Jewish Pride Is Not Enough
Genesis and the Ethics of Difference
I’m so grateful to be starting this Torah learning journey with you! I’ll usually send these out on Wednesdays, but I’m getting a little head start this week before Simchat Torah. If you know anyone who might be interested in Committed, feel free to share, and I’d love to hear any thoughts you have along the way. May our learning inspire us to live lives that honor all those we lost this past year.
Hag Sameah,
Mijal
The call to meet antisemitism with Jewish pride has been everywhere this past year. But here’s an uncomfortable truth I want to begin Committed with: Pride alone won’t save us.
I’ve felt this ever since I read the 2013 Pew Report on Jewish Americans. While many markers of Jewish practice (like raising children Jewish) were in decline, 94% of respondents still felt proud to be Jewish. This shiny statistic became the go-to for those brushing aside concerns about Jewish assimilation.
But I was worried. At the time I was studying the history of immigrant groups like the Irish and Italians who once thrived in tight-knit communities, passionately upholding their traditions. But by the third generation in America, those practices had faded, leaving nothing but... well, pride.[1]
Pride isn’t necessarily bad, but it can become hollow if we American Jews don’t understand why we should be proud. At worst, it can distract us from hard truths of what it means to stand up as Jews. Our ancestors weren’t blindsided by the hate they faced. They were deeply aware that our people were targeted because we embody something real and extraordinary. This helped them not only survive but ensure that Judaism lived on.
Whether the resurgence of Jewish pride after October 7th will deepen into something enduring is up to us. We need more than Jewish pride; we must have pride in Judaism itself.
To understand that pride, we should begin at the beginning.
Genesis is an unlikely place to find pride in Judaism. After all, the first portion of the Torah isn’t about Jews; it’s about the creation of the universe and the birth of humanity. Yet it is precisely because the Torah begins as a universal story that it sets the stage for Judaism's most distinctive value: the celebration of difference.
A recurring theme in Genesis is that God creates by making distinctions. The word hivdil—to separate—appears repeatedly. God doesn’t just create light and darkness, land and sea, day and night; God separates them. Differences are the beating heart of the world’s design. The Sages teach that man and woman were originally created as two sides of a single, two-faced being, joined until God separated them.[2] Goodness itself—the intimacy of cleaving to another, the joy of children—arises from difference.
In this light, Genesis’ tragedies reveal humanity’s failure to honor the ethics of creation and difference, with human beings choosing control, possessiveness, and jealousy—leading even to murder—when confronted with a different 'other.' Adam and Eve vie for control over one another: he names her Isha, defining her possessively in relation to himself, while she names their first son Cain, her acquisition from God. Cain, unable to tolerate that his younger brother Abel is favored, murders him. These jealous refusals feel all too familiar millennia later, reflecting the same human tendency to fear difference rather than value it.
But difference is also how Genesis lays the foundation for the Jewish story. If God creates through sacred seperateness, then Abraham and Sarah’s journey of standing apart is a narrative for all humanity. Their willingness to leave their homeland and embrace their unique covenant with God exemplifies the beauty and purpose of distinction.
Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah, philosopher Simon Rawidowicz argued that President Roosevelt’s famous “Four Freedoms”—freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—were incomplete. Illuminated by the inferno of Auschwitz, he added a fifth that all human beings deserve: the freedom to be different. Rawidowicz asserted that the Jewish people embodied this freedom in being “the greatest nonconformist history has ever known.”[3]
Standing apart has undoubtedly led to the “superhuman sufferings” of the Jewish people. Yet according to Rawidowicz, the reason antisemites persecute Jews is paradoxically tied to our service to the world: Our distinctiveness upholds the fundamental human right for any group to be different.
Rawidowicz argued difference must be fought for regardless of what it stands for. He insisted that “the world is not entitled to use our being different… to rob us of our elementary rights as human beings or as a group.” For him the idea of trying to overcome antisemitism by convincing the world that Jews are “the same” as everyone else was absurd. “Do not try to hide the Different inside you,” Rawidowicz urged. “Carry it with open pride to yourself and to the world!”
The monstrous attack on our people on Simchat Torah, along with the torrent of hatred we’ve faced since, wasn’t just an assault on Jews. It was an attack on our covenant of difference—a journey that began with Abraham and Sarah.
We Jews are the guardians of the freedom to be different. As such, we must respond with more than just Jewish pride. We must immerse ourselves in Jewish practice, study Torah from Genesis to Deuteronomy, and nurture not only Jewish children, but children who understand their calling as Jews.
My late teacher Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z’l wrote about the blessings that difference brings. While Jews may debate how and why we are different, for him to be Jewish was at heart to teach the world by example of “the dignity of difference.”
We must be proud of Judaism. But doing so requires us to be committed.
[1] Gans writes about the persistence of ethnic identity - even a positive one - in late generation descendent of immigrants as an ethnicity of “last resort”. Herbert Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2, no. 1 (1979): 1–20.
[2] Bereshit Rabbah 8:1
[3] Simon Rawidowicz, “Em kol herut” (Mother of all freedom), Metsudah 3–4 (1945), 5–20. See the English translation in Simon Rawidowicz, “Libertas Differendi: The Right to Be Different,” Conservative Judaism 29, no. 3 (1975): 24–35.
Well said, beautiful essay. Lately I have been seeing a trend of Jews being pitted against other minority groups. This is a tragedy as we should all have and celebrate the freedom to be different.
Thank you for this thoughtful beginning of our journey with you. I have also been feeling that trying to be like everyone has backfired. Too many of us forgot what it means to be Jewish in a positive way, having a bare identification or even negative. If there's a faint glimmer of a barely silverish lining, it's that Jews are discovering what it means to be a Jew.