A Student at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, from the college website

It was easy for the Left to be smug during the debate over violence in political discourse that opened up in the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. The days when violent discourse – and violence – were most popular on the Left are decades behind us, while the Right seems to be constantly ratcheting up the level of verbal violence. But we don’t have to draw crosshairs over opponents’ faces to turn them, rather than their ideas, into targets. Violent rhetoric may or may not spark acts of violence – but there is no doubt that targeting individuals rather than ideas snarls the debate on which democracy depends, and weakens the connection between progressive ideas and the generous, embracing notion of humanity in which they are rooted.

I learned the importance of speaking respectfully of and with those with whom I violently disagree from the most conservative people I’ve ever known personally: the students at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University who had visceral objections to my return to teaching as an openly transgender faculty member. To those most deeply identified with the homo- and transphobic strains in Orthodox Jewish culture, I was a walking billboard of sin and transgression – but no one showed me the slightest disrespect. Indeed, student after student responded to my presence by affirming, in lunchroom discussions, in webchats, in the school newspaper, that it wasn’t up to them to judge whether my actions constituted a sin. Such judgments were God’s business. Their business, as Jews and human beings, was to acknowledge that I was suffering and respond with compassion.

Many of those whose political views I disagree with most violently are people in pain, reacting with fear or rage to ideas and circumstances they see as threatening them and those they love. All of them are human beings. As a democratic citizen, it is my business to judge ideas presented in public discourse; but as my students taught me, it isn’t my business to judge the people who champion those ideas. I have students who are sure that my gender transition is profoundly wrong, morally and religiously – but that doesn’t stop them from treating me with the respect they show to every human being. They do this not because they approve of the way I live or what I “stand for,” but because only by treating me with respect can they can live up to their ideals – and to Judaism’s ideals – of what it means to be human.

American democracy isn’t based on any comparably rich definition of humanity. In fact, it is founded on a profound skepticism about the capacity of human beings to understand complex issues and even to distinguish right from wrong in any given situation. Our system of government assumes that most people are blinkered, prejudiced, foolish, readily swayed by demagogues and ideologies – and that even the best of us find it hard to see beyond our own needs, fears, and desires. That’s why America’s founders divided the government into branches with narrow powers and conflicting interests – they believed that it was more important to limit the damage done by fallible legislators and electorates than to maximize the effectiveness of the occasional wise and benevolent leader.

But the respect for tzelem Hashem, the image of God in which all human beings are created, that is at the heart of Orthodox Judaism, and the skepticism that is the basis of American democracy converge in one crucial regard: both summon us to acknowledge the limits of human judgment. When the students least comfortable with my gender transition treat me with respect, I’m dazzled by the wisdom of Jewish tradition. When, in the rough-and-tumble of democratic debate, we treat our most wrong-seeming opponents with respect, we shore up the basis of democracy – and show that the sense of shared humanity that motivates progressive ideas can lift us above the rage and self-righteousness which so readily obscure it.


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