Liberals and conservatives throughout the world disagree about so much in our polarized times. Yet there is one thing the extremes on both sides seem to agree on, and that is hatred of Jews and Israel.
Who could have imagined that we would see the day when, following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, progressive students would cry out in solidarity with this Iranian proxy. There are few countries more fascist, more authoritarian, and more limiting of freedoms, than Iran. And yet, ideological opposites unite in the mosh pit of university demonstrations, waving the same flag, calling for the destruction of the same people, and chanting the same slogans.
Deborah Lipstadt, the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, has coined this antisemitic phenomenon “the horseshoe.” Antisemitism is the area in which extremists of opposite polls meet full circle in a magnetic pull. Of course, neither liberalism nor conservatism is fundamentally antisemitic, but extremism of either kind leads down a predictable, well-worn path against Jews.
We have not fought against extremism; we have joined it. Our communities’ partisanship, especially for the younger generation, divides along Jewish denominational lines, a telltale sign that such political views are part of mass-movement thinking, not ones that were fully thought through by individuals.
The liberals are cursing the conservatives; the conservatives are cursing the liberals. I have heard polarized accusations from friends and congregants alike, seeing only the other at fault, blind to our own ideology’s shortcomings. Perhaps we are harvesting the societal antisemitic fruit of a partisanship that we ourselves have sown.
JEWS THROUGHOUT the world only recently completed the biblical commandment to count the 49-day omer from Passover to Shavuot. Biblically, the omer count is entirely agricultural – a counting from one grain offering in the Temple in Jerusalem on Passover to another grain offering on Shavuot 50 days later.
The seven middot
But there is also a strong kabbalistic tradition that this ritual is really about something else: the balancing of extremes. When the omer is counted we label each day with a nuanced combination of divine (and therefore human) characteristics, orientations, and outlooks.
The divine characteristics, or middot, that we count each day of sefira, are divided into seven categories. The first is hesed (mercy, or kindness), the second is its opposite, gevura (judgment or boundary-setting), and the third is tiferet, sometimes called splendor or truth.
Tiferet sits between mercy and judgment and represents a combination of or balance between its two opposing predecessors. Each day of sefira is defined by not one characteristic but by a combination of two, until every possible combination of middot is covered.
This process is a complex and nuanced 49-day experience, wherein each day of the omer we view situations through a new, and sometimes opposite, set of lenses than we did the previous day.
The message of sefira is clear: God is not an extremist. If we want to imitate God, a God who acts with justice and mercy, truth and kindness, and every combination in between, we must take seriously the lesson of the sefira and its middot-achieving balance, and protest against extremism of all kinds.
Though we might be inclined to see extremism as more passionate, more committed, and even more religious, I would argue that moderation is itself a committed, passionate, path and is indeed the one that not only the sefira count but also Jewish law views as the paradigm of virtue.
As Maimonides puts it in his book of law (Mishneh Torah, laws of character, chapter 1): “The straight path involves finding the midpoint temperament of every trait that humans possess... Therefore, the rabbinic sages instructed a person to evaluate their traits, to calculate them and direct them along the middle path... This path is the path of the wise.”
Moderation and integration, not extremism, is Judaism’s path to a more ideal world.
The writer is the rabbi of Kesher Israel: The Georgetown Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation in Washington, DC.