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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

A Counter Culture of Kindness Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations on the essential issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Thursday, November 7th, 2024.

In tractate Chagigah, the Talmud describes the climate in which real learning takes place. Scholars and students sit together in groups engaged in debate, some arguing for one side of an argument and some for the other. Sometimes those viewpoints are incompatible. But even if those incompatible positions make for very difficult politics, because after all, public policy usually has to choose a particular lane, it makes for a fascinating question about learning and trying to listen amidst these disputes.

A person might ask, how can I study in this environment? People want the clarity of one viewpoint and all the noise of a debate can feel like it obscures more than it enlightens. Therefore, according to the Talmud, the Torah describes all of the Torah as being spoken by God through the mouth of Moses, which is to say all the Torah, including the multiplicity of interpretations that we might come up with, all of which may contain some kernel of truth or truth possibility, and none of which can contain the entire truth. If God contains multitudes, therefore the insistence on single, simple truths by us mere mortals is idolatry.

You, then, the Talmud goes on to say to the learner, how would you want to study Torah in this environment? Well, make your ears like a funnel and acquire an understanding heart so that you can hear both sides of an argument and that you can learn from both. The rabbis demand of us that in times of noise, our demand should not be for more quiet, nor are we obligated to make a choice, but to be better at listening and kinder and more open in our hearts to the truths of others.

This is easier said than done. In today’s marketplace of ideas, a lot of truths that people claim for themselves, that are in combat with the truths of others, are not truths at all. They’re well styled and well manufactured falsehoods. So listening for their truth is actually enabling deception. A lot of truth in today’s political discourse is not the truth spoken to power, but a kind of rejection of social and political norms, a quest for destructive chaos. And meanwhile, listening to the noise is just impossible.

I watched the election results on Tuesday night, and it was the first time in forever I had watched an evening news program with its usual cast of diverse characters all sitting around the giant half circle table, all of them jockeying to add more commentary and insight, and I kind of marveled at it, especially because very few results had come in. So there wasn’t actually anything to talk about, but it didn’t stop anyone from talking. Eventually I had to take some breaks, muting the noise of the TV because confronting it, trying to listen for truth felt overwhelming.

I wanted to run an experiment for this week’s podcast and to try to find a way for us to produce some useful wisdom right now. I didn’t want more hot takes. I definitely didn’t want to lend Identity/Crisis to political commentary, which you can surely find elsewhere, some of it good, probably a lot of it bad, but with a lot better experts for whom the news cycle is their expertise. So instead, I asked six of my Hartman colleagues, four of whom are on our full time faculty, two who are research fellows at the Institute, to answer a simple prompt.

I asked them, what should be the agenda for the American Jewish community in working to repair our democracy in the wake of these elections? I asked them this question prior to the release of the election results, but I’m sure that the actual results influenced what they had to say. But I felt, and I think they would all agree, that our democracy here is in crisis in ways that would not have been resolved had Donald Trump been defeated. That to the extent that Trump is a threat to democracy, and I think he is, he may be as much a symptom of our democracy crisis as an enabler.

And then, after I sent them this question, something powerful happened in response. All six responded in somewhat similar ways to my general prompt. All of them encouraged us to think more simply. About social bonds, about the power of community, about bridging difference in one way or another. All of the responses exhibited to me a kind of deep and underlying kindness, a generosity, both in the tone that they spoke and in their aspiration. The whole exercise surprised me and moved me, especially as there is so much dissension and distrust all around us, especially it is so easy to become inclined to respond to violence with violence.

I felt so excited about this as well, as a leader of the Shalom Hartman Institute, because it reminded me or argued to me that maybe this is the work right now for our organization, that we return to the core principles of teaching ethics and lovingkindness, and trying to avoid all of the traps that are out there for thought leaders, thinking that the work is just about parsing politics and trying to influence politics.

And for those of us in education, a reminder that all of our work, always, if you work in education, you know this, all of the work is about envisioning an alternative future to the present, and doing deliberative and slow work that plans for it, with big, with big hearts, with open ears, and the wisdom to listen. A basic Torah of kindness for the moment, which I think is the most counter cultural commitment we can offer.

Now, I know all the risks. I know, as liberals know too well, that talking about kindness when others are ruthless can leave you vulnerable to their ruthlessness. I know that we liberals keep talking about norms and rules and how society should operate even when those rules and norms are threatened or completely flouted by major political leaders and even if the best thing to do to keep up would be to break the rules like the others do. You might win more elections, and here I just thank God I’m not a politician because of the choices it would demand, and because I don’t think I have the stomach for it. I would rather just try to live in the world the way that I think that I should, and be in community like this one, here at Hartman, and with all of you that’s eager to bring that way of thinking and living to scale.

So here they are, six responses. We curated for you a listening ear with this meditations on the moment, this anthology of wisdom for an anxious and noisy minute. I hope they are as helpful to you as they were for me.

Justus Baird is a Senior Vice President at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.

Justus: We have trust issues in America. No one will be surprised to hear that we’re living in an era with the lowest level of trust in government. Trust in institutions. Even trust in each other, since researchers started gathering the data decades ago.

There are plenty of reasons for these low levels of trust, but I’m more interested in ways we can rebuild trust. I found inspiration from an unlikely source: The Biblical practice of tithes. One of the tithes, the rabbis called it the second tithe, ma’aser sheni, was to bring 10% of your crops to Jerusalem and eat it with your household. If you lived far away, you could exchange the produce for money to make it easier to carry. But the catch was, you could only spend that money on food and drink. The result was a big shared feast in Jerusalem.

But why set aside a whole 10th of your crops, just to eat a few nice meals in Jerusalem? Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed reasoned that because the tithe could only be used for food and drink, it was unlikely your household could eat all of it. So you’d be likely to give some of it away for others to enjoy. A big crowd of people sharing food, Maimonides taught, would strengthen the bond of love and brotherhood between everyone. In other words, it would build trust.

Today we don’t tie in the same ways. But we do have a contemporary practice of sharing food that makes a similar impact. The potluck. A potluck, sharing food with people we don’t know all that well, is a mini stage for countless trust building practices. The food that we bring, whether we cooked it or bought it, tells a small story about ourselves, creating a connection point and sometimes recipe sharing. When we noticed at the potluck who appears frail and who seems a little anxious, we make a subconscious checklist of people to reach out to, creating a web of micro obligations to each other.

And when we see someone helps set up the buffet or clean up afterwards, without being told to, we realized that others are also invested in building our trust in people we don’t know. Unlike hosting guests, where the roles are more clearly defined, at a potluck, everyone contributes to build something together, a tiny version of living together in society.

After this election, we all have a responsibility to rebuild trust. Trust in government. Trust in institutions. And trust in each other. It’s going to take a long, long time. Why not get started with something simple, like organizing a potluck?

Yehuda: Deborah Bair is a Senior Faculty Member at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

Deborah: On the most important issues facing society, reasonable people, people of good character and good faith, will disagree. This idea is foundational to our democracy, and yet, we have lost sight of it. We treat those we disagree with as enemies, assuming they are bad actors engaging in bad faith. What happened?

I think part of the answer is that we have overinvested in national politics and underinvested in our local communities. I’m guilty of this myself. I followed the presidential race for months, but only read the local ballot measures the day before I voted. But I think this is a mistake, for two reasons.

First, because it doesn’t align with our ability to have an impact. If I take a public position on immigration, by which I usually mean writing something on the internet, the stakes might feel high to me, but they aren’t. I don’t work in government. My views are not going to impact national policy. That isn’t true when I advocate at a local level. My view on how the school board should allocate its budget will have a direct impact on both my neighbor’s children and my own.

Second, it is a mistake because it confuses imagined communities with real ones. If we never meet, if I never have to deal up close with your beauty and your flaws, it is easy for me to imagine that we are perfectly aligned or to write you off completely as a terrible person.

That is harder in day to day life because people are and can’t be reduced to their positions on a political issue. I might hate your stance on abortion, but love the way you coach my daughter on the softball team. And if I’m going to keep running into you at the grocery store, I have an incentive to build our relationship around the goals we share.

Our rabbinic tradition understood this. It valorized debate, but in the context of a lived community where everyone felt bought into a shared project. I do not think it is accidental that the Mishnah goes out of its way in Yevamot 1:4 to mention that the children of the houses of Hillel and Shammai married one another. In many ways, these houses were the political parties of their day, often fiercely opposed both ideologically and on practical matters. And yet they figured out how to dan l’kaf zechut, to judge one another generously, to deal with one another, so that they could continue to build their rabbinic world together.

This does not mean that they imagined their disagreements away. Far from it. Just because we work together on the PTO doesn’t mean we agree about how the school should be run or what we should be teaching our children. Centering the local doesn’t mean that everything will become harmonious. Instead, it means that we are tightening our feedback loop so that we can actually see the impact and the costs of our actions and use that information to refine how we move forward.

If we start by working together to make sure the roads get fixed or the HVAC system at the school gets replaced, we can start to build the kind of healthy communities of disagreement that are the heart and the hope of our democracy.

Yehuda: Flora Cassen is a senior faculty member here at the Shellam Hartman

Flora: Yehuda, in your recent op-ed in Israel Hayom, asking Israelis to partner with American Jews in supporting liberal democracy, you described American Judaism as a hundred-plus-year radical experiment in reimagining the possibilities for diaspora Jewish life. For me, coming from Europe, this characterization of American Judaism as a bold experiment really resonated with me.

I grew up in Belgium where the Jewish community was small and we were grateful to be accepted, but we could not feel fully rooted or settled. And looking back now, I feel we were more guests than citizens. But when I moved to the U.S., I discovered a very different situation with many diverse Jewish communities that seemed entirely at home in America. And when communities feel rooted, creative synthesis can happen, in this case between America and Judaism.

And you can see it from Reform to Conservative and Orthodox and everything in between: All these communities experiment with different variations of that synthesis. And this creativity and dynamism and vitality of the American Jewish community were things that I had not seen in Europe growing up, and that I’ve been impressed with ever since I moved here.

I’m sure this has complex roots and explanations, but one element that strikes me as important is the bond between American Jews and an American vision of pluralistic democracy. And on the one hand, America, with its diverse and chaotic melting pot of communities, offer Jews a place here. And on the other hand, American Jews have been deeply committed to supporting America’s pluralistic democracy.

Lately though, there has been a drift away from liberal democracy all over the world. And I worry sometimes that some parts of the American Jewish community have also drifted towards illiberalism. And this happened on both left and right. But my worry is not about left or right ideas. A solid democracy should be able to hear and debate all ideas. It’s about illiberal attitudes like, for example, book bans on one side or cancellations on the other that discourage listening to and respecting views different from one’s own. And I think when that attitude becomes predominant, the number of people and communities that can be included in this plurality of a pluralistic democracy necessarily becomes smaller.

And so if I’m correct that American Jewish flourishing is tied to the health of American democracy, my hope after this election is that American Jews can recommit to the values of pluralistic democracy. The idea of American democracy, that over 300 million people can govern themselves better together than a king or an autocrat can, can seem completely unrealistic in such a large country.

But it has worked when people could accept that no single person or group has all the answers, and that the art of living together requires humility and not just listening to others, but also letting their insights and ideas complement ours. And so I think that by recommitting to this practice of pluralism, American Jews can do the critical work of supporting both American democracy and their own communities in the process.

Yehuda: David Zvi Kalman is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, actually the former producer of Identity/Crisis, and now senior advisor for Sinai and Synapses.

David Zvi: In the days after the election, I found myself thinking about the synagogue, about shul. I’ve been thinking about it first because my shul is a polling station, a place where citizens line up morning until night to cast their ballots.

I’ve been thinking about it also because so many people in my shul spent their run up to the election organizing for the Harris campaign, canvassing the Philadelphia suburbs, driving people to the polls and driving food to the poll workers. It was a community inside a community that, in the days since the election, has given me a lot of comfort.

But I’m also thinking about shul because it’s such a rarity these days. David Weiss Halivni famously quipped that he couldn’t talk to the people he davened with and he couldn’t daven with the people he talked to. I’ve been thinking about how rare it is in our polarized society to spend any time at all with people we can’t talk to. How rare it is to have a physical space where people of different political persuasions still gather.

The tensions of such spaces are obvious, and in the coming years they’ll obviously get worse, but I wonder if there isn’t also in these spaces a hidden opportunity. A chance to understand the people in your literal neighborhood. A chance to ground ourselves in places where we live, and not the online environments in which so many of us increasingly spend our time.

I don’t have any illusions that these conversations will be persuasive, and I certainly don’t think that people who lose elections have a special responsibility to understand those who won. But community matters. And local community matters most of all. We should talk to the people we daven with. And it’s worth figuring out what to say.

One of the things we too often miss when thinking about Jewish community is that communities of any kind are becoming increasingly uncommon, increasingly precious. As Robert Putnam noted decades ago in his book Bowling Alone, American society seems to be optimizing its way out of all its middle structures, all the groups that are bigger than family and smaller than the state, which bind people together and give them a sense of place and purpose. These middle structures are inherently messy, but their messiness is a feature, not a bug.

Yehuda: Michael Koplow is a senior fellow at Hartman, as well as the chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum.

Michael: The crisis in American democracy is ultimately about silos. Americans don’t trust institutions that used to be broad based and widely accepted. Whether it be governments, the media, the courts, universities, the list is endless. Political polarization and social media have made our circles of engagement increasingly narrow so that we increasingly choose to affiliate only with people who think exactly like we do, and we rarely engage in any sustained and meaningful way with people who don’t.

American Judaism has a natural fix for this. American Jewish institutions revolve around gathering people together who share a Jewish identity, rather than people who all think the same way, or vote the same way. We sit and shul next to friends with whom we disagree on politics. We volunteer for community organizations because we agree on a common mission, rather than on whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris would be better for Israel. We regularly talk and even argue with Israeli family and friends who do not see the world as we do. We are often siloed as Jews. But we are not siloed in our ideological diversity.

One of the most important things that we can do for our democracy is to inculcate democratic habits in ourselves, as Democrats are made, not born. This means going out of our way to increase our engagement with other American Jews through our community institutions, precisely because they are not self-selecting based on politics or ideology.

If you only go to shul on the high holidays, start going on regular Shabbats. If you are Orthodox and rarely encounter non-Orthodox Jews, or if you haven’t been in a place with kosher food and kippot in recent memory, become involved in the larger community organizations that have Jews of all stripes.

We cannot solve the crisis of American democracy ourselves, but we can train ourselves to be more engaged members of our own ideologically diverse community. At a minimum, we can insulate ourselves from some of the breakdown in democratic norms taking place nearly everywhere we look. But at best, we can use that muscle memory to model a form of democratic engagement Born from the unique American Jewish experience that can be emulated by Americans more widely, and do our part to ensure that the United States does not break down into two buckets of pure red and pure blue.

Yehuda: Akiva Mattenson is a faculty member here at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

Akiva: Here in America, we seem to have an ideal of public life full of peace, but not the good kind. We want less public conflict and less interference with others. And we hope we can get a stable consensus with our fellow citizens on enough things to live together. But this ideal and the detachment it motivates leave us ill-equipped when passions boil over. In fact, the repression it calls for only makes matters worse. So we find ourselves unable to disagree on important things without casting each other as demons.

The piece we’re talking about resembles the conflict-avoidant ways of peace, darhei shalom that our tradition offers, for example, in the form of ritual, procedural rules and norms of minimal civility with outsiders. Likewise, we end up putting less faith in each other and more faith in formal democratic institutions and norms to keep things stable.

But as we have seen, norms are sub-vertical and institutions can become hollow. What we need is a political practice, not for avoiding our conflict, but for living together with them. We need to strive for a piece that is the fruit of surfacing, our conflicts and sparring, not as enemies, but as adversaries. It would be a piece that preserves our fellowship through the promise of just and reciprocal sacrifices and compromises, or else through the promise of each group’s commitment to the humanity of the other in their continued uncompromising work, toward competing visions of justice.

In so doing, we would revitalize our faith in each other. And we would reinvigorate our democracy by allowing the passion that animates us to drive us into public life, rather than away from it with the expectation that we check passions at the door.

We know this as Jews. The rabbis teach that even a father and son studying Torah at the gat must become adversaries to one another if they hope to learn together. Real encounter with each other and with Torah will be combative and conflicted. But we are also taught that they cannot leave there until they find fellowship with each other.

This practice we’ve been sketching Rabbi Yisrael of Salant saw as a fulfillment of the call to love truth and peace. Still, for fellowship to grow in these encounters, it has to be planted in the soil of another kind of piece. Not an adversarial one, but a cooperative one. One that involves cultivating the thick bonds of mutual care. This is the way of peace that the sages say animates the practice of eruv, of creating community through the pooling of shared food. Committing to peace in this sense will require us to weave our lives together with those of our neighbors, to show up for each other, to become a multi-lingual community, rather than just a multicultural one.

Cultivating adversarial and cooperative piece is serious and long work. But to borrow a Talmudic idiom. Orcheinu rechikah vetzavatim besimah, “our path is long, but the company is sweet.”

Yehuda: Thanks so much for listening to our show and special thanks to our guests this week, Justus Baird, Deborah Barer, Flora Casson, Michael Koplow, Akiva Mattenson, and David Zvi Kalman.

Identity/Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from M Louis Gordon and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silversound NYC with music provided by Socalled.

Transcripts of our show are now available on our website, typically a week after an episode airs. We’re always looking for ideas of what we should cover in future episodes, so if you have a topic you’d like to hear about or have comments on this one, you can write to us at [email protected].

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