-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
There is a peculiar feature of contemporary life: We all have become very good at being right.
We each know which side is right about politics, about religion, about parenting, about language, about history. We know which opinions are enlightened and which are backward. We know which people deserve our admiration and which deserve our contempt. We know, often with remarkable certainty, what other people should think.
What we seem to have become less adept at is asking a harder question: What if I am wrong?
Rosh Hashanah arrives each year with an almost unfashionable proposition. It asks us not merely to examine the world, or the people who have disappointed us, or the institutions that have failed us, but to examine ourselves.
The Jewish tradition calls this process teshuvah, usually translated as repentance, though the Hebrew means something closer to return. We return to ourselves. We return to our values. We return to the person we might have been before fear, anger, pride, habit or self-interest pulled us away.
At the heart of this process is a willingness to reconsider. That willingness is not weakness. It is a form of moral courage.
We often imagine conviction as the opposite of uncertainty. The person with strong principles is the person who knows exactly what is true and right and refuses to budge. But Jewish tradition offers a more complicated picture. The Talmud preserves arguments between rabbis for generation after generation, sometimes over questions so intricate that the reader wonders how anyone could have cared so much. And yet these disagreements are preserved, not because one side always won, but because the argument itself mattered.
The rabbis famously recorded the disputes of the schools of Hillel and Shammai. Even when the law followed Hillel, the opinions of Shammai were not erased. Both were taught. Both were remembered. The tradition understood that truth can be pursued through disagreement without requiring the annihilation of the person who disagrees.
There is a remarkable phrase the rabbis use about these arguments: elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim, “these and these are the words of the living God.”
Not everything can be true. But our tradition is telling us something profound about the pursuit of truth: Human beings can encounter something real even when they do not arrive at the same conclusion. That is a difficult idea in an age organized around certainty.
Our public conversations increasingly encourage us to treat changing our minds as a humiliation. We archive people’s old statements and use them as evidence that they are hypocrites. We reward the person who never concedes an inch. We mistake consistency for integrity, even when consistency means refusing to learn.
But there is another way to understand integrity, which might mean caring more about truth than about appearing to have been right all along.
That requires humility, and humility is one of the great themes of the Jewish New Year. On Rosh Hashanah, we encounter the shofar, an ancient instrument made from an animal’s horn, producing a sound that is raw, imperfect and impossible to ignore. The shofar does not offer an argument. It interrupts us. It asks us to stop. To listen. To wake up.
Perhaps that is what we need this year. Not another argument, but an interruption.
What would happen if, before explaining why we are right, we asked what we might be missing? What if, before judging another person, we tried to understand what experience brought them to their position? What if we could say, without embarrassment, “I used to think that, but I have learned something since then”? There is a particular kind of freedom in being able to change.
It does not mean abandoning our principles. Quite the opposite. Sometimes we change our minds because our principles have become clearer. We realize that the belief we defended was inconsistent with the values we claimed to hold. We discover that someone we once dismissed was right. We recognize that our certainty was partly fear.
Jewish tradition does not ask us to become people without convictions. It asks us to become people capable of self-examination. That distinction matters.
The High Holidays are not an annual exercise in self-hatred. They are an assertion that we are not finished products. The person we were yesterday does not have absolute authority over the person we can become tomorrow.
That may be one of the most hopeful ideas Judaism has to offer.
We are living through a moment when many people feel exhausted by conflict and distrustful of one another. We cannot solve every disagreement by becoming less certain. Some questions demand moral clarity. Some injustices require us to speak plainly. There are times when refusing to compromise is itself a virtue. But moral clarity and intellectual humility can coexist.
We can believe something deeply and still remain curious. We can defend what matters to us and still listen. We can disagree without turning disagreement into a verdict on another person’s humanity.
So perhaps this Rosh Hashanah, the question is not simply, “What do I believe?” Perhaps it is: “What am I willing to reconsider?” It is a small question with enormous possibilities. Because the opposite of certainty is not confusion. Sometimes, it is wisdom.
Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz is the author of over 30 books on Jewish ethics.
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
- The article argues that contemporary culture prizes being right so highly that people cling to their political, religious and social convictions with certainty, often sorting others into camps of admiration or contempt rather than questioning their own assumptions.
- It contends that Rosh Hashanah and the Jewish practice of teshuvah, understood as a “return” to one’s truest self and values, call for rigorous self-examination and a willingness to ask “What if I am wrong?”, framing that question as an act of moral courage rather than weakness.
- The piece suggests that Jewish tradition models a different relationship to truth through the Talmud’s preservation of intra-rabbinic disagreements, especially between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, where conflicting legal opinions are recorded side by side and described with the phrase elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim, “these and these are the words of the living God,” emphasizing that sincere disagreement can still be an encounter with something real without erasing the other party.[1][3][4][6][7]
- Building on that model, the article argues that integrity should be understood less as strict consistency and more as loyalty to truth, even when that requires changing one’s mind, and it criticizes a social climate that treats evolving views as hypocrisy and encourages public figures never to concede error.
- It connects this redefinition of integrity to humility as a central theme of the Jewish New Year, describing the shofar’s raw and interruptive sound as a spiritual disruption that invites people to stop, listen and “wake up” before rushing to defend why they are right.
- The column contends that changing one’s mind can be a form of liberation rather than betrayal of principle, because new insight may reveal that a previously defended belief contradicts the values one claims to hold, or that a once-dismissed interlocutor was correct, or that certainty masked fear.
- It stresses that the High Holidays are not about self-denigration but about recognizing that people are unfinished, and that the self of yesterday should not exercise absolute authority over who a person can become tomorrow, presenting this capacity for moral growth as a hopeful aspect of Judaism.
- While acknowledging that some conflicts and injustices demand moral clarity and non-negotiable commitments, the article maintains that moral clarity can coexist with intellectual humility, urging readers to defend what matters deeply while remaining curious, listening carefully and refusing to turn disagreement into a judgment on another person’s humanity.
- The piece ultimately proposes that, especially at Rosh Hashanah, people shift the central question from “What do I believe?” to “What am I willing to reconsider?”, suggesting that the opposite of certainty need not be confusion but can be a form of wisdom grounded in ongoing self-scrutiny.
Different views on the topic
- In contrast to broad celebrations of disagreement, one analytical essay on elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim notes that the Talmud’s famous affirmation of both Hillel’s and Shammai’s teachings as “the words of the living God” is often misread as blanket pluralism, arguing that the passage also insists on choosing a single normative practice and highlights Beit Hillel’s humility and willingness to present their opponents’ views first, thereby cautioning against romanticizing disagreement without clear communal norms.[3][4][6][7]
- A scholarly discussion of dissent in Talmudic and U.S. legal traditions emphasizes that while minority opinions are preserved, legal systems ultimately require consensus for practical governance, warning that unresolved disputes can fracture communal unity, which can be read as a counterweight to the article’s emphasis on ongoing reconsideration and as a reminder that institutions need stable decisions as well as humility.[6]
- Another exploration of Talmudic disagreements explains that early rabbinic practice sought to minimize halakhic conflict by escalating questions to higher courts, and it attributes the proliferation of disputes partly to failures in transmitting tradition, suggesting that disagreement is sometimes a symptom of breakdown rather than a virtue, and implying that constant questioning of one’s rightness may not always be ideal in maintaining a coherent religious or moral system.[2][6]
- A contemporary educational piece on Jewish disagreement underscores that Judaism distinguishes between disagreements “for the sake of Heaven” and those that are not, using the contrast between Hillel and Shammai on the one hand and Korach’s destructive rebellion on the other to argue that some conflicts are corrosive and must be met with firm opposition, thereby challenging any suggestion that humility about being wrong should extend to all positions, including those that undermine core ethical commitments.[5][6][7]
- A theological interpretation of elu v’elu points out that the phrase’s biblical resonances anchor pluralism in a conception of divine truth, but it also stresses that only one path becomes binding halacha, proposing that multiple perspectives can be valued without equating them, and raising concerns that emphasizing personal reconsideration over communal standards might unintentionally slide toward relativism.[4][6]
- Related commentary on intellectual confidence and humility in rabbinic sources notes that figures like Beit Hillel combined deep conviction with openness to critique, suggesting that humility does not mean abandoning strong positions or constantly doubting oneself, and that in contexts of acute injustice or moral danger, maintaining steadfast clarity about right and wrong can be as vital as the capacity to revise one’s views.[3][6][7]
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
It started as a ploy to scare Texas out of redrawing its congressional map and ended with California voters approving a new map of their own, one that could hat could help alter the balance of power in Washington.
William Mulholland was the water boss who made L.A. possible. His reputation gave him unchecked authority as a dam builder. In 1928, that led to one of America’s deadliest disasters--and the question of whether it was a crime.
