At the end of this week’s Torah reading of Mishpatim (Exodus 21–24), Moses reads the terms of the Sinaitic covenant to the Israelites, who then proclaim, “All that the Lord has spoken, we will do and we will obey.” Surveying some of the various rabbinic interpretations of this statement, Jonathan Sacks focuses on that of the 15th-century Spanish scholar Isaac Arama, who reads the word usually rendered “obey” (literally, “listen”) as “understand”:

According to this explanation, when the Israelites put “doing” before “understanding,” they were giving expression to a profound philosophical truth. There are certain things we only understand by doing. We only understand leadership by leading. We only understand authorship by writing. We only understand music by listening. Reading books about these things is not enough. So it is with faith. We only truly understand Judaism by living in accordance with its commands. You cannot comprehend a faith from the outside. Doing leads to understanding.

Sacks then contrasts this declaration with two other similar ones: “All the people answered as one, saying ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8) and “they [the Israelites] responded with one voice, ‘Everything the Lord has said we will do’” (Exodus 24:3). While the two verses that only mention “doing” emphasize the people’s unity, that which also mentions “listening” or “understanding” does not:

At the level of the Jewish deed, we are one. To be sure, there are differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. In every generation there are disagreements among leading halachic authorities. . . . Yet these differences are minor in comparison with the areas of agreement on the fundamentals of halakhah.

This is what historically united the Jewish people. Judaism is . . . a community of deed. That is where we require consensus. Hence, when it came to doing, the Israelites spoke “as one” and “with one voice.” . . . At the level of understanding, however, we are not called on to be one. Judaism has had its rationalists and its mystics, its philosophers and poets, scholars whose minds were firmly fixed on earth and saints whose souls soared to heaven. The rabbis said that at Sinai, everyone received the revelation in his or her own way.

What unites Jews, or should do, is action, not reflection. We do the same deeds but we understand them differently. . . . This does not mean that Judaism does not have strong beliefs. It does. . . . But we should allow people great leeway in how they understand the faith of our ancestors. Heresy-hunting is not our happiest activity.

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.