‘Let No Person Judge Himself’ — On the Apostate, Self-Hatred, and the Wrong Questions

Everyone is talking now about the film Naza, and in my view, they are asking the wrong questions. Did the twenty-four interviewees actually serve in Unit 8200? Is every detail they gave accurate? Are the images authentic? Are the things described moral or immoral? Of course facts matter, and certainly a functioning state must investigate serious allegations. But when Israel’s very existence is repeatedly placed in the defendant’s chair, we must not allow the factual questions posed by the accuser to become the only framework within which we explain ourselves. If we immediately enter that discussion, we have already accepted its rules of the game.

There are questions we should not allow to define the conversation. When someone asks, “Did the Holocaust really happen?” the Jewish response is not necessarily to open a file of documents and conduct the debate as though both possibilities were equally legitimate. There comes a moment when the very question reveals its purpose. Our strength also lies in the language with which we refuse to accept the premise of the questioner.

The Jewish people have already encountered many forms of rejection. Every exile formulated “the Jewish problem” differently. In Babylon, there was exile from the land. In the Greek world, the confrontation was with Torah and with the Jewish way of life: not necessarily that you Jews are the problem, but your Torah, your difference, your covenant. In the Christian world, the very existence of the Jew became a theological problem. Augustine did not seek to destroy the Jews; he wanted them preserved as witnesses to Scripture. In other words, even when the Jew was permitted to exist, his very existence required an explanation.

Later, harsher voices appeared. Martin Luther, who early in his life hoped that Jews would convert to Christianity, reached the end of his life writing virulently anti-Jewish texts. And here something disturbing becomes visible: sometimes even conversion does not solve “the problem.” The Jew is no longer judged only for his faith, but for the mere fact of being Jewish.

And here we come to one of the most difficult and astonishing phenomena in Jewish history: the apostate.

Who is the apostate in the deeper psychological sense of the word? Not merely someone who changed religions. Sometimes it is a Jew who seeks to escape belonging itself. He wants to be “normal,” to be accepted, to free himself from the burden, the memory, the covenant, the Jewish fate. But he discovers something painful: the other still sees him as a Jew. And the more he tries to distance himself, the more his origins pursue him.

Then an extreme psychological phenomenon may arise: in order to prove that he no longer belongs, it is not enough for him to be indifferent to Judaism. He must stand against it. It is not enough to say, “I do not believe.” He must say: They are guilty. They are corrupt. They are dangerous. He tries to free himself from the Jew within by condemning the Jew outside himself.

Not every Jewish critic is an apostate, of course, and not everyone who opposes Israeli policy suffers from self-hatred. We must not turn every political disagreement into betrayal. But the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred exists, and it is ancient. There is a difference between criticism that comes from responsibility and love, and an almost psychological need to prove to the world: I am not one of them.

Throughout history we repeatedly encounter Jewish apostates who became among the fiercest accusers of their own people. Nicholas Donin, a Jewish apostate in the thirteenth century who converted to Christianity, brought accusations against the Talmud before the Church, leading to the Disputation of Paris and the burning of Talmudic manuscripts. Pablo Christiani, another Jewish apostate who became a Christian, played a central role in the Disputation of Barcelona against Nachmanides. In other periods other apostates appeared, and in the eighteenth century some among the Frankists also acted against the tradition from which they had emerged. This is not a marginal phenomenon in our history.

It appeared in modern Europe as well. There were Jewish thinkers, or thinkers of Jewish origin, who sought to distance themselves from Judaism to the point of internalizing antisemitic images. Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character is one of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon: a man of Jewish origin who converted to Christianity and wrote about “the Jew” in deeply negative terms, almost as though he had to expel from himself something he could not bear.

And this is precisely where a film such as Naza becomes, in my view, more than another political work. When Jews take part in creating a work that portrays Israel and the IDF through the most extreme images of European evil, I do not think it can be understood only as a question of Left or Right. Here the question of the apostate appears again in its broader meaning: How far must a person go in order to prove to the world that he does not belong to the collective from which he came?

When Jewish creators such as Yuval Abraham and Rachel Shor place Israel inside such a framework, the question that interests me is not only whether every claim in the film is true or false. I am also interested in the psychological and historical question: Why does the Jew sometimes need to become the harshest voice against the Jewish collective itself? Why is criticism not enough, and why is a total indictment required?

I am not claiming that I know what motivates a particular person in the depths of his soul. We cannot know another person’s thoughts. But the historical phenomenon itself exists, and therefore it deserves to be examined.

Perhaps because there is nothing simple about being a Jew.

We are a small people that remained alive after exiles, expulsions, forced conversions, pogroms, and extermination. We lost sovereignty, lived scattered among other nations, and yet remained a people. And in the twentieth century, after nearly two thousand years, we returned to the same land and established a state there. It is difficult to find a historical story parallel to this one.

From the perspective of Jewish faith, this is not merely historical coincidence. It is covenant. “And I will establish My covenant… as an everlasting covenant.” A people with whom a covenant was made, with a memory that cannot be erased, with a longing that returns again and again to Zion. A miraculous people, possessing a history experienced from within as a history of Providence, survival, and return.

And perhaps that is the problem. A blessed people. That is what there is.

Once we are too weak, and once we are too strong. Once we were too “feminine,” powerless and without a state, and today we are too “masculine,” too armed, too sovereign. Once we were accused of having no homeland and living among other nations; today we are accused precisely because we have a homeland. Once the Jew was called a coward; today he is called an aggressor. Either way, in the end, he is guilty again.

When the Jew is on the cross, he can evoke compassion. When he comes down from the cross, stands on his own feet, and defends himself, suddenly, in the eyes of part of the world, he becomes Judas Iscariot.

This is one of the tragedies of the European discourse about Israel. Palestinians are, of course, human beings with suffering, rights, and a story of their own, and real suffering must be taken seriously. But there are moments when it seems that the issue is no longer only the Palestinians. Israel itself becomes the symbol onto which ancient European arguments about Judaism, Christianity, guilt, power, and redemption are projected.

That is why I do not believe that public diplomacy alone will solve the problem.

This does not mean that we should abandon truth, facts, or morality. Quite the opposite. We must examine ourselves rigorously. The prophets of Israel did not spare us. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Micah did not say: The world hates us, therefore we are exempt from self-examination. On the contrary: they demanded more of us precisely because we are the people of the covenant.

If an Israeli soldier committed a forbidden act, it must be investigated. If a system failed, it must be examined. If indeed twenty-four people who served in Unit 8200 gave the testimony attributed to them, we must establish who they are, exactly what they said, in what context, and what is true. And if it turns out that people who entered the most sensitive systems of the state act against it or improperly disclose information, that becomes a serious internal question Israel itself must confront.

Internal criticism is not weakness. It is a profound part of the Jewish tradition.

But there is an enormous difference between Jewish self-examination and accepting an indictment against our very right to exist.

That is the distinction I am trying to make.

My own family history teaches me something about this as well. My grandparents in Persia lived in a world where Jews knew they had to keep a low profile. In my family it was told that Jews were even careful about how they stood in the rain, because of beliefs in the surrounding society about the “impurity” of the Jew, and that they did not always dare to wear clothes that were too new or conspicuous. My father’s uncles, tall and handsome men, insisted on wearing beautiful suits and appearing in the street with dignity, and at times they came into conflict with Muslims who attacked them for doing so. Eventually their father, Yehezkel, the physician to the Khan and the grandfather of my father, Yaakov Zion, understood that the time had come to rise and return to the land of their ancestors.

For me this is not an exotic story about Persia. It is part of a much larger Jewish story: generations of Jews who learned to make themselves smaller so as not to provoke the anger of the majority.

In Europe too, memory lives inside the very stones. One can walk through German cities and encounter memorial stones, plaques, and remnants of communities that were erased, sometimes embedded directly in the ground on which people walk every day.

And now we have returned to our land. Precisely for that reason, we cannot build our lives once again around the question of how to make the world love us.

We can and should build relationships with peoples and nations. Rabbi Allalouf suggests, for example, that Israel should not remain completely dependent on Europe and should strengthen its ties with the non-Western world: Japan, China, Singapore, and other Asian countries. One can debate the exact policy, but the principle matters: we should not build our entire future on the approval of a single continent.

And on the social level, we must understand that Jewish life has never been simple. At times the world will be hostile. At times a film like this will receive applause, prizes, and wide distribution. At times it will affect public opinion, economics, trade, international relations, and even Israel’s freedom of action in matters of security. We cannot ignore the price.

But neither can we live constantly asking permission.

There is no point in turning every trip abroad into a public-relations campaign and every encounter with a non-Jew into a test in which we must prove that we are “the good Jews.” No person in the world has the right to demand that we stand trial again and again for the very fact of our identity.

And here I return to the apostate.

Perhaps he is the most tragic figure in this story. The Jew who finally wants to be “like everyone else,” to be freed from the burden, the wars, the bereavement, the responsibility, the belonging. He wants the family of nations to accept him. But sometimes, in order to be accepted, he feels that he must bring with him, as a gift, the indictment against his own family.

And perhaps the harsher that indictment becomes, the more clearly he hopes to establish the distance between himself and his people.

But history teaches us that even this does not always succeed. The world does not necessarily forget his origin.

And now we arrive at the Ten Days of Return.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this discussion comes now. Because true self-examination is not only asking what the world says about us. Self-examination begins with the question of what we say to ourselves: Who are we? Are we faithful to our own truth? Are we able to criticize ourselves without hating ourselves? Can we repair without dismantling? Can Left and Right, religious and secular, Sephardi and Ashkenazi still remember that they belong to the same story?

The strength of a people lies not only in its army. It lies in its identity, its memory, its mutual responsibility, and in knowing why it exists.

Perhaps there will always be those who accuse us. Perhaps there will always also be Jews who try to escape the Jewish story by attacking it. There is no need to despair of them, and there is no need to spend all our energy trying to persuade every person in the world.

We must do something far more difficult: become worthy of our covenant.

To be better. More honest. More successful. More prosperous. More united. Not united in our opinions — that has never been the Jewish people — but united in the knowledge that we depend upon one another.

And to remain awake to the Providence that hovers above us, guiding and directing us.

Perhaps this is the call of the Ten Days of Return: to examine ourselves without handing ourselves over to the judgment of those who hate us.

To engage in soul-searching without losing the soul.

To clarify the facts when necessary, but not to accept the premise of a question that asks us, every time anew, to prove our right to exist.

Our existence does not begin with the applause of the world, and it does not end with its condemnations.

It begins with the covenant.

And from there — with our responsibility to live within it.

We are moving into times where we can stop begging to be accepted- Israel is entrustued to be a light to the rest of the world. The light goes first – the rest will follow.