Spring. The season of graduations and protests. A time for institutions to celebrate continuity, even as the world outside, like the changing landscape itself, challenges the assumptions of the age.
At precisely this time last this week, a faculty speaker at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, used the commencement stage to denounce Israel’s war in Gaza, remarks that drew applause from some as others experienced them as alienating and unwelcome. This past Tuesday evening, yet again, masked, hate-spewing demonstrators waving Hezbollah flags protested the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” hosted at Park East Synagogue. At both the city and state level, lawmakers are debating “buffer zone” legislation around houses of worship and educational institutions, attempting to balance the right of free expression with public safety. In our own camp, the Jewish press has reported a number of undergraduate students expressing dissent over the decision of the Jewish Theological Seminary to award an honorary degree to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog at commencement later this month.
The conversation is not limited to Jewish life, the Middle East, or the Met Gala. There are ongoing “No Kings” protests, anti-ICE demonstrations, and more. Nor should we forget who will arrive in New York this week: Bruce Springsteen, whose concert – aside from its usual heart-stopping, house-rocking, earth-quaking three hours of fun – is an extended defense of the sacrosanct American right to protest.
From campuses to concert halls, from museums to synagogue sidewalks, from commencement stages to the streets themselves, the settings may differ, but the underlying question remains the same. What are the ethics of protest? At what point does dissent deepen democratic life and moral accountability, and at what point does it begin to fray the bonds of trust, dignity, and shared belonging upon which a society depends?
These are not questions we are going to resolve before Musaf. The reading list is long – Arendt, Rawls, Thoreau, Walzer and others – and the sermon time short. I am a rabbi, not a first amendment lawyer. My aim is not to tie these tensions into a tidy bow, but to offer three guiding principles to help us think more carefully as events unfold around us, as we debate with friends and family, and, hopefully, as each of us engages in the exercise of our own moral personhood amid the passions of the day.
Principle number one: Protest is a foundational building block of what it means to be both a Jew and an American.
From Abraham standing before God at Sodom and Gomorrah to Moses standing before Pharaoh, from the prophets calling kings and nations to conscience to Esther risking all for her people, to be a Jew is to take note of the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be, and then to summon the moral courage, communal will, and spiritual audacity to help close that gap. Judaism has never confused covenant with conformity. It is why rabbis so often quote Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous reflection after marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma: “I felt my legs were praying.” To protest is a religious act.
And as Americans, all the more so. In this year of America at 250, it is worth remembering that, poetic preamble aside, the American Revolution began, in no small measure, as a protest movement. The Boston Tea Party was an act of civil disobedience. The Declaration of Independence is, at heart, a list of grievances against King George III. America’s finest moments have emerged from moral protest: the Civil Rights Movement, women’s suffrage, the labor movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. And some of America’s deepest moral failures – the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the turning away of the refugees aboard the MS St. Louis – were marked not by excessive dissent, but by the silence of too many good people. As Jews and as Americans, we are heirs to two traditions of protest. To suggest otherwise is, I believe, to misrepresent both traditions and to abdicate a central responsibility of both.
Principle number two: More often than not, where we draw the lines around acceptable protest says as much about us as it does about the protest itself. Over the course of more than twenty-five years in the rabbinate, I have learned one ironclad rule: no congregant has ever told me that the pulpit is no place for politics when they agree with my politics.
Be it the pulpit or protest, we are inclined to admire what advances our beliefs and recoil from what challenges our convictions. I had little difficulty admiring Greta Thunberg when she sailed across the Atlantic to raise awareness about climate change. Not so when she joined a flotilla protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. The faculty speaker at the University of Michigan commencement sounded pretty good when advocating for the university’s first Jewish faculty member and a curriculum more attentive to Black American history. It was only when he condemned Israel that many listeners, myself included, experienced his remarks as alienating or ill-timed.
And the subjective nature of it all is an observation that cuts both ways. The progressive who passionately defends buffer zones around abortion clinics but not around houses of worship should ask why one form of vulnerability warrants protection and another does not. The free speech absolutist who champions a Gaza encampment but would never tolerate a white nationalist rally on campus should ask where principle ends and preference begins. The activist who mobilizes when civilians die in Gaza but remains deafeningly silent when tens of thousands of Iranians are murdered by their own regime must interrogate what moral framework governs that selective outrage.
None of this means all causes are morally equivalent. They are not. But it does mean that none of us are the neutral arbiters of protest ethics we imagine ourselves to be. Where we draw the lines, whom we applaud, what we excuse, and what we denounce often reveal not only our principles, but our loyalties, identities, fears, and tribal attachments as well. Moral seriousness requires not only the courage to express ourselves, but the humility to examine ourselves before we do, to check ourselves before we express ourselves.
Principle number three: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
As Jews, we believe in buffer zones – not just the kind being debated at City Hall, and not just the kind our rabbis built into Jewish life itself, like the extra eighteen minutes added onto Shabbat and the waiting time between eating meat and dairy. The rabbis believed in moral buffer zones, in living lifnim mishurat hadin, “beyond the strict line of the law.” In fact, rabbinic tradition explains this semi-somber period between Passover and Shavuot through precisely this lens. A vast number of Rabbi Akiva’s students, the Talmud teaches, died in a plague at this season. They followed the letter of the law. They perished because they failed to go beyond it, to treat one another with respect, kavod zeh lazeh. They failed to embody the deeper demand of leadership, to live not merely by what one is allowed to do, but by what one ought to do.
What might that mean for us today? A First Amendment lawyer might well argue that, legally speaking, almost everything goes: protests in the streets, disruptions at commencements, demonstrations outside houses of worship, encampments on campuses. And perhaps, under the law, it does. But just because you can do something does not necessarily mean you should.
The faculty speaker at the University of Michigan commencement may well have been within his rights, both intellectually and institutionally, to voice his objections to Israel. But his decision to do so in that setting reflected a breathtaking failure of leadership, reminding us that there is no direct correlation between tenure and wisdom, expertise and judgment, intellectual accomplishment and moral clarity. No different from the professor who hijacks a classroom to air political grievances under the guise of education, the speaker demonstrated an astonishing lack of discernment by alienating a sizeable portion of the very students and families he was there to honor and congratulate.
Regarding the protests outside of Park East Synagogue, whatever the letter of the law may be, to wave the flag of a terrorist organization, to chant antisemitic slogans, to proclaim that the Jewish state itself should cease to exist – that is not peaceful protest. That is intimidation masquerading as activism. Furthermore, I was deeply troubled by the response of the mayor, who felt compelled to preface his condemnation of the protests by first denouncing the event itself. The mayor should have simply said that no house of worship should be targeted or intimidated, full stop. To imply that the nature of the event somehow mitigates or contextualizes the harassment outside is not only unseemly but downright irresponsible. Not only does such rhetoric provide moral cover for behavior that crosses the line from protest into intimidation, but it shifts responsibility onto those being targeted, a form of moral equivocation disturbingly close to telling an assault victim that while the attack on her was wrong, perhaps she could have dressed differently. A peaceful protest calling for Palestinian self-determination alongside Jewish self-determination? As a liberal Zionist, that sounds like my kind of protest! But in an age in which there is a direct line between anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitic violence, our mayor must do more than merely follow the letter of the law. True leadership begins where the letter of the law ends.
Finally, the idea that “just because you can does not mean you should” finds application to the dissenting undergraduate voices surrounding President Herzog speaking at the Jewish Theological Seminary commencement. Of course one can object to Herzog speaking. As the ceremonial head and symbolic representative of the State of Israel, Herzog is protested all the time – from the left and the right, by Jews and non-Jews, in Israel and throughout the Diaspora. Protest, criticism, even passionate disagreement with Israeli policy are all entirely legitimate features of Jewish life and, for that matter, the Seminary, for a long, long time.
The issue is not whether dissent is permitted, nor for that matter whether this is, for all the reasons stated, the right moment to add fuel to fire of those who seek harm against the Jewish people. The issue is whether we in our own tent are not also losing the capacity for kavod zeh lazeh, basic regard for one another, and whether, in our rush to give voice to our objections, we have forgotten that not every moment is meant for protest, and not every gathering should be transformed into a battleground.
Three principles: first, that protest is woven into the DNA of both Jewish and American life; second, that the lines we draw around acceptable protest reveal as much about our loyalties as our principles; and third, that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Not a call to fear dissent or suppress it, but to house dissent in a manner that reminds us of our covenantal obligations to one another and our responsibility to preserve the civic and moral fabric upon which all disagreement ultimately depends.
As the secular prophet of our time, Bruce Springsteen himself has been reminding audiences across the country and will no doubt remind New Yorkers this week: “America, from the beginning, was born out of disagreement. It was built on disagreement. We can argue about what course we think the country should take while recognizing our common humanity, our dignity and, yes, our unity.”
Whatever our differences, the challenge before us is not whether we will argue – Americans and Jews always have – but whether we can do so without severing the kesher, the ties that bind us, as fellow citizens, fellow Jews, and fellow human beings.