In Judaism, justice is not a concept; it is a legal demand. Compassion is not a sentiment; it is a regulated practice. Guilt is not psychological; it is juridical. Innocence is not moral purity; it is legal standing. For this reason, Judaism assumes something fundamental: when something is done, someone must be able to answer for it.
Biblical and rabbinic Judaism understand the human being precisely in these terms. A person is one who must answer—to God, to law, to other human beings, and to memory. Moral life is not organized around inner intention alone, but around public answerability. Action and accountability are inseparable.
A crisis begins when events unfold in such a way that it is no longer clear who is supposed to answer, even though the demand to answer has not gone away. These moments function in Jewish history not merely as events, but as thresholds.
A threshold is reached when the old ways of knowing who is responsible stop working—not because people have become immoral, but because the world has changed how actions happen. Deeds are done, consequences follow, yet responsibility no longer falls clearly or decisively where it once did.
Judaism did not develop as a smooth moral continuum. Its ethical vocabulary did not simply accumulate layer upon layer of refinement. Instead, Jewish moral reasoning has repeatedly passed through moments of rupture—points at which inherited ways of assigning responsibility no longer sufficed and had to be reconstituted under radically altered conditions. These moments are best described not as stages, eras, or revolutions, but as thresholds.
When conditions change, Judaism does not first ask, Do our values still hold?
It asks, Where does responsibility now fall?
That question is the hinge on which the threshold concept turns.
Judaism is not primarily defined by metaphysics or political institutions. It is defined by moral obligation under changing historical pressure. It is not a moral philosophy. It is a culture of responsibility sustained across history. Moral categories are the byproduct. Answerability is the core.
Thresholds occur when history rearranges the world in such a way that answerability risks being misplaced—diluted, misdirected, or weaponized. The task of Jewish moral history is to recognize those moments and to ask, again and again, whether it remains clear who can be summoned to answer for what has been done.
The threshold appears when Jews—inside Israel and outside it—no longer agree, or are no longer able to say clearly, who answers for the state and what it does.
The moral confusion surrounding Israel stems from overlapping and conflicting claims of responsibility, none of which fully hold.
Israeli institutions often insist that the State of Israel answers for itself. It is a sovereign entity, accountable to its citizens, its laws, and its electorate. From a political standpoint, this is coherent. From a Jewish standpoint, it is incomplete.
The state acts not only as a government, but as the self-declared representative of the Jewish people—invoking Jewish history, Jewish trauma, Jewish continuity, and Jewish destiny. Once it does so, responsibility can no longer be sealed off within citizenship alone.
At the same time, Jews in the diaspora are frequently told—by critics and defenders alike—that they are responsible for Israel’s actions. They are asked to justify its policies, pressured to denounce or defend it, and targeted as moral stand-ins for the state.
Yet these same Jews possess no power to decide, no vote, no command authority, and no capacity to alter policy.
Judaism has always regarded this as a dangerous condition: responsibility without authority. To be forced to answer for actions one did not choose and cannot affect is not moral responsibility; it is moral exposure.
Within Israel itself, responsibility is often fragmented. Political leaders blame coalitions; coalitions blame voters; voters blame security needs; institutions blame history; history blames necessity. Each explanation may contain truth. Together, they produce a result Judaism recognizes as perilous: everyone participates, but no one fully answers.
This is not because Jews have become immoral. It is because the form of Jewish action has changed faster than the structure of Jewish responsibility. That is the definition of a threshold.
The Refusal to Stop Answering
Judaism does not survive history by offering answers to every age. It survives by refusing to let the demand to answer disappear—even when answering becomes painfully unclear.
Judaism treats a world without answerability as catastrophic.
When responsibility cannot be clearly located, it does not vanish; it spreads outward. People begin to accuse groups instead of persons, symbols instead of actors, identities instead of decisions. Moral life degrades into blame without accountability. Judaism regards this as dangerous because accusation without answerability produces rage, not repair.
When no one can answer in the present, memory is pressed into service. The past is used to justify present actions, excuse present failures, and silence judgment. Judaism treats memory as a restraint on power. When memory is used to shield power from judgment, it becomes an instrument of moral evasion.
Judaism’s deepest moral practice is not punishment, but repair—teshuvah. Repair requires someone who acted, someone who answers, and someone who can change course. When no one can answer, nothing can be repaired. Harm accumulates. The world becomes morally cluttered: wrongs exist, but there is no address for them.
Words such as justice, responsibility, accountability, and ethics continue to circulate, but they lose force. They describe expectations no one is positioned to meet. Moral speech becomes expressive rather than binding. Judaism recognizes this not as progress, but as exhaustion.
Even when no one can answer, the demand to answer remains. It appears as anxiety, protest, moral confusion, relentless argument, and rage without resolution. The demand does not die. It wanders.
This wandering demand is what marks a threshold.
Judaism does not promise that every wrong can be answered for. It insists that a world in which no one answers cannot endure. Thresholds are the moments when Judaism must decide whether it will allow this collapse—or whether it will struggle, imperfectly and without guarantees, to restore the possibility of answering.
That struggle is not comforting. But for Judaism, it is the only alternative to moral dissolution.
