(Jewish Group) To Err is Human; to Disagree, Jewish

by
Rabbi David Wolpe

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How should we respond when someone promulgates a view with which we disagree, or one that we find offensive, repugnant, even dangerous? What is our approach?

First, we need to separate the view from the individual who espouses it. We can argue without attacking. Once you assault an individual instead of his opinion, or conflate an individual with his opinion (“you are an anti-Zionist”), you make it much harder to change his mind — he is even more on the defensive, even more entrenched, and his view is now his identity, not simply his opinion.

Second, we must engage. Instead of walking away, shouting down, or deriding disagreeable opinions, we must take the more difficult but more responsible course of listening and marshaling opposing arguments. Even if you think your opinion is obviously correct, arguing for it is productive and important, both to clarify your reasoning to yourself, and to expose your views to the scrutiny of others. Immediate rejection is less helpful in the long run than serious engagement.

“I’m the boss” is also not an answer. Argument from authority, including “lived experience,” is never sufficient. Despite the reverence for teachers in the Jewish tradition, for example, there are limitations. The great Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin puts it this way: “A student must not accept his teacher’s words if he has an objection to them. Sometimes a student will be right, just as a small piece of wood can set a large one aflame.” Many teachers throughout history have refused to give their students the space to disagree, but Rabbi Hayyim realizes that to silence someone is not to answer him.

Third, we must take care to argue in the right way. How one argues is as important as the freedom to do so. The Talmud states: “Regarding two scholars who live in the same town and are not kind to one another, of them Scripture says, ‘I gave them laws that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live’ (Ezekiel 20:25)”(Megillah 32a). In other words, you can sour the very teaching itself if you do not present it in a way that can be heard. The rulings of the school of Hillel are preferred to those of Shammai not because they were more logical, but because Hillel and his students were “kindly and modest, studied both their own views and those of the house of Shammai, and they quoted the words of the house of Shammai before their own” (Eruvin 13b).

Social media is the antithesis of such generosity. It might simply not be possible to use the medium for the messages we want to promote and for the arguments we want to have. People are regularly belittled, doxxed, called all sorts of names, and associated with views that are not their own, though their words can be twisted to accommodate them. We need to use such platforms as town squares, not firing ranges — more of a place where views can be civilly exchanged than a mechanism for target practice. This requires an elementary respect for the humanity of those who disagree, and the expectation that such respect will prove an ultimate good. As Talmud scholar Richard Hidary notes in Dispute for the Sake of Heaven, “the motivation directing attitudes of pluralism is peace, that is, communal unity through acceptance of diversity.”

Social media is too powerful and ubiquitous to simply renounce. Instead we should subject it to the same rules we apply to interaction in real life: Would I say this to a person’s face? Do I use the platform as a tool for connection or a channel for aggression? The medium is new and we need to learn, as a child learns socializing rules, what is permissible and what violates human decency. Attacks, snide mockery, and cruelty should be off the table.


I found myself in a very dark place this morning, and this helped.

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