“Good faith partners don’t quote scripture at each other.”

Working with people from multiple faith backgrounds, I often say this and find general agreement among accomplices in justice work.

Jewish teachers regularly cite sacred sources, from the Five Books of Moses all the way through current writings. Many Jews quote texts all the time and do much more than say: “Look, I have a source to back up my argument.” We have thousands of years of established procedures for “d’rash-ing” or interpreting texts.

As a rabbinic colleague pointed out, we try not to do this “at” each other, so much as with one another. We aim to be guided by some agreed upon principles in the process. We don’t always get it right. We can be argumentative and hurtful and divisive as much as anyone else, but we do try to unite around some basic ideas, like these, which are only a sample:

- Respect and Dignity — as one family of humanity, hailing from the same universal source, we try to treat one another as mutual bearers of an infinite spark, a shard of divinity. When we teach, generally, and particularly when we use our sacred texts, we aim to uphold these principles, and our teachings ought not defy them.

- Compassion and Inclusion — kindness, soulfulness, a high regard for each other’s humanity and human needs. While there are many sources in our traditions that can be used to divide and exclude, we should aim higher.

- Learning and Tradition — while wisdom often starts in a source text, Jews have embraced an evolution and movement with the times that progresses our texts with us. We are people of many books, some of which have only been written yesterday.

Rabbi Amy Scheinerman teaches about these principles and and many others, calling them “meta-commandments”[1] — underlying guidelines for applying Jewish teachings in practice.

We try not to use our texts as a bludgeon against one another. Sharing wisdom from ancient sources fulfills another important Jewish principle — bringing us together in community. When we use our sacred texts to sow division and enmity, we fall into historical challenges that Jewish wisdom has cautioned us against for millennia. Jewish teachings often attribute the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, to “baseless hatred” between Jews, taking responsibility, perhaps unreasonably, for something that was clearly done to our ancestors by the Roman Empire.

Nearly seventy rabbis and rabbinical students from different affiliations recently joined together in an organization called Beit Kaplan, which is “a forum for the cultivation of a flourishing, dynamic Jewish civilization…With deep ties to Reconstructionist Judaism”[2].

Beit Kaplan rallied in support of students who left the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College last year because of the hostility directed at them as supporters of the State of Israel, self-proclaimed “liberal Zionists”. Beit Kaplan sponsored a gathering to hear the testimony of these former students on Monday, September 9, 2024.

On Friday, September 6, 2024, a rabbi and faculty member at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) wrote a regular email to rabbinical students and advised them to not attend the Beit Kaplan gathering “both for the sake of your own well-being, and to not give the event undue attention”. The rabbi continued to provide “Torah framing” for help in dealing with “the problems that pain us” seemingly raised by the Beit Kaplan event.

The rabbi invoked that week’s Torah reading, called Shoftim, (Deuteronomy 16:18–21:9), declared that the students who left RRC were “those who provide false testimony” who spoke “unethically” and cited the verses that call for such people to be swept from your midst (Deut. 19:19) and killed for their crimes without pity (Deut. 19:21). While tempering this harsh decree from scripture with the Talmud’s qualifications that punishments should be the monetary payment for damages, the rabbi summed up with this interpretation: “There is still a consequence, and the consequence does not need to be identical to the initial action. There is mercy mixed in with justice.” The rabbi concluded with a nod to loving-kindness as a sign of power and rigor in pursuing communal justice.

This brazen use of sacred texts to condemn former community-members, disparage them as unethical liars, and then call for their punishment in vague terms shocked me. This was the kind of scriptural argument that justified American white supremacy, imposed patriarchy and misogyny onto generations of women, and argued for the subjugation of the Jewish people for nearly 2,000 years. That a rabbi made these claims, offered no evidence nor any judicial process by which those they accused could be condemned, and then alluded to punishments from Biblical and Talmudic times without any real qualifications, horrified and saddened me.

This rabbi used our shared sacred texts as a bludgeon against former students and potential colleagues as part of a message to prevent people from engaging with one another. In contrast, I propose an embrace of shared values as a necessary precursor to an argument from sacred sources. What we are arguing for is as important as which sources we use to support that argument. Quoting from the same passages in last week’s Torah reading (Deuteronomy 16:20), “Equity, equity you are to pursue”, or “Justice, justice shall you pursue”[3], we do so understanding that equity, and justice may be repeated in this verse to remind us to take others’ perspectives into account. Justice requires community and overcoming distances between one another — it is a collaborative project. In this way, I offer a Biblical interpretation that I believe asks us to participate in a system of community values that elevate all of us to behave better with one another.

As a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a proud student of the teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan that inspired the founding of RRC, I implore the faculty and leadership of RRC to reconsider the words of one of your own. Please join us in this season of return and reconciliation in shared work of repair. Please engage with us and those who have shared their difficulties with RRC in good faith.

Let us teach and learn our texts with one another, and not use them as weapons against each other.

[1] I have heard Rabbi Scheinerman teach this under the phrase “meta-mitzvah”, here is one place in print:
Scheinerman, A. (2018, October). Hospice, Interfaith, and Halakha. https://collegecommons.huc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/BullyPulpit_Rabbi_Amy_Scheinerman_Transcript_FINAL.pdf, Pages 4–5

[2] Beit Kaplan. (n.d.). The Rabbinic Partnership for Jewish Peoplehood. Retrieved September 10, 2024, from https://www.beitkaplan.org/

[3] The first translation is from: Fox, E. (1997). The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken.

And the second is from: Jewish Publication Society Inc. (2009). JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh. Jewish Publication Society of America.