Hannah E. Meyers Days of Awe This is the week for universities to reestablish community around open, civilized debate.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/october-7-and-the-days-of-awe
The anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel falls during Judaism’s ten “Days of Awe.” This is the charged period between Rosh Hashanah, when fates for the coming year are inscribed in the Book of Life, and Yom Kippur, when they are sealed. All across America, Jews will be chanting in unison this year’s communal sins and beseeching: “For all of these, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement!” Jews stand before their fate, not as individuals, but as a community.
This will also be “The Week of Rage,” when anti-Israel groups on America’s campuses will chant in unison for the annihilation of Jews—now entering their 5,785th calendar year—and their nation-state. They will openly express their support for terrorism: killing, raping, and torturing civilians to achieve political goals. “By any means necessary!” they will call out. They will wave the insignias of Hamas and Hezbollah, for whom the goal is death to America and death to Israel—and while they’re at it, death to homosexuals, to political rivals, and even to their own children, if it results in their gaining power. As a community, they stand behind an ideological vision as intolerant in its aims as it is savage in the means it chooses to pursue them.
Sensibly enough, considering what we’ve seen on American campuses over the last year, many universities are planning extra security, erecting additional barriers to movement around their quads and buildings. So far this semester, however, similar strategies have failed to quell the rage: students from Pittsburgh to Michigan have been beaten or slashed for being identifiably Jewish. Creating truly safe campuses will require more than purely defensive measures.
To work a genuine transformation in campus safety this week and onward, universities need to confront the problem as a community. They must embrace the American community tradition, which thrives by welcoming disagreement.
A hallmark of the current climate is protesters’ stunning contempt for dialogue, a trait that sets their efforts apart from those of traditional activists, who desire above all to communicate. Nothing signals this contempt more explicitly than face-masking: you can’t talk with someone whom you can’t identify. Anti-Israel radicals threaten reporters and passersby for even querying what they want and why. On campuses, this behavior has crystallized into a refusal to “normalize” competing viewpoints by discussing them.
The anti-Israel community demands the ideological homogeneity it has become accustomed to on social media, but which does not exist in the real world. In genuine communities, disputation requires fostering interpersonal trust and mutually safeguarding personal safety. On campus quads today, by contrast, trust is no one’s expectation, and physical safety is far from guaranteed.
University leaders need to instruct students that effective free speech must not undermine trust. Yes, screaming “from the river to the sea” is protected language, as it should be. That doesn’t mean that it’s socially constructive. By conjuring the annihilation of Israel, it obviously degrades trust. Administrators should not hesitate to condemn these sentiments—and remind students that, if they’re not calling for the annihilation of Israel, it would be helpful if they made that clear.
Jews are the target of the Week of Rage, which constitutes a rejection of Judaism’s own embrace of disputation. Indeed, Jewish values function in direct support of navigating tensions between ideas within a community: observance of laws (mitzvahs), hyper competitiveness around scholarly acuity, respect for self-restraint (being a mensch), and a diasporic sense of self that longs for the homeland of Zion but recognizes that community values trump geographic indigeneity.
Compare this with the academic culture from which Week of Rage diehards have emerged. Under the fever dream of eliminating societal competition, students advocate for abolishing the criminal justice system that upholds laws, scrapping standardized testing requirements for admissions (Columbia being the first Ivy permanently to do so), denouncing and barring speakers with opposing views, and reacting with fury to the dislocation of any group given the imprimatur of indigenous.
Universities must step up and enforce our American culture that recognizes the permanence of dispute and molds communities around ensuring mutual trust and security. It is the basis of our Constitution. It’s why Jews have thrived here, as nowhere else.
During these Days of Awe, congregations sing a long list of unsealed fates for the coming year: “Who will live and who will die; who will live a long life and who will come to an untimely end . . . ; who will be tranquil and who will be tormented.”
These words have stirring resonance now, as we remember the thousands of Israelis who said these words during last year’s peaceful Days of Awe, only to suffer fates impossible to contemplate.
The liturgy concludes: “But repentance, prayer, and charity can avert the harshness of our destiny.”
This is the time for universities to repent an entire year spent bowing to a mob of anti-intellectual, anti-democratic hooligans. It is a time for them prayerfully to reflect on the higher power that blessed America’s Founders and enabled them to craft a nation of wildly differing beliefs and opinions into a community. And it is time for them to teach charity: the give-and-take of respectful civil debate that extends trust rather than scorns it.
May all of us be inscribed in the Book of Life.
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