation, in which I repeatedly trip the wire of someone else’s grievance or condescension, falling into the pit where they await me, also ensnared. (You think my internationalist reading of Hanukkah is blithely naive? Well, when we dispassionately consider the scholarly sources, it does seem that perhaps you are the idiot, not I.) Though I confess that I am particularly vulnerable to reactive polemic—to the sadomasochistic exhilaration of a verbal ping-pong match, in which the smashes and slices grow ever more nastily violent—I’m hardly alone. I have been subjected to much unmerited attack, and have observed thirdhand even more. And while I sometimes feel I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by online arguments, there are real reasons to enter the fray. Here we all are, after all, amid a genocide. And we are immediately proximate, by a ghostly digital affordance, to others sharing infinitely graded, subtly differentiated outrages, with no clarity on which misstatements of fact to correct, which unabashed barbarities to contest.

In some circumstances, religious Jews must critique. The requirement of tokhehah—rebuke or correction—is derived from this week’s (double) parshah, Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, in which God commands the Israelites, “Reprove your fellow.” Which emails, texts, and posts qualify? This verse has occasioned a voluminous rabbinic literature, which I will not rehearse in full, lest you censure me for long-windedness. Who is “your fellow,” who must, or even can, be rebuked? The early sage Rabbi Elazar son Azaryah once exclaimed, “I swear there is no one in this generation who is able to accept reproof.” Meanwhile Rabbi Akiva swore that no one in his generation knew how to rebuke. Even as they renounce tokhehah, however, these rabbis are implicitly performing it, eschewing direct reproof but delivering a second-order, generalized sermon, thus anticipating the liberal (or me, above) bemoaning “our” uncivil discourse.

Puzzlingly, in our parshah, this divine directive appears as one of several short, staccato directives, whose relations are tantalizingly ambiguous: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself: I am God.” That but, for instance, is often rendered as “and”—a translational nuance on which hinges the question: Is incurring guilt invoked to limit critique or to motivate it? The latter option implies a doctrine of collective responsibility. When I did not castigate my Israeli acquaintance for soliciting contributions to buy body armor for West Bank settlers, perhaps it is as if I had Venmoed her the cash. And then, are those different terms for the vexing Other (brother, kinsman, countryman, fellow) merely elegantly varied synonyms, or are subtle contrasts intended between differently neighborly intimacies and what they require of us? And so on—one can easily multiply questions. I suspect intentional obscurity, perhaps capturing the absurdity of settling fine-grained interpersonal and emotional problems with pithy maxims.

Last year I learned a medieval hot take about tokhehah, which I found novel and refreshing. Ramban, a 13th-century Catalan commentator, suggests that the Torah is not talking about general moral correction, but about cases when someone has wronged you. Ramban’s proposal has the advantage of tying the verses into a neat bundle. When someone acts against your will, you may want to fester in resentment or to retaliate; the Torah implores us in such a case to indulge neither temptation, but instead to advocate for our needs directly. As additional evidence, Ramban points to what tokhehah means when it appears in a story in Breishit: “Abraham reproved the [foreign king] Abimelech for the well of water his servants stole”—that is, about Abraham’s direct, material interest. For the Ramban, we are commanded to rectify only the errors that harm us.

Ramban’s suggestion intriguingly anticipates a classic Marxist insight. Marx, as the philosopher Vanessa Christina Wills elaborates in her level-headed recent book, Marx’s Ethical Vision, is skeptical of the idea that merely telling people what to do can improve the world—not because Marx is amoral, but because he thinks social change results out of self-interested struggles of historical classes. Marx could vituperate and excoriate with the best of them, but rarely by appealing to abstract rules—and with no delusion that he could reliably persuade elites to act against their interests. Rather, Marxists organize the working class by appealing to—if also sometimes clarifying—what they need and want. They thus see “moralism”—ascetic sermons about placing one’s duties above one’s needs, or a faith in abstract ethical debate divorced from a historical theory of change—as itself bourgeois ideology, which mystifies the world and impedes working-class power.

Marx’s and Ramban’s privileging of interest almost necessitates some sort of ethical psychotherapy, to untangle which of our immediate responses derive from our real needs, and which are the intellectual ephemera of scholastic point-scoring, utopian fantasies of convincing someone of something their salary depends on their not understanding, the profitable anxieties induced by the digital platforms and their sinister logics, or the perversely libidinal pleasures of moral disputation itself. In other words, when God concludes “I am God,” the assertion may be that universal critique is a uniquely divine prerogative. Our humbler job is just to look after ourselves.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, is out now.