A Different Jewish Voice: Conscience, Covenant, and Moral Clarity
By David Myers
Smol Emuni Conference
March 30, 2025
I think I speak for many of us when I say that we need to be together in this space at this time. The sense of urgency, of moral crisis, is so palpable. And the need to assert our voice is so great.
We have joined together, as people of faith and observant Jews, to proclaim a different kind of religious voice than that which is heard in mainstream Jewish discourse. '
Often our voice has been a קול דממה דקה, a soft murmuring voice, a voice at the margins or the backrooms of our communal institutions, uttered בלחש, in hushed tones and with caution.
But today we speak aloud, in unison, in public, openly and with purpose.
Not merely to say “not in our name,” but also to declare that there is another Jewish tradition than the one so often invoked in Jewish religious circles, a tradition to which we here are deeply bonded; a Jewish tradition that favors love not hate, peace not war, equality not supremacy.
Today’s gathering is the latest link in an historical chain of gatherings of Jews of conscience.
I think back to the first Smol Emuni conference in Israel in late January 2023 where 700 people assembled to assert a progressive religious voice on Israel’s brewing democracy crisis.
I think back even further, to 1997, here in New York City, to the first meeting of the International Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy, out of which developed JOFA, whose mission is “to expand women’s rights within the framework of halakhah.”
And I think back even further, one hundred years ago, to that cohort of Central European Jews who assembled in Jerusalem in 1925 under the name “Brit Shalom” (Covenant of Peace) with the mission, as we hear in a founding document, of “ensur(ing) that [Jewish] moral standards be applied in dealing with the Jewish-Arab problem in Palestine.”
In this shalshelet ha-kabbalah, in this chain of tradition, we’ll be talking today about morality, about Jewish morality, about what our conscience, our middos, our musar or halakhah dictate us to do, and how we apply them to the Jewish-Arab problem.
And now to the topic at hand. The announced topic is the tension embedded in the heart of the multivalent Jewish tradition between the principle of עם סגולה—the idea of Jews as a chosen people--and the ideal of צלם אלוקים, the belief that all human beings are created in the image of G-d.
This tension has been articulated in a vast range of sources from the Bible to an array of modern thinkers including Rav Kook, Rav Soloveitchik, Rav Haim David Halevi, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and feminist thinkers such as Professors Tamar Ross, Rachel Adler and Mara Benjamin.
In Zionist thought, there was a particular variation of the tension as represented byTheodor Herzl’s call for the normalization of the Jewish people vs. Ahad Ha-am’s vision of Jews as bearers of a unique national cultural heritage. We might frame this as the distinction between a vision of ככל הגויים vs. אור לגויים.
Finding a balance between the two poles helps define our moral positioning in the world. It helps explain how we act ethically in the world—as a universal, human imperative or as a mandate of Jewish ethics. If the latter, do we risk succumbing to a certain kind of moral exceptionalism—or is the category incoherent, as Yeshayahu Leibowitz famously believed, and as we will pursue in a later breakout session.
What are we called upon to do in a world that is so broken, here, in Israel-Palestine, and many places in between? Where is the north star of our moral compass as Jews?
And how do we understand a moral quest that is NOT defined by Jewish sources or thought?
I urge all of us to think about the following questions:
How do you understand the relationship between universalism and particularism in your own life? What are the sources of your sense of moral responsibility?
How do we prevent ourselves from descending into solipsism, a sense of exceptionalism?
Do we require a חשבון הנפש at this moment? If so, why? And what form should it take?
Where does our guilt take us? Toward a sense of our own moral failing or toward an obligation to address the suffering and needs of Palestinians on the ground?
