Let's Dialogue

This past week I delivered the Seventh Annual Rabbi Hillel Cohn Lecture on the Contemporary Jewish Experience at Cal State University, San Bernardino. Rabbi Cohn is a rabbi’s rabbi and respected colleague; the lecture in his name is the first time in the history of the California State University system that a rabbi has been so honored. In years past, some of my personal heroes have delivered the lecture, and I was deeply honored to be added to the list. The fact that they flew me out to Southern California enabling me to spend a precious forty-eight hours with my parents made it that much easier for me to say yes, not to mention giving me a chance to visit the place name of the 1970 Jeff Christie hit song “San Bernadino.”

My remarks were, as you would hope from your rabbi, strong and well-received: an exploration of the last century of American Jewish life leading up to the tensions we presently face. But the most notable thing about the evening was not anything I said but the nature of my reception on campus. As I entered the lecture hall, I was handed a flyer by someone who did not know it was me. The flyer was about me. Apparently, as a proud Zionist, I am what is known as a “genocide enabler.” The chants coming from the protesters outside the lecture hall were not warm ones. According to the aforementioned flyer, I am “actively involved in financing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.” How, the flyer asked, could the university have invited a person like me to campus?

In retrospect, I should have seen it coming, and I have been thinking about the evening ever since. But the most upsetting thing about it all was not the fact of the protesters. Truth be told, I felt like I had finally made it: “Wow,” I thought, “they are protesting me!” A little flattered, a little grateful, a little relieved; I now had a sermon topic for Shabbat. I was, to be sure, a little annoyed that in addition to the other mistakes in their literature, my protesters had misspelled my name. There were factual inaccuracies in their contention that Park Avenue Synagogue had raised eighteen million dollars for the “Israeli criminal forces.” We have raised much, much more! To be clear, I was never interrupted, and I never felt physically unsafe. Cal State, San Bernardino is not UC Berkeley. The university’s administration did a great job of setting the tone and tenor of the evening, though it was a new feeling to be whisked away by campus police following the event – Mick Jagger like – and escorted not just to my car but all the way to the highway. I am sorry to have missed the reception that followed. If invited back, which I hope I will be, my one request would be a snack box to-go for my future ride home. 

Neither the police escort nor the plainclothes police officers in the lecture hall, nor the flyers, nor the protesters bothered me. We live in charged times, I am not naive, and six months into the war we have all sadly grown accustomed to the blurred lines between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and between acceptable social protest and verbal and physical intimidation. We are all learning to live with the unimaginable. What surprised me, what upset me, and – in all honesty – what saddened me was my exchange with students following my remarks or, more precisely, my non-exchange with them. 

I don’t remember their precise questions but for the purposes of this morning, let’s presume they were along the lines of “How can I justify the actions of genocide enabling Israel or conscience supporting it?” What I do remember are the cellphones in their hands. For every person asking me a question, there was a sidekick, phone in hand, recording my every word and move. In the days since, I have compared notes with friends and come to understand that while new to me, such vigilante videography is a well-worn tactic and sign of the times. An electronic ambush, a TikTok takedown, to catch someone saying or doing something worthy of reposting on social media. The attempt to get an off-the-cuff or hot-mic moment that can then be clipped and posted onto Facebook or Instagram, bolstering the poster’s clout and cause and sullying the character of the person caught in a gotcha moment.

The whole thing made me so sad. While my talk was not about Israel, being the kind of guy I am, I was ready and willing to talk to anyone – especially college students, especially students who hold views contrary to my own. I live for that sort of thing. But that is not what happened. I saw the iPhones and Androids and I shut down. Their insistence to record, the telltale sign that the goal of my interlocutors was not dialogue but the performative leveraging of social media. I explained to the students that I would be happy to talk, to listen, and to debate, on the condition that they put their cameras away. An exchange of ideas – by all means. A clip for their Instagram feed – no way. They refused, I declined to engage, and I walked away. It was all so very sad. An opportunity for dialogue and discourse, a chance to challenge someone’s views and have my own views challenged, a chance to see, that despite our differences, we can dignify each other’s humanity. A lost chance to build a bridge of dialogue. 

Much maligned as social media is, often rightfully so, my point is not to bemoan the proliferation of smartphones in the public square. There is nothing wrong and sometimes there is everything right with our ability to record in real time. Be it documenting a fender-bender or catching a comedian using a derogatory racial slur, accountability is a good thing. Lest anyone forget, and as our rabbinic intern Aiden Pink reminded me, it was not until the incontrovertible truth of 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s recording of Derek Chauvin’s actions, that George Floyd’s death was believed to have been anything other than “medical distress,” as logged in the original statement of the Minneapolis Police Department. I deeply appreciate the democratizing power of iPhones and YouTube clips; not everyone has a figurative or literal pulpit to preach from and iPhones and social media can serve as a corrective to that imbalance. Long before our present technology, Louis Brandeis, in his famous 1913 article “What Publicity Can Do,” reflected on the wickedness of people shielding wrongdoers, and made his famous comment that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” When done right, a well-placed video clip can play an important role in our democratic process.

The problem, I believe, is that in order for dialogue – idea exchanging, mind changing, real dialogue – to happen, a degree of vulnerability is necessary. One must be able to state one’s views plainly and honestly, sharing the personal and collective experiences that root them and give rise to them. Our beliefs are reflections of our biographies – to share them is to share part of ourselves. Dialogue means giving expression to who we are and listening attentively, intently, and most of all, empathetically to the other side. Good dialogue is never “take it or leave it.” An idea is tendered, countered, sharpened, reframed and tendered again and again and again. We allow our views to be challenged, and we interrogate them ourselves, even as we challenge the thoughts and opinions of our sparring partners. Absolute Truth belongs to God alone. The debate of ideas is meant to nudge us closer, but never fully to that Truth. Sometimes, the process makes us more secure in our views. In the words of the late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, “One cannot affirm one’s own certainties without engaging in the counter-certainties of another.” Sometimes, lo and behold, we change our minds. In all times, hopefully, we come to appreciate another person’s views as situated in their humanity. 

But none of this happens if the cell phones come out. When dialogue is reduced to a performative exercise, both sides lose. The person holding the recording device is already one step removed; they are not thinking about the exchange of ideas but about the clever or damning post to follow. As for the person being recorded – the other night, yours truly – the shields go up, the introspection goes down, and the possibility for reflective and creative dialogue dials down to zero. The element of intimidation and the threat of broadcast foster silence, not dialogue, stifling speech not nurturing it. There is a reason that every historic negotiation – be it Oslo, Camp David, or any other – happens in some press-free location. For the parties to speak their hearts and minds and most daring of all, expose their doubts to another, it cannot be performative. You have to be able to be human – to go for a walk in the woods or chat with your guard down. There are wonderful dialogue programs in America and in Israel deserving of our support and participation – Seeds for Peace, Setting the Table, Roots, Encounter, the Parents Circle Forum – to name just a few. It is not easy, but it is also not rocket science. I, for one, know that in my years as a rabbi, of the incalculable number of people who have voiced disagreement with me, it has been the ones who have reached out, who have invited me for a coffee to quietly debate a position, who are not only the people whose opinions I respect most, but the people whose views have shaped my own.

Indeed, while the impetus for my remarks today began with what happened the other night and the need to create dialogue between our community and those beyond our community, I am equally if not more pained when I see such “gotcha” aggressions within our own people. Individuals who would misrepresent the views of another Jew in public. Individuals in positions of Jewish communal, journalistic, or rabbinic leadership who write a post or article maligning someone without even having inquired as to what and why another colleague said what they said. No matter where such individuals fall on the political spectrum, their behavior is reprehensible. They exist beyond the pale of what our community stands for and will never be extended a platform to speak from this bimah. One does not need to be a rabbi or even to know our Torah reading terribly well, to know that community can only be sustained with mechanisms by which deeds committed intentionally and unintentionally, maliciously or by mistake, can be differentiated and understood, and then – perhaps more importantly – with mechanisms by which repentance, restitution, and communal re-entry can be achieved. When used as an aggressive act, social media has the opposite effect of the rituals of Leviticus – a means of contagion not purification, contamination not purgation, exclusion not inclusion. We should expect more from ourselves and certainly from our leaders. 

The student body of Cal State, San Bernardino is a diverse one, eighty percent of whom are first-generation college students. The epilogue to my evening – both solace and sorrow – was an email I received upon my return, the reflections of a Jewish student present at the lecture, a first-generation immigrant from the Former Soviet Union. He expressed deep gratitude and appreciation for my presence and talk but – because of the protests – also sadness and loneliness. Given his family history, he was well aware of the toxic effects of non-democratic and antisemitic regimes. For him, the promise of America was a country that values diversity, protecting its citizens from ethnic, religious, and other forms of discrimination. How sad, this student wrote, reflecting on the evening, to see those same hardened hatreds now take root here in the erstwhile “land of the free.”

Friends, we’ve got serious problems. The once fertile soil of our country has grown less and less capable of producing the fruits of reasoned debate. As a Jewish community in our charged times, we feel the pinch more acutely than anyone. I know what I believe in. If you want to talk about war, peace, humanitarian values, fine. Just tell me where and when and I’ll show up. But come to me with more than your iPhone and Instagram feed. You bring your ideas, I’ll bring mine, and let’s dialogue. Let’s be vulnerable one with another and appreciate our shared humanity whatever the differences in our views may be. This is a time for serious people looking to solve serious problems. The time for performance is over. We deserve better. The people of Israel and Gaza deserve better. Most of all, our world deserves better.

Brandeis, Louis D. “What Publicity Can Do.” Harper’s Weekly, December 20, 1913. Reprinted in Other People's Money--and How the Bankers Use It. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914). Available online from the Louis Brandeis School of Law Library.