On Israeli Independence Day, the real question is not only what binds a people together, but what kind of moral language teaches the weaker side to bear the cost of that unity

There is a kind of moral language that does not heal a broken community but teaches it how to endure breakage without naming who keeps producing it. It speaks of unity, dignity, and deeper bonds, but what it often organizes in practice is submission to asymmetry. The injured are told not to remain with the injury. The humiliated are told not to answer from humiliation. Those placed lower are instructed to discover a nobler fidelity than the people and institutions that keep placing them there. This is not reconciliation. It is discipline dressed up as moral elevation.

That is why one has to say it without politeness: do not use Rabbi Akiva for this. Do not turn a hard rabbinic limit against humiliation into a sermon instructing the weaker side to bear more beautifully. Do not take a source meant to restrain the offender and convert it into an ethical burden for the offended. The moment the singular person is asked to carry the cost of communal appearance while the powerful remain sheltered by the language of unity, Torah is no longer being taught. It is being polished into an instrument of internal pacification.

The source being invoked is not a hymn to communal softness. It is a hard ethical limit. In the rabbinic discussion of humiliation, the point is not that the injured person must become morally more refined than the injury. The point is that humiliation cannot be discounted by the status of the victim. Human dignity cannot be reduced to weakness, poverty, exposure, or social position. That is a limit placed on the offender and on the community. It is not a spiritual instruction for those expected to endure more.

Yet a certain contemporary religious rhetoric performs a subtle but decisive transfer. A source about protecting the singular person is turned into a soft doctrine of communal cohesion. A prohibition against degradation becomes an appeal to look past behavior. Concrete injury is transformed into a test of the victim’s moral elevation. This is the perfidy of the move. The general is mobilized against the singular. Not to protect it, but to weaken its accusatory force.

This is not merely a mistake in interpretation. It has a political function. The community is taught that its highest task is not to name asymmetry, but to preserve the surface of togetherness. Women are expected to be more patient with rabbinic pedagogy. Children are trained earlier into silence before authority. Others learn the borders of their admissibility before they even dare to name harm. Citizens are reminded of fraternity exactly where they ought to be asking about power, procedure, and responsibility.

The result is always revealing. The strong are not the ones asked to reduce their position. The weak are trained to bear inequality with greater elegance.

And this must be said plainly: there is today an ugly competition in humiliation and in power over women, and any pedagogy that tries to cover it with the language of unity, dignity, and spiritual depth is simply unacceptable. That is not moral seriousness. It is moral camouflage for domination.

At this point, one more distinction must be added, because otherwise the discussion becomes too easy and too defensive. A soldier who desecrates a Christian symbol deserves condemnation. But not because desecration is exhausted by the material damage done to an object. Desecration is not, in the first instance, a material event. It is a violation of measure. It is a demonstration of power over what others hold apart, revere, or protect from ordinary use. Yet precisely for that reason one must ask the harder question: was the desecration itself condemned, or was it condemned because the one who committed it was a soldier, a visible representative of the state, its discipline, and its chain of command?

That is not a small difference. When a soldier profanes, the institution is exposed along with the offender. The scandal touches the uniform, the command structure, and the public image of a state that wishes to appear capable of moral measure. Reaction then comes quickly, because visible embarrassment must be managed. Much less readily is desecration recognized when there is no broken object, but rather the appropriation of a sacred symbol for narcissistic display, the pedagogy of humiliation toward women, female soldiers, or others, or the routine use of religious language to mask asymmetry. In such cases the deeper violation may be greater, because what is being profaned is not merely an object but an order of meaning. If a community reacts sharply only when disgrace touches one of its own official representatives, but grows quiet when desecration takes symbolic, political, or pedagogical form, then the problem is no longer only the act. It is the loss of a consistent capacity to measure.

The ambiguity, however, goes deeper still. These images are not black and white. They are saturated by the metaphysics of the place in which they occur. We separate military, political, and religious spheres far too quickly, as if they operated in clean layers. They do not. In such a space, the soldier does not act only as a soldier, just as the rabbi does not speak only as a moral commentator. Both move within a field charged by holiness, memory, fear, law, and rival claims to the Land. That is why the desecration of a symbol cannot be read only as a disciplinary incident, any more than moral rhetoric can be read only as private piety.

The same selective measure appears elsewhere. Some rabbis are ready to challenge the Pope in moral terms, yet remain far more cautious toward Trump and American Protestantism, even where the symbolic and theological stakes are immense. That asymmetry is not accidental. It shows that moral language never operates in a vacuum, but within a field of loyalties, dependencies, and strategic affinities. The same is true of Israeli internal politics, which does not rest only on security and administration, but is also shaped by gestures against foreign Elohim and by religiously sanctioned claims to the Land. Whoever pretends these layers can be neatly separated is not describing reality. He is sanitizing it.

This is why the issue is not merely contemporary. It is genealogical. This kind of moral generality does not sound, to my ear, like the older Hebrew sharpness of Torah. It operates more like a later pedagogy of asymmetrical burden-bearing, one in which ethical greatness is measured by the capacity to absorb inequality without tearing the communal surface. I am not interested here in a cheap civilizational contrast. The issue is structural. When people are told: do not remain with what was done to you; do not answer from the wound; rise above reciprocity; show a deeper fidelity than the other side shows you, we are no longer obviously within the grammar of rabbinic responsibility. We are already very close to a pastoral processing of inequality.

That is why it remains so important to hold fast to a view of Torah that does not dissolve its ethical edge into moral fog. Torah does not exist to turn tension into edifying atmosphere. It does not exist to use holiness against reality. It does not exist to convert command into a mood in which no one may any longer name what concretely places them lower.

The ethical sharpness of Torah does not exist to become a soft instrument of internal pacification against women, children, or others. It does not exist to sanctify asymmetry from positions often grounded less in real responsibility or spiritual gravity than in vanity, insecurity, borrowed power, or identification with someone else’s strength.

Wherever the language of unity and dignity is used so that the weaker side must bear more while the stronger side remains outside real reciprocity, we are no longer dealing with the ethics of Torah. We are dealing with its polished use against those already paying the higher communal cost.

And this leads to the harder question: what is a community now? Do its members still understand themselves civically, through conflicts over institutions, power, rights, and obligations? Or are they increasingly told to understand themselves primarily through sacralized belonging, a belonging invoked precisely to soften every fracture before it reaches the level of political reality?

That is not a small difference. A people may share memory, descent, and fate, while still remaining the site of hard disputes over authority and measure. If every such fracture is immediately translated into the language of deeper bond, then citizenship retreats before the pedagogy of sacred togetherness.

The point is not to reject dignity, restraint, or belonging. The point is to refuse their perfidious use.

That is not what Rabbi Akiva said.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

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