“Anyone can be in my tent who does not want to push me out of it.”
Yaron Shavit – one of the most senior and respected Progressive Jewish leaders in Israel – once told us this. The words have stayed with us ever since.
They capture something often absent from public life and increasingly from our Jewish life: confidence without uniformity.
At this moment of rising antisemitism and increasing division, the first instinct is often to make the circle smaller.
Political movements, religious communities and social spaces alike seem to reward purity over breadth. People are expected to arrive fully aligned, already fluent in the language of the group, already certain where they stand. Ambivalence is treated as weakness. Complexity is treated as suspicion.
Yet there is a particular conversation we both seem to be having repeatedly at the moment. Usually quietly, after an event or rally has finished.
Someone waits until the room has emptied a little and then says, almost apologetically, “I don’t really know where I fit anymore.”
Then comes the rest. A Jew frightened by antisemitism but uncomfortable with parts of organised Jewish politics. Someone who feels politically on the left, but increasingly homeless inside those spaces and alienated by some of the rhetoric. Another who feels pushed out of traditional or right-wing environments because their questions, doubts or moral discomforts no longer feel welcome there either.
What strikes us is not how unusual these conversations are. It is how many people are having them.
Public life often demands total allegiance. Shared platforms become moral tests. Stand beside someone on one issue and you are assumed to endorse everything they have ever believed. The pressure is always towards simplification: choose your side, remain inside it, and speak only to those already convinced they belong with you.
But human beings are not actually built like that.
Some of the most important spaces we have occupied this year – as Co-Leads of The Movement for Progressive Judaism – have involved standing alongside people whose politics and values differ sharply from our own because, on one issue in that moment, there was still enough shared purpose to matter.
That has included politicians, faith leaders and activists with whom we disagree profoundly elsewhere. Sometimes that is uncomfortable. But once a society loses the ability to cooperate across disagreement, communal and democratic life both begin to contract.
Leadership demands something difficult in such a climate. It requires enough rootedness in your own values that disagreement no longer feels existential. It asks whether we are still capable of recognising shared humanity and shared responsibility even when serious differences remain unresolved.
There is confidence in Shavit’s idea. And generosity too. It assumes disagreement. It assumes difference. But it refuses the idea that difference alone makes relationship impossible.
Most people carry competing loyalties, fears and hopes all at once. Most people are more complicated than the public categories currently available to them
Judaism has never demanded ideological tidiness. Our foundational figures wrestle constantly: with God, with one another and with themselves. The rabbinic tradition preserves arguments long after decisions are reached because minority voices still matter. Jewish life at its best has always made space for human complexity rather than pretending it can be resolved away.
One of the things we value most about communal life is its diversity. We should never underestimate it. But perhaps we should also not underestimate the diversity within ourselves. Most people carry competing loyalties, fears and hopes all at once. Most people are more complicated than the public categories currently available to them.
We worry particularly about younger people growing up inside a culture that increasingly treats wholeness as suspicious. What happens when belonging depends on presenting only one acceptable fragment of yourself? When people feel they must amputate parts of their moral or political instincts simply to remain inside community?
We want our children to know something different. That maturity is not about becoming simpler. That integrity is not the same as certainty. That it is possible to remain principled without becoming closed.
Perhaps that is one of the central tasks of leadership now: not to flatten complexity, but to create spaces large enough for people to remain whole.
Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy are the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism
To get more from community, click here to sign up for our free community newsletter.