As religious Jews, we try to resist all forms of assimilation, be they religious, cultural, moral or otherwise. But one way we’re failing, I’ve noticed, is by assimilating politically.
Jews on both sides are willing to line up behind our preferred political parties and say ours is the true and perfect representation of “Torah values”—when, in truth, there is no way to take the complexity of Torah and halacha and match it perfectly with a 2024 partisan agenda. For instance, halacha in no way lines up with either the current pro-life or pro-choice movements. Halacha would support neither the NRA’s agenda nor a total ban on weapons. And Jewish values would reject a platform that endangers police in the name of Black lives, and vice-versa.
Truthfully, most of the time, it’s more secular Jews that see the Democratic Party as min haShamayim, and it’s our Orthodox world that tends to wrongly see the Republican Party as divinely ordained. However, all of us with yirat shamayim have to acknowledge that there are extremists on both ends, with the excesses of Jamaal Bowman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rashida Tlaib, Lauren Boebert and others all being a threat to what Rav Moshe Feinstein called the Medina Shel Chesed.
As Torah Jews, we ought to seek nuance, seeing each issue on its own terms rather than siding instantaneously with our favorite party. We ought to be deeply worried that, while support for Israel used to be a bipartisan position, it’s at risk of being monopolized by the Republican Party, with some Republicans leaning into a maximally hawkish stance and some Democrats feeling they need to appeal to the anti-Zionist fringe.
We should almost be embarrassed as Torah Jews to publicly stand behind something so inadequate. When we cast our votes and defend our choices at the Shabbos table, we should be doing it almost reluctantly. We know that none of these movements represents us, that all we can do is pick the best strategic option.
That said, we still have to be engaged and vote — but we must do it with the knowledge that our choices are far from ideal. Our communal identity and discourse should hold the nuance even when our ballot options don’t. The people who brought down the Talmud should not dumb itself down in this era to the simplicity of sounding like Fox News or MSNBC.
This is not at all to dismiss the importance of voting. As the Rav wrote, in “Out of the Whirlwind,” “Every person … can and must serve God by self-involvement in the drama of redemption on all levels. This is Judaic humanism, or Judaic democracy.”
When we cast our votes, we’re making all kinds of considerations, with what’s best for Jewish day schools, Israel’s security and policies around antisemitism. But also, those questions are only the beginning, as Torah values inform what we should think about all the “less Jewish” issues as well.
In his work “Logic of the Heart, Logic of the Mind,” Rav Ahron Soloveichik wrote, regarding the relationship between Jewish and secular law, “A Jew should always identify with the cause of defending the aggrieved, whatsoever the aggrieved may be, just as the concept of tzedek is to be applied uniformly to all humans regardless of race or creed.”
I don’t believe that political leaders are our saviors or that political change is the most effective path for societal transformation. The brutalities of the marketplace and abuse of state power are everywhere locally, nationally, and globally. The state is a crucial tool but not our answer. But I do believe elections matter enormously and that we need to ensure that, even when we don’t agree with everything, we must take sides. We must do more than lament and scold. The plight of the Other is everywhere calling us to listen, answer, advocate, and show up and march.
And yet, with all this energy towards elections, I’m reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s words: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”
While Americans, including religious Jews, have enabled two identities to dominate (our identities as consumers and citizens), we’ve neglected a more important third identity: society-builders. We can actively contribute to arts, science, religious culture, and grassroots social change efforts. We must get involved but we must develop our religious and spiritual conscience beyond our role as citizens to support and challenge the state. We dare not assimilate into the rallying bandwagons of the days and merely become Democrats or Republicans as our primary identities but rather make choices and align with causes and movements but always exist intellectually and spiritually outside of them and beyond them. The language of politics has proven to be too contentious to inspire a collective spiritual revolution so we must embrace it, but we must also transcend it.
This election season, I hope we can exercise wisdom and nuance worthy of the Jewish tradition and not be sucked into the seductive partisan trends where the entertaining spin of the sensationalist secular media actually convinces us that the true moral policies and true moral allies are simple to detect.
Rav Feinstein said it best: “A fundamental principle of Judaism is hakaras hatov—recognizing benefits afforded us and giving expression to our appreciation. Therefore, it is incumbent upon each Jewish citizen to participate in the democratic system which safeguards the freedoms we enjoy.” May we be humble but may we also act, even amidst uncertainty.
Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz is the president and dean of Valley Beit Midrash, founder and president of Uri L’Tzedek, founder and CEO of Shamayim: Jewish Animal Advocacy, and founder and president of YATOM: The Jewish Foster & Adoption Network. He lives in Arizona with his wife Shoshana and four children.
