Yesterday was the 12th of Cheshvan, the 16th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, at the hands of a right-wing extremist, Yigal Amir.
That day and the succeeding days are vivid in my memory. We were in Jerusalem, and had no television in our apartment, only a radio, which we kept in the bedroom we shared with our one-year old. After a Saturday night party at a friend’s house, we put the baby to bed and didn’t turn on the radio, so he would sleep. The next morning we didn’t turn on the radio either, and didn’t learn anything of the events until I walked to school an hour later.
It was a fascinating time to be an American in Israel. My recollections are of profound national mourning and heshbon hanefesh, self-examination. The night after the assassination I walked around the Knesset where thousands of people, including Yeshiva students from the occupied territories, were mourning and reciting psalms with genuine pain.
In 1995 it seemed like Israel – and by extension the whole Jewish people – had gone to the brink, peered into the abyss and would pull back toward sanity. The early Oslo period had been full both of hope and rage and accusations of betrayal. It led to the unthinkable – the murder of the prime minister of Israel, a war hero from 1948 and the IDF chief of staff from 1967, for crying out loud! It seemed for a moment that we would all heed the tzav piyus, or the order to reconcile (a Hebrew play on words, borrowed from the phrase tzav giyus, the order to report for military duty). (Check out www.12heshvan.org/eng_index.aspfor a great Israeli organization, maintaining the spirit of those days.)
But all that lasted only briefly. The deep national rifts over Israel’s direction were only more raw and exposed after the continuing bombings of 1996, the failure of Camp David in 2000, the second intifada and the simply incomprehensible bombings of 2001-2003, and the Gaza withdrawal and subsequent rocket attacks. Now, the recriminations have returned, more accusations of disloyalty and treason. We’ve seen this film before, and know where it may end, rahmana litzlan, may God save us.
On the night he died, in his speech before a mass rally for peace, Rabin said: “Violence gnaws away at the foundations of Israeli democracy. We must condemn and isolate it. This is not the way of the state of Israel.” Ken yehi ratzon.May it be Your will.
The remarkable features of rabbinic Judaism include its genuine moderation, its revulsion at extremism and violence, its great esteem for open questions beyond solidified answers. What does it mean that perhaps 85 or 90 percent of Talmudic discussions are left unresolved – awaiting grappling by later readers? The inspiring hallmark of rabbinic literature is that it considers most questions as complex and multivalent, not easily resolvable. That means that even when parties disagree diametrically, they each contribute to a search for truth.
Likewise, today’s Jews should not follow the typical response of those confronted with sharp disagreement: we should not regard ideological or political enemies as wicked, stupid or dishonest. Unfortunately we see that response all the time from the right to the left and the left toward the right, the Orthodox to the heretical, and the heterodox toward the traditional. That response lays the foundation for violence: since your ideological opponents are wicked liars, it becomes necessary to be rid of them. That’s the Yigal Amir option.
Instead, we should do what the Sages recommended [Talmud Hagiga 3b, paraphrased]: “Make your ear like a grain-hopper – wide going in and narrow coming out. Take in everything and sift it rigorously, to extract the truth.” Your opponents just might have some good points, you know.
That’s the hardest part of being a pluralist. Typically, we adopt the pluralist label to mean that our misguided opponents should bend to accommodate our correct views. But all too rarely does a commitment to pluralism mean that we ourselves actually try to learn from our adversaries, because we concede that they actually have something to contribute to hard questions. Please ask yourself: When was the last time you opened yourself to learning from people who take diametrically opposing positions to yours? I find that most people consider themselves pluralists … just not toward error, which is self-evidence of bad faith.
Sorry, that’s not the way it works. Jewish society – American society, too – needs to scale back on the peremptory rejection of those we disagree with. We ought not tar people as … fill in the blank … racists, fascists, traitors, Nazis, commies, fanatics, whatever. That is the path of messianists and absolutists, who cannot tolerate what they perceive as error and want to purge the field of people they regard as reprehensible. And that way lies delegitimization and demonization, and ultimately paves the way toward violence.
Instead – and this is not easy – we have to be less messianic. Less certain we’re right. Less certain our adversaries are wrong. So we can listen and learn from each other. As Ben Zoma said [Avot 4.1]: Who is the wise? The one who learns from every person.
- Nedarim, Daf 79 - January 12, 2023
- Nedarim, Daf 78 - January 11, 2023
- Nedarim, Daf 77 - January 10, 2023