On Hillel’s Values: Pluralism and Trust after the suspension of JStreetU
Dear beloved fellow members of Harvard’s Jewish community,
I hope my message finds each of you well: that your years, Jewish and academic, are off to good starts, and that you are growing in your studies and held close by your friends.
This message is long and complex, since the principles involved are diverse and conflicting, and the sentiments of our community deeply conflicted. I am asking you to read all the way to the end – laptops, not phones, recommended – in hopes that we can and will together build an inclusive, mutually supporting Jewish community at Harvard.
Late Tuesday night I made the decision to temporarily suspend Harvard Hillel’s affiliation with JStreetU, based on the process by which the group’s leadership made use of Hillel’s charge account at Flashprint to print and distribute a set of posters around campus and in front of Rosovsky Hall. Yesterday, members of our community reached out to me to express every conceivable sentiment. One message began, “I’m shocked and saddened”; another, “Bravo.” One person wrote, “I have long kept my distance from Hillel because of its embrace of JStreet, and I hope this is a step towards permanently severing ties”; another said, “I want Hillel to be a home to all Jews, including those who wear keffiyehs – and this was a giant step away from that.” Someone wrote, “I am sure you’re getting flak – don’t pay attention to it,” another said, “I am sure you are getting plaudits from some corners of the community – you shouldn’t heed them.”
On one level, this is exactly as it should be: the time, and thought, and anguish or relief, of so many members of our community evince a shared depth of care, even passion, for this place. Every community should be so fortunate to be filled with people to whom it matters so urgently.
On another level though, these messages reveal a polarized community – divided not only over the right course of action, but against itself – fissures that reach much deeper than any single policy or decision. We will never agree on everything, nor ought we. My hope – and, as I see it, our shared project – is to make Harvard Hillel into a community where, beyond our disagreements, even the fundamental ones, we would have one another’s backs – and know that others have our backs. Relating to each other – and to our communal policies – with trust and integrity means making clear to one another something like, “You and I may disagree, and profoundly so, about Judaism. But the only person I would work to defeat and exclude is someone who says you (or Jews like you) don’t belong here.”
The context for my decision on Tuesday, and the context for all of our work with students, is the foundational role of student empowerment at Harvard Hillel. If you’d like to explore this in greater depth, this hour-long session lays out the theory, practice, and some test cases. A central element of this empowerment is delegating to student leaders the authority to spend portions of Harvard Hillel’s funds. We ensure that these funds are spent in ways that advance Hillel’s vision of flourishing, diverse Jewish life at Harvard, by requiring student leaders to sign an affiliation agreement that lays out the core elements of our vision for Jewish community.
I encourage you to take a few minutes to read the agreement, and then to reach out to friends to think together about what types of communities you would like to build at Hillel. So much of the yet-to-be-realized potential of Jewish life here is through the creation of diverse, vibrant, and well-supported Jewish sub-communities, and I would like nothing more than to work with each of you to build theses, which were the hallmark of this place during my undergraduate years.
On Monday, a student leader reached out to a member of our staff asking to use Hillel’s Flashprint account to print “flyers for an event,” conveying neither their content nor their highly-public method of distribution – and we did not make specific inquiries, based on our trust that the affiliation agreement was being followed. When our staff discovered fliers outside the Hillel building Tuesday morning, we had no idea that they were produced by a Jewish group, much less students, and even less with Hillel’s resources – and so we informed the police officers stationed in front of Rosovsky Hall, who removed the posters and collected them as evidence. That evening, I learned from a Crimson reporter that Hillel’s funds had been used to print these posters, and realized that JStreetU’s leadership had not operated in keeping with the affiliation agreement. As a result, I revoked the permissions granted by affiliation, until such a time as we could re-establish trust that their decision-making would be in keeping with the document’s spirit and substance. This process was accelerated, and made more difficult, by the press deadlines and publicity, and I wish that we could have navigated it with more time and opportunity for dialogue. Yesterday I met with the involved students for over 90 minutes, and together we began to explore what might constitute such a repair.
The rest of this letter lays out my thinking and priorities, in the spirit of transparency, and in hopes of building a more trusting and understanding community. I don’t expect that every member of this community will agree with everything that follows. The purpose of our rules is not to create uniformity of opinion, but to articulate guardrails that enable trust within a community of vastly different, even bitterly contradictory, views. To the extent that you would propose modifications to the affiliation agreement for the 2025-26 academic year, I look forward to considering them.
My central concern throughout this process has been deliberateness and dialogue before undertaking events with the potential to deepen our community’s polarization: “In planning events with the potential to engender conflict between different elements of our community, we will select topics, titles and descriptions, speakers, and formats with an aim to educate and include rather than inflame and divide – and will consult closely with Harvard Hillel’s staff throughout.” I believe there is widespread agreement that distributing posters across campus and in front of Hillel using the language of ‘sin’ to describe the IDF, has “the potential to engender conflict between different elements of our community” – whether you are for or against the posters or the postering.
I could conclude here, offering a purely procedural account and leaving the black box of ‘controversy’ unexamined – but that would deprive us of an opportunity to explore the contours of our community’s conflicting visions of Jewishness: what is the controversy, and how and why does it matter?
Many members of our community believe that other elements of the agreement would prohibit the public display of these posters. Clauses such as “advancing the welfare of Harvard’s Jewish community as a whole, and the flourishing of all of Harvard Hillel’s affiliated groups, no matter their religious or political convictions” and “My group, and I as one of its leaders, will not participate in, identify with, or lend support to any efforts that stigmatize other Jews or types of Judaism that accept the spirit and substance of this agreement” – are some of the most relevant.
The concern that Monday night’s public postering did not “advance the welfare of Harvard’s Jewish community as a whole” and that it “len[t] support to efforts that stigmatize other Jews or types of Judaism,” specifically those who see service in the IDF as a central component of their Jewish identity, as many of our Israeli students do – are precisely those that we would have thought through in the consultation required by the affiliation agreement.
It is important to take in the argument for not just the legitimacy, but the religious and moral urgency, of these posters. It is built on two claims, both of which are true:
- These images come from Gaza. They depict, in ways that are painful to confront, effects of the IDF’s campaign against Hamas there on Palestinian civilians. It is vital that we, as Jews, not evade the effects of the Jewish state’s army’s actions on others.
- The text superimposed on the images derives from the High Holiday liturgy. These are ancient and sacred words, expressing and impressing Judaism’s unyielding demand that we relentlessly scrutinize our actions and demand more of ourselves.
The combined force of these claims merits expression in action, and make a compelling case for a Hillel-hosted discussion juxtaposing the introspection of Yom Kippur with students’ ethical positions on Israel’s war with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. To the extent that such conversations do not occur here, it is a loss not only for progressive Jews and progressive Judaism, but for the fullness and richness of Jewish life writ large. I could even imagine a scenario in which these very posters could be the source-text for such an event, provided that the session was designed with a goal of introspection and deliberation. I imagine there may be pushback against Hillel supporting such an event, but for a sincere and significant portion of our community, these are the most pressing Jewish concerns of the moment. These students – many of you – have a legitimate claim to full expression at Hillel.
It is helpful, perhaps essential, to point out that the affiliation agreement is primarily concerned with “stigmatization,” not criticism, of certain types of Jewish expression (in this case, service in the IDF). Searching, honest, and vulnerable discussions are almost never stigmatizing; posters, public pronouncements, and mass chants may well be. In other words – time, place, and manner are decisively significant.
A parallel illuminates the vast distance between public postering, with no address for or invitation to dialogue, and a study session held within Hillel. In the book of Psalms (22:7-8), David says, “But I am a worm, less than human; scorned by men, despised by people/ All who see me mock me, they curl their lips and shake their heads.” This Jewish text is no less canonical, and no less challenging, than the High Holiday liturgy.
One can, and should, imagine side-by-side scenes set, say, in the 1960’s USSR or 1990’s Cairo – places and times where anti-Semitic propaganda depicting Jews as vermin was widely circulated and consumed. In one scene, a group of Jews are piously reciting Psalm 22, giving abject expression of the darkness that each of us carries somewhere within ourselves. At prayer, they are surrounded in prayer by a community of mutual care and support. Their words have the character of theater – vital and moving when stated within the confines of the synagogue, but not to be translated into real-world action on the streets once services conclude and the prayer-shawls are folded up.
In another scene, these very same words are printed in a newspaper or magazine, next to an image of a Jew as a spider with legs reaching across the globe or as mutant larva with bulging, empty eyes. Appearing alongside these images, the Psalm’s words would lend permission and credibility to the stigmatization of Jews, legitimizing discrimination and, God forbid, violence against our people. This is because these dehumanizing portrayals of Jews by others have the character not of theater, but of propaganda: they are meant to come to life on the streets, as legislation and as violence.
Sadly, Harvard’s campus of 2024 shares significant echoes of those times and places. It is not only February’s hideously anti-semitic cartoon, or the depiction of President Garber with horns at the encampent, but also the PSC’s recent call that “now is the time to escalate,” an anonymous vandal “bringing the war home” by spraying red paint on the John Harvard statue and smashing windows of University Hall, and the PSC’s libelous accusation that Israeli soldiers are using bags of flour to lure Palestinians into kill zones. In this context, public posters superimposing on images of Palestinians’ corpses the words “We have become more guilty than all people; we are more shameful than all nations,” seems more likely to foment hatred of Jews and particularly Israelis than to facilitate soul-searching or reflection.
I have been thinking a lot about the context of such words and images because on Rosh Hashanah, on the streets of Brookline, a man drove past me and shouted, “Shoah – you should’ve been killed!” Three days later, as I walked to CVS on Harvard Avenue, another person said loudly, “Synagogue of Satan – you’re all going to hell.” The saturation of public spaces, and the minds of an increasing number of Americans, with images of Jews as heinous, is real, and dangerous, and requires – just like testing and masking during COVID – that we curtail some public freedoms to protect one another.
In the Crimson, Halakhic Left defended these posters as “not an attack” on the Jewish community – and they are correct. But not everything that is dangerous is an attack: leaving a toddler near an unfenced swimming pool or going out in public with the flu, are things we know not to do, because of the risk of harming others. Our moral and legal vocabularies are adequate to describe them: the terms of recklessness, negligence, and endangerment are all real and relevant concepts. For Harvard Hillel to be a place of trust, we all will all need to step up to protect each other, not merely clear the very low bar of not attacking one another.
If each of us and all of us take not only our own commitments, but also one another, seriously – the widest set of possibilities stands before us – before you – as to what can be done and said at Hillel. I invite you to come to Hillel bearing your full commitments. You will find some of your peers in deep agreement, and with them build compelling friendships that will shape this community, and your lives. And you will also be asked to speak forthrightly and listen sympathetically to everyone here, especially those who are most concerned by your words and your presence – and you will build friendships with some of them as well, that will also enrich and transform your life. Living out twin concerns – for your own commitments, and for the welfare of others – is the only thing that can knit together our kaleidoscopically diverse community. This will not always be easy, but there is nothing more urgent, more noble, or with greater potential to shape Jewish life, here and elsewhere, in the years and decades to come.
I hope that this letter has given you an understanding of my thinking, goals, and methods – a user’s guide of sorts to Harvard Hillel. As always, I am eager to hear from you – on this topic, or on others, and look forward to replying to those of you who have already reached out. Each of us on Hillel’s staff is profoundly committed to holding this fractured Jewish community – by creating a place where each of you holds and supports one another in the fullness of your conflicting commitments to what Judaism requires of each of us. I am grateful and honored to pursue this work with all of you in this new year, and please God, for years to come. (As a small step – I invite you to join tomorrow night, Yom Kippur, at 8:30, for an hour of communal reflection and learning framing teshuvah, repentance, as viewing one another, and ourselves, with grace and sympathy.)
Gemar hatimah tovah – may you and yours, and our entire community, be inscribed and sealed for only goodness and blessing in this new year,
Rabbi Jason Rubenstein
Executive Director