When Strategy Becomes Surrender
Judah, Ben Shapiro, and the Cost of Moral Clarity
To my Christian readers celebrating today — thank you for your friendship and support. Wishing you and your families a wonderful holiday season.
I remember a conversation I had years ago with a prominent Jewish communal leader. This was in 2019, before anti-Zionism and antisemitism were openly normalized, when liberal Jews were still debating whether to support the Women’s March.
I had taken a public stance arguing that antisemitism constituted a red line—one that should block coalition-building with the Women’s March, not be negotiated around. The leader I was speaking with disagreed. They believed it was wiser to stay in the relationship, to remain inside the coalition, and to try to influence change from within.
As a pragmatist, I understood the appeal. Politics is the art of the possible. Refuse every compromised alliance and you risk irrelevance while worse actors seize power.
But as we talked, I kept returning to a simple question: Is there a red line? Is there a point at which coalition politics must end—where staying in the room becomes appeasement rather than influence?
I don’t think they had a real answer, and I didn’t have one either.
But that conversation changed something for me. It forced me to articulate a principle I hadn’t yet fully named: pragmatism without pre-commitment to a red line collapses into moral drift.
If you don’t decide in advance what you will not tolerate, you will always find reasons to tolerate more than you should.
In my head, I started calling this “the line Neville Chamberlain never drew”—the moment accommodation stops being strategic patience and becomes complicity.
I understand why drawing that line felt so hard. There is something torturous about leadership in moments like this. You know that moral purism can hand victory to worse actors.
But you also know that sooner or later, endless concessions hollow out the very values you claim to protect. How much compromise preserves decency—and how much corrodes it? That question never has a neat answer.
I didn’t yet have language for what I was struggling to articulate. But I knew that leadership without a red line isn’t pragmatism—it’s moral drift.
I thought about this late last week while watching Ben Shapiro’s speech at Turning Point USA.
I don’t regularly listen to Ben Shapiro, and I have plenty of disagreements with him. But that speech was consequential.
He stood in front of an audience that had helped elevate him and said, plainly, that there are lines he will not cross—even if doing so costs him reach, applause, or coalition strength. He named figures in his own ideological ecosystem and said: not this. Not at this price.
That stand deserves attention. Shapiro did something that many leaders avoid: he accepted the risk of losing in order to refuse appeasement.
That posture—the willingness to draw a line and accept the cost—has deep roots in this week’s Torah portion, Vayigash.
We meet the story at one of its most dramatic moments. Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, has risen to become second-in-command of Egypt. His brothers, desperate for food, stand before him without recognizing who he is. Joseph does recognize them.
The Torah is deliberately silent about his motives: revenge or reconciliation? Punishment or test?
He engineers a crisis, forcing them to bring Benjamin, their youngest brother, before him. Joseph accuses Benjamin of theft and declares he will be enslaved while the others go free.
That’s where last week ended.
This week, Judah steps forward.
What follows is the longest speech in Genesis. Judah explains that their father Jacob is still grieving the loss of a son and would not survive losing Benjamin as well. He appeals for mercy and then offers himself in Benjamin’s place. Take me, he says. Let the boy go home to our father.
This speech breaks Joseph. It also establishes Judah as the brother who steps forward as a leader—the lion from whose line Israel's kings will later emerge.
That outcome was not inevitable. Judah’s prior record is unimpressive. He initiated the sale of Joseph. He slept with his widowed daughter-in-law Tamar—who was disguised as a prostitute—and nearly had her burned at the stake when her pregnancy was discovered.
His life to this point does not hint he will emerge as a moral leader.
So what makes this moment decisive?
Some commentators, including Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, emphasize his moral transformation. Judah becomes a leader because he takes public responsibility, moving from sacrificing a brother to saving one. Leadership, in this view, is the capacity for repentance and the willingness to bind oneself morally.
Others emphasize rhetoric. Judah knows how to speak. He understands power, narrative, persuasion. Reuben may be the eldest, but no one listens to him. Judah speaks—and the world moves.
But this year, I read his words differently.
Judah’s speech reminds me of Queen Esther. She plans meticulously—but only after naming the risk. “If I perish, I perish.”
Strategy matters, until it doesn’t. There comes a moment when conviction outruns calculation, and exposure replaces control.
Judah does that here. He stands before the second-most powerful man in the empire, a man who can have him killed instantly, and says: I will not abandon my brother. Not again.
That willingness to risk everything rather than cross a moral boundary is what makes the speech transformative. It’s the moment when strategy gives way to truth.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. In his Pulitzer-winning biography of King, Jonathan Eig quotes Emerson to capture his moral posture: “Great men are not boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”
King faced it. Esther faced it. Judah faced it.
I am not comparing Ben Shapiro to Judah, Esther, or King. But I am saying that in that speech, he demonstrated a rare and necessary leadership trait: the willingness to draw a red line and accept the cost.
The speech is worth watching in full—not because of any single confrontation, but because Shapiro offers a theory of truth-telling in a moment saturated with noise.
He names the incentives that push public figures toward moral slippage: audience capture, algorithmic outrage, coalition dependency—and insists that moral clarity must sometimes override them all.
Within hours, Jewish group chats were already debating whether he’d gone too far—whether naming Megyn Kelly was strategically unwise, whether he’d picked a fight he couldn’t win.
Those concerns are understandable.
But survival has never belonged to those who avoided risk entirely. In moments shaped by what Emerson called “the terror of life,” leadership requires more than clever coalition management. It requires the courage to say ad kan—this far and no further—without knowing how the chips will fall.
This is the lesson of Vayigash: there are moments when strategy must yield to moral clarity. Our moment—especially in the fight against antisemitism—is one of them.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
For our Wondering Jews podcast last week, Noam and I recorded a fun, thoughtful conversation on modesty in Judaism 🎙️
What does Jewish law actually have to say about modesty? 🤔 What myths and misconceptions surround it? 🧩 And how should we understand modesty through a gendered lens today? ⚖️👗
I know this can be a fraught topic for some—so feel free to share any questions or thoughts you’re sitting with.
Excellent. Shapiro is a man of integrity. Has never shown anything but standing by his convictions.
brilliant, as usual. I can barely listen to him but I’ll heed your advice and listen. Leadership is rare these days especially at a national level.