The Quiet Erasure of Jewish Artists in America
4 min read
Seven Jewish habits for judging wisely in an age of viral clips and deepfakes.
One afternoon, your son Jacob comes home from school fuming. A classmate, David, insulted him publicly, and the teacher responded by kicking Jacob out of class. By the time he finishes explaining what happened, you are fuming too. You call the principal to demand an explanation—and an apology.
The principal listens patiently and then fills you in on what Jacob left out: despite the teacher’s repeated warnings, he had been teasing David throughout class. You realize that Jacob didn’t lie, but he didn’t give you the whole truth either. As a result, you formed a judgment on the basis of partial information.
We encounter variations on this story all the time, such as when we see a short video clip of a police officer attacking someone or an image purporting to show the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike. The human tendency to jump to conclusions is hardly new. What has changed is the speed and volume of the information we receive, and the ease with which it can travel halfway around the world before anyone subjects it to serious scrutiny. AI has dramatically exacerbated this dynamic, making it easier to create convincing deepfakes or fabricate evidence.
The challenge before us, then, is how to make sound judgments in a frenetic world. The Torah and Jewish tradition suggest seven habits that can help.
Facts do not interpret themselves, and so we weave them into a larger story—often without noticing where the evidence ends and our interpretation begins.
In the book of Numbers, Moses sends 12 spies to scout the land of Canaan. They return with a series of factual observations: the land is fertile, its cities are fortified, and its inhabitants are powerful. But their sin comes when ten of the spies make the jump from their observation—that they “saw fortified cities”—to an unjustified conclusion: “We cannot succeed.” Soon enough, they say that the land’s inhabitants saw them as grasshoppers, and the entire nation despairs.
The same thing happens to us when someone doesn’t respond to a message right away. The unanswered message is a fact; “He is ignoring me” is an interpretation. The interpretation may be right, but it’s worth noticing when we make that jump from facts to explanation. Before reacting, we can ask ourselves: What do I actually know, and what larger story have I told about what happened?
Even an accurate description may leave out essential context. Ethics of the Fathers, an early collection of rabbinic teachings, cautions: “Do not judge your fellow until you have reached his place.” We often see what another person did while knowing little about their personal history and how it might help us better understand where they are coming from.
The opening chapter of the book of Samuel tells of Hannah, a woman devastated by years of infertility, who travels with her family to the Tabernacle. She prays for a child so intensely that her lips move but no sound comes out. Eli, the High Priest, sees her unusual behavior and assumes she is drunk.
Hannah explains that she is not intoxicated but brokenhearted and has been pouring out her soul before God. Rather than becoming defensive, Eli immediately accepts her account and sends her away with a blessing. She later gives birth to Samuel, one of the Bible’s great prophets and leaders.
Eli’s greatness in this scene lies in his willingness to listen when Hannah tells him what he could not see. His example suggests a simple question worth asking before jumping to a conclusion: What additional information might lead us to see the situation differently?
We are very good at recognizing other people’s biases—and much worse at recognizing our own.
The Torah warns judges not to accept bribes, “for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise.” The Talmud takes this principle remarkably far. It tells of Rabbi Yishmael son of Rabbi Yose, whose tenant once brought him a small gift. Rabbi Yishmael refused to accept it and disqualified himself from judging the tenant’s case.
As he listened to the case from the sidelines, he caught himself thinking of arguments that might help the tenant win. He was stunned. He hadn’t accepted the gift, yet the mere offer subtly affected his judgment anyway.
Most of us are not taking bribes. But we all have interests that can function in similar ways. Loyalty, ambition, embarrassment, friendship, resentment, or simply the desire to prove ourselves right can all skew our judgment.
Before judging, then, we might ask not only what information we are missing, but what might be pushing us toward a particular conclusion. Would I interpret the evidence the same way if I had nothing personally at stake?
We naturally grow more confident when the people around us all reach the same conclusion. After all, we reason, if everyone around us is in agreement, they must be right.
The Talmud records a remarkable rule that goes to this point: if every judge in a case involving the death penalty votes to convict, the accused is acquitted. Why should unanimity produce an acquittal? Shouldn’t it be precisely the opposite?
While the commentators offer several explanations, one is that if the judges are unanimous, no one is likely to push back against the danger of groupthink, and they might miss important arguments for leniency in their deliberations—and might even come to kill an innocent person.
This problem has become even more serious online, where algorithms create information bubbles, showing us more and more of what we already believe. Before accepting a view simply because everyone around us seems to share it, we should be able to explain the strongest case on the other side in a way its supporters would recognize. Otherwise, our confidence may simply be the result of hearing the same argument over and over again.
The Talmud tells of troublemakers who lived near Rabbi Meir and tormented him repeatedly. In his anger, Rabbi Meir prayed that they would die. His brilliant wife Bruriah challenged him by pointing to a verse in Psalms: “May sins disappear from the earth” (Psalms 104:35). The verse, she pointed out, does not ask for the disappearance of sinners, but of sins. Rather than pray for the men to die, she told her husband, he should pray for them to repent. Rabbi Meir did so, and they changed their ways.
Note that Bruriah did not play down the hooligans’ actions. She simply refused to fully equate the men with their sins.
We are often much more generous in explaining our own behavior than we are in explaining someone else’s. I spoke harshly because I was exhausted; you spoke harshly because you are cruel. Bruriah reminds us that we can hold someone responsible for what he has done without reducing that person to those sins.
Some decisions truly cannot wait, but many of the judgments we make hastily feel urgent but really are not.
According to the Mishnah, compiled in roughly 200 CE, a court trying a case involving the death penalty could acquit the defendant on the day of the trial but could not issue a conviction until the following day. The judges were required to spend the night reconsidering the case and searching for grounds for acquittal.
A delay gives our emotions time to settle and allows other interpretations to emerge. The same principle applies before we send an angry message or repeat an accusation. Waiting a day or two can help us avoid mistakes and think more clearly.
Near the end of the book of Joshua, the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh, who had settled east of the Jordan River, build a large altar near the river. The other Israelite tribes, who lived west of the Jordan in the Land of Canaan proper, hear about it and assume the worst: their fellow Jews have established a rival altar in violation of God’s command.
They send a delegation across the Jordan to confront the eastern tribes and give them an opportunity to explain themselves.
The altar, the two-and-a-half tribes explain, was not intended for sacrifices at all. The eastern tribes feared that future generations living west of the Jordan River might deny that they belonged to the people of Israel. The altar was therefore meant as a witness to their shared identity, not to the chasm separating them. The delegation accepts the explanation, and the crisis ends peacefully.
Their anger was understandable. The eastern tribes had already chosen to live apart from the rest of Israel, and now they seemed to be in open rebellion against God. Righteous anger could easily have led to great tragedy.
But what stopped them was their willingness to listen before acting. Once they heard the explanation, they changed course.
We can cultivate that same openness by asking what evidence would change our minds. If the honest answer is “nothing,” then we may no longer really be trying to find the truth.
Modern technology makes it extraordinarily easy for us to react immediately. We can instantaneously condemn someone online before we have enough information to come to a reasonable conclusion. But good judgment requires us to pause between receiving information and responding to it.
Before reaching a consequential conclusion, we might ask: What do I actually know, and what have I inferred? What context might be missing? What interest could be shaping my view? Have I considered the strongest argument on the other side? Am I evaluating an action or defining a person? Must I decide now? What evidence might change my mind?
These questions won’t guarantee that we get it right. But they can remind us that we may not know the whole story, that agreement is not proof, and that conviction does not make us infallible. In a culture that rewards quick, forceful reactions, Jewish wisdom asks us to take responsibility for what we think next.
