In the West today, most people, regardless of religious attitudes, desire the freedom to choose their moral path and the obligations that come with it. Reform Judaism, in the roughly two centuries since it emerged, has always been aware of the tension between the ideas of human autonomy and of divine command. Yet, Rabbi Leon Morris argues, there is a need to “recalibrate” that understanding:

Personal choice needs to shift from being Reform’s central principle to being a starting point. Of course, the ultimate authority in religious life lies with the self. But what do we do with that? If we understand idolatry as the worship of one aspect to the exclusion of the whole, we have arrived at a moment where we in the Reform movement have turned personal autonomy into an idol. We have isolated one aspect of contemporary Jewish life from all the other values that need to live alongside of it.

To find a path forward, Morris turns to a talmudic exegesis of a verse in the book Exodus, which describes the word of God as having been “engraved upon the tablets” that were given to Moses. The rabbis play on the similarity between the words harut (engraved) and herut freedom. Morris comments:

What at first glance seems to be the polar opposite of freedom—the law literally written in stone—is, in fact, the very basis of freedom. The mitzvot also allow us to transcend our mortality by committing our lives to a system that will outlive us, and to a God who is eternal. Commandment and freedom are not polarities. Rather, freedom expresses itself most fully through the opportunity to hear and live the commandments. . . . Such dialectic tension will create an impetus for deep thought, for serious and engaging study, and for creating environments that use liberalism as a way into deeper Jewish engagement rather than out of it.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”