Why is Jewish unity so hard to achieve? Because the stakes seem so high. When your counterparts are wrong, they are not just wrong — they are disastrously so. When each dispute seems existential, an error is a catastrophe and disagreement seems like betrayal. To make a concession is to open the floodgates of the apocalypse. Those who oppose you are not merely mistaken; they are apikorsim, heretics, traitors.
The appeal is almost unvarying: “I cannot be moderate, because the other side is bringing us to disaster.” Yet a single decision or position very rarely guarantees catastrophe. History is filled with turning points, missed opportunities and chances to change course. Even in the 1930s there were many waystations on the path to destruction. Additionally, fury is not a persuasive argument. To be vigilant is to be careful along their way, not assuming every bend in the road is the edge of the cliff. Not every compromise or even loss is ruinous.
Throughout their history Jews have argued fiercely. The Bible itself is a chronicle of rebellion and fury, from sibling fractures to Korach’s revolt in the wilderness onward. When the Rabbis attribute the destruction of the Second Temple to “baseless hatred,” they are warning of what happens when disagreement turns to enmity. In Roman times Jews killed one another over how to deal with Rome. In medieval times the Maimonidean controversy led to his books being burned, then later the Mitnagdim excommunicated the Hasidim, Orthodox rabbis in America burned Mordecai Kaplan’s prayer book, the Rabin assassination reminded us too briefly of the consequences of such division and more recently, Israeli society tore itself over judicial reform. We are a people of passionate disputes.
Rabbis point with pride to the argumentation in the Talmud, but its example is more often honored in the breach. The Talmudic ideal is argument about ideas, however tortuous the reasoning, rather than the thunderous denunciations so common in our discourse. The sages could be very sharp, but to an end and in a common enterprise. Pirkei Avot calls this machloket l’shem shamayim, an argument for the sake of heaven, and its model is the dispute between Hillel and Shammai. Its opposite is the quarrel of Korach and his company.
Jewish tradition teaches that process can be as powerful as result. In the Talmud, disputes favor Beit Hillel over Beit Shammai because the former were humble, and even taught the opinions of their opponents before their own. They understood something we too often forget: how you argue is often as important as what you argue, and in the long run may prove more persuasive than the argument itself. In the Talmud the defeated views are preserved, not erased. And for all their disputes, the two schools never refused to marry into each other’s families. They disagreed without a breach. The purpose of the argument is to ensure we still have a people when the argument is over.
David Wolpe is the Max Webb Senior Rabbi at Sinai Temple. His most recent book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press). This piece was published on his Substack.
