Political and Personal, Public and Private

Respecting a person’s individuality does not mean treating that person’s opinions as unquestionable and sacrosanct. In the public domain, no one, nothing, is exempt from criticism.

In the private domain, it’s a different story. There, one answers to no moral authority other than one’s own except when to act on one’s beliefs will have damaging outcomes as in, for example, cases of domestic abuse. That is antisocial behavior driven by belief in the “right” to dominate and subjugate. However, if you’re not hurting anybody, you can think and do whatever you like behind closed doors in the privacy of your home!

Our public lives operate according to a different set of moral and behavioral imperatives, ones with consequences for each one of us. What goes on in the social sector - on the street, at work, in the halls of government, under military command - has effects that inevitably seep into our private ruminations and help shape our personal designs.

Imposing public concerns on private lives undoubtedly ruffles - if not undermines - each person’s domestic tranquility, but this can’t be helped. What’s happening in the society around us does affect us as individuals, and we have to cope and deal with the effects.

The personal is not political.

Confusing one’s private prerogatives with one’s public rights, mistaking one for the other, or insisting on “principle” that any one person’s subjective judgment deserves - as a matter of general consent - encouragement without reservation leads to moral depravity on a societal (maybe global?) scale.

In my work as a rabbi, I had to deal with the toxicity of psychological malaise acted out in public settings. Once, at a synagogue event that I was leading and for which I helped arrange child care, an emotionally fragile adult who’d volunteered to do child care “felt” threatened by me for reasons she would not articulate and demanded that I tiptoe around her insecurities.

In another instance, when I was a teaching assistant (i.e., classroom teacher) in English composition during my graduate school days, a freshman whose writing abilities were substandard felt slighted because I had given her a low grade on an assignment.

Incensed at my lack of cultural sensitivity, she accused me of prejudice against her as a member of an ethnic minority. Instead of facing the obvious although unglamorous fact that she needed to learn how to write, she projected her feeling of insecurity into the convenient form of a moral indictment against me as an agent of the oppressive ruling class.

The syndrome flourishes because it has plenty of willing (and gullible) adherents: people who believe in their hearts that the personal is political and so will readily stake their moral reputations on faith in the credibility of an accuser’s unsubstantiated feeling of having been victimized. Jews who get caught up in such nonsense do themselves and the cause of justice no favors.

In these politically correct situations, how one feels is what matters. Playing the “feeling” card is emotional blackmail. Instead of addressing recognizable concerns with real facts, the tyrant exploiting public sympathies resorts to nasty insinuation about others’ motives and actions, the accusation divorced from actuality.

Can the political be personal?

The subject touches upon matters of Halachah / Jewish religious law.

It delineates four domains pertaining to carrying and moving objects on Shabbat. Rules involving two of those domains, reshut hayachid / the private domain and reshut harabim / the public domain, are worth reflecting upon for Jews trying to sort out the personal from the political in their lives. Judaism distinguishes sharply between public and private domains and assigns to our Shabbat activities in each a separate set of expectations.

Reshut Hayachid refers to a reasonably large space surrounded by walls - e.g., a house. Reshut Harabim is, generally speaking, a wide-open, unenclosed outdoor space - e.g., a street, public square, field, or marketplace.

Tractate Shabbat of the Babylonian Talmud outlines permitted and prohibited types of carrying on Shabbat. For instance, one may carry things in Reshut Hayachid but not across Reshut Harabim, and one may not move an item from the one domain to the other.

Pertaining to these two reshuyot/domains, behind legal distinctions and technicalities that preoccupied our Rabbis, is a Jewish sensibility with wide-ranging implications for our thinking and conduct. The Rabbinic understanding can have psychosocial applications.

One follows here…

Reshut Hayachid connotes intimacy, confidentiality, and autonomy. Reshut Harabim signals formality, dialogue, and civility. How you act and react to what people are saying and doing depends in large measure on which of these two domains you’re in.

Sitting at your kitchen table with a close family member, you may express with candor what’s on your mind, voice alarm about what troubles you, vent freely. In that inner sanctum you feel safe enough to open up, and no issue is off the table.

Standing on a city street corner at rush hour, though, you may not just walk up to strangers and lecture or berate them but must edit your thoughts to avoid causing friction or becoming a nuisance. On Shabbat, our Rabbis told us, we’re not allowed to carry from reshut hayachid / the private domain to reshut harabim / the public domain; you don’t have a right to drag your personal issues into social spaces.

By the same token, they told us that on Shabbat we may not carry an object from reshut harabim / the public domain to reshut hayachid / the private domain. In psychosocial application, easier said than done since public controversies often find a way of slipping through the cracks in your walls and invading your privacy: The political can and does get personal very fast. (This is where I diverge slightly from what I think would be Rabbinic wisdom applied to psychosocial experience.)

Torah law forbids dragging into our hopefully Shabbat-pristine home whatever we’ve found out there. Dream on! As if we could resist the urge to soak up culture and politics and fashion - whatever has entered public discourse or caught the public’s interest - and to digest it in conversation around the table as we’re digesting our Shabbat meal and the candles are burning low. “No [hu]man is an island,” as Donne wrote; we can’t hermetically seal ourselves off, shutting out the world entirely.

The halachic prohibition reminds us, nonetheless, that, in Wordsworth’s words, “the world is too much with us.” And it serves as a caution.

We need to be conscious of our tendency to let even legitimate worries we have - about the state of the world and choices we face in it - tarnish the quality of our homelives. When the political starts to get personal, we should remember the injunction to not mar Shabbat menuchah / tranquility by bringing things from outside - in psychosocial terms: public preoccupations and worries - into our private sphere.

As inquisitive human beings open to the currents of contemporary social life, we’re not going to follow that law to the letter, but we’d be wise to catch the spirit and place some constraints on our voracious appetite for more and ever more social stimulation.

I do not subscribe to Halachah but find some of its guidelines - including this one - useful. Distinguishing between public and private domains - honoring the difference between them - is wise. Thus, we should not turn our personal hangups into political causes.

And, even though we can’t resist obsessing on political controversies that filter into our personal space, the less we turn it into a theater of operations for them to act out in, the better.