Uniting a people: No more fights

Kozhnitzer Maggid was known to be a pursuer of peace.

It happened that a terrible fight broke out amongst the Jews living in a city close to Kozhnitz, which caused some kind of “breakaway” in the community.

The Maggid gathered the leaders of the rabble-rousers, the hotheads of one of the fighting groups, and told them the following:

“There are three cardinal sins in the Torah – such as idolatry, murder. The Torah spells out the devastating punishments for these sins. But there is never a warning in the Torah to separate ourselves from those who commit these terrible sins.

“Only one time do we find a warning in the Torah to, ‘Separate from this group of people,’ and that is specifically when it comes to the story of Korach and his congregation.

“All they wanted to do, as Onkelos translates, is to make a fight, to stoke the coals of machlokes.

“People who want to foment machlokes (fights) in the community – from them we are warned and obligated to separate.”

In this past week, since the kidnapping of three teenagers in Israel, we have seen a unity in the Jewish community that has surpassed any reasons we may otherwise have for disagreeing with one another. This is a beautiful thing.

What is sad, however, is that it takes such a troubling episode to unify the Jewish people. This has happened before. In more recent history, the captivity of Gilad Shalit, the kidnapping of Nachshon Wachsman, and a hundred years ago, through the blood libel tales surrounding the personalities of Mendel Beilis and Leo Frank.

While the Jewish people as a whole may understand God differently and view Torah and/or observance differently from one another, Jewish Peoplehood is one thing that we cannot afford to break apart on account of fights.

The OU’s recent Jewish Action magazine had a number of articles responding to the Pew Research Center’s recent survey of Jewish Americans. One of the themes raised by a number of the contributors is that the Orthodox community – while it has a remarkably high in-marriage and retention rate – hasn’t done enough for Jews of other denominations. The synagogue is too intimidating and not inviting enough to those who are not “in the know.”