A Sword at the Entrance: Pluralism, Polarization, and the Future of Jewish Community
Benjamin Berger
Credit: Kurt Hoffman, ChatGPT, Wikimedia commons
Benjamin Berger is Senior Vice President for Education, Community, and Culture at Hillel International.
In one of the more haunting passages of the Talmud, we are told that on a day of fierce disagreement between the schools of Shammai and Hillel, Shammai, exasperated by the dispute, drew a sword and plunged it into the ground at the entrance of the beit midrash, immediately raising the specter of violence. And then out went a proclamation by Shammai, representing the majority that remarkable day: “Whoever wishes to enter may enter, but whoever wishes to leave may not leave.”
There are actually two versions of this troubling story. In the Babylonian Talmud, the tension within the beit midrash symbolized by the sword remains sharp, dangerous, but contained (Shabbat 17a). In the Jerusalem Talmud, the story picks up where the other leaves off, and violence is no longer only a threat. That very day, we are told, the students of Beit Shammai take up weapons and kill the students of Beit Hillel. Their disagreement, whatever it was about, leads to a massacre (Shabbat 1:4).
Lately, this story feels all too familiar. No sword may be visible in our sanctuaries or our houses of learning, but all too often we can sense it hovering at the entrances of too many of our communal spaces. The mood is tense, the lines are drawn, and the consequences of saying the wrong thing or of trying to enter, exit, or simply stay in the room can feel dire. Even the most sacred Jewish spaces are increasingly challenged by ideological division as we wrestle with the question of who belongs and who does not.
Across American Jewish life, we are facing crises of belonging and trust. Institutions that once held diverse constituencies together are straining under the weight of polarization. Generational, ideological, and communal divides are widening. Conversations that once felt difficult now feel nearly impossible. The impulse to retreat into aligned spaces, to sort into camps, has grown stronger. Disagreements over what kinds of criticism of Israel are legitimate; how much attention should be given to Palestinian suffering; how best to confront antisemitism; or whether government actions, like those of the Trump administration, reflect support for Jews or opportunistic punishment of universities have deepened our divides. These are not abstract debates; they cut to the core of identity, values, and belonging. And in the current climate, they too easily turn disagreements into ruptures.
Campus as a Microcosm
Nowhere has this situation played out more dramatically than on college campuses. Universities should be sites of exploration and connection, but in recent years, and especially since October 7, they have become places of contestation, with pressures coming from multiple directions. Jewish students are being scrutinized and sorted, cheered and condemned by one another, by non-Jewish students, by professors and other campus professionals, by their home communities, and by a platoon of keyboard warriors. Given the impact of academic anti-Israel discourse around the world, it’s little surprise that it is contributing to the raising of tensions on campus.
But Jewish campus life is also unusual insofar as it is almost always centered around a commitment to pluralism. Campus pluralism is practical: Given their numbers, Jewish college students from a variety of religious, cultural, and political backgrounds simply must work together to produce Jewish life. But it is also ideological, a principled commitment to the dignity of difference and to the idea that Jewish peoplehood can encompass divergent practices, beliefs, and political commitments. Pluralism on campus isn’t just a necessity; it’s a vision for Jewish life rooted in mutual respect and the pursuit of shared meaning across disagreement. That vision is ideally reflected in the broader campus culture as well. And yet, despite the characteristics that make campus different from other settings, I think that when it comes to Jewish life, campus is not an outlier but a microcosm. Thus, it offers us a powerful insight: If we can find ways to support young people in building relationships across difference during some of the most formative years of their lives, we may learn lessons that apply across the Jewish community. Campus may also be a place of possibility.
I write from personal experience. I began my journey toward the rabbinate and Jewish leadership during the Second Intifada, a time when public discourse around Israel was fraught and divisive. On campus, I saw patterns similar to those we see now, including how the rhetoric of anti-Israel protests fractured the Jewish community, turning campus and community organizations as well as off-campus stakeholders against each other as each struggled to serve students, support Israel, and uphold Jewish values in the ways they found most compelling. Relationships with non-Jewish colleagues and organizations also suffered, and the loss of these allies had a further negative impact on Jewish campus life.
Even in the fog of that time, I could still see that moral seriousness and pluralism were not mutually exclusive. Those early experiences shaped my Jewish identity and my understanding of what leadership requires when stakes are high. They showed me what Jewish community can look like in times of conflict—sometimes inspiring, sometimes painful. The intensity of that moment propelled my career in which I have been consistently entrusted with supporting environments that serve pluralistic Jewish communities. I have seen how tricky that responsibility is because it entails holding a broad tent open while also articulating and advancing specific values.
Over these years, I’ve watched many of our institutions—campus organizations, but also synagogues, schools, and federations—struggle to hold ideological diversity without falling apart. It’s not just that we are more polarized—what once felt like disagreements now feel like fault lines. And what once could be discussed quietly in study or debate is now played out in public, and especially online, where nuance disappears.
Rather than accepting this as a new status quo, I see this as a challenge we must address.
The Ethics of Argument
In both versions, the Talmudic story of the sword at the entrance of the beit midrash warns us that the danger of this moment is not disagreement itself but what happens when disagreement hardens into exclusion, when difference becomes danger, and when argument threatens to become annihilation.
Most of us do not orient our lives around a literal beit midrash, but it remains a powerful conceptual model. It reminds us that Jewish community should not be built on uniformity but rather on the belief that disagreement, held with integrity, can refine rather than destroy. Jewish community must include a commitment to working together toward shared goals and that work must include healthy disagreement. This sacred struggle is the tradition we’ve inherited and the responsibility we bear—to argue passionately, to listen generously, and to remain in covenant with one another even when we diverge.
Another tradition about Hillel and Shammai, this one better known than the story of the sword at the entrance, might point the way toward how we can do this. Though the two schools often disagreed sharply, they rarely allowed their debates to curdle into hatred even when the stakes were high. It’s easy to dismiss these texts as trite, cliché, or merely the story of two schools who ultimately agreed to operate within a shared system. But to do that is to miss the point. Their debates were not about minor differences but about status, belonging, and marriage; they disagreed on the very definition of Jewishness. And still, their communities remained in relationship, most of the time.
In Eruvin 13b, the Babylonian Talmud famously teaches that Jewish law generally follows Beit Hillel not because they were always right but because they were humble. “They were agreeable and forbearing,” the text explains, “and they would teach both their own statements and those of Beit Shammai, even placing Beit Shammai’s words before their own.” The pluralism of Beit Hillel was not ideological but behavioral, showing up not in what they believed but in how they treated those with whom they disagreed. Beit Hillel’s humility is revealed by their recognizing and preserving the dignity of dissenting voices. This instinct is both noble and practical.
The Emotional Architecture of Polarization
Jewish communities in Israel, the United States, and around the world are facing a climate of escalating hostility with no clear end in sight. Since October 7, antisemitism has surged in both overt and insidious forms on campuses, in the streets, online, and even within institutions where such hatred once seemed unthinkable. The war with Iran intensified the pressure. In such a threat-filled environment, the kind of behavioral pluralism I described above becomes all the more difficult. When survival feels at stake, the human impulse is to retreat inward or strike outward. But that instinct, however understandable, comes at a cost. External pressure has a way of turning into internal fracture. We grow suspicious, defensive, and guarded. And too often we turn that fear against one another.
When we allow it to grow, fear reshapes our relationships. We no longer listen only for what our adversaries say; we also listen for what our allies fail to say. We analyze each other’s reactions for signs of disloyalty or ideological deviation. In an environment increasingly sorted into “for us” or “against us,” even silence can be perceived as betrayal. This kind of scrutiny corrodes trust. It narrows the space for complexity. And it makes the already exceedingly difficult work of staying in relationship feel risky or impossible.
The legal theorist and Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt famously argued that politics begins when a group defines itself by identifying an enemy. This move divides the world into “us” and “them,” and moral belonging is determined by the clarity with which one chooses sides. We may reject the authoritarian implications of Schmitt’s argument, but the logic he described nevertheless feels familiar. More and more, we are measuring belonging by what a person denounces.
This is what I think of as the emotional architecture of polarization. But at the foundation, beneath the fear and the suspicion, lies something deeper and more primal: anger—a kind that is cultivated and sustained over time. Sometimes, we even enjoy it. Consider how outrage plays out online, where mockery and moral certainty often replace curiosity and compassion. The line between protest and performance becomes difficult to see while conviction hardens into contempt.
Some have called this a state of “high conflict”—when disagreement becomes magnetic, identity-forming, and emotionally self-sustaining. As author Amanda Ripley writes, people in high conflict don’t just want to be right. They come to need the conflict itself. It offers clarity, certainty, and even purpose. But it also locks us into a pattern from which it is difficult to exit.
A Tradition of Restraint
Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, a leading Religious Zionist thinker of the early twentieth century, understood this emotional dynamic with remarkable clarity. Even when hatred seems justified, he warned, it can still be rooted in something dark. In a 1939 article, he writes, “We must look skeptically at one who says they can fulfill the commandment to hate the sinner, because it brings them special enjoyment—the pleasure of persecuting.” His concern was not only about what we feel, but about how easily we come to enjoy the feeling.
Judaism does not deny that anger can be warranted. Rambam teaches that in cases of certain unspeakable crimes, we are not only permitted but required to hate a wrongdoer (Hilchot Rotzeach 13:14). But Amiel directs our attention away from the person we are angry with and back toward ourselves. He asks us to examine what hatred does to us emotionally; to notice how righteous anger can quickly become pleasurable, and how moral clarity can turn into moral arrogance; and to recognize when we have come to take satisfaction in the suffering of those we oppose.
When we start to take pleasure in our enemy’s suffering, something in us shifts. We no longer seek to understand, or even to persuade, but to win and to shame, even humiliate. The desire to be right overtakes the desire to be in relationship. Our goal shifts from truth to triumph. This is the dynamic that fuels all those “gotcha” moments that dominate our discourse and reward performance over substance.
The challenge, then, is how to resist that world without retreating into false neutrality or silence. Jewish tradition does not ask us to avoid conflict. It asks us to inhabit conflict differently. It teaches that integrity is not the absence of struggle but the way we carry ourselves within it.
Amiel’s most powerful teaching comes not in his critique of hatred but in his reading of a deceptively simple mitzvah from the book of Exodus: “When you see the donkey of your enemy lying under its burden, and would refrain from helping it, you must nevertheless help raise it” (23:5). This verse does not ask us to feel differently but to act differently. Even when we feel repelled by the Other, we are still commanded to lift the burden.
The tradition goes even further. The Babylonian Talmud teaches that if you encounter both a friend and an enemy in need of help, you are obligated to assist the enemy first (Bava Metzia 32b). The goal is not only to relieve suffering but to confront the pleasure we might take in watching our enemies struggle. The act itself becomes a form of resistance, an interruption of the emotional reflex that turns anger into righteousness and righteousness into cruelty. It recognizes that even as we might find our enemies’ conduct reprehensible, we must refuse to let them make us into worse people.
Amiel defines this mitzvah not as an act of kindness but as an act of integrity. It forces us to examine the satisfaction we may derive from hatred and to act against it. The Torah does not ask us to stop feeling anger. But it does ask us not to indulge it. We are called instead to interrupt it, to resist the reflex that turns conflict into condemnation. That is where spiritual maturity begins, and it is also where pluralistic community thrives.
Love Jewish Ideas?
Subscribe to the print edition of Sources today.
Pluralism as a Discipline
The idea that disagreement must be held with dignity is not only a religious teaching—it is also a democratic one. Political philosopher Danielle Allen argues that pluralism thrives when people learn to remain in relationship, even across deep and painful divides. Reflecting on her politically divided family, she writes, “they never broke the bonds of love.”
Allen calls this “confident pluralism”: not the erasure of difference but the conversion of disagreement into shared learning. It is a civic ethic that mirrors a spiritual one. And it reminds us that pluralism is not passive. It is a discipline, a choice. And it often takes great courage.
Like the model of Beit Hillel, this vision of pluralism is not primarily about belief. It is about behavior. It is not rooted in ideological alignment but in a willingness to listen, to teach with humility, to try to understand, and to remain in relationship even when consensus is impossible. It is practiced not through what we say we value but through how we treat one another, especially in disagreement.
The Connective Architecture of Bridges
In our post-October 7 reality, the language of “bridge building” has taken on new urgency. Organizations are trying to figure out how to build bridges effectively, and funders are seeking to support that work. Popular efforts to create “viewpoint diversity” and “dialogue across difference” reflect a growing awareness that polarization, both within and beyond the Jewish community, is no longer just an abstract concern. It is a defining condition of our time.
Cynicism about this trend is understandable. The language can feel vague. The initiatives can appear symbolic or reactive. And in a world increasingly shaped by binary thinking, where identity is reinforced by opposition and trust is rationed based on alignment, the idea of building bridges can seem naïve, or even suspect. But beneath the language lies something real: a collective recognition of how fragmented our communities have become and a desire to resist that fragmentation. There is a longing, especially among students and younger Jews, not only to be heard but to live in relationship with others who see the world differently. There is a hunger for connection across ideological distance that does not require consensus.
Too often, we respond to that longing with something anodyne, a temporary performance of goodwill rather than a discipline of engagement. We gather to break bread, to affirm each other’s humanity, and to feel better about having sat in the same room for a few hours. That has emotional value, but it is not enough, for when the deeper, harder questions surface, as they always do, we find ourselves unprepared. We should not mistake presence for substance.
Real bridge building asks us to say what we mean; to listen when it is uncomfortable; to stay at the table when we would rather leave; to work to truly understand each other. It calls us to do this not because it feels good, but because it is the only way forward. If we take our longing for belonging without erasure seriously, we will need a more precise framework for thinking about the work. Not all bridges serve the same purpose. Not all require the same risk or investment.
Some bridges are long, built across profound ideological, historical, or communal divides. They demand patience, integrity, and the humility to act without any guarantee of reciprocity. These are investments in the future, not strategies for the present. Some are short, coalitional by nature, formed to achieve shared goals despite political differences. Whether organizing around antisemitism or civic repair, these bridges allow people who may disagree profoundly to work side by side with mutual respect.
Some bridges are wide, designed to hold maximal diversity of viewpoints. They are often disorienting, sometimes uncomfortable, but they stretch us in ways that narrower spaces cannot. Other bridges are narrow, grounded in ideological or spiritual alignment. These allow for intimacy and depth. But when we rely only on narrow bridges, our communal imagination begins to shrink.
We need all of these bridges. We need them in more than one direction. And we can’t be afraid to cross them.
These bridges matter within the Jewish community, where ideological, generational, and religious divides run deep. But they also matter between Jews and non-Jews, especially at a time like this, when polarization, misinformation, and rising antisemitism have strained relationships across civic and interfaith life. If we are to resist both isolation and erasure, we must invest in the kinds of connections that allow us to live in relation to others, even across real and painful differences.
Bridge building is not about erasing conflict or pretending away difference. It is about choosing connection where we might otherwise choose withdrawal. It is not a performance of tolerance. It is the practice of responsibility.
Amiel reminds us that we do not build bridges only for the purpose of crossing them. We also build them because doing so shapes who we are on our side of the bridge. This is the work that now lies before us across Jewish life: to build and sustain the kinds of relationships and institutions that can hold complexity without collapsing. That means investing in bridges of all kinds, not as performative gestures, but as serious strategies for communal resilience.
We will need courage—not dramatic, public-facing courage, but quiet, sustained moral courage. We will need the kind of courage that shows up in how we listen, how we interpret one another, how we remain in rooms where we are not always comfortable; the kind that distinguishes between disagreement and rupture, between critique and betrayal.
We will need leaders—not just those with titles but those with the relational strength to stay present in hard conversations. We will need institutions that understand that conformity is not unity, and we will need communities that resist treating nuance as disloyalty.
I started this essay with a focus on campus because campus life compresses and intensifies the dilemmas that face the broader Jewish community. The circumstances of student life force pluralism because students don’t get to choose who else shows up in Jewish spaces, and so they must learn to navigate difference with creativity, courage, and care. In that way, campus is not only a site of tension; it’s a testing ground. And it is also a source of wisdom. If we take seriously what students are learning and struggling with as they try to build community amid complexity, we can begin to imagine what it might mean to build stronger, more resilient Jewish communities beyond the campus gates. We owe it to our students to help them navigate this terrain with integrity, and we owe it to ourselves to learn with them because their challenges are already our own, and their pluralism may offer us a path forward.
None of this is easy. Disagreement, even sacred disagreement, is exhausting. It requires patience, humility, and the willingness to be misunderstood. It demands that we stay when we would rather withdraw and that we engage when we would rather protect ourselves. It asks us to risk connection without knowing whether it will be reciprocated. It means we have to sheathe our swords, even when our impulse is to wield them with greater ferocity.
But this is the task: to build a communal life capacious enough for difference and durable enough for dissent, to treat disagreement not as a threat but as a form of commitment.
In the story from the Talmud that opened this essay, even with the sword at the entrance of the beit midrash, people still entered. They still argued. They still stayed.
So must we.
