A recent, thoughtful critique of the idea of a “Jewish Compassion Deficit Syndrome” raised a crucial point about the pragmatic necessity of distinguishing friend from foe. Why, the commenter asked, should we hold an Arab village that supports Zionism to a different standard than our political allies? Why demand a pure, abstract morality from them when we engage in the necessary “tit for tat” of statecraft with everyone else? To fail to see the difference between the friendly village of Hirbet Zakaria and the hostile one of Beit Fajjar, the writer argued, is a “dangerous mistake.” Lumping all Arabs together is a “disservice” that ignores the complex reality of Israeli society.

The point is framed as a matter of pragmatism and fairness, a call to avoid a self-defeating double standard. It appears to be a reasonable argument, on its own terms. But it is also a symptom of a much deeper, more dangerous philosophical error, one that has been gestating in the Western mind for centuries and has now come to full fruition in the heart of the Jewish state.

To engage in a forensic, point-by-point debate over which village is loyal and which is not is to miss the forest for the trees. The real issue is not our judgment of Arabs, but the philosophical lens through which we, as modern Israelis, have been taught to see the world—a lens that distorts our judgment and, paradoxically, leads us to judge our own with a harshness we would never apply to our enemies.

The origin of this distortion lies not in statecraft, but in a revolution of the soul that has led us to a place where, as we will see, the loyalties of “Israeli” and “Jew” are in direct conflict. The inevitable outcome of this conflict is not peaceful coexistence, but a form of tyranny cloaked in the language of reason and tolerance.

Obedience and Atrocity

To understand our current predicament, we must first turn to an unexpected source: the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s analysis of the Holocaust. In a private meeting with the writer Harvey Swados, the Rebbe made a startling claim. The Holocaust, he argued, was not some uniquely Jewish metaphysical event, a chasm in history beyond human comprehension. Rather, it “had arisen from a cultural-historical phenomenon of obedience to authority and a desensitization to basic belief in G-d and morality.” It was the product of a specific cultural milieu, and the Rebbe warned Swados that it could happen again “tomorrow morning” if that same environment were allowed to reappear.

That “tomorrow morning” is today, in Israel. The cultural milieu the Rebbe spoke of is flourishing. We see it in the chilling willingness of soldiers and police to drag terrified, weeping Jews from their homes in Gush Katif in 2005. These were not monsters; they were ‘good citizens,’ young men and women who had been taught that the highest virtue was obedience to the state. Their faces were impassive, not because they were inherently cruel, but because they had been conditioned to believe they were serving a higher cause—the cause of a state that had declared its own citizens an obstacle to peace. They were the instruments of an authority they dared not question.

We saw this dynamic again, in a different key, during the societal pressure and state-sanctioned coercion of the COVID years. It was a time when dissent from the official narrative was not just a disagreement but a form of social treason. Families were divided, and the unvaccinated were publicly shamed and ostracized, all under the banner of “following the science.” The government promoted health policies, such as those for pregnant women, based on what was later revealed to be misleading data. The point is not the policy itself, but the social mechanism of its enforcement: a demand for absolute trust in “expert” authority and the branding of skepticism as a moral failing.

And we see it in the post-October 7th landscape, where the reflex is not unified resolve, but a frantic search for internal enemies—the Haredim who don’t serve in the army, the settlers who “provoke” the Arabs, the “unenlightened” who cling to their ancient faith—who can be blamed for the state’s failures.

These are these are the new scapegoats, the internal impurities, the Emmanuel Goldsteins who must be purged for the rational, secular state to achieve its vision of security.

In each case, the pattern is the same: a segment of the population, convinced of its superior virtue and rationality, declares another segment to be an obstacle to the collective good. The state then provides the “authority,” and the people, desensitized to a higher morality, obey. They would, and do, perpetrate heinous acts against their fellow Jews, all in the name of a greater good defined not by Torah, but by a secular, state-sanctioned ideology.

Totalitarian Temptation

Writing in 1960, the Israeli scholar J.L. Talmon gave this ideology a name: “totalitarian democracy.” He located its origins in the 18th-century Enlightenment, when the philosophes launched their assault on tradition, faith, and custom. They sought to replace the messy, organic reality of human society with a “deliberately planned uniform pattern” that would be “natural and rational.”

This new vision had several key components. First, it rejected religion as an “imaginary” and divisive force. With the Creator and transcendental justice set aside, the State became the “sole source and sanction of morality.” It became, in effect, a secular church, complete with its own dogmas (democracy, equality), its own priesthood (the judiciary, the media, the academy), and its own concept of heresy (anything that challenges the supremacy of the state’s authority).

Second, it replaced the concrete individual, rooted in family, community, and history, with the “abstract, individual man.” This abstract man had “rights,” but they were granted and defined by the new secular order, and could be revoked when they conflicted with the needs of the state. We see this in the way the rights of the Gush Katif residents were summarily extinguished in the name of a political strategy.

Finally, it postulated a “single valid system,” a “general good” that was presented as a tangible, achievable goal. Virtue was no longer about character or closeness to G-d; it was “conformity to the rationalist, natural pattern.”

Talmon saw the terrifying potential in this line of thought. A system that believes it has achieved perfection cannot tolerate dissent. “When a régime is by definition regarded as realizing rights and freedoms,” he wrote, “the citizen becomes deprived of any right to complain that he is being deprived of his rights and liberties.” Opposition is not a difference of opinion; it is a moral perversion, a refusal “to be free and virtuous.”

This is precisely the logic that fuels the culture wars in Israel today: One cannot be a truly loyal citizen and a truly observant Jew, because the loyalties clash. The demands of the Torah—on land, on conversion, on the sanctity of life—are seen as irrational and sectarian, an affront to the “homogeneous society” where all citizens live on “one exclusive plane of existence.” The secular state, as the sole source of morality, demands a totalizing allegiance that a Torah-observant Jew cannot give.

This creates an impossible choice: either dilute your Judaism to fit the contours of the secular state, or be branded an enemy of the people.

The Unraveling of ‘Reason’

The intellectual architects of this worldview, as Professor Ira O. Wade documented, were driven by a desire to apply the methods of the new science to the human condition. They sought to create a “natural” religion, a “natural” morality, and “natural” laws based on “right reason.” They believed they could sift, clarify, and organize ideas to transform a world of chaos into one of organic unity.

But their project had a fatal flaw. Their entire system was based on the Stoic assertion that “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” They had no access to first principles, no anchor for their “reason.” This led them to the deist’s dilemma: they could affirm a distant, impersonal G-d who created a rational universe, but they could not explain the existence of evil, pain, and suffering without undermining G-d’s goodness or power. Their “reason” was a closed loop, incapable of providing ultimate meaning or a true basis for morality.

Their solution was not to question their premise, but to invent a replacement for theodicy: the “doctrine of tolerance.” Since no religion could claim absolute metaphysical truth, all sects must be respected. This sounds noble, but it is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy. It is a tolerance born not of conviction, but of doubt. It is the tolerance that insists we treat Hirbet Zakaria and Beit Fajjar as morally equivalent until proven otherwise, because we have no transcendent basis for judgment. It is a tolerance that, lacking any real foundation, ultimately collapses into the “despotism of evidence” that the Physiocrats preached—a tyranny of the so-called experts who define what is “rational” for the rest of us.

The inevitable outcome of this philosophy is the very situation the commenter I’m responding to decries: a vague, demagogic approach to reality. When you can not tell the difference between a Christian and a Muslim, a citizen and a non-citizen, or a friend and an enemy, you are indeed in trouble. But this confusion is not the cause of our problems; it is the symptom. It is the end stage of a philosophical disease. It is the direct result of abandoning the one system that provides the ultimate tool for making distinctions: the Torah.

Ending the Error

The Jewish people are not, and have never been, bound by the deist’s dilemma. We possess knowledge of first principles. The Torah is not a collection of quaint traditions or one sectarian belief among many; it is the blueprint of creation, the ultimate source code for reality. As noted, the very return of the Jews to their land was a singularity, an event that shattered the secular laws of history and reasserted the primacy of the divine historical narrative. To apply the failed categories of the Enlightenment to the Jewish nation is to willfully ignore the evidence of our own eyes.

The “tolerance” espoused by well-meaning moderns is, in practice, the engine of the totalitarian democracy Talmon described. It is this mindset that allowed the state to declare the communities of Gush Katif a threat to the “general good” and to enact their brutal expulsion. It is this mindset that fuels the IDF’s tragic rules of engagement, which value the lives of enemy non-combatants over those of our own soldiers, a modern form of human sacrifice on the altar of a foreign morality. It is a tolerance that is infinitely flexible toward those who seek our destruction, but rigid and merciless toward Jews who refuse to bow to the secular state’s definition of virtue.

The path forward is not to become better practitioners of a bankrupt philosophy. It is to reject it entirely. The answer to the dangerous double standard is not a more nuanced application of secular tolerance, but a wholesale return to Jewish morality.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s point was not merely an historical observation; it was a call to action. The only inoculation against the cultural poison of “obedience to authority” is the cultivation of a society rooted in an unwavering belief in G-d and an absolute commitment to His moral law.

This means building a society where the sanctity of a Jewish life is once again the supreme value, where the bonds of kinship are not sacrificed for a fleeting political gain, and where our leaders and our people understand that the laws of the Torah are not an obstacle to our national life, but the only guarantee of its survival.

We must stop trying to be a nation like all other nations and embrace the destiny that has been ours from the beginning. Only then will we be able to distinguish friend from foe, reward loyalty, and, most importantly, end the vicious cycle of judging our own people more harshly than those who seek our destruction.