Shmuly,
Thank you for inviting me to comment on your excellent essay. I have three quick points:
If you are correct and the values and social justice work that Uri LTzedek advocates is an integral component of Judaism and a demand of the Torah, then its educational benefits are somewhat beside the point. We have a responsibility as a community to enact the social initiatives of the Torah and embody in our communal life the ethical priorities of the Torah. The educational effects of that work is secondary.
Princeton is a more conservative campus politically than most other Ivy League universities and a substantial percentage of our Orthodox students here are politically right-wing. I have been sensitive to that fact when I teach and I was anxious that the presentation that Uri LTzedeks R. Ari Weiss gave on campus, when he was our guest for Shabbat, would be broad enough to encompass students with diverse political opinions. R. Weiss did a wonderful job of putting together a presentation that was extremely focused, containing a great deal of moral clarity, and yet broad enough to include students with different political opinions. There is a danger that a group such as Uri LTzedek will either become a narrow propaganda mouthpiece for a religious left or be so inclusive in its message of a broad swath of the political spectrum that its message becomes banal and irrelevant. If we believe that Jewish tradition contains a unique approach to contemporary social justice questions, it should be possible to express that approach in language that is sharp and focused, but also politically neutral. The Torah may have a vision for just human interactions in a just society, people will differ in the political approach to achieve those ends.
Finally, Uri LTzedek has modeled its focus on the wonderful Israeli organization BMaaglei Tzedek, but like its Israeli sister organization, Uri LTzedek has not, to my knowledge, ever attempted to wrestle with the moral and social justice implications of the Arab - Israeli conflict etc. I can easily see why each organization has chosen not to add their voice to an already crowded, loud, and strident public discourse - but the absence means that each organization has nothing to say about the most acute moral questions facing Jews today. The extant public discourse is increasingly polarized. Defenders of Israel, for example, reject out of hand the possibility that Israel or Israelis could cross moral redlines in the course of the conflict or, more disturbingly, accept the truth of war crime allegations and defend the indefensible. On the other hand, much of the liberal world can no longer conceive, under any circumstances, of an Israel existing as a Jewish and Democratic state in peace and justice. Rabbi Menachem Schrader once remarked that those who came of age in the era of the Six Day War, to this day, have a different perspective on the religious significance of Israel than those who came of age during the Yom Kippur War. The Oslo years (1993-2000) took place during my own formative teenage years and I retain a vision of Israel as a nation heroically searching for peace that is a legacy of those years. My students teenage years were filled with the increasingly desperate and increasingly violent years of the second intifada and its aftermath. There are many young Jews who love Israel, who have spent months or years of their lives living in Israel, and who are shaken to the core by recent allegations of misconduct during the recent Gaza War - to take only one contemporary example. It would be a project of incalculable value if religious Jewry could formulate and articulate a coherent moral response to the ethical challenges of warfare, statehood, and counter-terrorism without simplistically translating a priori political opinions into moralizing language.
David Wolkenfeld
Director of the Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) at Princeton University
JLIC is a partnership between the Orthodox Union and Hillel
