Much Jewish practice finds its justification in appeals to precedent and tradition (masorah in Hebrew), even though it is not at all evident why one should do things simply because they were done by one’s ancestors. Making use of the tools of philosophical logic and the ideas of the modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alex Ozar constructs a defense of tradition, and then explores some of the implications of his own argument:

[According to Wittgenstein], “if one person is considered in isolation, the notion of a rule as guiding the person who adopts it can have no substantive content.” This is because the individual, presented with a new case, has no way of distinguishing between what is really “right” and what one merely, presently, thinks one ought to do. To get beyond subjective whim, Wittgenstein argues, requires accountability to a community. . . . It is through and only through our embeddedness within a community, and that community’s continuing fidelity to a specific form of life, that the facts of past precedent—rules, customs, examples—can provide real guidance.

An intriguing consequence of all this, it is worth noting, is that mere third-person acquaintance with the rules is not enough for faithful interpretation: it will of necessity be only those who truly and deeply feel the pulse of the community’s form of life, and achieve a view not only of the individual norms but of the whole in which those norms are integrally embedded, who will adequately project traditional practice into the future. . . .

But of course . . . just what qualities it takes to qualify an authoritative interpreter of communal tradition will of necessity be itself determined by nothing other than the concerned community and the world it makes. Why, according to Maimonides, are the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud authoritative? Because the [Jewish] people made a world that made them so.

The meaningfulness of the guidance of precedent, then, requires that the ends and purposes of the statute, custom, or exemplar are the same as, or continuous with, the ends and purposes of the community’s interpretive practice as embedded in its present form of life.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.