Trust and Courage

Dear fellow members of Harvard’s Jewish community,

I hope my message finds you, and those you love, well.

The developments at Harvard this week were complex, fast-moving, and high-stakes. In this message, I want to sketch how Hilllel is sustaining and guiding our community through the uncharted territory of open, multi-billion-dollar, conflict between Harvard and the Federal government framed largely in terms of the welfare of the Jewish community.

The stakes at Harvard are existential: nationally – the future of American higher education and science, and, most of all, the rule of law and guarantee of due process; for Harvard – those, and nothing less than its financial future, its capacity to advance the frontiers of science and medicine, and its integrity in the eyes of constituencies with irreconcilable definitions of academic integrity; and for our community – all of the preceding plus our ongoing efforts to right the on-campus wrongs on and after 10/7, and the misfortune of being the ostensible beneficiaries of a political upheaval that is much larger than, and by no means exclusively about, Jews or anti-Semitism.

The rapid drumbeat of significant events began last week, and likely went undetected off-campus. The Harvard administration took a number of major steps in quick succession, building on the numerous proposals Harvard Hillel has sent to Harvard’s leadership since 10/7:

• Suspending the partnership with Birzeit university, whose policy of refusing to work with non-Palestinian Israeli scholars renders any joint project between the schools discriminatory against Jewish Israelis
• Requiring FAS centers to report on their adherence to viewpoint diversity guidelines and rules
• Articulating and enforcing rules barring unrecognized student groups from using Harvard resources including holding events in university buildings and classrooms
• Suspending the Palestine Solidarity Committee – not for the content of their speech, which would be concerningly illiberal, but for violating campus-use rules
• Pausing and restructuring the Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative
• Shaking up the leadership of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies – and defending this step against faculty push-back

The government’s Monday letter arrived against this backdrop and acknowledged Harvard’s recent, positive steps – imposing only a review of funding and contracts, rather than the freezing of funds inflicted on Columbia. President Garber’s reply in turn emphasized areas of agreement between Harvard and the Federal government.

It is critical to point out that President Garber has been consistent and clear-eyed in refusing a simplistic framing of “Harvard vs the Republicans.” In a November faculty meeting, he described the government’s “bipartisan frustration with Harvard” and refused to dismiss the criticisms as unwelcome intrusions, saying instead that they “contain elements of truth.”

This is significant because one of the main lines of attack against the changes of the past two weeks, and those to come, is to delegitimize them as concessions to a hostile Republican administration in which Harvard sacrifices its integrity in a desperate effort to secure its finances. But this is untrue: spend enough time around Harvard, and you will meet numerous senior members of the faculty and administration who see in the current crisis an opportunity to right deeply rooted problems that have vexed the university for years – exactly the position articulated by President Garber in November. Harvard must not sacrifice its integrity, mission, or values – and there is no indication that it has, or that it will. Freedom of inquiry and the principled pursuit of truth even when inconvenient or uncomfortable are sacrosanct to the pursuit of knowledge – and the path of the past two weeks is a well-conceived plan to increase, rather than decrease, the prominence and purview of these cardinal virtues throughout Harvard.

This week, our community raised its voice(s) as not only commentators, but as participants in these momentous events – from Judith Shulevitz’s clear-headed and forceful analysis; to Jacob Miller and Abigail Chachkes’s searching, even anguished, pieces in the Crimson (Shulevitz, in a later comment, called Miller’s piece the best writing she’s seen yet on Harvard’s situation); to Shabbos Kestenbaum’s full-throated defense of the Trump Administration’s actions; to Larry Summers’s sharp criticism in the opinion pages of the New York Times. Just this morning, Charlie Covit and Danielle Greco published two more forceful op-eds in the Crimson.

I encourage you to read these pieces: each is written with conviction and urgency, and together they provide a composite picture of a community, diverse in its experiences and prescriptions – and animated by deep, and deeply shared, commitments: principled intolerance for discrimination against Jews and libel against Israel and Zionism; simmering frustration at seventeen months of slowness, haziness, and vacillation from Harvard in squarely confronting anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism; reverence for the intellectual work that expands the frontiers of knowledge; fears about creeping authoritarianism and breaches of the bulwark of due process; and a commitment to working to create a Harvard where Jews, and others, are not merely safe – but one that brings us together to creatively and courageously addresses the hardest questions together.

And of the many messages I received from students, the most moving were a pair urging that our community’s stance be driven by principle and courage, not expediency and fear – that integrity is more important than this or that position.

What stance carries weight, and with it risk? In this moment of turmoil, the answer is saying, to this entire community, something I tell individual alumni each week. I am constantly asked, “Is Alan Garber the right person to lead Harvard right now?” And the answer I always give is, “Yes.” Through hours of conversations, and exchanges the contents of which I cannot disclose, I have come to the same conclusion as many others throughout Harvard: that Alan carries love of Harvard and hatred for anti-Semitism in his heart; that he is a man of both calmness and conviction; and that his skill and courage should give us hope as he leads this deeply divided and irreplaceable university through this long crisis.

This of course doesn’t mean endorsing every choice, plan, or trade-off President Garber has made or will make. I am making the basic distinction of friend or foe, of someone you can work with or must work against – and saying that Alan is worthy of the task of transforming and saving Harvard; he is someone with whom we can and should work closely. The covenant at the foundation of Judaism is not blind obedience but devoted questioning running the gamut from agreement to disbelief, built on a basic trust – and I am suggesting something similar here (in Hebrew, the words for ‘belief’ and ‘trust’ are one and the same). This is not a call to sit on the sidelines and leave President Garber and his team take care of things, but rather to engage with them actively and respectfully, maintaining a measure of curiosity, and goodwill – even and especially in times of high tensions like this week.

These are the relationships, and this is the type of community – one where we act together, not allowing our fears to isolate us and turn us against one another and defeat our collective search for truth and joy – that we are building with students at Hillel each Shabbat; and as we mend the rifts of this great, dispersed, community, that spans the world and contains within it infinite possibility.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Jason Rubenstein
Executive Director