The Debates We're Not Having

June 19, 2026/4 Tamuz 5786/Shabbat Korach

Hevre/Friends,

Pride month. 

A time to celebrate. 

Diversity. Dignity. Freedom.

All the more so this year, as the LGBTQ+ community continues to face rollbacks of hard-won freedoms. While trans people have been rendered the most vulnerable legally, medically, and socially, gays and lesbians are seeing workplace protections challenged and the stability of marriage equality grow more uncertain.

Against this backdrop, an op-ed appeared this week in the Jerusalem Post describing how decades of work toward greater compassion and acceptance of LGBTQ+ Jews in Orthodox communities are now in decline. The numbers of synagogues and leaders willing to be welcoming and inclusive are shrinking. More and more LGBTQ+ people are being told by that part of the Jewish world: You are not welcome here. Go find another Jewish home.

Upsetting as it is, it's part of a larger trend. People around the world have retreated into increasingly narrow thinking, their values and moral certainties calcified by social media, rendering them incapable of integrating, or even considering, other people's experiences and perspectives. Courage and leadership have evaporated, and those who try to offer them are met with judgment and criticism. Fear of the other dominates and demonizes, as thicker and more dangerous walls are built insulating us not only from the outside, but locking us in on the inside.

But here's the real rub.

What has been destroyed is the capacity to navigate the world of ideas; the ability to rationally discuss and debate consequential ethical positions, whether around gender and sexual diversity, immigration reform, economic disparity, or anything else. Instead of engaging with the issues themselves, we train our fury on those who we believe represent the opposite of our own views.

A striking illustration of this emerges from this week's Torah portion which narrates Korach's rebellion against Moses. Korach assembles a group of disaffected Israelites with their own notions about how the people should be governed. But instead of initiating a discussion with Moses, they attack him and Aaron personally. The result: Divine wrath, mass death, and a plague upon the nation that only Aaron's intervention miraculously suspends.

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains that what corrupts our civic discourse is our inability to reckon with the different moral architecture that shapes positions and policies unlike our own. Rather than genuinely trying to understand what informs the other's vision, we fight the people who we think embody it. We talk past each other — or worse, we identify everything wrong in the world with those with whom we disagree, fomenting hate in the process.

Sound familiar? It should. This is the classic MO of the oldest haters in the book: antisemites, who blame the Jews — all of us — for whatever they dislike about their lives or their experience of the world, rather than using their right to free speech to interrogate beliefs they find offensive and advocate honestly for their own. Real debate requires openness, even the willingness to evolve in response to genuine dialogue. Absent that, "difference" is revealed for what it really is: naked bias. And we know what happens when naked bias has access to the internet, guns, and elected office.

But something else should sound familiar, though you have to strain to hear it: communal silence. Our indifference to this malignant form of difference. Whether it's the Orthodox world's perceived silence in the face of LGBTQ+ exclusion, or our own lackadaisical political engagement that allows the moral depravity posing as leadership today to proceed largely unchallenged. Like the ancient Israelites, will we only raise our voices when hate touches us personally?

Homework for Shabbat: Think of someone with whom you have profound disagreements. Then think deeper than the divergent opinions that divide you. Ask yourself to consider, or better yet, reach out and ask them directly: What foundational beliefs and values shape their outlook and inform their dreams for themselves and their loved ones? Don't expect to be transformed by such a conversation. That's not necessarily the goal. But perhaps you — and they — will come to better understand what agitates, and what placates. Perhaps you — and they — will at the very least be able to hold each other's difference in a more productive way.

Understanding someone else's vision doesn't mean surrendering your own. It might mean doubling down harder. But it might also mean being better equipped to do so without resorting to the ugliness and violence that are darkening our world. Keep building the communities you wish to live in and creating the world you know is possible. Not in spite of anyone else, but in defiance of the smallness that is diminishing us all.

And one more piece of homework: register for my session next Wednesday night, June 24, that illuminates Judaism’s antidote to this all: 

The Space Between: Judaism Beyond the Binaries.

Permitted/Forbidden

Sacred/Mundane

Kosher/Treif

Obligated/Exempt

Pure/Impure

Jewish Law might seem rooted in polarities, yet the system tells a richer and more nuanced story. Discover the fluidity embedded in Jewish legal thinking across centuries and celebrate Judaism's courageous and compassionate embrace of all who seek its holiness, wisdom, and fellowship.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dini

REGISTER FOR THE SPACE BETWEEN