The following is a transcript of Episode 155 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, and welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer and we’re recording on Wednesday, September 20th, 2023. 

So today, here at Hartman North America, we’ve been doing something unusual. It’s been kind of delightful to be in the office today as we have been convening online a full day of learning, something we call a Tishrei Teach-In with learning and discussion on the urgent questions facing Israeli democracy and society. We’ve titled today “Raising Our Voices in Protest and Solidarity.” We knew that the timing of today’s event would make sense on the Jewish Calendar, where the week between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, which is the time of year when we most raise our voices, at least in prayer, maybe not in protest, but at least in prayer and certainly in an act of solidarity, certainly together with the people who we might show up with together with at synagogue, but metaphorically with the large gatherings of the Jewish people that take place in small and large synaoguges all around the world at the same time.

I’m not sure we knew exactly that the timing would be right for the visit of Prime Minister Netanyahu to New York as part of the UN, which has invited a real activation of the protest movement, which has been galvanized in Israeli society for the past nine months, finally really take root here in New York, led by Israeli Americans and increasingly with the participation of American Jews, trying to figure out, as many of us have been doing for quite some time now, what it means to be in solidarity from afar, some Jews together with other Jews, as relates to issues of a socety that are in many ways of the Jewish people’s making.

One question I’ve been conflicted by for a long time is the basic question of what do Jews do on behalf of, for, or with other Jews when they’re in trouble, whether or not those troubles have been caused by us or by external forces. What are we going to do about it? What does it mean to show up? 

This morning, as part of the teach-in, I gave the opening talk titled: “On Screaming — and Other Radical Ways of Showing Up.” We’ve recorded for you, and we’re presenting it today as part of Identity/Crisis. My hope is that the Torah and the teaching provided today are not only thematic to you, as you get through this complicated Jewish holiday season, but useful to all of us as we continue to consider what it means to be part of the Jewish people today. Enjoy. 

And I want to start by, first of all, acknowledging all of you who’ve shown up in this busy week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I see a whole bunch of familiar faces and names. I know a bunch of you are clergy. I don’t know if you are preparing or stalling. But it is delightful be with all of you. I also want to really acknowledge my colleagues here at the Institute, especially under the leadership of Maital Friedman, who initiated this idea, and I think more importantly, not just had this idea, but had the ability to execute this quite quickly. It was clear to us in the last few weeks that we have a responsibility in moments like this, that that responsibility is less obvious here in New York about what we’re supposed to be doing, although I’ll speak about that more, that our Israeli colleagues have been doing the work of both being the Hartman Institute and taking on all the responsibilities while simultaneously for the past nine months being active citizens.

And so for us, as the Hartman Institute, this is a moment of solidarity between North America and Israel. For us, as an institution, hopefully many of you feel similarly, this is an opportunity to stand together with Israelis, Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, who are seeking to belong to their society, to improve it, and who have been incurring a tremendous amount of risk and loss in the activity of showing up in order to do that kind of work. 

I want to frame today before I get into some of what I want to learn together. It’s actually a pretty complicated week for North American Jews right now, around this exact question of, what does it mean to be in relationship to the state of Israel and to, in particular, to the Israeli government?

As folks know, the Prime Minister of Israel is here in New York this week. Those of you who are in New York have experienced the traffic ramifications of that. It’s not about the Israeli Prime Minister, it’s about the UN in session. And in connection to that, there’s been quite a bit of drama around who the Prime Minister will and won’t meet those of you in the Bay Area know the Prime Minister swept in to meet with Elon Musk. Therefore, in some ways, embodying an attempt to represent American Jews in a moment like that. That’s a complicated story as well. 

But the response in some sectors of the American Jewish community, largely led by Israeli Americans, and that, too, is its own whole story that we can unpack, has been a series of protests that are underway in the New York area right now, which I would say without a full kind of historical perspective on it are the largest of their size. But what I mean by that is there has only been protests against the Israeli government, historically, many of those protests have been coded in some way as quote unquote “anti Israel.” What these protests look differently, much like the protest movements in Israel for the past nine months, are not anti Israel protests at all. They are Zionist Israeli solidarity protests of Israelis standing together in opposition to their government. And so now, with the leadership of Israeli Americans, there’s quite significant attendance and participation by more American Jews who are showing up to a protest about Israel than I think we ever have seen before. 

I will say at the same time, I think many American Jews, and I would say myself included, have struggled with the question of how and whether to show up in protest, in America, about Israel. I will say I was unambivalent when I was in Israel this summer about participating in the protests. I felt unambivalent about the activity of Jewish people who that seemed so obvious that if something like 65 percent of Israelis oppose the current course of action, that it was a slam dunk to feel that it was a pro-Israel activity to join in those protests in Israel. And I’ve always felt a little bit more conflicted about what that means to do that kind of thing here in America.

I’m not the only one who’s conflicted about it. It has also been explicitly named by the Prime Minister as an activity that when diaspora Jews show up in protest against the Israeli government in the diaspora, Netanyahu said as much at the airport, iIt’s the equivalent of participating in the BDS movement. I don’t agree with that assessment. I find it to be almost a violent assessment of this activity. But what I think it does capture, to some degree, is that there is a little bit of a difference between what it means to show up in protest in Israel and outside Israel. And we can argue and disagree about whether there should be a difference, but it does raise a question for many people of how and whether to show up to protest in a way that will convey solidarity, without necessarily conveying animosity, which is a very different conversation to be a part of in Israel than it is in the diaspora. 

So I want to make an institutional comment to frame this. It’s been an interesting question for us as the Hartman Institute. And I’ll say this, pluralistic institutions of Torah should be ambivalent about mass populist movements. We should be. It’s because we’re committed to pluralism, and therefore you want to make possible communities of difference, and that includes political difference. And we are an institute of Torah, which sometimes doesn’t quite get captured in its nuance and its complexity when people are chanting slogans.

The Institute also has no position on, let’s say, judicial reform, lowercase. Meaning, we think that there’s perfectly plausible for Israelis to have different opinions on various constellations or the makeup of our democratic infrastructure of the state of Israel. The Institute has, however, taken a position, which is a little bit unusual for our history, about the Reform, this combination, a huge package of legislation that is being forced through by a thin coalition and a right wing coalition against the majority of the interests and, and wishes of Israelis. And we have taken a position against the way in which this government has pushed its political agenda against the will of the people.

So we too, as an institution, have been navigating the question of what is our role and our relationship to this protest moment in Israeli society. And let me put it more positively. The Institute also embraces peoplehood as one of our core commitments. What it means to try to big, build the largest, imaginary or real, constellation of Jews who feel connected and committed to one another, and we believe in liberal Zionism. We believe that the project of the State of Israel was meant to be consonant and consistent with the values of a liberal nation state, even if those values are contested. And we see in the protest movement a huge, in some ways unprecedented window of opportunity to lean into the commitments of Jewish peoplehood.

How do we collectively stand for something, maybe a little bit broader, that can’t be captured by one partisan political position, but that can represent that we all, many of us, feel that we are part of a shared enterprise? And we feel this is an unprecedented window of opportunity that when millions of Israelis are talking openly about the risks to democracy, now is the time to be talking about investing in and building democratic culture.

I’m particularly grateful to all of you for being here today because this felt to us like the easiest way, or perhaps the most important way, maybe the most brand-consistent way, for us as the Hartman Institute to create an atmosphere of showing up. This, too, is an act of solidarity. Maybe some of you are people who have been to protests. Maybe some of you wish you could be, but are not in proximity, or otherwise are limited from the ability to go to protests. Maybe some of you are ambivalent about the protest question. But this is still an act of solidarity, showing up together with other people, raising our voices, although I’m actually the only one right now raising my voices. You all are, for at least now, blessedly, on mute. 

And doing an activity that we feel is consistent with what we do as an organization which is, um, teach real Torah and convey ideas and discuss ideas in ways that enrich all of us and ultimately shape our society for the better. And, needless to say, the timing of this is not just about Bibi Netanyahu at the UN. We are, as I said before, in the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. For American Jews, North American Jews, the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur symbolized the times in the Jewish year when Jews show up. Sometimes this is a way in which North American Jews self-disparage. Oh man, Jews only are twice- or three-times-a-year Jews.

I don’t see it that way. I feel like it’s realistic and reasonable that a diverse and diffuse people like ours doesn’t regularly show up to be in the same place at the same time. It’s just not in the character of we, the ornery Jewish people. So we have to embrace that a couple of times a year, it is part of the normative culture of Jewish life to show up. There’s an extraordinary number of Jews who show up to synagogue for the High Holidays whether or not they want to be there. That is an immense activity of Jewish peoplehood that has to be embraced. And it’s part of the timing of why a conversation like this one this week, about what does it mean to be in solidarity, what does it mean to show up, and to raise our voices, feels very timely.

This is also the time of the year where the Jewish calendar and the Jewish liturgy invites us to be most proximate to language of urgency and crisis. The crisis and urgency that is imagined by the High Holiday Liturgy is not always about democracy, but it’s not not about how our society should be organized.

One of the most common refrains that appears throughout the liturgy is this phrase, “Ki ta’avir mamshelet zadon min haaretz,” the wish that governments of wrongdoing, corrupt governments be eradicated. In other words, the liturgy is familiar with what we now know to be contemporary political questions. They are part of the vocabulary of religious life during the high holidays as well. So language of urgency and crisis are part and parcel of the high holiday moment, as is the culture of introspection. 

And so I invite today to be both a day of raising our voice because there is a sense of urgency and palpable crisis, but also that our Torah study enable us to engage in the activity of introspection, looking inwards and figuring out who are we. What is our society? What is the Jewish people supposed to be about? And may it be your will, whoever we’re speaking to, that that has an efficacy for us and an efficacy for our people. 

So here’s the question I wanna start with today, in terms of our learning, which is a bit meta for our learning today, in general but also has some specific elements. My question that I’ve been thinking about for decades now is: What are Jews meant to do when other Jews are in trouble? It’s a simple and not so simple question. What are Jews meant to do when other Jews are in trouble? 

It’s rendered not that simple by a lot of variables. One of which is difference. Like, I’m doing my thing, you’re doing your thing. We hold in common that we are part of the same enterprise. We are all Jews, but actually our differences oftentimes are much more pronounced than our similarities. Second of all, oftentimes the things that you’re struggling with, well, they seem very bad from far away, but, you know, my neighbors are struggling with something else that feels kind of bad, whether or not they are Jewish.

And so the ethics of proximity also sometimes get in the way of the question of what I’m supposed to do on behalf of other Jews just because they are Jews. And what is, what most vexes this question is, it’s kind of an easier question to ask, what should Jews do for other Jews when the events that transpired, that are making them feel vulnerable, that are putting them in trouble, are not caused by their own hand, right?

We know, as human beings, what it looks like to stand up and support, you know, heaven forbid, a group of people who are victimized by an earthquake. We know how to respond to all those things. I’m going to use this phrase very intentionally, because it’s not just a theological phrase, it’s the phrase used evasively by homeowners insurance companies. We know how to respond to acts of God. Amazing phrase, throwaway line. But that means, things that are outside our control. 

And we know how to do it because, you know, I may donate money when there’s a terrible natural disaster that takes place in Haiti, just because there are human beings in Haiti, even though I’m not related to them, and therefore it becomes relatively easy to say, well, if I know how to do that for people who I have no connection to, it should be a little easier to leverage that for people who I may be connected to in places where I may have cousins, literally or figuratively.

More complicated question is, how do I stand up and show solidarity together with my people if I feel that the things that they are suffering from are caused by their own hands? And the question that is, has been on display for us for quite some time is this one, precisely because the questions that Israel seems to face right now are not questions of Hamas rockets, although that’s always an imminent threat. It’s not necessarily the question of standing in solidarity with Israel about Iran, although that seems always an imminent threat as well. It’s what does it mean to stand in solidarity with Israel when Israelis elected a government that is leading them down a bad path. The corollary question to this that I’ve been struggling with for some time, and it’s something that is oftentimes yelled at me, as someone who has taken positions, that there are ways to be critically supportive, constructively supportive of the state of Israel, in difficult moments, and as a personal matter, and I suppose as an institutional matter, we have stood in opposition to political strategies.

It’s like the boycott movement or the attempt to coerce Israel through a shift in policy around military funding. It’s been the position that I’ve opposed, and the argument that is oftentimes weighed against me and against that position is, well, at least we’re doing something. You’re just hand wringing, right? In a moment of crisis, when the Jews are doing things that we don’t want them to do, at least those types of political activities involve doing something. That’s the phrase I want to keep coming back to. At least we’re doing something, not just feeling bad or being angry. 

So the question of what does it mean to show up for the Jewish people cannot merely be an emotional question, right? I think it doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. I think to feel sad is also an important demonstration of Jewish peoplehood. To be angry is an important demonstration of Jewish peoplehood. I’m not suggesting that those emotional reactions are irrelevant or insignificant, but I’m wondering what it means, what are we supposed to do? What are the ways in which we as Jews are meant to show up? 

I also want to suggest that when, when folks come along and say the way we are meant to react is through political action, right? Elect politicians who will take a harder line on Israel, oppose funding to Israel, or try to get it to get restricted, or even go towards boycott.

Those set of actions, and I suppose, I think they are part of the playing field of how Jews might react, and plausibly argue that those are extensions of their commitment to Jewish peoplehood. What feels limited to me about those kinds of commitments is that they feel like the reason people gravitate towards them is because we have watched Jewishness become so heavily politicized over the past century. Many of us understand, because the dominant activity of modern life seems to be politics, that Jewishness can only be expressed in actions that resemble political actions. That’s what we mean by showing up. Not doing those kinds of things, not doing direct political action, is therefore not showing up. The only actions of merit are political in nature. 

I don’t want to disparage that. I don’t want to argue against it, but I want to argue today that we have a richer Jewish religious vocabulary that gives us some other tools, other ways, what I’ll call radical acts of showing up, not just trying to enact or exact political change in the world, but other ways in which Jews have argued for a long time that the way we show up and what we do is also rooted in action, is also rooted in behavior, but it is not quite as political as all of those other activities. And those three ways of showing up, radical ways of showing up, I want to say are screaming, and I want to go deep on screaming, blowing the shofar, and fasting. 

I want to argue today that those three activities, screaming, blowing the shofar, and fasting, are actually acts. They look like coded religious behaviors and activities. I don’t think they actually are. I want to argue that there’s a, we’ll call it a secular or a communitarian way of reading why screaming, blowing the shofar, and fasting are essential acts. But in particular, I think the reason why they are acts that convey a meaning that really matters right now is that they are acts that are done in community and therefore they don’t merely represent being in community, they instantiate a vision of Jewish peoplehood. These are different and discreet activities from the thing that we call political action. They involve something else and I think I want to try as modern jews to take them more seriously.

So let’s go to the first set of sources on the question of screaming. And here, we’re gonna start with, a kind of unusual place to start, we’re in Maimonides Mishneh Torah, Laws of Fasting. Maimonides codifies the Laws of Fast, and what’s striking about what Maimonides does here is, you would think that if you were gonna start a book on the Laws of Fast, you would start with, I don’t know fasts. But Maimonides doesn’t start with fasts. He actually starts prior to that, before introducing the idea of fasting. He actually introduces the obligation of screaming and what he will do later on is say, fasting is in a complimentary activity to the fundamental thing that you do on a fast, which is not fasting itself, not the restraining from food. The fundamental activity of fasting is about screaming. 

Maimonides says as follows: “It’s a positive commandment from the Torah to cry out, that is to scream, and to sound trumpets in the event of any difficulty that arises which affects the community. As the verse says in Numbers, ‘When you go out to war against an enemy attacks you, who attacks you, and you sound the trumpets.’”

I want you to listen closely to what the, how radically Maimonides has shifted what the Torah seems to mean. The Torah has said, you’re attacked in a war, and then it gives you the rules of fighting the war, and it seems like one of the things that prompts your reaction, or that starts your campaign, is the blowing of the trumpets.

We know this from like movies about the Middle Ages. You got the guys in the front with the flag who blow the trumpets. You might think that the blowing of the trumpets is merely like, I don’t know, the soundtrack of the war. It’s the call to battle. Maimonides actually argues that the blowing of the trumpets is in and of itself part of the positive Torah commandment. That’s what the first action that one does when you are entering into war is actually sounding the trumpets. 

Maimonides goes on to say, by the way, the fact that I’m using the analogy from the war should not lead you to believe that this is limited merely to wartime. But rather, it’s not a limited scope, rather the intent is, כל דבר שיצר לכם, anything that distresses you. I’ll give some examples like, I don’t know, famine, plague, or locusts, etc. It’s a very loaded etcetera.. There’s a whole bunch of circumstances that there’s going to be something that afflicts you, something that plagues you. And therefore the first response you are meant to do is to cry out, now the translator adds to God, that’s not in what Maimonide says. Cry out because of them and sound the trumpets. 

So I wanna just pause on this for a moment to notice that the phenomenological argument is that screaming and sounding the trumpets are not a precondition to the work that comes next. I also have not said to you there, if you do this, there’s an immediate effect. Maimonides is trying to situate the activity, the mitzvah, the obligation of if you are in crisis, the first thing that you are meant to do is to scream and sound the trumpets. Maimonides’ second move is to then help us to understand why.

Again, as a reader, it’s sometimes really useful to notice when a text doesn’t tell us the reason right away, and then to be able to say, I’m separating those two moves. Something is valuable in and of itself, and by the way, there’s also a reason for it, because it leaves open, it leaves the pregnant possibility that there were more reasons available to us than just the one that the author has decided to provide us.

That’s a second law that Maimonides enumerates here is, this is practice is one of repentance for when a difficulty arises, and the people cry out, parentheses, to God. Although I want to leave out the parentheses if we can. And sound the trumpets. Everyone will realize that this came about because of their evil conduct.

If we actually raise our voices and scream, we will become aware, right? We will have internalized that this was in part or entirely because of us. As Jeremiah says, consistent with biblical theology, your sins have turned away the rains in the harvest climate and this realization will cause the removal of this difficulty.

This is a little bit of a dangerous theology. The way that biblical theology always is that you’re always gonna feel that things are your fault and sometimes they’re not. Right. Although it’s, climate change is one of those interesting places where you find a coalescence between theologies that blame human failure and kind of the state of the world. It’s kind of interesting that, like, the whole conversation about climate change has basically brought back, like, the Book of Numbers. You did this. We did this. And that’s created the conditions of why we’re here.

But there is a little bit of a dangerous thing here that maybe this only becomes relevant to people who believe in direct theological ramifications for our actions. So, I want to try to find a way to read this that doesn’t obligate us to think in those kind of theologically fundamentalist ways, and I’m aided here by the third thing that Maimonides says. So, if you’ll scroll down to the English of Maimonides, Laws of Fast 1:3, he says, Let me explain to you, conversely, should the people fail to cry out, again, I’m not saying to God, just cry out, I think that’s what he actually means, it’s just about crying out. To God makes it too easy. And you know God’s listening. I don’t care whether God’s listening. If the verb is to cry out, I don’t measure the quality of the crying by whether someone is listening. If you are weeping, it still matters as an activity if no one else hears it. It is a, it is an unbelievable human commitment. 

So the people, if the people fail to cry out and sound the trumpets, and instead what they say is what happened to us is merely a natural phenomenon, and this difficulty is merely a chance occurrence. Maimonides use the phrase “harei zo derech achzariyut,” this is a cruel way of being in the world. Because it causes us to remain attached to our own commitments and our own wicked deeds, and this time of distress will lead to further distresses. 

Now of course there is a theological undertone to this. But I want to argue that actually what Maimonides is doing is creating an obligation of screaming that can also be read as a kind of virtue ethics. It’s not about the outcome. It’s about what kind of person are you? Are you a person who witnesses a whole bunch of suffering or human failure and stands passively by saying, well, that just is the way the world is. Politicians are bad. It’s one of the great escapes that people sometimes make in moments of political crisis. Well, that guy’s terrible, but the other guy would have been equally terrible. There’s nothing we can do about it. 

And what Maimonides is arguing is that it’s not just that that’s a weak response, but it makes you a certain type of person in the world. A person who has decided to enshrine your own powerlessness. Or worse, is a person who fails to understand the ways in which you are privileged. That you actually have agency to shape the world. That you may have created, you may have participated in creating the conditions for why you are afflicted. 

Not that you are meant to fully blame yourself. I don’t think Maimonides, or the Mishnah, or the Torah, I refuse to allow them to fully believe that the suffering of innocence is entirely rooted in the behavior, or the human failure of our own piety. I don’t want to live without theology, but I do want to find a way to extract what is useful as a virtue ethics of this, is that to scream in response to something that happens is to resist the complacency of believing that those things happen anyway. 

It is, in other words, a way of showing up in the world. It’s not measurable by whether or not you succeed at reversing the earthquake, the plague, or the judicial reforms. It’s not measured by that. It is a virtue ethics approach of saying, it’s a way for a human being to be in the world, to act in the world, and to be awake to the world. Maimonides goes on and punches this through the book of Leviticus in a magnificent way by saying, this is implied by the Torah’s statement, “ If you remain indifferent to me, I will be indifferent to you with a vengeance.” The implication of the verse is when I bring difficulties upon you so that you repent and you say it’s a chance occurrence, I will add to that a measure of vengeance. 

Let’s just read that first half. I love the idea, the Bible’s resistance to human indifference. And we might even argue that the urtext of Jewish ethics is you shall not remain indifferent. One way for us to show up in the world is to refuse to embody indifference. Does this mean automatically Maimonides, for Maimonides this does not translate into go to protests. It does not translate into withhold military aid. The first activity that he argues that connotes a refusal to engage in the complacency of indifference. The first act is raising our voice and screaming. 

Let’s move to the second act. Act one is about screaming. The second is fasting. Maimonides goes on to say, “In addition, it’s a rabbinic ordinance to fast whenever there’s a difficulty that affects the community until there’s a manifestation of divine mercy. On fast days, we cry out in prayer, we offer supplications, and we sound the trumpets only.” And then he has a little bit of negotiation on whether it’s trumpets or shofarot. But the second activity is this activity known as fasting. Maimonides goes on to say, I will read the rest of Maimonides, then we’ll move to the second, we’ll unpack it a little bit more.

He says, “These fasts ordained for community because of difficulties should not be consecutive, for the community would not be able to observe such a practice.” I love this. I’m panicked. Terrible things have happened. I tried blowing the shofars and screaming it didn’t work, so I moved to phase two, which I started fasting. But don’t try to fast too much, because if you try to push too hard, then the community won’t be able to come along with it, which suggests a core element of what it means for a community to fast is to engage in the very kind of activity that will keep a community together. There’s no point in the pious fasting of a precious few if it can’t be done together in community. And the only way to get it to be done together in community is to be mild enough that a lot of people can participate. 

Listen to this as an amazing kind of thing. There’s a crisis in the world. My goal in response to this crisis is to get as many people as possible to feel motivated and moved to respond to this crisis. And in order to get as many people as possible motivated to move to this crisis, I can’t push too hard. It’s got to be in a modest sense, and I hear, like, when I read this text, I was reminded of the fact that one of the things that has made the protest movement in Israel work is that it’s basically every Saturday night and not other times.

Now it doesn’t mean, there are smaller protests that takes place during the week. And those are for like the full time protesters. The majority of the protesters show up Saturday night because it’s an off day, and because it’s doable once a week, it’s a routine, it’s a ritual, it’s like I go to the farmer’s market on Sunday, I go to the protest on Saturday night, right? It’s manageable. 

And you might look at that and say, no, what they have to do is, in order to solve this crisis, you have to bring the complete society to a snarl. You have to shut things down. Actually, I think the protests understood Maimonides, maybe implicitly. The only way to make this work is to create the kinds of responses, collective responses, that privilege the collective and make it possible for as many people as possible to participate. And that’s an extraordinary gesture and understanding part of the work of what it means to actually show up. 

Now, by the way, what are fasts? Our tradition has three different types of fasts. We have fasts that are commemorative. Like, we fast on Tzom Gedalia, which took place, I guess, two days ago because of the assassination of the governor of Judea, Gedalia ben Achikam, as a moment of kind of political crisis in the 6th century BC. Or, perhaps more famously, we fast on the 9th of Av to commemorate the destruction of the Temple. One type of fast is commemorative. 

A second type of fast is Yom Kippur, which is its whole other category. It seeks to do something about the purification of the people in the temple. 

And then there’s the third kind of fast, which actually is the most kind of radical fasting that we have, which is the fasting suggested here, which is not commemorative, and it’s not Yom Kippur, because it’s not that onerous. You only do it in the daytime, you don’t do it at night. You don’t withhold yourself from all of the prohibitions, just eating and drinking. And that is fasting in response to crisis. This is a different type of fast, and the rabbis lean heavily into this. There’s no limit on how many times you can issue a fast, and the most common crisis that is articulated about this relates to rain. You’ll keep doing it, over and over, until you exact some sort of response. 

And again, I think we are meant to understand that these two things are, there’s two possibilities of what that response can look like. The theologians of us might say, or the god people, I’m gonna fast like a toddler who holds their breath until they get what they want. That’s an answer that says I’m trying to get something out of God. 

There’s another phenomenology here, which is I’m going to fast because when I do that, and when I get everybody involved, I will have reordered communal belonging. I will have created a sensibility in a collective that we are responsible for our society. We are going to lean in and engage in a kind of introspection about what we are missing and what needs to change. And Maimonides goes on again, echoing what he had said earlier to say, there are a lot of different situations of communal distress that would force these kinds of actions of fasting and trumpets, whether it’s by our enemies, armed forces, plague, wild animal on a rampage, various species of locusts, black blight, yellow blight, don’t know the difference between those, falling buildings, an epidemic, the loss of our sustenance, and because of rain. I think Maimonides giving us a comprehensive list gives us a way of saying, there’s a lot of options, terrible things that happen in the world that invite us to these activities of fasting and introspection. 

One last comment on fasting, which we’re going to read about, actually, on Yom Kippur, early next week. And this is, you know, one of the most famous ideas that has occupied liberal Judaism, from the beginning, which is Isaiah’s commentary on fasts. Isaiah says, I don’t need your stupid fasting. Jeremiah says it, too. I don’t need your stupid fasting. What’s the point of repudiating that? He says, you think that you’re fasting to get me to do stuff. I don’t care about that. If your fasting doesn’t make you act different, then your fasts are meaningless to me. The strongest argument against the belief that this, these activities of fasting or praying or blowing the shofar are just theological acts, the strongest repudiation is within the tradition itself. The argument that the reason we fast is because we become different people as a result. 

I want to do one last thing in Maimonides, just to this last line that he says in this chapter and this is really relevant to us here today, “If there was a plague in the land of Israel, Diaspora Jews should fast also. If there’s a plague in one country, and people travel back and forth, they should fast even if they’re distant from one another.” In other words, when I raise my voice and scream, the measure of whether it matters is not whether you can hear me. Measure is whether I did it. 

This is an extraordinary comment on Jewish peoplehood, and it’s a way, a first step, by which these commitments, to say I’m going to scream because something else that is happening to other Jews, does not really reflect a commitment to Jewish peoplehood, but it instantiates it. If I show up here today on a Zoom together with, let me see, 152 other people, presumably mostly Jews, maybe some non-Jews, who all feel that something matters right now, and I want to be with people, have we fixed the world? No. Does the Prime Minister hear it? No. Do most Israelis hear it? No. Does that matter? Also no. 

Did we show up? Did we participate? Were we raising our voices? Were we counted? Jewish peoplehood is always a mythic construct. Made up of belonging to something that is bigger than any of us can see. These acts, screaming, fasting, raising our voices, they do something like that.

Let me hear, I want to hear the echo of this in the next text on shofar. Rabbis say in the Mishnah, “A person who blows the shofar into a pit, or into a cistern, or into a jug, if you heard the shofar, you fulfilled your obligation, if you hear an echo, you have not fulfilled an obligation.” Right, there too, there’s no point in an individual autonomous blowing of the shofar. It only, it relies on the capacity to be hearable within the context of community. 

And then I’ll look at the last piece of the Mishneh here, which is in number eight. As part of the analogy to this, the rabbis describe the story that took place in Exodus 17:1. “So it came to pass when Moses would hold up his hands, the Israelites would prevail.” Remember when they’re fighting against Amalek, Moses is sitting atop the mountain, his arms are being held up by Aaron and Chur, and whenever he holds up his hands, the Israelites would triumph and when his hands would go down, the Israelites would lose. And the Mishnah asks the obvious question, “Did the hands of Moses wage war or break Israel’s ability to wage war? Rather, this teaches us that as long as Israel would look upwards and subject their hearts to their father in heaven, they prevailed, and if not, they fell.” 

I want to read this secularly. What did it mean for Moses to do this atop a mountain? What it meant was, when there was an organizing principle for the Israelites, they felt that they were part of something. When there was no organizing principle for the Israelites, their capacity to fight on behalf of a collective became fundamentally limited.

The story of fasting, of screaming about showing up, is about ingraining collectivity. It is not about being seen. It doesn’t merely need to be about effectuating change. It does two things. It constitutes a virtue ethic. I have done something in the world. I am a person who recognizes that I have agency and I have responsibility. It changes who we are as human beings. And it creates in real communities, and as a collective, a vision for collectivity that the Jewish people ultimately need in order to withstand our challenges. And this is why, this is our last text, and I’ll give a couple of closing comments, and then I’d love to get a couple of questions. This is why Maimonides then says in the Laws of Repentance, an amazing thing. 

So a person who separates themselves from the community, even though they haven’t transgressed any sins, Right, what if a person just decides not to be part of Jewish communal life? They still light Shabbat candles, you know, do everything they’re supposed to do Jewishly, a person who separates themselves from a congregation of Israel doesn’t do mitzvot together with them, doesn’t take part in their hardships, and perhaps most poignantly, does not join in their communal fasts. The refusal to engage in this activity, but rather goes on their individual path as if they are from another nation, and not Israel, doesn’t have a portion of the world to come.

And what does it mean, doesn’t have a portion of the world to come? It’s not something Maimonides can exactly police. Maimonides is acknowledging a truth of modernity. Jews can decide not to participate in Jewish life, and we have no coercive consequences against them. By the way, this is good news. We don’t live in ghettos, we don’t live in shtetlach, we’re not forced to live there. We can’t control the decision that somebody might make not to be part of our community. 

But if someone says, I don’t want to be part of the collective, we can say, then we no longer imagine you as part of our collective, either it is its own active, the activity generates its own sense of punishment. You don’t get to be a part of us, and I want to just zero in on that line of the participation in communal fasts. I want to put it as part of this phenomenology of fasting, screaming, raising our voices. And in particular, the kinds of fasts we’re talking about are crisis-driven fasts, as opposed to commemoration fasts. When we stand up and say, we want to be counted. We want to raise our voices. That is a way in which we instantiate the sense of Jewish people or the sense of Jewish belonging that’s essentially available to us.

Now, so what does it mean for us to have a range of options available to us as Jews in a moment of crisis, especially when some of us have different dispositions? Some people are protest people, right? Some people actually, not only are protest people, but have actually taken this religious symbolism, shofar and screaming, and have, or talit, and have brought it into protests, right? That’s one disposition, right, which centers protest activity. Some of us have different positionalities or geographies about whether or not we want to engage in that activity or another. 

What does it look like for us, however, regardless of our choices, to feel as though we are less powerless in moments of crisis for the Jewish people? What does it look like for us to try to imagine community if we live remotely from other Jews? If we live far away from the state of Israel, what does it mean for us to have a sense of responsibility to have a playbook with a set of activities that we can engage with that put us into an ecosystem of choices?

The thing I want to resist right now is the suggestion that when someone says there’s a crisis here and there’s only one way of showing up and if you fail to show up in this way, you are a bad Jew. There’s a terrible way to actually build a movement. What we have to find is ways to think about these as an ecosystem of choices.

When I was in my Orthodox upbringing, it’s something that still lives in the Orthodox community much more than in non-Orthodox communities, and it’s something that I want to see change. So one of the things that Orthodox Jews oftentimes do when there’s, when the Jewish people are in crisis, is that people say Tehillim. They read Psalms. They do so privately, or sometimes they get so, they, they do it together. It’s an interesting thing, because you’re like, what does that do? I love the comment, what does that do? The answer might be, based on what we’ve seen, it’s not about what it does. It’s about who we become. It’s not about what it does. It’s about what kind of community gets created. Rabbis said to me throughout the Gaza War a couple years ago, what are we supposed to do? I said, I don’t know, get everybody into shul. Stand together. Sing. Scream. Is that gonna change Hamas’ behavior? Is it gonna automatically alter Israel’s policy? No. 

Does this act of showing up right now, and I’m not screaming, I’m just talking, does this act fix the world? Well, I’m not sure. Does it change us? Does it help us to imagine collectivity? So my hope is for all of us to find other. And Jewish tradition gives us three models: screaming, fasting, blowing the shofar, blowing the trumpet that, good news is, have traction at least three days a year for North American Jews. We do these activities between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We know that therefore they mean something to us, even sometimes maybe a little too nostalgically. And maybe they become an additional model for us to think about what it means to show up now in this moment of crisis.

I’m gonna stop there. I’m gonna turn over to my colleagues, to Ethan and Maital and see how you wanna do this. Do you wanna unmute people or take questions in the chat?

Maital: Okay, terrific. We will take questions. I want to thank you all also for joining the class. Heidi asks a question: Does ranting on Facebook count as screaming? 

Yehuda: Great question. One that is close to my heart. I want to say provisionally yes, and I want to say so because it counters a piece of vocabulary that a colleague of mine who I respect a lot, Eitan Hersh has a view on this, political scientist, who argues that we have stopped doing politics largely. We’ve done, we do a lot of political hobbyism. People get very angry. They don’t actually, mobilize their local town elections, or get out the vote. They get angry. 

And he said, you know, the data to this is like people will self describe as being very politically active. And when you ask them, what have you done in terms of politics? They’ll say, well, nothing, but I care a lot about politics. And one of the data points that’s oftentimes deduced to that is the way that people use social media screaming about politics, but not doing anything. So I would say there’s probably a version of this that is politics. Maybe a screaming that helps other people understand the depth of your pain about something that might invite them to feel pain also, to feel motivated, to feel concerned. I think that’s important. 

I was struck by how many of my Israeli colleagues, including folks like our colleague Yossi Klein Halevi, who has been adamantly opposed for years about American Jews and the way that they get involved in Israel, and said, we need people to be louder. And did he want, a boycott movement? No. Do you want people to be noisy? Yes. And maybe social media is one of those activities. 

A couple of other questions that were related include also giving tzedakah. Giving tzedakah, which is imagined in the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy. You know what’s like the big punchline of the whole Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur liturgy? It’s when the cantor or the service has actually stopped the U’Netanah Tokef part, talking about who will live and who will die, and just utters out the three magic words: Prayer, repentance and charity, actually enable us to withstand the evil decree. 

I would say, it’s interesting, everyone’s like yeah, yeah prayer, got it, we’re here already in services and it’s interminable. I’m committed to that. Every sermon, invariably, winds up touching on repentance, but it’s that charity piece that’s like the hardest to wrap our head around as like one of the things one does to fix and change the world. So maybe that too, is an activity. And the question about is there limits about screaming wolf about human and natural catastrophes? Yeah, I think that’s probably a good thing to be worried about. I think I, I found myself skeptical sometimes of the people who are always screaming. I think part of the reason why the rabbis, Maimonides, based on the Mishnah here, and so much, so much of this other Torah is adamant that these are collective activities, is because there has to be some difference between the atomized individual screaming at everybody and then being mad that they’re not listening, versus the capacity of a community to say we have decided that this is worth screaming about.

I know that that’s uncomfortable because it means that you know, we, for a whole bunch of reasons modern Jews like the prophets, but the prophets were the worst. They were terrible at this. The prophets were individuals who saw things going wrong in their society that no one else saw and that nobody listened to. And for some, for whatever reason, it seems like a lot of modern Jews are attracted to the image of the prophet as the ideal, pious person. But it’s not. The rabbis have an alternative here. Which is, no, no, we’ve decided something terrible has gone on here and we’re raising our voices. 

That’s why, to me, the numbers are so significant. When you have, in Israel, this volume of people showing up together and saying, We don’t agree on much. And by the way, they really don’t agree on much. But we agree that something is broken here and we refuse to allow it to be, to endure. That, to me, seems phenomenologically equivalent to this act of what the rabbis describe as when the Israelites go to battle, we raise our voices together, we decide to fast because something is afflicting all of us, and we blow the shofar.

Maital, any other questions?

Maital: Hannah Kober adds to the question about screaming, how this taxonomy applies to more sustained long term crises. What is the effect of someone beginning these visceral response activities months and months? 

Yehuda: Thank you, Hannah. I think I think part of my point here is that screaming, I’m glad you said it this way, screaming tends to be understood as a visceral response. That is, you’ve caused me pain, and I yelp in response. But actually what Maimonides is suggesting here is that it’s not a visceral response. You’ve caused me pain right now. It’s a planned and orderly response. It’s a deliberate response. It’s a positive mitzvah to do this, whether or not you actually feel it, but because, you know, it is a problem and therefore somebody, you know, so the community ordains a fast. And then they ordain another fast, and you only join at fast number eight? Great! All you’ve done is proven the point that these things mobilize, galvanize, and organize people.

The fact that these are sustained crises, too, the rabbis use that example as well. If you have, you haven’t gotten rain for months at a time, you just keep declaring those fasts. You don’t make it too onerous on people. It’s not day after day. Maybe it’s just every Saturday night on Kaplan Street. You make it possible for people to participate. And over time, you will build the kind of momentum that will make it very hard for those who refuse to participate or those who stand against it to decry it or to describe it as merely like, a visceral response or the response of a minority. 

I mean, that’s exactly, you’ve helped us kind of unlock a big part of what Maimonides is pushing us to do, to understand these activities precisely not as visceral responses, but entirely as planned responses. And that’s why, Hannah, I think these are like, that’s why I’m excited by these as a kind of curriculum for us. I want us to have rabbis and community leaders who have a range of options at our disposal. When our people say to us, how come you’re not doing what I want you to do? Well, maybe what they’re really saying is, what are we meant to do right now? 

And instead of arguing, I want to follow exactly this political platform. We can say, here are the range of activities that constitute acts of showing up as ways of demonstrating Jewish peoplehood. Not merely ways that reflect a commitment to Jewish peoplehood, but things that instantiate Jewish peoplehood.

I’ll just summarize what I tried to do today and then I’ll hand it over to our 10 o’clock speaker. I started today by talking a little bit about what’s been complicated and hard about this moment for diaspora Jews, especially those of us who feel deeply connected to Israel, feel far away and are not quite sure how to react and show up. I suggested that this activity that we’re doing today is our attempt to both identify and empathize with our colleagues, our friends in Israel, and to do a kind of thing that we, as a pluralistic institution of Torah study, feel is totally in our lane. 

And it’s actually quite moving to be on this side of this, to see folks coming in. It’s actually also powerful to see people leaving, because you know what? It’s fine. You know what? You showed up to shul, you left a little early, that’s fine too. Because part of the whole message here.

I talked about how our political world inclines us to think that there’s only very concrete ways that people are supposed to act in the world in moments of crisis, and argue that our tradition gives us a religious vocabulary of alternatives, screaming, fasting, and blowing the shofar as argued that these are not inherently religious acts because they’re not measured by whether they work, they measured on to other indexes.

One is, do they create the kind of people that we want to be? A virtue ethics reading? And do they create the conditions by which we as a collective imagine the world of belonging that we ultimately need and create the conditions for us to do the kind of work in a society that can change us? And finally, I wanted to argue that these become options that are available to us. That maybe, in moments like this, these kinds of tools of showing up help us to account for whatever, dispositions and limitations we have about what it means to be here right now. 

And may, you know, as we say in our prayers, we say at the end of Avinu Malkeinu, “tihei ha’shaah zot shaat rachamin v’eit ratzon.” May this be a moment of mercy and will, for us and for the people of Israel. Thank you, everybody. 

Thanks for listening to our show this week. Identity/Crisis is produced by M Louis Gordon and our executive producer Maital Friedman, with assistance from Miri Miller, Sarina Shohet, and Talia Harris. This episode was edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC, and our music is provided by Socalled.

Transcripts of our show are available on our website, typically a week after an episode airs. To find them, to learn more about the Shalom Hartman Institute, and to learn more about today’s teach-in and schedule you can find us online at shalomhartman.org. We’re always looking for ideas of what to cover in future episodes. If you have a topic you’d like to hear about or comments about this one, you can write to us at [email protected]. 

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