Building a Coalition That Stands Up For Tolerance and For Jews

Dear beloved members of Harvard’s Jewish community,

I hope my message finds you and those close to you, well.

I’m writing to share positive developments over the past week, following up on the video and statement I sent a week ago. You can find the follow-up video and transcript below. Thank you for your ongoing dedication to Harvard’s Jewish community.

Jason Rubenstein
Executive Director

Last week, I made a video sharing with the world the news and our reaction to, and pushback against, an editorial in The Crimson entitled, “Dear Ethicist, Should I Let Go of My Zionist Friends?,“ explaining how this is exactly the type of exclusion, and justification for that exclusion, God forbid, that our community has been facing for a number of years, and we’ve been really working assiduously against. And I’m sharing this video today, exactly a week later, because there’s a development I think is significant I want to share with you all, which is that yesterday in The Crimson, four letters to the editor were published, each one rejecting different aspects of this piece and together expressing really a kind of a chorus of dissent, of principled commitment to the welfare of this campus and the welfare of the Jewish community.

I just want to share a little bit about each of those. There was one by a pair of students who are active in the leadership of the Jewish community here, describing the centrality of the place of Zion, the images of Zion, to Jewish liturgy, Jewish practice, Jewish belief, going back to antiquity in the way that you can never disentangle these political and religious questions from one another, even as we take different stances politically and religiously as individuals and as a community. There was one by a pair of Jewish professors who were former Crimson editors themselves, about the threatening nature of the idea that association with a country would be grounds for exclusion, when participation with your peers is such a central component of what it means to be a student here, and calling on students to exercise courage and stand up for free exchange of ideas, and stand up for their Israeli and Jewish colleagues.

There was one by the Reverend of Memorial Church about the moral necessity and urgency of friendship, the poignance of being in relationship with people, even when you disagree, and a faith that there’s no real path forward other than through getting to know and sticking with those around us. And finally, the Executive Committee of the Harvard Chaplains, the 35 chaplains of which I’m proud to count myself as a member, published a piece criticizing this as an example of religion-based exclusion, which is antithetical to the very project of university chaplaincy of coming together across difference, even very profound existential difference, and seeking out not just common ground but really respect and the possibility of supporting one another. And I wanted to share that with you all because part of our community’s concern has really been that there’s been so much bad speech around campus; but that’s only half the concern, in some ways the smaller half.

The other half of the concern is there’s been so little good speech emanating from campus, so little reaffirmation of the dignity and the place that the Jewish community and all of its varieties deserves here. And I wanted to share this moment because it’s a very different thing if a piece comes out and just the Jewish community and Chabad are pushing back against it, versus if we are leading in a chorus of sympathetic voices who are diverse in many ways, who are religiously diverse but also politically diverse, some of whom might agree with some of our central claims or the claims that are advanced by most of our community, and some of which are working with us in a coalition based on other principles they have. We are mustering that support and really drawing out a broad-based rejection of certain ideas.

And I wanted to share that with you all, because the work of drawing in those friendships, those relationships, those partnerships has been going on for years, really decades, here in the chaplaincy, in work with professors and students and other religious leaders. And we’ve been working increasingly since October 7 to draw on those relationships so the Jewish community won’t be standing alone, and that’s really our project here in America for Jewish life, one that is embraced and advocated for not just by Jews, but by a very broad and deep coalition. And I wanted to share that picture of what this advocacy looks like. It’s a kind of a tip of the iceberg where those meetings, those conversations are going on constantly.

You’ve seen them come to fruition in the last week here. The Talmud says a person should always draw others in with one hand and push back with the other. In this pair of videos, I’m trying to describe just that dialectic. Last week, there was strong pushback that I offered to some of what’s happening here and is continuing to happen. We should be ready for, we need to be ready for, continuing to push back against. Also, this week, I want to share with you what can happen when we draw others in, when we act as educators. And there’s so much more going on that I hope to be sharing with you in the coming weeks. I’ve reached out to the author of the piece, and to the editors of the Crimson, to the Intellectual Vitality Initiative, and to other key members around campus, because at the end of the day we need to not only advocate; we need to educate, which means we need to listen.

We also need to speak personably. We need to build relationships here, which most of the time will stay out of the limelight, and which at critical moments like this will also have the courage and the conviction built over years and years of trust and closeness to stand up with and for us. I want to thank you all for your participation in these conversations across the country and across the world and for carrying the burden of this community together.