פסח על שום מה?

 מקור שמו של החג פֶּסַח נעוץ באחד המאורעות הדרמטיים בסיפור יציאת מצרים – ה’ פָּסַח על בתי בני ישראל וכך ניצלו בכוריהם. הפסוקים עצמם קושרים ביניהם: “וַַאֲמַרְתֶּם זֶבַח פֶּסַח הוּא לַה’ אֲשֶׁר פָּסַח עַל בָּתֵּי בְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּמִצְרַיִם בְּנָגְפּוֹ אֶת מִצְרַיִם וְאֶת בָּתֵּינוּ הִצִּיל” (שמות יב, כז; וכן בפסוקים יג, כג). מקובל על רבים כי לִפְסֹח הוראתו ‘לדלג’, ‘לחלוף על פני’, ולפי זה דילג ה’ על בתי ישראל והכה רק את בתי המצרִים. הוראה זו של הפועל פָּסַח באה בכל המילונים העבריים ואומנם בהוראה זו הפועל משמש בעברית בת ימינו. ביטוי מפורש לקשר שבין פֶּסַח להבנה הזאת מובע בשמו של החג בפיהם של דוברי אנגלית – Passover.

ברם עיון במקורות העברית מגלה שההסבר הזה אינו פשוט כלל ועיקר.[1]

לפסוח – ‘לדלג’

ההתקבלות הבלתי מעורערת של פָּסַח במובן ‘דילג’ שמורה ככל הנראה לרש”י. בפירושו לפסוק בשמות יב, יג הוא קובע “ואני אומר כל פסיחה לשון דילוג וקפיצה: “ופסחתי” – מדלג היה מבתי ישראל לבתי מצרים, שהיו שרויין זה בתוך זה [כלומר גרו בשכנות ולכן היה צריך לפסוח על חלק מהבתים]”.[2]

הוראה זו לא נתחדשה בפירוש רש”י אלא הייתה ידועה היטב כבר מתקופת בית שני. הדים לה אפשר למצוא בספר היוֹבלים, מן הספרים החיצוניים למקרא (מן המאה השנייה לפני הספירה), ובכתבי פילון ויוסף בן מתתיהו (מן המאה הראשונה לספירה). אף בוולגטה, תרגום המקרא ללטינית, הפועל פָּסַח מיתרגם transivit, ‘עבר’.[3] הבנה זו מובאת במפורש בספרות חז”ל (בדרשה שמגייסת את ערעור העיצורים הגרוניים ח–ע בתקופתם): “אל תקרי ‘ופסחתי’ אלא ‘ופסעתי’, שהמקום מדלג על בתי בניו במצרים” (מכילתא דר’ ישמעאל בא, ז). זו דרך המלך גם בפרשנות ימי הביניים, ובכללהּ כאמור פירוש רש”י.

פרשני המקרא נתנו דעתם גם על פעלים מן השורש פס”ח מחוץ לסיפור יציאת מצרים – לציון מי שנעשה פִּסֵּחַ,[4] צולע, מי שלקה ברגליו: “וְלִיהוֹנָתָן בֶּן שָׁאוּל בֵּן נְכֵה רַגְלָיִם… וַתִּשָּׂאֵהוּ אֹמַנְתּוֹ וַתָּנֹס וַיְהִי בְּחׇפְזָהּ לָנוּס וַיִּפֹּל וַיִּפָּסֵחַ” (שמואל ב ד, ד). דרכו של פִּסֵּחַ לצלוע, כלומר להלך במין דילוג, בקפיצות. וכן בביטוי הנודע בנאום אליהו בהר הכרמל: “עַד מָתַי אַתֶּם פֹּסְחִים עַל שְׁתֵּי הַסְּעִפִּים” (מלכים א יח, כא), היינו מדלגים בין שתי אפשרויות (“אִם ה’ הָאֱלֹהִים לְכוּ אַחֲרָיו וְאִם הַבַּעַל לְכוּ אַחֲרָיו”) ומתקשים להכריע.

לפסוח – ‘להגן’

ברם במקור מקראי אחד עולה בבירור שפָּסַח פירושו הֵגֵן: “כְּצִפֳּרִים עָפוֹת כֵּן יָגֵן ה’ צְבָאוֹת עַל יְרוּשָׁלָ͏ִם, גָּנוֹן וְהִצִּיל פָּסֹחַ וְהִמְלִיט” (ישעיהו לא, ה). בצלע האחרונה בפסוק יש תקבולת פנימית: אל גָּנוֹן (מלשון הגנה) מקביל פָּסֹחַ,[5] אל הִצִּיל – הִמְלִיט (כמו מילט).

אף פסוקי יציאת מצרים מתקבלים יפה במובן הזה: “פָּסַח עַל בָּתֵּי בְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל” פירושו ‘הגן על בתי בני ישראל’. עניין ההגנה האישית מובלט ביתר שאת בשני הפסוקים האחרים בפרשה: “וּפָסַחְתִּי עֲלֵכֶם וְלֹא יִהְיֶה בָכֶם נֶגֶף לְמַשְׁחִית” (פס’ יב); “וּפָסַח ה’ עַל הַפֶּתַח וְלֹא יִתֵּן הַמַּשְׁחִית לָבֹא אֶל בָּתֵּיכֶם לִנְגֹּף” (פס’ כג). ואומנם כך מיתרגם הפועל פָּסַח בתרגום השבעים (תרגום המקרא ליוונית מן המאה השלישית לפנה”ס)[6] ובתרגום נֵאופיטי (תרגום התורה לארמית). תפיסה זו עולה גם בספרות חז”ל: “והקב”ה הגן על בתי בניו במצרים כדי שלא ינָגפו, שנאמר ‘ופסח ה’ על הפתח'” (מכילתא דר’ ישמעאל בשלח), ובמדרשים מאוחרים: “כביכול עמד בפתח ודחה את המשחית שלא יגוף את ישראל” (שמות רבה יח, ז).[7]

ומה עניינו של הפִּסֵּחַ לכאן? אין מנוס מן ההנחה כי לשורש פס”ח שתי הוראות שונות משני פעלים שונים: האחד מובנו לצלוע (פועל גזור־שֵם מן פִּסֵּחַ) והשני להגן.[8]

לענייננו – לפועל פָּסַח בהקשר של יציאת מצרים נוצרו שתי מסורות פרשניות כבר בתקופה קדומה. מימי הביניים ואילך נתעלתה אחת מהן על פני חברתה, ועל פי הסקירה כאן – אולי לא בצדק.[9]

_________________________________

[1] התיאור הקצר המובא כאן נסמך על ניתוחו המאלף של חוקר המקרא שמואל אפרים ליונשטם, ובעקבותיו של חוקר הלשון חיים כהן (ראו ‘מבחר מקורות’).

[2] בתחילה הוא מביא פירוש אחר למילה ופסחתי – “וחמלתי”, כנראה על פי תרגום אונקלוס “ואחוס עליכון” (וכן בשני הפסוקים האחרים בפרשה). הבנה זו עולה גם במכילתא דר’ ישמעאל בא, ז, ומאוחר יותר אצל מדקדקי ימי הביניים, ולדעת רבים אין הפרש בין ההוראה ‘חמל’ ל’הגן’ (ראה להלן).

[3] מילת היחס הלטינית trans שמרכיבה את הפועל ועניינה מעבר התגלגלה אל האנגלית כתחילית -trans.

[4] המילה פִּסֵּחַ (ברבים פִּסְחִים) באה במקרא לא מעט פעמים, גם לתיאור בני אדם וגם לתיאור בעלי חיים.

[5] פרשני המקרא ניסו להסביר בשלל דרכים מדוע גם כאן לפסוח פירושו ‘לדלג’. כך למשל בפירושו של ר’ יוסף קרא, בן דורו של רש”י: “מדלג ומקפץ מלהכות ביושבי ירושלם שסמוכין למחנה אשור”.

[6] בשתיים מתוך שלוש היקרויות (בפסוקים יג ו־כז). בפסוק כג בהוראת ‘עבר’.

[7] הגנה של האל מפני מלאך משחית (שהוא בעצמו שלח) מוכרת מספר שמואל ב: “וַיִּנָּחֶם ה’ אֶל הָרָעָה וַיֹּאמֶר לַמַּלְאָךְ הַמַּשְׁחִית בָּעָם רַב, עַתָּה הֶרֶף יָדֶךָ” (כד, טז).

[8] לפי זה “פֹּסְחִים עַל שְׁתֵּי הַסְּעִפִּים” קשור אל פיסח, והביטוי הוא דימויו של הנבוך והמתלבט לצולע הנעזר בקביים (סעיפּים הם ענפים) ונוטה בהליכתו פעם לכאן ופעם לכאן. בערבית מוכרים שני שורשים דומים – פס”ח (فسح) ופס”ח’ (فسخ) והיה מי שהסמיך אליהם את שתי ההוראות בעברית: הראשון שעניינו ‘הרחיב’ קשור אל הגנה, והשני שעניינו ‘נקע’, ‘הזיז’ קשור אל פִּסֵּחַ. אף באכדית באה המילה pessû בהקשר של צליעה.

[9] ייתכן שלניצחון הדילוג תרם הפסוק שבו נכרכים השורשים פס”ח ודל”ג יחדיו: “אָז [ביום ישועת ה’] יְדַלֵּג כָּאַיָּל פִּסֵּחַ וְתָרֹן לְשׁוֹן אִלֵּם” (ישעיהו לה, ו). יש מן הפרשנים שראו בזה הוכחה לכך שפָּסַח פירושו דילג, ואולם עיון בהקשר הכללי מלמד שבדיוק להפך: הפיסח (המתקשה בהליכה) – ידלג כאיל, וכמוהו גם האילם (המתקשה בדיבור) – ירוֹן, יזמר. פרשנות זו ברורה מן הפסוק הקודם: “אָז תִּפָּקַחְנָה עֵינֵי עִוְרִים וְאָזְנֵי חֵרְשִׁים תִּפָּתַחְנָה”.

A Miracle I Witnessed

 This might or might not be a true story. 

Yesterday a man came to shul for the Netz minyan [which I was at b/c I spent the whole night watching Netflix - "Netz" is an acronym for "Netflix"?] at about 6am and put on his tallis and started davening. Netz was at 6:03. By 6:03 he was already at Shmoneh Esrei and seconds later he was done and was walking around saying his daily Tehillim. 

A PESACH MIRACLE!!! The entire davening from Brachos to Shmoneh Esrei in three minutes!!!

Habit

 "The producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia.

Habit is necessary; but it is the habit of having careless habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways."

Dr. Belkin z"l

The following are excerpts of the eulogy delivered by Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik at Dr. Belkin’s funeral, April 20, 1976 in Lamport Auditorium. 

There are two books, the open book and the Sefer Hachasum. The two books are concerned with two different questions, the Sefer Hagalul, the public book, the open book asks a very simple question. What did this particular individual do? What did he accomplish for society? What are his accomplishments? The private book, the Sefer Hachasum, asks a very different question. It doesn’t ask what did man do for society; it asks, who was he; not his accomplishments, but who was the individual himself? 

The private book of Dr. Belkin remained a Sefer Hachasum, a sealed mysterious book. The first question of the private book is, “Who was he?”, not what did he accomplish; who was he? I don’t know … I would like to use a certain verse from Sefer D’varim, Deuteronomy, in order to portray Dr. Belkin. It is a verse consisting of five words, but I believe those five words tell the story of Dr. Belkin. 

We just read those four, … five words in the haggada; “Arami ovaid avi vayered mitzraima.” I will interpret it in accordance with the ibn Ezra. A straying, wandering restless Aramean was my father and he went down to Egypt. Let me paraphrase this pasuk. A restless Lithuanian yeshiva talmid, student, who was my friend, Dr. Belkin. He also dreamt. He also became a visionary. Whenever I entered his room unannounced (I didn’t do it frequently) I used to find him dreaming. I simply saw the dream in his eyes. His gaze used to be fixed on something far: it was something unknown, to me at least. 

Now the question is, what did he dream about? He was an arami ovaid, a restless Lithuanian. What did he dream about? He dreamt of a generation of young American Jews who combined the good components of both an excellent secular and Torah education. Let me tell you, Dr. Belkin’s standards of lamdus, of halachic scholarship were very high. I repeat, he dreamt of a generation of young American Jews who would combine both an excellent Torah education with the capability of participating in the scientifically oriented and technologically minded complex American economy. 

However, Dr. Belkin, the restless spirit, the arami ovaid, the restless nomad, had another dream. And this second dream was bolder, more daring than the first dream. This was his original dream. No one shared his opinion, not even people who were very close to him … He wanted to show the Jewish, as well as the non-Jewish community that the Orthodox Jew is as capable of establishing scientific, educational institutions as the non-Jew or the secular Jew is. 

He told me once, when he presented the plan of a medical school under the auspices of the Yeshiva, to an internationally known Jewish abdominal surgeon, that the latter became so indignant that he said the whole project is not only impractical, but arrogant as well. And perhaps he was right, the surgeon. It was arrogant. Well let me tell you, the restless Yeshiva student of Lithuania was indeed …  tough, tough and arrogant. However, his arrogance was translated into reality. And isn’t a Jew an arrogant person, defying for thousands of years the whole world? And isn’t little Israel an arrogant nation, defying the united nations of the world? 

… Who was he? Answer number one: He was a restless, arrogant, impudent student from Lithuania. He dreamt of moons and suns, of heaven and earth. 

Let me give you the second answer. The arrogant dreamer, the restless Yeshiva bochur, the arami ovaid, was a great teacher, a rosh yeshiva … I spent my life in teaching, I know teachers. He was a magnificent teacher. He was, perhaps, the teacher par excellence … His disciples were the best trained boys in the yeshiva… 

He always moved in a straight line. He knew neither of angles nor of curves nor of corners. His thinking was two-dimensional. His code, so to say, his coat of arms. His lamdus, the symbol of his lamdus was the geometric plane. He did not engage in so-called analysis of depth. He had no trust in the thin abstractions of three dimensional thinking. But whatever he said, it was logical, it was plain, it was understandable… 

He is responsible for the fact, only he, that Yeshivas Rav Yitzchak Elchanan, now, as of today, is a great center of Torah, and that as far as the attainment of lamdus, good, real genuine scholarship is concerned it is the best place in the United States. You don’t have to believe me, just take a look at the young roshei yeshivas who sit right over there to my right. They were trained right here. They are the finest roshei yeshivas any institution, here or in Israel, any institution, now, at present or a hundred years ago… 

Answer number two to the question who was he. He was a restless dreamer, who was an excellent teacher and who was in love with Torah. He had a romance with Torah. 

Dr. Belkin was a charming person. He radiated, I’ll use the Biblical expression for it, Chaine. Chaine is charm. The restless teacher, the lover of Torah, like Joseph of old, again, attracted people. He was, indeed, charming. He enchanted them with his magnetic personality even those who disagreed with him, and quite often I disagreed with him, quite often. Even those who disagreed with him succumbed to his powerful charm. 

The charisma Dr. Belkin possessed was precipitated by two basic virtues. Virtue number one, let me use the Biblical expression for it, he was a baal chesed, he was a man of loving kindess. He was a kind person. And let me say his kindness was not due to character weakness. Sometimes people are kind because the are weak, or character softness. Sometimes people are kind because they are soft. Dr. Belkin was not a weak person. He was tough, I said before, and firm. He was a man who exercised power and he liked power. He practiced what the Talmud calls gemilus chasadim bimamono ubigufo. Kindness as far as money is concerned and kindness as far as physical efforts are concerned. If there was a person who was not appreciated by his own friends, this was Dr. Belkin. He was the most unappreciated restless dreamer, an excellent teacher and kind person. The most unappreciated in the world… 

… I’ll tell you something. He was, and this will come as a surprise to many of you in the hall, he was a saintly person. He possessed saintliness. I don’t say holiness, I say saintliness. Kindness alone does not generate or precipitate charismatic chaine, unless it is tightly knit with saintliness. And Dr. Belkin was a saintly person. And I understand if you ask me in what manner, in what respect, did he manifest saintliness, I’ll tell you. He felt it in four respects. 

First, he was a soneh betza, he hated gain. You know the Biblical expression soneh betza, to hate gain, to hate profit, to hate money. The saintly person is a soneh betza. And, Dr. Belkin while he knew the importance of money as far as the institution was concerned, he had no concept of, he had no desire for money as far as he himself was concerned … He died a poor man. He died a poor man because he was a saintly man. He was a saintly man because he was a great man, and he died a great man. He simply was a soneh betza who raised so much money, who was a wizard, a wizard as a fund solicitor… 

Dr. Belkin was a saintly person for a different reason. Dr. Belkin lived a simple life. It’s very hard to find people nowadays who are satisfied with a simple life, plain simple life. Dr. Belkin lived a simple life because he was a simple man. A great man, but a simple man… There was a streak of asceticism in him, a streak of prisha min hachayim. He lived not to enjoy life, because he hardly enjoyed it, but to create, to serve and to sacrifice and to die on the altar of Torah. He had saintliness. He could live a life stripped of all manner of frills and petty, petty enjoyments. He hated the formalities. I know that some people misinterpreted, misunderstood it. He hated the formalities and the protocol and the public etiquette even though from time to time he had to go through it. But he never enjoyed it… 

Dr. Belkin was a saintly man for a third reason. He had, what shall I say? I’ll use the Hebrew term, a lashon nikiah, a dignified speech. Judaism has always emphasized the significance of the word. The latter, if uttered with dignity and sanctity may create a world. The latter, the word uttered with vulgarity, may destroy a world. Dr. Belkin’s speech was clean and dignified. I’ve never heard him malign anybody, ANYBODY, or make some derogatory remarks about people. Enemies, who indeed wanted to destroy him, physically and spiritually, he never said a bad word about them. 

He was also a saintly person in his relationship to Yisroel. Dr. Belkin knew how to accept suffering; he suffered with dignity. Dr. Belkin knew, as I said, to suffer, how to meet crisis and how to confront disaster. He never complained. He never asked any questions. He never engaged in self-righteous monologues. Vayidom Aharon, and Aaron said nothing. A great man, a saintly man says nothing. He was silent, Dr. Belkin. A saintly man must possess the heroic quality of being mute at a time when one is ready to talk… 

… We prayed for miracles. Apparently we were unworthy of a miracle, it happened. We ask just, we bid you farewell. Lech Lishalom, visanuach bikaitz hayamim kechol chai. We promise thee that Yeshiva will be guarded by us and it will continue to be a great center of Torah. Your name will never be forgotten. 

The Cataclysm

Some Reform Guy 

October 7, 2023 forever changed Jewish history. The cataclysm is so profound that it will take years to fully understand. Time froze. It is still October 7. We have not yet moved on. Our anguish is too raw, our fear and uncertainty too pervasive. We are still traumatized, unable to truly begin the healing process until the most intense fighting ceases and the danger is lifted. Commissions of inquiry have yet to be established, but they will be, and the political and military reckoning is sure to come. It will be a deeply painful process, but there can be no healing without painstaking investigation and genuine accountability. These will roil Israelis as well as world Jewry, including American Jews.

What are the most immediate and urgent challenges we face?

Zionism

Among the most consequential of the many gifts that Zionism bestowed upon the Jewish people is the gift of the spirit. The State of Israel embodies the indomitable will of the Jewish people to survive and prosper. Zionism represents hope, a testament to the remarkable resilience and dogged determination of the Jews: Pick yourself up from the valley of despair, dust yourself off, and walk again. The Zionist ethos awakened a can-do spirit in our people. We jolted ourselves out of nearly 2,000 years of national passivity, actively participating in our own — and humanity’s — destiny. Self-determination restored our confidence and pride. In the course of building this miracle of a country, the Jewish people themselves were rebuilt.

The founders and early activists of the Zionist movement never promised to eliminate Jew-hatred. To the contrary, they thought it was an incurable disease. It was their Jewish ideological opponents who believed that antisemitism could be eradicated through the full embrace of the Enlightenment. While no one could have predicted the dimensions of the Holocaust, in retrospect it proved that the Zionists were more right than their critics in contending that the Age of Reason could not cure antisemitism because hatred of Jews is not grounded in reason and is therefore ineradicable. Zionists concluded that the best response to such hatred was to create a state of our own, where we would not depend on the inflated promises of European nations to protect Jews.

At the center of the Zionist ethos stands this resolve: We will defend ourselves by ourselves. Never again would Jews be powerless prey to marauding murderers. The State of Israel would guarantee Jewish security and dignity.

October 7 shattered our faith in this, Zionism’s most basic commitment. Hundreds were massacred, brutalized, tortured, abused, and kidnapped, while the state itself was largely absent. Two hundred thousand Israelis became homeless in their national home. One shudders to contemplate the dimensions of the catastrophe had Hezbollah also invaded from the north on that Simchat Torah day.

Most ominously, October 7 thrust us back into a pre-1948 mindset of exile that Zionism had supposedly transcended. This explains why most Israelis believe they are in an existential struggle, as elemental as the fight for independence. This war is not a territorial dispute. It is not about settlements. Most Israelis now believe that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict never really was about either of these. Rather, it is a war of survival: Hamas or us, Iran and its proxies or us. It is a war to restore faith in the Zionist enterprise itself.

Antisemitism

October 7 also exposed the persistence of Jew-hatred constantly bubbling under the surface of Western societies, including America.

It is not that we were oblivious to the still-existing hostility toward Jews. We remember the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre well. The chants from Charlottesville, “Jews will not replace us,” are still fresh. But in terms of our daily routines, most American Jews related to Jew-hatred as we all tend to relate to our own mortality: We know it is inevitable, but we convince ourselves that, somehow, it will not happen to us.

One of the saddest developments since October 7 is the shock experienced by American Jews who are encountering pervasive antisemitism for the first time in their universities and schools, at work, on social media, in threats to their synagogues and other Jewish communal institutions, and on the streets of their hometowns. The realization that age-old hatreds are still alive and kicking, even here — especially here — has plunged our community into a crisis of confidence in American exceptionalism. We are beginning to hear echoes of Europe, the howls of hatred that brought our ancestors to these shores in the first place.

The nexus between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is now much clearer to many of those who were blind or naïve. Leave aside the intellectual debate about whether anti-Zionism, by definition, constitutes antisemitism: The effect, if not the intent, of anti-Zionism is to generate intense hostility to Judaism and Jews themselves. We have now seen with our own eyes how easily the words “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” transform into “gas the Jews,” “kill the Jews,” “cleanse the world of Jews.” How naturally hatred of Israel mutates into hatred of Jews. How easily anti-Israel passions lead to violence against Jews and Jewish institutions.

Western Liberalism

For years now, some of us on the Left have been warning of the deteriorating commitment of our side to liberalism. Too many were unwilling or unable to see or acknowledge this through the camouflage of such high-sounding words as “liberation,” “progress,” “civil and human rights,” “antiracism,” and “anti-colonialism.” October 7 cleared away these pretenses and exposed the moral rot growing within the central institutions of American liberalism.

No matter what atrocities the Palestinian national movement commits, it is American and Western progressives more than conservatives who hem and haw and find ways to justify terrorism. Universities, elite public and private schools, feminist and human-rights organizations, and far too many more institutions allegedly devoted to justice, truth, and freedom failed to muster the basic human compassion to empathize with the victims of Hamas, let alone to condemn the perpetrators, even before Israel responded militarily. Longtime interfaith colleagues who showered us with support after the Pittsburgh massacre — our friends with whom we initiated many communal projects for peace, tolerance, and religious understanding — were silent. Not only did many progressives avoid condemning Hamas, they considered the massacres legitimate resistance to a supposedly genocidal settler-colonial state that needed to be eliminated. As one speaker emphasized at an Oakland city-council debate: “It is a contradiction to be pro-humanity and pro-Israel.”

The liberal community that I represent — with which the majority of American Jews identify — is disheartened, disillusioned, and disoriented. What has happened to the decades-long partnership with our allies and ideological soulmates? Jews helped build America’s great universities. How could they be indifferent, at best, to our pain? We devoted ourselves to civil liberties and human dignity, helping to create and populate some of America’s preeminent civil rights organizations. Where are their condemnations of the most grotesque violations of human rights most of us have ever encountered? We have marched arm in arm with the black community in pursuance of racial justice since the 1960s. How did the moral clarity expressed by Martin Luther King Jr. — who insisted that “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in security is incontestable” and who, according to the late Representative John Lewis, once chastised an anti-Zionist student, saying, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism” — collapse into glorification of Hamas paragliders by some Black Lives Matter activists?

What business do progressives have defending those who oppress women, gays, minorities, and Christians? How could feminist organizations not condemn horrific sexual violence against Israeli women? How to explain that the very people who insist that women should always be believed when reporting sexual assaults now demand proof from Israelis and refuse to accept the starkest evidence in front of their eyes? What to make of climate activists taking time out of their day and money out of their coffers to oppose Israel, as if there is some insidious intersectional interplay between the supposed evils of the Jewish state and the perils of climate change?

Why no outcry against the sinister use by Hamas of human shields, or against the conversion of hospitals, schools, mosques, and playgrounds into terrorist bases? Why do young adults, especially, who are so acutely sensitive to the assignment of moral accountability, fail to assign moral agency to Palestinians? Why treat Palestinians as passive victims who have no political or moral responsibility for their actions?     

There is an expanding and deepening realization within the liberal Jewish community that this type of progressivism is a threat to the well-being of American Jews and to Western civilization itself. It is not progressive; it is regressive. It is not liberalism; it is a betrayal of liberalism.

In December 2023, more than 1,000 current members and alumni of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), mostly young, signed a letter to the movement’s leadership demanding that the URJ support an immediate cease-fire. Aside from a passing reference to Hamas’s atrocities (in a sentence grieving for Palestinian victims of Israel’s counterattack), the letter warned of the “grave risk of genocide” in Gaza.

It goes without saying that it is entirely legitimate to debate whether and when a cease-fire should come into effect. But the most revealing part of the letter was the signatories’ explanations as to why they signed it. Over and over again, they mentioned the URJ’s complicity in “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “the oppression of the Palestinian people,” and Israeli “apartheid” and “colonialism.” They expressed no doubt, no complexity, no qualms. Their righteousness was self-evident to them, as was the moral culpability of those who disagreed. They accused the Reform movement of violating the principle of tikkun olam (repairing the world) that we, their rabbis and educators, had taught them in our synagogues, schools, youth groups, and camps.

With ice in their hearts, they expressed no Jewish warmth, nary a word of sympathy for Israelis or compassion for the murdered, brutalized, sexually assaulted, and kidnapped of our own people. There was no gratitude or grief for Israeli soldiers their age, who put aside everything to protect the people of Israel, sacrificing even their lives. It is as if all Jewish solidarity, empathy, responsibility, and mutuality have been stripped from these young Jews. According to them, it is we Reform rabbis and educators who taught them these values.

We are reaping what we have sowed.

We have distorted and mistaught the meaning of tikkun olam. In our enthusiasm to convey Judaism’s universal obligations, we neglected to emphasize that Judaism starts with the covenant of the Jewish people. All Jews are responsible for one another. When one Jew feels pain, all suffer. The uniqueness of Judaism and the source of its moral power lie in our commitment to the Jewish family and to all the families of the earth at one and the same time. Ahavat ha’briyot — love of humankind — is balanced with ahavat Yisrael — love for the Jewish people. It is not one or the other. It is both.

We have also distorted and mistaught our prophetic tradition. All the Hebrew prophets that anti-Zionist Jews are so fond of quoting were of the Jewish people, by the Jewish people, and for the Jewish people. If any of those prophets were alive today, they would be appalled by the use of their names to promote anti-Zionism.

I am, of course, in favor of vigorous debate. In one way or another, all of us are critics of Israeli governments. But the anti-Zionism of increasing numbers of young American Jews disheartens me. Their ignorance of history is breathtaking, as is their shocking callousness to the dangers of Islamism. The tone and tenor of their earnest pontification is a form of privilege. Where you stand, the saying goes, often depends on where you sit. It is much easier to preach to Israelis how they should deal with terrorists when you do so from the safety of an American university quad rather than from the kibbutz a mile from Gaza. Don’t these young people know what would happen to the nearly 7 million Jews of Israel if the “from the river to the sea” crowd succeeded? Don’t they think at all about what might happen to themselves and the other millions of Jews around the world if, indeed, Islamists “globalize the intifada”?

We know the answer. “There will be a second, a third, a fourth [attack] . . . until Israel is annihilated,” as a Hamas official Ghazi Hamad helpfully explained.

I am very worried about the future of our youth. In the end, our debates in America are less about the Jewish state than the state of American Jews. Israel’s future will be forged with or without anti-Zionist American Jews; it is American Jews who need Israel. To sever ourselves from our own people is to sever ourselves from Judaism. The will to Jewish distinctiveness ensures Jewish distinctiveness. The will to continue leads to continuity. There is a ferocity to Jewish survival instincts, a mighty and majestic sense of Jewish destiny.

When these are lost, the future is lost. 

Black Radicalism

If I had only a glancing knowledge of American history, I would never guess that black Americans and Jewish Americans had ever clashed. After all, both groups understand what it’s like to be a despised minority, both groups have been reliable Democrat voters for the better part of the past century, and both groups share the same historical enemy: the far Right. One need not be crazy to look at the photos of Martin Luther King Jr. walking shoulder to shoulder with Abraham Joshua Heschel during the civil rights movement and wonder how the relationship between these two groups could be anything other than a love-fest.

The reality of black-Jewish relations, however, has fallen short of that ideal. At the center of that failure is the troubling phenomenon of black antisemitism. The reflexive support given to Hamas by Black Lives Matter’s Chicago chapter, which on October 10 tweeted a picture of a paraglider with the caption “I Stand with Palestine,” is only one of the latest examples. To understand the roots of black antisemitism, we must go back much further — before the realities of war brought the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli control in June 1967.

In April 1967, as Israel anxiously prepared for war with its Arab neighbors, James Baldwin published an essay in the New York Times under the title “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” The headline advanced a heavily oversimplified version of Baldwin’s thesis, but it nevertheless captured something true. Leaving aside the question of whether Jews are in fact white (the Nazis certainly didn’t think so, and there are many unambiguously non-white Jews — for instance, Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews), it is nevertheless true that black Americans see Jews as white. And to the extent that there is a deep well of anti-white sentiment in the black community, that sentiment gets grafted onto Jews.

But there is much more to black antisemitism than that. In his essay, Baldwin pointed out that during his youth in Harlem, he mostly encountered Jews in roles of power and authority relative to him: his landlord, his grocer, his butcher, etc. As a result, Baldwin claimed, one source of black antisemitism was the natural friction that results when one ethnic group operates the lion’s share of businesses in an area mostly populated by a different group. In other words, it wasn’t because Jews were Jewish: Any group overrepresented among landlords and shopkeepers would have been hated. One can look, for instance, at the targeting of Korean-owned stores in inner-city race riots to find support for this theory.

That said, Baldwin’s point explains less than it appears to. For one thing, black-Jewish tensions in Harlem were a local and temporary reality. They therefore cannot explain what has become a national and long-lasting phenomenon. Jews may have been landlords in Harlem during the early and mid-20th century — Harlem was, after all, a Jewish (and Italian) neighborhood long before blacks arrived — but blacks have resented Jews all across the nation, long past the time when Jews owned many buildings and businesses in Harlem. When I lived in Hamilton Heights and Harlem between 2016 and 2020, my landlord was Dominican, and all the delis were run by Yemenis.

One underappreciated source of black antisemitism omitted in Baldwin’s essay is the Nation of Islam (NOI). NOI is a syncretic blend of Islam, black nationalism, and a sort of copy-paste of the Jewish story, but with black Americans swapped in for Jews as the “chosen people” — an aspect NOI shares with the Black Hebrew Israelites. As Elijah Muhammad put it in his book Message to the Black Man in America: “A Savior is born, not to save the Jews but to save the poor Negro.”

Though NOI’s founding scriptures contained more white-hatred than Jew-hatred, it did not take long for Jew-hatred to become central to NOI. In 1960, the great civil rights leader Bayard Rustin pressed Malcolm X, then a spokesperson for the NOI, on allegations that Elijah Muhammad had singled out Jews as “exploiters.” In one of the least convincing defenses ever made, Malcolm replied:

I don’t think you can find an article where he has ever pointed out the Jew as an exploiter of the black man. He speaks of the exploiter. Period. He doesn’t break it down in terms of Frenchmen or Englishmen or a Jew or a German. He speaks of the exploiter and sometimes the man who is the most guilty of exploitation will think you are pointing the finger at him. 

Any doubt about NOI’s antisemitism was put to rest when Louis Farrakhan assumed leadership of the organization in 1981. Farrakhan called Hitler “a very great man” and Judaism “a gutter religion.” He holds Jews responsible for funding both the American slave trade and the Holocaust. “Jews have been so bad at politics they lost half their population in the Holocaust,” Farrakhan said. “They thought they could trust in Hitler, and they helped him get the Third Reich on the road.”

Though Farrakhan has appropriately been deeply criticized by organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, he has not been canceled to the extent that he should be — and certainly not to the extent he would be if he were a white person with the same views. For instance, three of the co-chairs of the 2018 Women’s March — Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory — had ties to Farrakhan, despite his regressive views on the role of women in society. Indeed, the New York Times reported that NOI members were involved in providing security for some of the marches. As a result, the Women’s March refused to dissociate itself from Farrakhan for almost a year, until a particularly fiery Farrakhan speech denouncing the “satanic Jews” finally elicited a mealy-mouthed Facebook post.

While NOI’s official membership has never constituted a large part of the black community, its influence has far outstripped its official numbers because of its popularity with rappers. NOI’s and specifically Farrakhan’s teachings formed the waters in which rappers of a certain generation, from Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg to Ice Cube and of course Ye (formerly Kanye West), swam. As a result, the antisemitism inherent in NOI has found a bullhorn in hip-hop lyrics and hip-hop culture more broadly.

But the true source of black antisemitism lies deeper than ethnic tensions in Harlem or the influence of NOI. At bottom, black antisemitism has to do with the story that black Americans tell ourselves about who we are. Every ethnic group has a dominant story — a story as sacred to its members as any religious catechism. The dominant black American story runs as follows: We are the only Americans who came here not by choice, but in chains. And though the country has moved past slavery, legalized white supremacy, and open discrimination, we remain a disproportionately poor and downtrodden people as a result of our past oppression. But for that history of oppression, we would be thriving.

A typical challenge to this story is the “model minority” argument: namely, the fact that many immigrant groups have arrived on America’s shores penniless and despised but have nonetheless risen up the ladder within a few generations. Why, then, can’t black Americans do the same? The typical response is that those groups were not trailing centuries of brutal discrimination and therefore did not have to climb as steep a hill. And with most groups — say, the Italians and the Irish — this response seems convincing enough.

But then there is the troubling case of Jewish Americans. The trials and tribulations of the Jewish people are so numerous, so well documented, and so undeniable that this response rings somewhat hollow. Jews have indeed had to climb the steepest of hills. But to acknowledge Jewish success in the face of that history, and to do so without resorting to odious conspiracy theories, would require a reconsideration of the black American story. In other words, Jewish Americans are proof that it is possible to succeed economically even when history has thrown every possible obstacle in your way. So, more than any other “model minority,” Jewish Americans, thanks to their success, present a serious challenge to the story that black Americans tell ourselves — a challenge that is not so easily rebutted.

In a sense, the particular way in which a black individual might arrive at antisemitism is secondary. Ultimately, they all draw energy from the same source: a desire to preserve the black American story in its current form, and a knee-jerk rejection of any perceived challenge to it. Given a choice between rewriting our own story and rewriting the Jewish story, many black Americans choose the latter, by downplaying or simply denying Jewish history. A recent YouGov/Economist poll asked Americans whether the Holocaust was a myth. Eighty-two percent of whites and 71 percent of Hispanics said no. Sadly, only 55 percent of blacks said the same.

Somewhat less abhorrent than Holocaust denial has been the falsehood, popular among black Americans, that Jews must have arrived in America with money to begin with. In his final book, Where Do We Go from Here?, Martin Luther King Jr. lamented the fact that “Negroes nurture a persisting myth that the Jews of America attained social mobility and status solely because they had money,” and that this myth “encourages anti-Semitism.” The truth of the matter, he offered, was that “Jews progressed because they possessed a tradition of education combined with social and political action.”

As in so many areas, King sketched a healthier path forward. Ultimately, he advised: “Without overlooking the towering differences between the Negro and Jewish experiences, the lesson of Jewish mass involvement in social and political action and education is worthy of emulation”.

In 2023, it would be heretical to suggest that black Americans should in any way emulate Jewish Americans. But when you live in crazy times, perhaps common sense comes across as heresy. 

COLEMAN HUGHES hosts the podcast Conversations with Coleman and is the author of The End of Race Politics.

The Talmudic Cure for Our Technology Sickness

Sapir Magazine

When new technology enters the world, it enriches it and pushes it forward. New technologies always add to people’s lives something they didn’t have before. But technology not only adds to people’s lives; it also takes away from them, as Marshall McLuhan observed. What it adds is always shiny; what it takes away is always obscured and practically impossible to see at the time. Technology gives quickly but takes slowly. Its advantages are therefore always widely seen and discussed, while its disadvantages remain largely hidden and unspoken. This asymmetry can create the illusion that technology is nothing but a blessing for humanity; in practice, it always comes at a cost. That is to say, technology is not the same as progress; technology is a trade-off.

This process would repeat itself throughout history. When humans started using clocks, for example, they acquired a power they didn’t previously have. Suddenly, they could accurately measure time and plan their days with extraordinary efficiency. The clock allowed them to boost productivity. But its use came at a price. The ability to sense the natural passage of time was eroded. The ability to feel the fine differences between the early and late morning, to sense the position of the sun in the sky and the length of the shadows on the ground, was damaged and almost disappeared. In exchange for our control of time, we paid with an atrophied sense of time.

Here is another example: Millions of drivers all around the world are reporting a decline in their navigation skills and spatial memory. The introduction of GPS devices in cars has hugely improved drivers’ powers of navigation, but it has damaged their ability to navigate. There are many other examples, but the principle remains the same: Technology gives us powers and takes away abilities.

Around two decades ago, digital screens started entering our lives, bringing with them countless striking and familiar blessings. But what have they taken away from us? While digital technology has given us so much power, what abilities has it undercut? One is our ability, as human beings, to listen with empathy to opinions different from our own. Paradoxically, the technology that has opened our eyes to people far away is closing our ears to opinions different from our own.

How has digital technology atrophied our listening muscles? The answer lies in the dominant business model of the world’s digital corporations.

We enjoy the services of platforms such as Facebook and Google for free. The reason has nothing to do with the generosity of the Meta and Alphabet shareholders. Economically speaking, we are not getting a product; we are providing a product in return for their services. And what is that product? That product is us. Our eyes, our attention, our focus, our gaze — all these are the product, which we are giving to mega-corporations in return for the ability to communicate and search the internet. What do they do with all this attention? They sell it to advertisers. This process, which Tim Wu calls the “monetization of attention,” is transforming the world. The major digital corporations’ interest in keeping people glued to their screens is not so different from oil corporations’ interest in drilling deep into the ground. Why do oil corporations try to pump petroleum out of the ground? Because it’s worth money. Likewise, digital corporations try to pump more and more attention out of the human mind. Why? Because it’s worth money.

When the average person logs into Facebook “just to check something,” how long does he stay there? In Irresistible, Adam Alter, a researcher of addiction, presents findings that show that people who do not plan to spend longer than a minute on Facebook get stuck there on average for more than 20 minutes. This is no accident. It’s intentional. Thousands of engineers at Facebook have deliberately designed the platform to break its users’ willpower. How? How is it possible that screens are more powerful than their users? The answer is that the users have psychological weaknesses that these companies are good at finding and exploiting in order to keep them glued to their screens: the need for recognition and feedback, the addictive power of random reward, social anxieties, and more. The result is that these companies pump ever fatter portions of users’ valuable attention out of their minds.

Of all the psychological weaknesses the new industry is exploiting to invade our minds and pump even more of this new oil out of them, one has transformed our politics beyond recognition. This weakness is called confirmation bias. In general terms, this is what it means: We have a strong emotional relationship with our opinions. We tend to be blind supporters of our own opinions. One consequence of this tendency is that we perceive positions that are similar to our own to be more interesting and intelligent than positions different from our own.

We’ve all experienced this before. We feel pleasure at the sound of others voicing opinions we already hold. Right-wingers enjoy lectures by eloquent right-wing speakers but suffer in lectures by equally charismatic left-wingers. Liberals enjoy watching clips that mock conservatives but suffer when watching clips that make a mockery of liberal positions. Why do we love our own opinions so much? For the same reason that we love our children: because they are ours.

Confirmation bias affects most people, and social-media companies effectively exploit it to capture our attention. How does this all work? When an algorithm sifts through information and decides what to push into our news feeds and what to leave out, it employs only one criterion: Which posts have the greatest chance of keeping us glued to our screens? Since people prefer their own opinions, the algorithms show them posts reflecting positions similar to those they already hold, thus keeping them for longer in front of their screens and extracting more valuable minutes of their attention.

The mechanism underpinning brainwashing is repetition. A message repeated again and again over time will break our defense mechanisms and penetrate deep into our minds. A person who has been subjected to ideological brainwashing will believe in the truth of that ideology with such certainty that he will see anyone who disagrees with it as delusional and dangerous for disputing a self-evident truth.

The same mechanism used in brainwashing is also in play when people are subjected to extended exposure to their Facebook feeds. But this time it is a completely different kind of brainwashing, because the positions and ideas that people are exposed to over and over again are already their own. Unlike political parties and movements, which try to breach our defenses and plant in our minds opinions that are foreign to us, the algorithms work by locking us into positions we already hold. Browsing Facebook is, therefore, a campaign of self-propaganda.

What happens when someone who lives in a digital echo chamber, hearing his own right-wing opinions echoed back at him, suddenly meets someone who also lives in his own digital echo chamber that echoes back to him his own left-wing opinions? They both perceive each other as disputing a self-evident truth. They do not see each other as wrong, but as delusional. We live in a reality in which the Right and the Left simply cannot understand each other and are shocked and alarmed by each other. Naturally, they lose any ability to listen to each other.

What, then, is the great trade that humanity has made for digital technology? All in all, it has given human beings powers they never had before, but it has also weakened the abilities they have always had — and one of the most important such abilities is the one that helps us listen to ideas with which we disagree.

In the 20th century, the automobile sped into the lives of the Western middle classes, giving them incredible freedoms and powers they had never had before. But because they could drive from place to place, people began to exert themselves less. Their daily step count collapsed, their bodies expanded, and their muscles atrophied. Yet even when people discovered the price they were paying for this trade, they did not give up their cars. Instead, many took up brisk walking, jogging, or working out. The middle class has given rise to a rich and impressive culture of sports and exercise.

The relationship between exercise culture and the automobile offers a useful model for the relationship between humans and technology. There is no need to abstain from technology to avoid its costs. We can simply take up other activities to strengthen the abilities that technology has weakened. Exercise culture is a “compensatory culture,” a culture that restores to human beings what technology has deprived them of.

What would a compensatory culture look like in the context of digital technology? What kind of culture would strengthen the muscles that digital technology is atrophying — including the key one that helps us listen to ideas we disagree with? It turns out that one culture that might strengthen our listening skills is that of the Talmud.

Jewish tradition has always sanctified study and scholarship. And the book at the heart of the Jewish intellectual tradition is the Talmud. The Talmud is not a book of halakhah, or Jewish religious law. If you open a Talmud, you won’t find laws; you will find arguments about laws. First the Talmud presents the position of a certain rabbi or group of rabbis; then it presents the contrary position, from a different rabbi or group; then it presents arguments supporting the first position and those supporting the latter. For the most part, the Talmud does not include any resolution of these arguments; it records only the arguments themselves.

Jewish tradition makes two demands of its members. The first is intellectual: Jews must study the sacred texts. The second is practical: Jews must obey the binding laws of their tradition. Since the main text that Jews study is the Talmud, the following occurs: Intellectually, Jews are required to recognize all sides of the argument concerning a particular law; practically, however, they must follow only the position that has become settled law. This synthesis of scholarship and practice gives rise to a lifestyle in which people’s intellectual world is much broader than their practical world. Jews must study and familiarize themselves with positions that they are forbidden from following in their own lives.

It is as if an American liberal who holds progressive opinions and always votes for Democrats were obliged to learn about conservative thought. She might read books by conservative authors, watch clips sent by Republican friends, and listen to podcasts by right-wing broadcasters. She would be left-wing in practice, but her intellectual world would be much broader than her practical world. Her curiosity would spill far beyond the borders of her own personal opinions.

Listening broadens our world, but let’s be honest: Listening has a price. Listening puts our opinions in jeopardy. By listening, we might end up discovering a spark of light in our rivals’ positions, and we might even end up convinced and changing our minds. As it happens, that is exactly the price that the greatest heroes of the Talmudic tradition had to pay.

During the fiery arguments between the rival schools of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, there were occasions when the scholars of Beit Hillel had second thoughts, changed their minds, and accepted their rivals’ positions. And how does the Talmud react to Beit Hillel’s inconsistency? According to the Jerusalem Talmud, this is exactly the reason Jewish law was settled in accordance with Beit Hillel, with just three exceptions among their many disputes.

Why did the judgment of the Beit Hillel become the basis for determining the law? Rabbi Jehudah bar Pazi said it was because they quoted the words of the Beit Shammai before their own words. Not only that, but if they were convinced by the words of the Beit Shammai, they changed their opinions, as recorded in Tractate Sukkah 2:8 in the Jerusalem Talmud.

It wasn’t because Beit Hillel was always right that Jewish law was settled in accordance with this ancient school of thought. It was because Beit Hillel was conscious of the fact that it was not always right. According to the wonderful paradox of the Talmud, Jewish law was determined according to the opinions of those who were not locked into their opinions.

The kind of listening that the culture of the Talmud cultivates can be characterized by a term coined by the psychologist and feminist activist Carol Gilligan: radical listening. “Radical listening” is an interesting phrase, because these two words do not seem to go together. Radicalism is typically associated with shouting, not listening. How is it possible, then, to listen radically?

Here is what our regular, non-radical listening looks like: When we hear people voicing opinions contrary to our own, we dismiss them automatically. What are we actually doing here? We are comparing their opinions with opinions we already hold, and when we discover a mismatch between them, we reject the new ones. That is, we use our own opinions as the yardstick for assessing the truth. The more similar a theory is to our own opinions, the more truthful we feel it to be; the more different, the more we feel it is unsound. Our opinions are the ultimate authority, and we use them to judge and evaluate everything else. Broadly speaking, we can say that non-radical listening means listening to ourselves. Radical listening — the word “radical” comes from the Latin radix, or root — replaces typical, superficial listening with a careful attendance to the roots of a competing opinion.

To listen radically, we need to free ourselves from ourselves. In that singular, refined moment of radical listening, we cast off our own opinions and choose not to use them as the yardstick for assessing the truth of the position we are listening to. Instead of judging the people we are listening to based on our own premises, we judge them using theirs. We start asking ourselves a different question while listening. Instead of asking why we think the other person is wrong, we ask why he thinks he is right. Digital technology’s algorithms feed us opinions and ideas we already have, and in an anti-Talmudic maneuver, they restrict our intellectual world to the narrow confines of our own existing opinions.

In sum, there is a clear principle here: Technology gives us powers and weakens our abilities. Digital technology massively expands our power to hear other opinions when they match our own, but it weakens our psychological ability to listen to different ones.

Culture has the power to strengthen the muscles that technology has atrophied. And perhaps here lies the conclusion: Our listening muscles, the ones that are atrophying because of digital technology, can be reawakened by drawing inspiration from and perhaps even reviving the ancient spirit of the Talmud.

For those who think that introducing the study of Talmud back into the Jewish mainstream is a pipe dream, it’s worth noting that we perpetually lament another lost ability that comes courtesy of a new technological power: In return for the power to multitask, to do a dozen things “at once,” we appear to have lost the ability to pay attention to anything without becoming distracted. To this, too, the Talmud appears to be an excellent answer — perhaps because radical listening and respectful attention are, at root, one and the same. 

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Note: I am not advocating listening to כפירה or other Halachically forbidden programs.

Chas Vi-shalom.