The following is a transcript of Episode 172 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on January 18th, 2024. 

I’ve come to appreciate after now a number of years in this business, the superior power of simple ideas over complicated ones. This was an adjustment for me as a teacher. I used to think that my role as an educator was to find complicated text that I was meant to help my students decode, or to pull out some obscure text no one had ever seen, or to tackle a strange or remote topic that no one would have thought about before coming into the room, or if I was engaging something simple and straightforward, it was my job to make it way more complicated than anyone could anticipate.

Then I came to the Hartman Institute and I started noticing something very different. That’s the same basic texts, some of those texts that many of us know really well, kept reappearing on all of the source sheets. Could be a different topic, a different faculty member, but always somehow Genesis 12, 1-3, God’s call to Abraham to leave his father’s home with the promise that he will become the progenitor of a great nation, which becomes the anchoring covenant of the Jewish people as an extended tribal family, or Exodus 19, 1-6, which lays out the terms of the covenant between the Israelites and God at Sinai as a commitment by us to obey God in very specific ways. And oftentimes those two texts both appearing on the same source sheet together.

I started to understand a few things about the possibilities and responsibilities of Jewish education. I started to understand that while there was a place for the kind of Torah study that privileged the obscure, the work of ideas-based Jewish education should play the hits for a reason. I started to realize that those known texts, the straightforward texts, are useful, raw materials for the powerful ideas that they convey, and actually, the best ideas of our tradition are best conveyed through simple texts that help us appreciate their majesty, much more than by requiring of us to excavate our way through a complicated text to get to the main point.

I also started to notice that to teach the core canon was an act of confidence. It was a way of saying we’re more interested in the power of our people’s ideas and our capacity to internalize them than in the posture of showing to our students the breadth of our knowledge. 

Lately, I’ve found myself completely incapable of escaping the attraction of Genesis 1:27, in which God creates human beings in God’s own image. I keep going back to it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about liberalism, about the political ideal of societies that privilege and value human autonomy, and especially Jewish liberalism, which sees those values of autonomy and responsibility as religious commitments and not just secular enlightenment ideals. 

And every time I return to that same text, I’m overwhelmed by the simple power of its message. It’s a strong enough foundation, just in one little text, to spend 90 minutes or two hours just unpacking its implications for the societies we’re trying to build.

I don’t know a better thinker and teacher who is a master of this methodology than Donniel Hartman in his teaching in general, but now in this masterful new book that we’re going to study today: Who Are the Jews, and Who Can We Become? The book takes the complicated reality of modern Jewish identity in both Israel and North America and the wide set of challenges we face as a people and interrogates them through a simple textual prism, what Donniel calls the difference between the Genesis Covenant and the Exodus Covenant, that, taken together define the terms of what it means to belong to the Jewish people. 

The Genesis and Exodus Covenants, rooted in texts, become a basic reading strategy to understand some of the most complicated questions facing Jewish life, and thus they help us to illustrate some of the essential divides that Donniel is interested in bridging.

It doesn’t mean the textual readings aren’t deep and rigorous and serious, but they’re also profoundly accessible. They become frameworks for us as modern Jews to understand ourselves. In the accomplishment of creating such a simple but useful framework for advancing a novel set of ideas that actually implicates so many of the key questions of modern Jewish life, this whole strategy is one of Donniel’s true gifts, and the book is, therefore, a gift to all of us.

Donniel writes at the outset of the book, “The Jewish story has no place for select individuals to climb the mountain and commune with God in private spiritual ecstasy, while the rest of the people wander and stray. Without a Jewish people, there is no Torah. Indeed, there is no Judaism.” 

This core insight defines the program for the book, an attempt to define Judaism today, not through the modern conceit of a conversation about identity, which oftentimes privileges the individual, but by forcing us to consider that the Jewish people is a collective, a composite whole. I would suggest that the book’s core argument is that to be a Jew is to belong to something. 

The truth is it’s not an easy time to put out a book on Jewish peoplehood. It’s actually, I think, not an easy time to put a book out on any Jewish topic, but certainly not a book that doesn’t seem to challenge us directly on the nose about this impossible war that Israel is waging and all the ways it’s challenging us. But then again, in both Israel and around the world, there’s a revived conversation on Jewish solidarity. It’s a big topic, which implies that collective belonging seems to have a muscle memory in the Jewish consciousness when Jews act in ways that signal solidarity, or even sometimes when we pull apart from one another, we’re reminded of this core dimension of our being. 

Meanwhile, there’s new boundary lines being drawn in the Jewish people, which suggests to us that when we are tested as Jews, we are tested as a group more than we are tested as individuals. Maybe this war needs precisely this book. 

Donniel, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for being part of this conversation. Thank you for this book. And it was complicated for you to figure out when in the last couple of months was a time to let this book come into the world. What was it that finally allowed you to say, in the midst of all of this, I’m ready to allow this book to be part of the public conversation?

Donniel: It’s really nice to be with you, Yehuda. Early in the war, I realized that the real challenge is not going to be merely in the military front, but it’s going to be what type of people we’re going to be at some stage. The battle, the fear, the tragedy engulfed us. But from the beginning I knew tomorrow’s coming and I said, let’s wait. I said to JPS, let’s wait three months. I said, it’s not a six-day war, it’s not going to be a three-week war, but in three months we’re going to have to come back to who we are. And Gaza is challenging us to who we are, who do we want to be?

My hope back then was that I could, that this would be a fair projection. I’m actually feeling that I was pretty accurate. As we see this next stage evolving, the critical questions aren’t which tunnel we’re going to attack right now, but what does Gaza tomorrow look like? What does Israel tomorrow look like? What is our future as a Jewish people look like? So I took a gamble. 

Yehuda: Yeah. I mean, the very phrase, who are we and who do we want to be? It’s only the title of the book. It’s not only the main argument of the book, but it surfaces, I think, a really deep tension, which is one of our instincts around Jewish peoplehood is to just lean into the people, who we are. And then there’s this other piece that is always demanding accountability about our failings and our limitations.

We’re going to get into the details of some of this argument, how it manifests as Genesis Covenant and Exodus Covenant, but I want to start by asking you to kind of reflect on that emotionally, because isn’t it kind of like there are some moments where you want the conversation to be, I want my people to be better, and maybe some moments when it’s just I want to love my people for who they are. How does that sit with you as an emotional state before we even get into the kind of textual or philosophical categories? 

Donniel: I think I’m an emotional wreck about this all the time. It’s what keeps me up. The deepest sense of my Zionism is to love the Jewish people for who they are. I’m all in, period. Just, if the Jewish people need me, I’m like, I’m drafted always.

But it’s never enough, and it’s that ambivalence about loving and expecting, and they get mixed in all the time, and you’re scared. And you get criticized, and you don’t know, and if you say what you should be, does that mean you’re not accepting me for who I am? And if you’re saying that you’re accepting me for who I am, do you have no further expectations?

By the way, with children, it’s the same thing. It’s an impossible thing, and that’s why we have to pay for therapy for our children. Because they’re never, we’re never going to get it right. Did you love me? Did you love me for who I am? But this journey that I, my whole life I’ve had with this people, it haunts me. And you never get it right. But they’re both so deep in my love for this people.

Yehuda: Yeah, they’re both deep claims on us. And, you know, part of the problem is when someone else is doing the activity of demanding just love the Jewish people for who they are, that’s when you want to be in the conversation of pushing.

And, you know, I’ve felt for three months more than I’ve ever felt since October 7th. And maybe this is because I’m far away that what we need now as the Jewish people is a little bit more of, love the Jewish people for who they are, and a little less of the kind of culture of criticism that comes from the demand for us to be better. And I’m dealing with a lot of kind of political fallout in my own community for holding that line. 

And I think you, maybe by being here, are a little bit more ready for a conversation on the moral failings of the Jewish people in the state of Israel right now. And I don’t know whether that’s just geography, whether it’s personality, whether it’s, 

Donniel: I think knowing you and I, I think our personality on this is pretty similar. I think it’s a lot to do with geography and a sense of, what’s right to do, because we always feel this, you know, we hate armchair critics. We don’t respect them. Critics are people who are invested or in love, who are part of the community. This is what Michael Walzer teaches us. That’s, a real critic is a lover. And you and I, our criticism is an act of love. 

But when you’re closer, you feel that you have a little more license. I’m also trying. That it shouldn’t just be criticism, talking about who we might become doesn’t have to speak about failure, it could just speak about aspiration, hopes, it’s adding another dimension to a conversation that so many of us just sort of naturally want to put aside, because they’re afraid either it’s not the right time, war is not the right time, or there’s always enemies outside, it’s never the right time, and oh, what will the enemy say, they’re going to listen to you as if Donniel Hartman is singular, if I say something, this is going to undermine public relations for Israel, there’s always a sense of, let it go, and I think part of it is that for many, many years, we know that something’s not right in the Jewish people, and something’s also not right with Israel.

We aren’t overachieving. And when you’re frightened, you just want to, let’s, let’s not talk about it because I don’t want the answer. And now here too, for the first two months, I was very, very careful. But now I believe that my responsibility to defend Israel is to create room for hope and conversation and questions. It’s legitimate to question not even to accuse, just to raise a question and at the end we will grow as a people because of that. 

Yehuda: Yeah. I wanna go back to something you said at the beginning of this answer. Cause I was thinking about Walzer also, I heard a presentation by a scholar recently who was mapping out what he imagined as the two options for how a Jewish scholar can use their wisdom to influence their community.

And the two options that he had were what you may call the Edward Said model, rooted in like, actually the prophets. You’re on the outside, and you’re a critic, and the whole point is that the distance allows you to be a critic, but, by the way, that means that you don’t really participate in the social life of your own community, by definition, you can speak truth because of your distance, and he said the more aspirational one is the Michael Walzer version, which is the connected critic, and Walzer says the distance of the critic to their community should be measured in inches.

And I sat there listening and saying, wait a second, isn’t there a third possibility, which we’re not entertaining, which is not the distant critic and not the connected critic, but the connected supporter? Or the connected leader? I think what you’re trying to do with a book like this and with your Torah is to say, I’m trying to bring wisdom, I don’t want to be outside measured in inches. I not only want to be on the inside, but I actually want to move my community forward in a way that a critic on the outside can’t do. 

There’s a different dynamic here because ultimately you’re trying to take responsibility for the people. You don’t want a book like this. And I know you, the books are reflections of your Torah. They’re not like, you don’t view your success through how many books you sell. You view your success, when we can think about success, on whether we’ve actually helped the Jewish people achieve its objectives. It kind of feels like that’s what this is trying to do, to actually be inside the very people who we’re trying to influence.

Donniel: This book is the result. It’s interesting you’re saying that. I taught this book for 15 years. That’s why, by the way, so many of the texts showed up in so many of the sources. 

Yehuda: Yeah, of course. 

Donniel: I’ve been testing it, but I’ve been teaching it, and I’ve been asking, Is this helpful? Does this give you a sense of who you are? Are these categories helpful for understanding? And that’s why it, really, I’m not interested in being a critic. I’m interested in being a teacher. 

Now, a teacher has to be willing to see a gap between where the student is and where they might be. But it’s not about criticizing them for who they are. It’s about, you’re right, I’m all in. I’m like, I’m invested in changing this people. I get up and I get attacked and I’m, but I don’t care. I’m all in. This is my people, and expecting things from Jews is the essence of the Jewish story. You know, God spoke to Moses saying, speak into the children of Israel, do something, you know, like that’s not criticism.

Yehuda: And I, by the way, I think this is a thing Jewish educators should ask themselves all the time. You can come out of a class and feel like, wow, I taught a great class, but the key question is, was it helpful? Did it help somebody think, it doesn’t matter even whether they remember the material, did it help them process, did it help them grow?

And yes, all of these are classes that I think many of your learners and many of our rabbis will recognize. What I hope that they’ll do is be able to say, now I have a nine-page, 10-page digestible version that can help me advance the same set of ideas to help move my congregants or my people into a different place.

Donniel: Literally, it’s, tens of thousands of people. I, I did, what do they call it? A focus group. I did a 15-year-long, tens of thousands of people focus group and I changed them and reclarified them as I came to understand where people are and also what it is that I really want.

Yehuda: Yeah, I’m going to come back to the changing and clarifying shortly, but let me go back, let’s go to the core argument of the book. And the core argument of the book is there are essentially two covenants, Genesis covenant, the Exodus covenant. But one of the things that you say right at the outset is, and the Genesis covenant effectively conveys belonging to a tribal family. We use this phrase, the Judaism of being, and the Exodus covenant is the Judaism of becoming, a set of responsibilities and obligations that the Jewish people take on in terms of relationship with God and our own people.

But you’re very clear at the outset that this is not another set of rehashing the old debate, are we a people or are we a religion? You say, actually, these are both expressions of religion. Can you expand on that a little bit? It took me, I read it a few times, and I said, okay, there’s something big here. Because if it’s just people in religion, then you’re just taking an existing dichotomy and adding new terms to it. But you’re making a very clear nudge here to something else. Walk us through that. 

Donniel: There’s a hierarchy in the nation-religion story, in which you’re a nation, but you’re not really playing the Jewish game. Judaism is the game that I own, but the Genesis Covenant says to embrace being Jewish is a covenant with God. That means it gives legitimacy to a broad range of Jews. Religiously, Jewishly, like, I grew up in an Israel where I’m religious or not religious. The experience of somebody monopolizing religion by understanding that peoplehood, being Jewish, is actually the first covenant that God has with the Jewish people, the notion that we as a people embrace you for who you are, creates a foundation for religious tolerance. That the dichotomy between peoplehood and religion doesn’t, it actually creates a tension. What are you gonna do? Oh, I’m more on the religion side. No, I’m more on the people. And then which one wins, it’s a zero-sum game. It can’t. 

Here we have two religious insights. It’s a religious insight in which a person stands with their Jewish identity with God In the midst of simply being, being loved, being embraced, it has a lot, I use the word grace, which Jews don’t use, it has this Christian connotation, but it is, it’s just, I love you, you’re not a bad Jew, see, the religion-peoplehood distinction creates good Jews and bad Jews. 

You’re the peoplehood? Oh, you’re a good nationalist, but you’re not a good Jew. Genesis Covenant says that there is no such thing as a good Jew and a bad Jew. There’s only a Jew. And I think that’s very deep. That’s deep in Jewish psyche. I want it to be deep in Jewish religious thought. 

Because then when I look at Jews of different backgrounds, I start from a different place. I start from a place that you’re a good Jew. And I don’t care where you go to shul. I don’t care what you believe or don’t believe. I don’t care what you keep or don’t keep. The start is that you’re a good Jew, and nothing that you do could change that. 

Now, I want to look at the world that way, and I also believe that when people are seeing that way, it enables them and empowers them to be on a journey. So much of what we think about is also a byproduct of our own life story. 

I was a very, very inadequate, to say the best, student. I was ADHD without Ritalin. I couldn’t listen, I couldn’t tell the teachers what they said, and that was what I was measured on. And so many ADHD students feel stupid, feel failures, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the greatest gifts my mother gave me in my life, which I will never be able to repay, is she said, Donniel, all your report cards aren’t report cards on you, they’re report cards on your teacher. If you fail, it’s because your teacher didn’t know how to bring it out in you. So here it is, this little pishy kid, goes through school, years and years of school, failing continuously and never feeling bad about myself. I actually felt bad for my teachers. Here it is, they failed again. 

So this notion of that you want to belong somewhere where, where you’re loved, where you’re respected, where you’re appreciated. Genesis Judaism loves Jews. Genesis Judaism says you’re a good, there’s nothing wrong with you, I respect you. And when I look at the various types of Judaisms that you create for yourself, it starts from that respect. And when someone feels validated, they want to be a player. When someone says, I’m a bad Jew, that was the story of secular Judaism in Israel. They just gave it up. 

And so, I found in Genesis Judaism a remarkable story of a God who turns to the Jewish people and says, I love you, you’re great, just be Jewish, just be, just be, I’m going to walk with you. I also love the fact that it says that you’re not superior, you’re not great, you just are. It’s a relationship and it’s a religious relationship which gives birth to profound possibilities.

Yehuda: So by differentiating this from the national religious divide. You’re essentially taking for granted, of course, these are both national stories, they’re the stories of a people, but you’re trying to play in the terrain of quality. What’s the nature of the national commitment? Because whenever we talk about religion, that winds up being higher on the hierarchy.

Donniel: Or I would actually say they’re both religious categories. That nationhood and Judaism is a religious category, not a political category. So that’s part of the attempt and finding this voice so dominant, not in Jewish political discourse, but in Jewish religious texts validated it.

Yehuda: Yeah. And I, two of my favorite textual moves that you make in the book is that you effectively reject that the rabbis try to clean up Genesis, right? They try to say, let me make out the protagonists of the book of Genesis, which is a terrible book about dysfunctional characters. They try to clean them up by making them into great heroes, and you say they kind of miss the point of Genesis. They were Exodus Jews trying to Exodus Genesis by turning those characters, instead of being able to read it on its face as like their fallibility was the point.

And in turn, the second move you make in Exodus is helping us understand the way that Maimonides That’s effectively invents the category of the bad Jew by spelling out all the things that if you don’t believe these things, you can’t be a good Jew, right? 

So that, I guess the, the question I want to ask though is I’ve seen sometimes in classrooms where some people will hear what you’re doing and say, great, I’m a Genesis Jew or I’m an Exodus Jew. I think your point in the book is not merely to free people into being able to say, okay, I’m this kind of Jew or that kind of Jew, but you’re inviting them to think about these as in dialogue with each other. 

Donniel: The core argument of the book is that when one becomes too dominant, when Judaism is just simply who you are, or when Judaism is who you have to become, that something distorted enters into the Jewish tradition.

And that it is the way in which the two talk to each other that creates something special. And it’s inviting people to have their own dialogue between Genesis Judaism and Exodus Judaism. If you pick one, if Judaism doesn’t embrace our acceptance and a core identity of who you are, independent of what you do, then oh, or you know, we’re some minor denomination and we’ll living in a world of good Jews and bad Jews.

And if on the other hand, all we are is who we are without any hope to become more, yeah, then we’re mediocre. Then we’re totally mediocre. It’s a dance. And so, the book is an attempt to look at 2,000 years or 3,000 years of Jewish history and ask, how did these categories talk to each other? 

And in fact, the interesting thing in the Bible is that there is a Genesis covenant, then there’s an Exodus covenant, and then the rest of the Bible has Genesis and Exodus in it, over and over and over again. They just go back and forth and back and forth. And God gets very confused about what God wants. Does God want to be in a Genesis covenant? Does God want to be in an Exodus covenant? 

And they’re both there in the rabbis. And then Maimonides and then later on in Jewish history, these two voices, they obligated you. Don’t pick. When you pick, it just gets shattered.

Yehuda: And a lot of the book winds up being the ways in which the Exodus and Genesis covenants can help sharpen each other. They can be critical tools to prevent a whole bunch of overreaches. But there’s one place where I kind of wish they could do better together at preventing an overreach, and that is about exclusivism, particularism, Jewish supremacy, because the truth is, both Genesis covenant, taken to its logical end, just love the people because they’re your people, can breed a kind of ethnocentrism and chauvinism, and the Exodus covenant, which is there’s a way of being Jewish and failing to do so breeds a kind of hierarchical way of thinking some Jews are better than others, those don’t balance each other out because you could actually merge Genesis and Exodus and get the worst of both worlds together. You know, people who would say, not only am I superior ethnically to people around me, but I’m also superior to other Jews. 

Donniel: Yes. That is a great danger. It’s a great question because it is a danger. We make choices on how we read each one of these categories, and I write about this, that I’m making choices. I am writing as a liberal Jew who believes, just like your favorite text, that the foundation of liberal Judaism is that all human beings are created in the image of God. And I know that our tradition could be used, abused, and correctly interpreted as an ethnocentric racist doctrine, and many people have. 

When I tell the story of Genesis, one of the most interesting things about the story of Genesis in the Bible is that there’s no romanticization of this Genesis people. Quite to the contrary. We talk about Genesis Jews, and then we talk about all their failures and inadequacies. So to argue anywhere that on the basis of Genesis we’re superior, it’s bizarre because the Bible says the opposite. The Bible says I’m with you even though you’re, you, frankly, you’re an abomination. I could barely hold on. I exiled you. I just, I can’t stand, frankly, being with you, God says over and again. 

You know, I love this chapter from Nehemiah, chapter 9, which just outlines, when I saw it, it was just this epiphany. God, you’re great, you’re great, you’re great. The Jewish people, you’re terrible. God, you’re great, the Jewish people. It tells 3,000 years of Jewish history as the history of the Jewish people failing. 

Now how could there be any notion of Jewish ethno-racial superiority on the basis of Genesis as depicted in the Bible? Now, when it comes to Exodus, 

Yehuda: Right, and just to be clear, you’d have to read Genesis wrong. You’d have to say, God loves the people of Israel in spite of their failings and doesn’t care about their failings. In order to read it correctly, you’d say, God does love the Jewish people in spite of their failings, but is mad about their failings. 

Donniel: That’s right. Or, what you would do is you would deny that there’s any failings. And so the rabbinic reading, the way you clean it up is you say the Jewish people never failed. The Jewish people are just the best of the best of the best, but, but our Bible doesn’t talk about us that way. So any notion of superiority as a result of Genesis is just a distortion of the way the Bible talks about it.

Just as I’m connected to my family without any claim of their superiority, it’s actually built on that. The minute you claim superiority, you’re undermining. The core element of tolerance, love, loyalty, and acceptance for people the way they are. 

Now, Exodus, which is where the Jewish people are challenged to be more, could breed this sense of only those who are on the journey of Exodus with me are the valuable people. That’s where we have a cultural war. And it’s in general we have to understand, there is no such thing as Judaism. Doesn’t exist. There’s different chapters and there’s different readers and interpreters of Judaism. And the question is whether we can articulate a story. 

And that’s what this book is. We are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Could we tell a story that ennobles, deepens, and enriches Jewish life, and that creates a Jewish life committed to moral decency, liberal values, human rights. So I’m biased from the outset. 

Now, I do believe that a careful reading of Judaism could enable that. I know very well, and I say this explicitly, the devil quotes Scripture. The devil doesn’t misquote Scripture. And it’s all there. So this is a battle. We have to tell a story which could inspire Jewish life, but we know that there are other people telling other stories. There’s people telling stories of Judaism which is just Exodus. There’s people telling stories of Judaism which is just Genesis. And worse, there’s people who are telling stories in which the two, as you said, complement each other into some racial privilege superior nationalism, which is what you and I are fighting against it. It’s not some nightmare about something that could be. It’s here. 

You know, every time someone says, oh, this is not in Judaism, Judaism doesn’t say this. I point, listen, there’s a political party in Israel, which that’s its platform. 

Yehuda: Yeah. Even worse, there are people who will say all of Judaism is Leviticus. That’s not helping us either. And maybe even there’s those who will say all of Judaism is the book of Isaiah, which also undermines our ability to talk about a collective, because if all you can do is engage in a conversation about the failures of a collective, you may think that’s a conversation about peoplehood, but it’s not really because it has no tether, no real tether of belonging.

There’s an idea that recurs a lot here in the book, and I know it’s important to you because it goes to kind of the question of maybe the ultimate criteria of belonging, which is the idea of loyalty. Ultimately is the last measure of what it means to belong either to a covenant of responsibility or to a covenant of tribe, family, whatever terms we want to use.

Why is this word so important to you? I don’t know. 

Donniel: I don’t know. I really don’t know. You and I have been talking about this for many years. Just loyalty is, is the beginning of my Jewishness. I am claimed and I feel before I’m claimed by God, I’m claimed by my people. I’m claimed by a God who tells me to be claimed by my people. That notion of loyalty is so, I was raised that way, it motivates everything in my life, it’s what doesn’t enable me to sleep, it’s what asks me all the time, are you doing good by the Jewish people? That’s just my life. 

I also believe that that is the essence of what belonging really is about. And here I’m indebted to George Fletcher and his book on loyalty, and I remember a section he wrote there in which he says, communities demand loyalty. That’s part of what a community does. It regulates and demands it. But he goes further and he says, but communities are built on it. They don’t demand it, they assume it. You can’t even have a notion of community unless you’re claimed by somebody. 

And I know we’re living in a time where people say, like this being claimed is somehow seen to be morally flawed. Okay, so then there’s a relationship between, what does it mean to be morally claimed by your people and to be morally claimed by others. So I have to get it right. But to disconnect from my core moral instincts that, yeah, you claim me. It’s such a big part of my Zionism. 

It’s also, I’m a Zionist, you know, the proudest parts of my life was when I served in the army. When I cheated to become a combat soldier, even though I’m legally blind, wasn’t a smart idea. It wasn’t a great idea to be a commander of a tank when you can’t see. It’s kind of foolish, but not to do everything? It’s not my Jewishness. 

And so, that term for me, is a source of great inspiration. It’s a challenge teaching it today. Because loyalty is somehow seen as morally flawed. 

Yehuda: You know, as we’re talking, I think what I understand about this now, which I didn’t before, is that in the public conversation, loyalty is understood as a, almost like a political tactic, and it’s a coercive political tactic. It’s oftentimes wielded by those who are trying to burrow out who’s not loyal. 

For you, it’s almost like a virtue ethics conversation. This is what I want people to aspire towards. You want loyalty to be an expression of maybe something, for you it’s innate. You want it to be either innate for people or at least a virtue that they understand. You’re not trying to kick people out using a framework of loyalty. You’re kind of begging people to notice how it enriches,

Donniel: What it does for you. Now, we are so frightened from claims of loyalty because loyalty, is that assuming superiority? Is it assuming xenophobia? Is it assuming discrimination? It doesn’t. It just says, I’m claimed, and then the story of my life is how do I balance my loyalty with my other moral responsibilities?

But your observation that it is virtue ethics is absolutely, it’s a virtue, and throughout our life it is a virtue. And here, let me quote again another teacher which I’m deeply indebted to, Michael Sandel, in his book on justice. How does he deal with arguments that people said, how do I pick this or how do I pick that?

Using the Socratic method, he talks to people, and he tries to activate their innate sense of the ethical. And we have an innate sense of loyalty. And we look at loyalty as virtuous and say, so why be so frightened of it? Okay, everything has to be controlled. Everything has to be balanced. 

But there’s something unnatural when we don’t understand ourselves or see ourselves as essentially social animals who are part of communities and part of connections. You know, as a father, like, loyalty defines me, like it defines me as a Jew, it defines me as an Israeli, it defines me, and part of my growth now, as I connect more and more to my Israeli identity is to give expression to my loyalty to Israeli Arab Palestinians who aren’t Jews. Yeah, you’re my people. Like, I’m like, look at me. It’s like, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Like, I’m not even sure I want to be your people and you’re giving me loyalty, but it is a profoundly, morally enriching place to be.

It also is very very natural, I think there’s something unnatural in a certain, I don’t want to use the word woke because I don’t know exactly what it means, who woke from where. It’s too broad. But there is a certain discourse which is disconnecting us from some of the most beautiful things that define us simply because there’s a price. Let’s deal with the price. 

Genesis is about God’s loyalty to the Jewish people and his obligation that if I’m going to love the Jewish people regardless of who they are, you’re going to love the Jewish people regardless of who they are. You’re going to be tolerant. You’re going to be feel committed to, and you’re going to make room around the table for them.

Yehuda: In some ways, this correlates to other pieces of the theology that I’ve seen you advance over the years, including when you’ve taught about, do I have to believe in God to be a good Jew? And your broad conclusion was, no, but let me talk about the ways in which a belief in God or a life in relationship to God, might be a more inclusive way of describing this, could enrich your Judaism, which is also kind of a virtue ethics orientation. 

Your whole approach seems to be, it is clear in the book, you’re not trying to create boundary type prescriptions. You don’t even tell people at the end, who can we become? Right? What is this story? It’s an invitation. It feels to me like there’s something very classically liberal about what this book is trying to do, which is to say, you want to be part of this conversation. Here’s the way to be part of it. And here’s what it’s going to enrich.

But by the way, you also say quite clearly at the beginning, it’s not enough to say Judaism is just being in an argument or being in a debate. That’s not enough. You want something deeper than that, but you also don’t want to make it something coercive. 

Donniel: Maybe that’s, again, as I’m talking about the book, I’m understanding things about it. Maybe that’s the deeper relationship between Genesis and Exodus, that when you do Exodus, You don’t do it as a boundary, you do it as an invitation, as an empowered journey which you could be a real player in. I am claimed by anybody who wants to be Jewish. And here this goes back to my PhD in which I, where the boundaries of Judaism were basically almost always self defined. That if the rabbis saw you as wanting to be inside. And the ones who they excluded were the ones who they thought were really creating an alternate identity. That you were looking from the outside. It’s like the mythic evil child of the Haggadah, who it’s not, doesn’t apply to him, and it’s a terrible distortion.

But that evil in our tradition is to say, what is this worship to you and not to me. When you see yourself as outside, separated from the community, you are a heretic in the essence in our tradition. That’s Genesis Judaism. So if you want to be in, you’re in. Now, what do you want to do with it? It’s what do you want to do with it?

But now you’re doing it as an act of love and expression and unfolding of potential, not somebody sitting outside and judging you, and you’re a good Jew, bad Jew. That language, also I’ve been so traumatized by it, and I see Israeli society so traumatized by it. I also see, even in North America, the so, the deep inferiority complex of peoplehood Jews towards the person who really owns the mezuzah, owns kashrut, owns, you know, they’re going to keep Judaism alive as my children assimilate, or I remember there was this articulation that, who is a Jew? He or she whose grandchildren are going to be Jewish. And then basically condemning all liberal Jews because they’re Americans and their kids are going to have complex identities.

So I hate that. It’s such a journey into your own. It’s an antithesis of loyalty. So when loyalty, when Genesis and Exodus talk to each other, you do Exodus differently. It’s not about boundaries. It’s about, okay, it’s about not questions. It’s about a search for an answer and then finding multiple answers, which all could be equally legitimate.

Yehuda: Well, so in the second half of the book, you apply these categories to the modern Jewish condition with a kind of symmetry between. Zionist project in Israel, the diasporic project. There’s one place where there’s a deep asymmetry. This is what I worry about, which is, Zionists in the land of Israel have almost an innate commitment to the Genesis covenant, because the only way Zionism could come into being was by arguing this familial, tribal sense of belonging that kind of becomes the root of secular Zionism. And yes, they have an inferiority complex, or maybe they forfeited too much of Exodus, the Exodus covenant themselves. And then Exodus can be a refinement morally and spiritually to the Zionist project. 

But there’s no equivalent for diaspora Jews. There really isn’t. American Jews, who are the most continuous Jewish community actually in the world right now, most continuity, but who have come of age in a assimilative and liberal context, and I use those terms not disparagingly, I use them approvingly. There’s no inherent attraction or claim that’s made on our Judaism by either covenant. 

And that’s maybe why so many Diaspora Jews and leaders gravitate towards boundary setting and hierarchies, because they need something to hold something together. So I felt excited about the, almost the policy prescriptions for the Zionism side and anxious about the policy prescriptions on the Diaspora side because of that head start.

Donniel: Right. It’s true. That’s why I wrote the last chapter of the book. The purpose of the last chapter of the book was to try to come up with a language which could make loyalty, particularism, peoplehood more applicable, more usable, more comfortable for a North American Jew. But I know it’s a journey because it’s not there. 

It was there. Antisemitism, by the way, does it big time. And Holocausts do it big time. Catastrophes do it big time. But at the end, this is something that you and I share, that while catastrophes and antisemitism might exist, at the end, people are only going to choose Judaism if it inspires them. So could we talk about Jewish peoplehood in a way that could be inspiring? 

And I think the last line of the book, if I remember, is somewhere asking them, here, I just told you a story. This is why I love peoplehood. Does it work? 

Yehuda: Yeah, you tell me. 

Donniel: You tell me was the last line. And I think it’s a project. I think North American Jews need a project of Jewish peoplehood, but that’s very different from their parents and grandparents project, in which they embrace Jewish peoplehood as self evident, often as an expression of crisis. And, I don’t think crisis, I think crisis could help a little bit. I think in the end of the day, it will hurt more than it will help. 

But, in a world of Jews who choose, they also have to choose particularism. And how do we talk about it, is, I think, a great educational challenge. And the outcome is in no means self evident.

Yehuda: You’re defining theory on boundaries because you can’t talk about community or belonging without at some point talking about boundaries. And your dichotomy, which many of the students will recognize, is the categories of pluralism, tolerance and deviance. 

Donniel: I’ve been, by the way, testing those categories for decades, for 30 years. And with great resonance by the way.

Yehuda: So I appreciate the way you talk about them as ultimately different tools in a toolkit for a community to think about its choices with all the different ramifications. I’m going to ask us kind of a specific question about this, which is, I’ve watched over the years, your own thinking evolve that whenever you encounter new people, communities, variations of Judaism’s adaptations, like all of us, you’ve formulated a line or a theory, and then you encounter human beings. And suddenly you’re like, oh, I got to rethink that category. 

So what, you mentioned one group before, which is the Israeli Palestinians, Palestinian citizens of Israel. Another category is intermarried North American Jews, who basically have done something that no intermarried population did before, which was, they said, I’m not leaving. I didn’t cross the boundary. I’m here. I want to be a part of this. 

I just want to hear you reflect a little bit on what that, I’ve seen it happen with you, like, oh, I didn’t think about this person as part of my me, my, my group, and now I have to reinterrogate the boundaries. Can you talk a little bit about what that process feels like for you?

Donniel: Sure. I’m actually going to use a third example, which is you, Yehuda. Do you remember one of the initial real important Torahs that you brought to the Hartman Institute was that you have to understand that we in North America are at home and we haven’t left and we’re not inferior to you. 

Growing up in Israel, you know, you’re Zionist centric, it’s easy. And you forced the Institute to change. When I saw you, my Genesis loyalty just takes over. Similar, by the way, with gays and lesbians, when I have categories, my Genesis gets activated when I see. It’s almost a Levinas type, that seeing the other, oh, you see yourself as in? Now I have to therefore rethink, and what happens is, is it’s almost immediate. There’s almost this moment of enlightenment where you, the minute I, Yehuda Kurtzer, stood up and said, I am a dignified Jew who lives in North America and I’m at home, and I don’t think my life in North America is inferior to Israeli Judaism. The minute you said it? I had to change. That’s the Genesis claim on me.

And by nature, we don’t always see. That’s what it is. To be a decent human being is ultimately to see, and to choose to be willing to see, to see somebody. So whether it’s North American Jews, whether it is intermarried couples who are still inside, like, how could I reject and disrespect their claim, because of some theoretical Exodus notion, which works for me?

The big part of this book, and I say it at the beginning, it’s not about me, and it’s not about you. Do we have a collective story, and that collective story has to listen to what other people say. And so the minute we started to move also, and bring into the institute Israeli Arab Palestinians, who are also at a very complex place of trying to figure out, where do they really belong? Are they ready to be Israeli or not? And I’m willing to accept that they’re very ambivalent because we haven’t accepted them. But the minute they’re here, they obligate me. 

And it’s a process of being aware of your moral responsibilities and then beginning a journey to fulfill them, because you can’t fulfill them right away, and you don’t even understand all the implications of them right away. But it’s living as an Exodus Jew perpetually on a Genesis foundation and never letting your notion of the ideal Jew, the ideal citizen, go untethered. 

Yehuda: But you know it’s not intuitive for most. For most people who have a sense of their identity and what they’ve carved out, what they consider to be important, what they consider to be essential, non negotiable, and if they encounter somebody who is testing the boundaries of that, even that claim of, I want to hold on to your category, actually generates a different instinct, which is, no, I need to block you from coming in, because if you come into this collective thing that I think has these criteria for belonging, you’ve screwed it up. You’ve, you know, it’s not intuitive. It’s not easy for people.

Donniel: I appreciate that. I know. And that’s why I realized my limitations as a teacher for so many people. And sometimes people come to me and ask me, and they talk to me, and at some point I say to them, I don’t want to, I’m not saying this paternalistically. I just don’t think I’m a good teacher for you. Because what you need is something that I can’t give you. You need truth. You need clear cut answers. 

For me, Judaism is a journey of identity. It’s a journey of, not individual, of collective identity. And Torah is a part of that journey. And you have to be willing to subordinate your Exodus certainties with Genesis realities.

I was shunned so many times in my life because of people’s Exodus certainties. People did terrible things to me so many times in my life, simply because I’m a Hartman or simply because I claimed I’m Orthodox but I wasn’t Orthodox like them. 

Yehuda: Yeah. You’d rather take the risk on the other end.

Donniel: Yeah. And I don’t even feel, I don’t even feel there’s a risk at the end. I feel love, kindness, acceptance, wins, wins. Creates something powerful. And you know what? And if there’s some vagueness along the lines? That’s okay too.

Yehuda: You know, second week of the war, I wrote a piece in The Forward about the new emerging boundaries in Jewish life, where it became clear, the tent of, essentially liberal Zionism, or Zionism broadly construed in North American Jewish community was showing that it was robust. It was a solidarity instinct had returned from many North American Jews. 

And by the same token, there was a realignment that organizations that had been kind of hanging around the left, had now squarely said and done things that were positioning themselves outside of the tent of Jewish life. 

I was really careful in that piece and in general I never refer to people as un-Jews. Never say to somebody, you’re a bad Jew. In this case, it was a more political argument. There is a kind of tent of Jewish life that has to operate in certain ways. It is an economy. It is institutions. It is choices. And I, in some ways it was like, I was okay with the movement of some folks to say, we don’t want to be part of that tent, but it is a boundary drawing exercise.

I’m curious whether your instinct in some ways against boundary drawings of feeling claimed by somebody who stands before you, I guess if I would go one step further, I would say I felt a little bit like what was happening in the early phase of the war was that for some people, I felt that their Exodus impulses had eradicated their Genesis commitments.

Donniel: That’s absolutely correct. You see, you were doing the same move, Yehuda. 

Yehuda: I’m asking you, have you felt the boundaries move? Has your attitude shifted because of this war? Have you felt that kind of or seen that kind of realignment either here or as you’re observing the North American Jewish community?

Donniel: First of all, we all have to give ourselves a break. That when a war comes out, we’re not supposed to be balanced. And I wasn’t balanced either. You know, it’s, we’re talking about a life, we’re talking over time. There’s certain moments where you have to stand up and say, where am I? And where you look at people who you think are really hurting you, who are hurting your people.

And that’s one of the criteria, do you have loyalty to me? Let’s go back to the Walzer, are you inside or are you outside? And you are asking people, are you inside or are you outside? Now some of them, you’re going to say, I’m outside. Others are then going to push back at you and say, no, I’m inside. I’m trying to do something different. And then ultimately you yourself will say, okay, then I have to make room for you. 

You know, we, we’ve spoken a lot. You’ve been teaching me a lot about the shifts in If Not Now, between where they started as a Zionist movement and where they become and sometimes,

Yehuda: Well, not quite Zionist, but at least more committed to critiquing the Jewish community.

Donniel: They didn’t say they were anti Zionist. They didn’t think they were. 

Yehuda: They didn’t use those terms. 

Donniel: They didn’t use those terms. They were very ambivalent. And who are your friends and who are your partners? And like, who do you associate with? And at some point you began to feel, one second, where do you belong?

Now if somebody from If Not Now says, I am committed to the Jewish people, I’m in, I’m not leaving. But I believe that these actions of Israel, or even of Zionism itself, are deeply flawed. At the end, when you make that move, after a couple of months pass, and I could find a balance, I think somewhere along the line, I have to embrace you as part of the story.

Not everybody who’s in the story do I have to agree with. I don’t have to agree with them, but at some point, now, I do believe that, for them, they’re not ready to make the loyalty claim anymore. That’s the problem. The problem is that they’re building loyalties and communities with others who are avowed enemies and who really want to destroy Israel, who really, who talk about the destruction of Israel.

You know, we spoke about the difference between calling for a ceasefire now or calling for a ceasefire on October 8th. October 8th calling for a ceasefire was to say Israel doesn’t have a right to defend itself. Calling for a ceasefire in the middle of January is about saying the war has achieved what it can achieve, and now I want to argue as to whether it’s still legitimate in light of the civilian casualties.

Now, I could agree or disagree, but that has to fall under a decision, are you a Genesis Jew? So when you claim it, I’m in with you. And I remember when you were making that stand. And when I read the article, I said, I agreed every word with, I understood exactly what that was the moment. Because also we’re not supposed to be balanced at every time either, by the way.

Yehuda: Yeah, context matters actually. 

Donniel: Context actually does matter. 

Yehuda: And what I think is essential here is that what we’re talking about is not just tone. Sometimes this gets reduced to tone. It’s not, you see sometimes the pundits will say, you have to declare your love for the Jewish people before you criticize them, as though it’s just some ritual of passage. I’m not talking about that. We are talking about saying, how do you foreground your commitments? Make it clear that I respect the Genesis Covenant and what it demands of me, and that’s why the virtue ethics language can help. This is something powerful about this, and if I refuse to listen to it, if I disregard it, maybe that’s the thing you need to do at this point in your life, and I get it. You have to know that there’s going to be consequences to the social and political communities to which you can belong, and you also have to be open to the criticism that someone’s going to come along and say, I understand you have an Exodus grievance, but are you listening to the Genesis claim that I’m trying to make on you as well?

Donniel: Right. But here too, I would, I would be careful about something. I don’t want to judge people’s Genesis commitments. I want them to bear witness to their Genesis commitments. It’s when they refuse to bear witness, then I say, okay, but I don’t want to say looking at you, you’re not really loyal because then you become the guide. You become the arbiter of loyalty. 

The fact is, is that they made anti-Genesis statements. Or like, even right now, when Israel is on trial, literally in the court, not of public opinion, but in court, over genocide. You want to accuse Israel of war crimes. You want to accuse Israel of abusing its power. The minute you use the word genocide as a critique of Israel, you are basically associating yourself with those people who are trying to undermine the ability of the state of Israel to be.

Words matter. Words really matter. And at certain times, just like on October 8th, when you say ceasefire, who are you associating with? These are claims. Genesis obligates you. Now, you tell me your Genesis story, I’ll accept your reading of it. But again I could question it. So this is some of the dance that needs to be made. 

Yehuda: Yeah. And one of the places in the book that’s going to be interesting in terms of the test of time is when you talk about the Gaza conflict of 2021, and you paint very generously the Exodus loyalists and the Genesis loyalists. And there’s something different about October 7th, because, something changed on October 7th that maybe the same calculuses around Genesis loyalists and Exodus loyalists can’t carry the same way today.

Donniel: That’s correct. Now, the problem of ever putting out a book, you know, and that’s why I never hold all my books and, you know, you write a book, your job of a book is to hopefully create some thought. I get into trouble when I try to translate into Hebrew and a few years later, I don’t like them anymore, because one of the gifts of being at the Institute is we learn from each other and we’re changing.

But there’s no doubt that this book felt very, very deeply the call for Israel to be a great and moral nation, and that with our return to power, we have the ability to take risks for the sake of pursuing peace and for the sake of fulfilling the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. And I tell that story and feel it very deeply that Israel had become too Genesis focused in its discourse with Palestinians and was forgetting, because of trauma, it’s Exodus sensibilities. 

And I was pushing, if the Second Intifada created some trauma that lasted for 20 years about the rights of Palestinians, October 7th changes the whole equation again. Again, you know, I still am so committed to a two state solution. How this is even possible? So I would be far more forgiving now to the Genesis obligations. It was a call to overcome some of those Genesis dimensions. 

But I have to tell you even right now, and I know I’m getting into a little trouble with people, but I’m starting to push some conversations, because I think there are places in which we could talk about our Exodus responsibilities which don’t undermine or threaten our Genesis loyalty.

Genesis loyalty could create a culture of silencing, silencing your Exodus responsibilities, even when there is no conflict, even when it’s not an either/or. So I make a very careful distinction, I can’t micromanage why the Air Force bombed this or not that. I just don’t know. Gaza is, you know, to use the word complicated, like, I don’t know. I think we’re gonna have to give an accounting, we’re gonna have to talk about it, but now in the midst of the war, I’m not sitting and saying to Israel, you shouldn’t have done this, you should have done that. No. I think we have to attempt to pursue victory. Even if the price is very, very high to civilian casualties, because the presence of civilian casualties cannot undermine the ability of a country to fight a just war. So I’m quiet there. 

But at the same time, I’m asking, okay, while we’re pursuing the battle, what does Exodus tell us about civilian casualties, about hospitals, about humanitarian aid, about our responsibility to treat prisoners of war? Over and again. These are things that have nothing to do with our security. Then you know what people tell me? Don’t talk, you’re going to undermine the soldiers unity. That’s not, Genesis, you have my unclaimed loyalty. But part of my loyalty is to ask, okay, where could that come forth? 

So even now, post-Gaza, I’m not using Exodus to speak about the obligations of a solution, but Exodus obligates me to see all human beings as creating the image of God, and that means Gazans. And it even means Hamas terrorists, but it certainly means civilians. And it means Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. And October 7th can’t give us the license to stop talking about this for another 20 years. What it means? I would be much more cautious because frankly, I myself don’t know what it means right now.

Yehuda: Maybe that’s the gift and the complexity of what you’re trying to do with the book, which is, you want Jews to think in a certain way, or to be claimed by a certain way of thinking. You’re less committed to the specific policy implications that come from this or that. In fact, the book is designed by having two parts. You’ve created the first part. It’s a little bit more timeless. Here’s a way of reading our tradition and Jewish peoplehood, and the second part is here how it applies to a number of big questions facing Jewish life today, with the possibility that the map is going to change, and the context is going to be different, but I can still go back to the first half of the book and say, how do I still use this way of thinking?

Now, a lot of Jews don’t do this, Donniel. You know this, they look, they’ll say, okay, this is how I think as a Jew, and therefore this is my automatic commitment to policy. I guess you’re asking us to do something a little bit different, which is just because I’m awakening an exodus consciousness about my moral responsibility, that does not translate into automatic conclusions about failures of policy this way or the other, but it’s so delicate. It’s so hard to do. 

I guess I’ll let you have the last word on like, what are our pastoral responsibilities, if it’s rabbis listening, helping their communities to do this work, or it’s individuals trying to hold themselves together through this very difficult time, when Genesis and Exodus feel like they’re making such different claims on us.

Donniel: My loyalty, my religious loyalty to my people obligates me to not just be loyal to their physical needs, but also be loyal to their spiritual, intellectual, and moral claims, and to make sure that it has room around the table. And, in many ways, what Genesis obligates me is to never be too enamored with my truths.

Because a Jewish story is not my individual journey in pursuit of God on top of a mountain. It’s not my search for Nirvana. I achieved it. I have to be with the people. And that means my truths, my opinions, are just part of a story. That means I have to accept that there are a lot of different ways to be loyal to the Jewish people. A lot of different ways to love the Jewish people, a lot of different ways to love the state of Israel. 

By the way, also a lot of ways to love moral aspirations and the journey of the Jewish people. There can’t be one political outcome for a story of a people who have walked for 3,000 years in trying to balance Genesis and Exodus. I hate the Shulchan Aruch. I don’t accept that there’s one single mode of Exodus. How could all of the complexity of our story be ever monopolized by one? When you do it, you’re really exiting the peoplehood game. You really are. You’re creating a dichotomy of religion and peoplehood, and you’re claiming mastery over this.

But when they’re both an integral part of your religion, like I say, I know what it is that I know, I never claimed that that which I know is true. That means I have to listen, I have to let somebody else, and always be challenged by it, and to be open to it, and to create room for Jews to love Judaism in their own way.

The truth is that I want Jews to love Judaism. I want Jews to feel that they’re a part of this tradition. I want them to feel loved, respected, and to activate a sense of identity. And I think that will happen when we inspire and love at the same time. That’s Genesis and Exodus for me. 

Claire: Thanks for listening to our show. And special thanks to our guest this week, Donniel Hartman. Identity/Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sam Balough and Sarina Shohet and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC with music provided by So Called.

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