If We Are Not for Ourselves

Hillel asks three questions in Pirkei Avot, but American Jews have often seemed most comfortable with the second.

Im ein ani li, mi li? U’chshe’ani l’atzmi, mah ani? V’im lo achshav, eimatai?

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (Sefaria)

We love the middle question.

If I am only for myself, what am I?

It speaks to the best instincts of American Judaism: universal responsibility, concern for the stranger, the conviction that Jewish ethics cannot terminate at the boundaries of the Jewish community. We have built organizations, movements, sermons and entire conceptions of Jewish identity around the proposition that Jewish moral obligation extends outward.

And it should.

But Hillel did not begin there.

Before asking what kind of person I become if I care only for myself, he asks a prior and more elemental question:

Im ein ani li, mi li?

If I will not be responsible for myself, who will be?

That question has been on my mind since the attack at Central Synagogue in Manhattan this past Friday night.

A man disrupted services, rushed toward the bimah, assaulted a congregant, damaged synagogue property and attacked a member of the security team before being taken into custody by an NYPD sergeant working a paid detail. He has since been charged with hate crimes. The following morning, with additional police security outside, Central Synagogue gathered again for Shabbat services. (eJewishPhilanthropy)

There is a particularly Jewish form of courage in simply returning to shul.

You frightened us Friday night.

Saturday morning we will be there.

You interrupted our prayer.

We will pray again.

That is Jewish resilience. But the incident also raises a harder question, one that Liel Leibovitz posed with considerable provocation this week in Tablet: Have American Jews become too accustomed to outsourcing responsibility for our physical security? (Tablet Magazine)

I would not make his argument exactly as he does.

I have no interest in watching a livestream of frightened worshippers and judging, from the safety of my computer, who should have tackled whom. Human beings respond unpredictably to sudden violence. Some freeze. Some flee. Some fight. None of us knows with certainty which person we will become until the moment arrives.

Nor should every synagogue congregant imagine himself a security professional. But Leibovitz presses on something uncomfortable that deserves to be taken seriously.

Walk into many American synagogues today and you will see the architecture of outsourced security.

The off-duty police officer.

The private guard.

The cameras.

The locked doors.

The panic buttons.

The reinforced glass.

The security consultant.

The federal grant.

All of these may be prudent. Some are essential. Security professionals have saved Jewish lives, and the security team at Central Synagogue deserves gratitude for intervening in a frightening situation. Central already had significant security infrastructure before Friday’s attack. (eJewishPhilanthropy)

But there is a difference between employing professionals and surrendering responsibility.

That distinction is the heart of the matter.

We should hire security.

We should work closely with law enforcement.

We should apply for grants and harden vulnerable buildings.

We should maintain relationships with the people whose vocation is protecting the public.

But we cannot allow the Jewish communal instinct to become:

Someone else will save us.

Because Judaism teaches something different.

It teaches responsibility.

The Torah commands, lo ta’amod al dam re’echa do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.

The Talmud in Sanhedrin does something remarkable with that verse. It asks what happens when a person sees another drowning, being dragged by an animal, or attacked by robbers. The answer is not that one should summon the relevant authorities and consider the obligation discharged. The observer bears an affirmative responsibility to attempt rescue. Indeed, the Gemara extends the obligation beyond personal intervention: when necessary, one must even expend resources to bring others to the rescue. (Sefaria)

The Rambam codifies the principle starkly: when a person has the capacity to save another and refuses to act, lo ta’amod al dam re’echa has been violated. (Sefaria)

That does not mean everyone must become a cop.

It means nobody gets to become merely a spectator.

And that is quite different.

Perhaps we need to recover that distinction in American Jewish life.

For decades, we have professionalized nearly every function of Jewish community. We hire rabbis to teach Torah, cantors to lead prayer, educators to educate, fundraisers to raise money, social workers to care for the vulnerable and security personnel to protect the building.

Professionalization has brought enormous benefits. Expertise matters.

But it can also subtly teach communities that responsibility belongs to whoever is being paid to exercise it.

The rabbi does Judaism.

The cantor does prayer.

The educator does Jewish learning.

The guard does security.

And the congregant attends.

That is not actually what a kehillah is.

A Jewish community is not a collection of consumers purchasing religious services from professionals. It is a covenantal community in which people assume obligations toward one another.

The Talmud famously renders that principle as kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh — all Israel are responsible, bound up, even guarantors, for one another. (Sefaria)

Areivut is thicker than sympathy.

A guarantor is not someone who feels badly when something happens to you.

A guarantor has skin in the game.

Your fate has become, in some measure, my responsibility.

That should include physical safety.

What would it mean if American synagogues actually internalized that?

It would not mean handing every congregant a firearm.

It would mean cultivating communities of capable Jews.

Jews who know where the exits are.

Jews trained in CPR and Stop the Bleed.

Jews who understand their synagogue’s emergency procedures before an emergency occurs.

Jews who notice when something is wrong.

Jews who know that a propped-open door is not someone else’s problem.

Jews willing to participate in trained volunteer security teams.

Jews who understand that protecting children at religious school, elderly worshippers at morning minyan and strangers who walk through our doors is part of what it means to belong to the community.

And yes, for those who are legally permitted, temperamentally suited, appropriately trained and integrated into a serious security plan, communities may determine that physical defensive capability is part of that responsibility.

The thesis is that Jewish safety must become something Jews participate in creating rather than a commodity we purchase from someone standing at the entrance.

There are already models for this. The Community Security Service now fields more than 2,000 trained volunteers in over 150 American synagogues. Richard Priem, its CEO, argues that communal volunteers provide something an outside guard cannot: they know who belongs, they understand the rhythms of their own synagogue, and they can combine scrutiny with welcome. (eJewishPhilanthropy)

This idea is not new. After Pittsburgh in 2018, JTA reported both the enormous financial costs congregations were beginning to shoulder for armed security and the growth of volunteer-based models in which community members worked alongside professionals. Even then, security experts argued that paid guards function better when partnered with congregants who know the institution and its people. (JTA)

There is also something deeply humanizing about that arrangement.

A stranger approaches a synagogue door.

A hired guard sees a stranger.

A trained congregant sees a stranger too but perhaps also sees a potential Jew looking for a minyan, a parent arriving for a baby naming, someone saying Kaddish, a prospective convert, a college student home for the weekend, or simply a human being who has never been in a synagogue before.

Security and hospitality need not be enemies when the people providing security understand the community they are protecting.

That tension became painfully vivid at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, in January 2022. Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker welcomed a stranger into his synagogue and offered him tea. The stranger took him and three congregants hostage. But Cytron-Walker had also undergone extensive security training. Hours later, when he saw an opportunity, he threw a chair toward the gunman and led his congregants to safety. He later credited that training with saving their lives. (J.)

There is a whole theology of Jewish life in that story.

Offer the tea.

Know how to throw the chair.

Those two instincts need not cancel each other.

Hospitality without prudence can become naïveté.

Security without hospitality can transform a synagogue into precisely what Philip Graubart warned about in the Forward a decade ago: a fortress whose architecture communicates fear so powerfully that the searching Jew can barely find a way inside. (The Forward)

We need something more mature than either extreme.

A synagogue cannot become a bunker.

But neither can vulnerability become a Jewish virtue.

This is where Hillel’s ordering matters so much.

Im ein ani li, mi li?

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

The sentence is not a rejection of alliances. It does not mean that Jews should distrust our neighbors, reject law enforcement, or imagine ourselves abandoned by everyone outside the Jewish community.

We have friends.

We should be grateful for them.

Police officers who stand outside our synagogues deserve our gratitude. Public officials who secure Jewish institutions deserve our gratitude. Christian, Muslim and other neighbors who stand beside us after attacks deserve our gratitude.

But gratitude is not dependence.

Help from others is a blessing.

Depending entirely upon others for our survival is a strategy.

Jewish history should make us cautious about confusing the two.

Rabbi Akiva offers another text that is uncomfortable precisely because it refuses to romanticize helplessness.

The Talmud imagines two people crossing a desert with enough water for only one to survive. Ben Petura teaches that both should drink rather than one witness the death of the other. Rabbi Akiva disagrees. From the verse v’chei achicha imach “your brother shall live with you” he derives the principle chayecha kodmin l’chayei chaveircha: your life takes precedence over the life of your fellow. (Sefaria)

That teaching can sound harsh until we understand what Rabbi Akiva refuses to sanctify.

Needless death.

Judaism does not teach that powerlessness is morally superior to survival.

It does not require Jews to become victims in order to prove that we are virtuous.

Life itself is sacred.

Preserving it is a mitzvah.

And perhaps that is something American Jews need to say more confidently.

There is no nobility in being incapable of protecting ourselves.

There is no Jewish value called helplessness.

We can be generous without being defenseless.

We can welcome strangers without surrendering judgment.

We can work with police without imagining that police carry the entirety of our obligation.

We can hire guards without believing that the guard is the only person in the building responsible for what happens to everyone else.

We can teach our children compassion and also teach them competence.

The goal is not to raise frightened Jews.

It is to raise capable ones.

Which is why I keep returning to what happened the morning after the attack at Central Synagogue.

The congregation came back.

Additional police were there. Security was heightened. And Jews walked through the doors and prayed. (AP News)

That is exactly as it should be.

Because ultimately the purpose of Jewish security is not security.

It is Jewish life.

It is Torah.

It is prayer.

Security exists so that all of those things can continue.

And the responsibility for their continuation belongs, finally, to us.

Hillel does not end with im ein ani li, mi li. Judaism does not permit us to care only for ourselves.

But neither does Hillel allow us to skip the first question on the way to the second.

There is no shame in asking who will protect us.

There is wisdom in answering:

First, we will take responsibility for one another.

We will welcome the help of our neighbors.

We will honor and support those professionals who stand watch over us.

But we will not hand them sole responsibility for the survival of Jewish life.

Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh.

We are responsible for one another.

Not abstractly.

Not sentimentally.

When someone is hungry, we feed them.

When someone is grieving, we sit beside them.

When someone needs Torah, we teach them.

And when Jewish lives are threatened, we protect them.

Im ein ani li, mi li?

If we are not for ourselves, who will be?

Perhaps it is time we remembered that Hillel expected an answer.