I Hold These Truths to be Self Evident

When I was about 14 I won a scholarship to a Haredi sleepaway camp. I didn’t actually join a competition; the High School Yeshiva I was studying at gave it to me at the prizes ceremony at the end of the year. I think the deal clincher was their promise of photography classes, I was very much into photography at the time.

The camp took place on the campus of a vocational Yeshiva High School on the other side of town. We slept in the dorms, studied ‘seder’ in the morning, and went on trips in the afternoons. Every ‘knitted kipa’ kid was paired with a slightly older ‘black kipa’ boy for the paired learning sessions. One morning, the conversation with my Hevruta took an unexpected turn. As I found throughout my Yeshiva years, Hevruta study more often than not branches out to any subject but the study material. So, as I recall, we were discussing suits, and then he mentioned his cousin who was in jail somewhere for being caught smuggling drugs.

“What?! Is he religious?”

“Sure”

“But how can he be religious and smuggle drugs?”

“The drugs were for goyim”

“Well, even assuming he could be sure that there were no Jewish clients for the drugs, it’s ok to endanger the lives of goyim?”

My study partner saw nothing wrong with taking advantage of non-Jews, even to the extent of endangering their lives. I was flabbergasted. He suggested we take the question to the older student who was available to ask difficult questions.

“Weeeeellll, maybe for the sake of peace” said the older guy. In other words, as far as he was concerned, according to Halacha you could take advantage of non-Jews even to the extent of taking their lives, with the caveat that you shouldn’t do it so as not to cause trouble, so as not to give non-Jews an excuse to war against us.

In my later studies I found that technically, he may have been correct; there are specific halachic discussions that seem to say exactly what he claimed. These are the texts that modern Jews sweat over, either re-interpret or repudiate. But for these people, the clash with what was for me, self-evident moral imperatives, was non-existent. There was no conflict, no cognitive dissonance.

I hold some truths to be self evident; Murder is Wrong, Exploitation is Wrong, Discrimination based on arbitrary attributes is wrong. Maybe they aren’t self evident to everyone, but they are to me. I cannot live with a religion that contravenes these principles. I don’t think Judaism does, as I understand it and live it. I don’t think my Father’s Judaism did, or my Mother’s, or my Maternal Great Grandfather’s. I think that this approach, this literalism with no independent moral judgement, is not what Judaism always was. I might be wrong, but that is what I believe. So, as far as I am concerned, I am continuing my Minhag Avot (and Imahot). There is no discontinuity on the essential tradition of my Jewish life: Shabbat, Kashrut, Prayer, Community, Justice.