The circles we draw
Rabbi Lizzie Horne Mozes
Rosh Hashanah Day 2
Sept 13, 2026
Watch
Last school year, every Friday was show-and-tell day in my kid’s daycare class.
I hated show-and-tell day.
This had very little to do with show-and-tell itself – show-and-tell is perfectly cute. I just feel I am perennially bad at daycare mom things. There is always a theme week I have not adequately prepared for; some special outfit or object that every other parent seems to have known was supposed to come to school that morning.
And last year, my most reliable opportunity to feel like a failure mom was show-and-tell – because show-and-tell required me to remember that it was Friday. Which, given that I’m a rabbi, I know is a particularly embarrassing day of the week to repeatedly lose track of.
Shai, meanwhile, was three, and definitely did not know when it was Friday. He knew that sometimes he got to bring something to school and show it to his class, but the responsibility for knowing when that was supposed to happen was mine.
On more than one occasion, I realized it was Friday as we were arriving at daycare. I would look around outside and find, like, a leaf.
“Here! You can bring this for show-and-tell,” I’d say with a disturbing amount of excitement.
And Shai would look at me, baby brow furrowed, potentially on the verge of tears and yell: “No! I don’t want to bring a leaf!”
Which was fair. But it was 8:30 in the morning, and the options available to him were increasingly limited.
Once, he had actually chosen something he wanted to bring – I’m sure it was a ball – and I forgot it at home. I dropped him off and then went all the way back to get it. This was, undeniably, absurd.
Nothing terrible would have happened if my three-year-old went to daycare without the ball for show-and-tell. And yet, whether remembering show-and-tell was my problem wasn’t up to me. He cared about it, he couldn't remember Friday for himself, and so, somehow, remembering Friday belonged to me.
Of course, this is what it means to be responsible for a small child. They need things from you that they cannot yet do for themselves, and so you do them. The relationship comes with obligations.
Parenthood makes that particularly obvious, but I don’t think it is unique to parenthood. Our lives are full of relationships, communities, and commitments that ask things of us, often before we have stopped to decide exactly what we owe them. And the boundaries of that responsibility are much less obvious once the person in question is not your three-year-old.
I’ve been thinking about how far that responsibility extends. What do we owe the people with whom we share our lives and world – and how much of that did we ever actually choose? Jewish tradition has its own language for being bound by what we owe. We call it chiyuv, obligation.
–
Obligation isn’t, I imagine, a word that makes any of us feel particularly excited. It does not, generally speaking, feature prominently in most advice about living your best life.
It carries the sense of something imposed – something we have to do when we would rather be doing something else. We live in a culture that places enormous value on our ability to choose for ourselves what we will give ourselves to and what we are allowed to decline. And there is some wisdom in that.
This makes one of the Talmud’s claims about obligation particularly striking. In the tractate Kiddushin of the Talmud Bavli, Rabbi Ḥanina teaches:
גָּדוֹל מְצֻוֶּוה וְעוֹשֶׂה מִמִּי שֶׁאֵינוֹ מְצֻוֶּוה וְעוֹשֶׂה
Gadol metzuveh v’oseh, mi-mi she’eino metzuveh v’oseh.
Greater is the person who fulfills a commandment because they are commanded, than the person who does the same thing without being commanded.
I find this genuinely counterintuitive. We give a certain moral prestige to doing something freely. Surely, there is something especially admirable about doing the right thing entirely of our own volition. But Rabbi Ḥanina thinks otherwise.
The Tosafot, the medieval commentary, offers an explanation: the person who is commanded experiences greater anxiety about failing to fulfill the commandment. The person who isn't commanded knows that, if they want to, they can simply leave it.
Obligation changes the meaning of walking away. You may still be capable of leaving, but your own desire is no longer the only consideration.
Part of me resists this. I have had to learn, sometimes painfully, that being needed does not automatically make me responsible, and that I am allowed to decide what I can and cannot carry. But I am also not sure I want my own desire to have the final word about what I owe.
–
This topic has been on my mind a lot this year because of Hineini, our new conversion program at Kol Tzedek. Last year, our first cohort brought together twelve students who met monthly as they made their way toward becoming Jewish. One night of the program, we devoted the whole class to the question of chiyuv: what does it actually mean to become part of a tradition that understands you to be obligated?
The conversation was about Judaism, but also about the obligations that already structured their lives. We kept coming up against the question of whether obligation constrains a relationship, or whether relationship itself generates obligation.
For people actively choosing Judaism, this becomes a particularly interesting problem. What does it mean to freely choose a tradition that then claims some authority over your choices?
We spent some time contrasting the language of rights with the language of obligation. Rights are indispensable: they establish what is owed to a person and what cannot legitimately be taken from them. Chiyuv directs our attention toward the other side of the relationship: what do I owe?
Shabbat makes the distinction very clear. In Devarim 5:12, Moses tells the people:
שָׁמוֹר אֶת־יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת לְקַדְּשׁוֹ כַּאֲשֶׁר צִוְּךָ יהוה אֱלֹהֶיךָ
Shamor et yom haShabbat l’kadsho ka’asher tzivcha Adonai Elohecha.
Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as Adonai your God has commanded you.
There is a meaningful difference between believing that rest is good and believing that you are obligated to rest. A value can remain aspirational, but an obligation makes a demand on your behavior.
Many of us probably learned something about that distinction when we were very young, long before we had any language for it. When I was in first grade, I made a tzedakah box out of cardboard. I painted it gray and made it look like a synagogue, with what were supposed to be stained-glass windows made out of tissue paper. It lived on our kitchen counter (it still lives there), where, all week, my parents would put their loose change. Before Hebrew school each Sunday, my siblings and I would empty it out, divide the coins between the three of us, and we’d each bring our Ziploc bag of change to pour into the bigger tzedakah boxes in our classrooms.
I knew that giving tzedakah was a good thing, but that wasn't really the point. I was learning that some of what we had was supposed to be given away.
–
Obligations are not always this simple, though. The Torah portion we read yesterday in Bereishit is, among other things, a story about competing obligations.
Sarah sees Ishmael, the son Hagar has borne to Abraham, and tells Abraham:
גָּרֵשׁ הָאָמָה הַזֹּאת וְאֶת־בְּנָהּ כִּי לֹא יִירַשׁ בֶּן־הָאָמָה הַזֹּאת עִם־בְּנִי עִם־יִצְחָק
Garesh ha’amah hazot v’et b’nah, ki lo yirash ben ha’amah hazot im b’ni, im Yitzchak.
Cast out this slave-woman and her son, for the son of this slave-woman shall not inherit with my son, with Isaac.
The Torah tells us that Abraham is deeply distressed, al odot b’no, because Ishmael is his son, but God tells him:
כֹּל אֲשֶׁר תֹּאמַר אֵלֶיךָ שָׂרָה שְׁמַע בְּקֹלָהּ
Kol asher tomar eilecha Sarah, shema b’kolah.
Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her voice.
Abraham listens to Sarah and sends Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness with bread and a skin of water. The water runs out, and Hagar places Ishmael beneath a bush and moves away because she cannot bear to watch her child die. Hagar and Ishmael bear the consequences of the obligation Abraham chooses to honor. And then we read:
וַיִּשְׁמַע אֱלֹהִים אֶת־קוֹל הַנַּעַר
Vayishma Elohim et kol hana’ar.
God heard the voice of the boy.
The same language appears in both verses: shema, to hear, and kol, voice. Abraham listens to Sarah because God has told him to, and the story continues with another act of hearing: God hears Ishmael, whose life has been endangered by Abraham’s decision to listen. The repetition holds those two voices together. Listening to Sarah has not made Ishmael’s claim on Abraham disappear; the Torah makes us hear him too.
Chiyuv still requires judgment. Our obligations can be real and still come into conflict, and deciding among them is never morally neutral – especially when we have the power to make a decision whose consequences someone else will have to live with. Abraham decides which obligation will prevail, and Hagar and Ishmael live with his decision.
–
But who is the “we” doing the deciding? What kind of self is being obligated in the first place?
Scholar of modern Jewish studies Mara Benjamin takes up this question in her book The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought.
Benjamin traces how twentieth-century Jewish thinkers increasingly located obligation in the encounter between human beings, rather than only in halakha, in the authority of divine command. She writes that they came to understand humans as “existentially, but not practically, obligated to the other.”
Benjamin explores that idea through the experience of caring for a young child. She describes the caregiver as occupying a “position of obligation.” Motherhood, she writes, is an experience of “being subject to rather than master over.”
I recognize that description. Having Shai reordered my sense that my time was only mine; his needs could suddenly determine what happened next.
Caregiving – whether for a child, a parent, a partner, a friend – challenges the idea that we are autonomous first and obligated later. Every one of us enters the world completely dependent. By the time we are old enough to imagine ourselves as independent, we have already been shaped by years of dependence and care.
Being needed does not automatically make me responsible. But Benjamin makes it harder to imagine that I begin with a life that belongs solely to me, and then decide how much of it I am willing to give away.
By the time I am asking what I owe, I am already implicated in obligations I didn’t choose.
–
It’s probably about time I admit that I come by my affinity for chiyuv honestly. My Catholic mom is someone I regularly describe, in earnest, as a “real Ten Commandments girlie.” I grew up with a pretty healthy sense that sometimes you do things whether or not you feel like doing them.
That understanding of obligation is at the heart of a recent piece by Rabbi Avigayil Halpern where she writes about chiyuv as a form of discipline and devotion for the Jewish left. Halpern draws on the twentieth-century Jewish thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who understood religious practice as something that could not depend on inspiration. She points to Leibowitz’s description of mitzvot as belonging to the prose of life: the ordinary, repetitive, frequently mundane things we do again and again.
I love the way Leibowitz describes this – because so much of Jewish practice really is deeply ordinary. Shabbat comes every seven days whether or not this particular Friday night feels spiritually promising. (The Jewish calendar, in general, has little respect for whether this is a good week for you.) We say blessings we have said hundreds of times before. A minyan still needs ten people on an otherwise completely ordinary Wednesday night.
Halpern argues that this is part of what chiyuv makes possible: we do not have to renegotiate our commitments every time our feelings about them change. Obligation allows a commitment to retain its force even when the feeling that first drew us to it is no longer there.
I think some of my harder negotiations, though, are not actually about whether I feel like showing up. They are about who I believe I am obligated to show up for. I notice this especially in my political life, where I can become very preoccupied with whether the people I am being asked to stand beside see the world the way I do.
There are real limits to whom I would make common cause with, and solidarity can’t require abandoning our judgment. But I worry that we have become very good at turning disagreement into exemption. I can decide that because someone has gotten something wrong, I am released from whatever responsibility I might otherwise have felt toward them. When disagreement becomes a reason to withdraw from one another, it becomes harder to imagine how we ever come back together. And I can be right about every disagreement and still find that the circle of people I believe I owe anything to has gotten smaller and smaller.
Feminist philosopher Judith Butler writes in her book Frames of War that “the obligations ‘we’ have are precisely those that disturb any stable notion of the ‘we.’” In other words, obligation can ask something of us even when our sense of who belongs to us – and who we belong to – is unsettled.
I understand the desire for solidarity to be reciprocal. It’s hard to keep showing up for people when you don’t feel that they’ve shown up for you, and harder still when you feel hurt or misunderstood by them. I don't think chiyuv makes any of that irrelevant. But I do think it asks us to take a risk: to consider that what I owe another person might not disappear when they fail to give me what I believe they owe me.
Because if my obligation to another person exists only for as long as I believe they have earned it, then I am still the one setting all the terms. And, for much of my life, I’ve wondered whether an obligation that exists only on our own terms is much of an obligation at all.
–
There’s a moment from six years ago that I often think about. In June of 2020, my partner, Eric, and I were at one of the protests following the murder of George Floyd. We were on the Vine Street Expressway when police began firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd. Everyone started running.
The person directly in front of us was hit in the head by a tear-gas canister, fell to the ground, and began to have a seizure. So Eric and I didn’t run, even though the gas was coming. We stayed with him until he seemed okay, helped him get up, and eventually got him somewhere safer.
I don't remember Eric and me deciding to stay.
I don't mean that I know why we stayed, or that there was anything especially virtuous about us in that moment. But I have wondered in the years since about the absence of that decision. Maybe there are things we practice often enough that, when there isn't much time to decide, some choices begin to require less choosing.
Chiyuv, I think, does more than tell us what we owe. The obligations we practice can become part of who we are.
–
The Maharal, the great 16th-century rabbi and Jewish thinker of Prague, describes the human being as an ilan hafuch, an upside-down tree.
A tree is rooted in the earth and grows upward. We are the reverse. Our root, the Maharal says, is above, in God, and we grow from that root downward into the world.
What does that mean for the part of the tree that is visible? If we are rooted in God, what grows from those roots is a life lived here, among other people, whose demands on us are not entirely ours to choose.
–
That evening, when we studied chiyuv in Hineini, I introduced the students to what's called the “Universe of Obligation.” You are given a page with four concentric circles and you put yourself in the center – which, admittedly, doesn’t sound like the most promising beginning for an exercise in moral responsibility.
But hear me out. In the next circle, you put the people to whom you feel the greatest obligation – the people for whom you would take a significant risk. Then you move outward, placing people according to how responsible you feel for them.
The exercise makes visible something most of us already know. Our obligations are not evenly distributed. We may owe more to our children, our immediate family, or our closest friends than we owe to a stranger. There are people whose lives are bound up with ours in ways that other people’s lives are not.
But the exercise also assumes that we know where our obligations end. We are the ones holding the pen, deciding who goes in which circle and where the boundaries of our responsibility lie.
Chiyuv does not give us a radius. It asks us to relinquish the fantasy that we can determine that radius entirely for ourselves. We do not get to decide in advance that the people beyond the circles we have drawn can ask nothing of us.
Our community gives us somewhere to practice this. It is a mitzvah to show up for one another in both moments of joy and grief. We come to a baby naming or a b’nei mitzvah and help make a celebration communal. We show up for a shiva and make it possible for someone to mourn.
And we do these things for people we might never have placed close to the center of the page.
There is something countercultural about allowing ourselves to be formed this way – by obligations we did not invent, to people we did not choose.
Over time, the circles do not disappear. But their edges can become a little less certain.
We will keep drawing circles.
We have to.
But we can learn to hold the pen less tightly.
Rosh Hashanah Day 2
Sept 13, 2026
Watch
Last school year, every Friday was show-and-tell day in my kid’s daycare class.
I hated show-and-tell day.
This had very little to do with show-and-tell itself – show-and-tell is perfectly cute. I just feel I am perennially bad at daycare mom things. There is always a theme week I have not adequately prepared for; some special outfit or object that every other parent seems to have known was supposed to come to school that morning.
And last year, my most reliable opportunity to feel like a failure mom was show-and-tell – because show-and-tell required me to remember that it was Friday. Which, given that I’m a rabbi, I know is a particularly embarrassing day of the week to repeatedly lose track of.
Shai, meanwhile, was three, and definitely did not know when it was Friday. He knew that sometimes he got to bring something to school and show it to his class, but the responsibility for knowing when that was supposed to happen was mine.
On more than one occasion, I realized it was Friday as we were arriving at daycare. I would look around outside and find, like, a leaf.
“Here! You can bring this for show-and-tell,” I’d say with a disturbing amount of excitement.
And Shai would look at me, baby brow furrowed, potentially on the verge of tears and yell: “No! I don’t want to bring a leaf!”
Which was fair. But it was 8:30 in the morning, and the options available to him were increasingly limited.
Once, he had actually chosen something he wanted to bring – I’m sure it was a ball – and I forgot it at home. I dropped him off and then went all the way back to get it. This was, undeniably, absurd.
Nothing terrible would have happened if my three-year-old went to daycare without the ball for show-and-tell. And yet, whether remembering show-and-tell was my problem wasn’t up to me. He cared about it, he couldn't remember Friday for himself, and so, somehow, remembering Friday belonged to me.
Of course, this is what it means to be responsible for a small child. They need things from you that they cannot yet do for themselves, and so you do them. The relationship comes with obligations.
Parenthood makes that particularly obvious, but I don’t think it is unique to parenthood. Our lives are full of relationships, communities, and commitments that ask things of us, often before we have stopped to decide exactly what we owe them. And the boundaries of that responsibility are much less obvious once the person in question is not your three-year-old.
I’ve been thinking about how far that responsibility extends. What do we owe the people with whom we share our lives and world – and how much of that did we ever actually choose? Jewish tradition has its own language for being bound by what we owe. We call it chiyuv, obligation.
–
Obligation isn’t, I imagine, a word that makes any of us feel particularly excited. It does not, generally speaking, feature prominently in most advice about living your best life.
It carries the sense of something imposed – something we have to do when we would rather be doing something else. We live in a culture that places enormous value on our ability to choose for ourselves what we will give ourselves to and what we are allowed to decline. And there is some wisdom in that.
This makes one of the Talmud’s claims about obligation particularly striking. In the tractate Kiddushin of the Talmud Bavli, Rabbi Ḥanina teaches:
גָּדוֹל מְצֻוֶּוה וְעוֹשֶׂה מִמִּי שֶׁאֵינוֹ מְצֻוֶּוה וְעוֹשֶׂה
Gadol metzuveh v’oseh, mi-mi she’eino metzuveh v’oseh.
Greater is the person who fulfills a commandment because they are commanded, than the person who does the same thing without being commanded.
I find this genuinely counterintuitive. We give a certain moral prestige to doing something freely. Surely, there is something especially admirable about doing the right thing entirely of our own volition. But Rabbi Ḥanina thinks otherwise.
The Tosafot, the medieval commentary, offers an explanation: the person who is commanded experiences greater anxiety about failing to fulfill the commandment. The person who isn't commanded knows that, if they want to, they can simply leave it.
Obligation changes the meaning of walking away. You may still be capable of leaving, but your own desire is no longer the only consideration.
Part of me resists this. I have had to learn, sometimes painfully, that being needed does not automatically make me responsible, and that I am allowed to decide what I can and cannot carry. But I am also not sure I want my own desire to have the final word about what I owe.
–
This topic has been on my mind a lot this year because of Hineini, our new conversion program at Kol Tzedek. Last year, our first cohort brought together twelve students who met monthly as they made their way toward becoming Jewish. One night of the program, we devoted the whole class to the question of chiyuv: what does it actually mean to become part of a tradition that understands you to be obligated?
The conversation was about Judaism, but also about the obligations that already structured their lives. We kept coming up against the question of whether obligation constrains a relationship, or whether relationship itself generates obligation.
For people actively choosing Judaism, this becomes a particularly interesting problem. What does it mean to freely choose a tradition that then claims some authority over your choices?
We spent some time contrasting the language of rights with the language of obligation. Rights are indispensable: they establish what is owed to a person and what cannot legitimately be taken from them. Chiyuv directs our attention toward the other side of the relationship: what do I owe?
Shabbat makes the distinction very clear. In Devarim 5:12, Moses tells the people:
שָׁמוֹר אֶת־יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת לְקַדְּשׁוֹ כַּאֲשֶׁר צִוְּךָ יהוה אֱלֹהֶיךָ
Shamor et yom haShabbat l’kadsho ka’asher tzivcha Adonai Elohecha.
Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as Adonai your God has commanded you.
There is a meaningful difference between believing that rest is good and believing that you are obligated to rest. A value can remain aspirational, but an obligation makes a demand on your behavior.
Many of us probably learned something about that distinction when we were very young, long before we had any language for it. When I was in first grade, I made a tzedakah box out of cardboard. I painted it gray and made it look like a synagogue, with what were supposed to be stained-glass windows made out of tissue paper. It lived on our kitchen counter (it still lives there), where, all week, my parents would put their loose change. Before Hebrew school each Sunday, my siblings and I would empty it out, divide the coins between the three of us, and we’d each bring our Ziploc bag of change to pour into the bigger tzedakah boxes in our classrooms.
I knew that giving tzedakah was a good thing, but that wasn't really the point. I was learning that some of what we had was supposed to be given away.
–
Obligations are not always this simple, though. The Torah portion we read yesterday in Bereishit is, among other things, a story about competing obligations.
Sarah sees Ishmael, the son Hagar has borne to Abraham, and tells Abraham:
גָּרֵשׁ הָאָמָה הַזֹּאת וְאֶת־בְּנָהּ כִּי לֹא יִירַשׁ בֶּן־הָאָמָה הַזֹּאת עִם־בְּנִי עִם־יִצְחָק
Garesh ha’amah hazot v’et b’nah, ki lo yirash ben ha’amah hazot im b’ni, im Yitzchak.
Cast out this slave-woman and her son, for the son of this slave-woman shall not inherit with my son, with Isaac.
The Torah tells us that Abraham is deeply distressed, al odot b’no, because Ishmael is his son, but God tells him:
כֹּל אֲשֶׁר תֹּאמַר אֵלֶיךָ שָׂרָה שְׁמַע בְּקֹלָהּ
Kol asher tomar eilecha Sarah, shema b’kolah.
Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her voice.
Abraham listens to Sarah and sends Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness with bread and a skin of water. The water runs out, and Hagar places Ishmael beneath a bush and moves away because she cannot bear to watch her child die. Hagar and Ishmael bear the consequences of the obligation Abraham chooses to honor. And then we read:
וַיִּשְׁמַע אֱלֹהִים אֶת־קוֹל הַנַּעַר
Vayishma Elohim et kol hana’ar.
God heard the voice of the boy.
The same language appears in both verses: shema, to hear, and kol, voice. Abraham listens to Sarah because God has told him to, and the story continues with another act of hearing: God hears Ishmael, whose life has been endangered by Abraham’s decision to listen. The repetition holds those two voices together. Listening to Sarah has not made Ishmael’s claim on Abraham disappear; the Torah makes us hear him too.
Chiyuv still requires judgment. Our obligations can be real and still come into conflict, and deciding among them is never morally neutral – especially when we have the power to make a decision whose consequences someone else will have to live with. Abraham decides which obligation will prevail, and Hagar and Ishmael live with his decision.
–
But who is the “we” doing the deciding? What kind of self is being obligated in the first place?
Scholar of modern Jewish studies Mara Benjamin takes up this question in her book The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought.
Benjamin traces how twentieth-century Jewish thinkers increasingly located obligation in the encounter between human beings, rather than only in halakha, in the authority of divine command. She writes that they came to understand humans as “existentially, but not practically, obligated to the other.”
Benjamin explores that idea through the experience of caring for a young child. She describes the caregiver as occupying a “position of obligation.” Motherhood, she writes, is an experience of “being subject to rather than master over.”
I recognize that description. Having Shai reordered my sense that my time was only mine; his needs could suddenly determine what happened next.
Caregiving – whether for a child, a parent, a partner, a friend – challenges the idea that we are autonomous first and obligated later. Every one of us enters the world completely dependent. By the time we are old enough to imagine ourselves as independent, we have already been shaped by years of dependence and care.
Being needed does not automatically make me responsible. But Benjamin makes it harder to imagine that I begin with a life that belongs solely to me, and then decide how much of it I am willing to give away.
By the time I am asking what I owe, I am already implicated in obligations I didn’t choose.
–
It’s probably about time I admit that I come by my affinity for chiyuv honestly. My Catholic mom is someone I regularly describe, in earnest, as a “real Ten Commandments girlie.” I grew up with a pretty healthy sense that sometimes you do things whether or not you feel like doing them.
That understanding of obligation is at the heart of a recent piece by Rabbi Avigayil Halpern where she writes about chiyuv as a form of discipline and devotion for the Jewish left. Halpern draws on the twentieth-century Jewish thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who understood religious practice as something that could not depend on inspiration. She points to Leibowitz’s description of mitzvot as belonging to the prose of life: the ordinary, repetitive, frequently mundane things we do again and again.
I love the way Leibowitz describes this – because so much of Jewish practice really is deeply ordinary. Shabbat comes every seven days whether or not this particular Friday night feels spiritually promising. (The Jewish calendar, in general, has little respect for whether this is a good week for you.) We say blessings we have said hundreds of times before. A minyan still needs ten people on an otherwise completely ordinary Wednesday night.
Halpern argues that this is part of what chiyuv makes possible: we do not have to renegotiate our commitments every time our feelings about them change. Obligation allows a commitment to retain its force even when the feeling that first drew us to it is no longer there.
I think some of my harder negotiations, though, are not actually about whether I feel like showing up. They are about who I believe I am obligated to show up for. I notice this especially in my political life, where I can become very preoccupied with whether the people I am being asked to stand beside see the world the way I do.
There are real limits to whom I would make common cause with, and solidarity can’t require abandoning our judgment. But I worry that we have become very good at turning disagreement into exemption. I can decide that because someone has gotten something wrong, I am released from whatever responsibility I might otherwise have felt toward them. When disagreement becomes a reason to withdraw from one another, it becomes harder to imagine how we ever come back together. And I can be right about every disagreement and still find that the circle of people I believe I owe anything to has gotten smaller and smaller.
Feminist philosopher Judith Butler writes in her book Frames of War that “the obligations ‘we’ have are precisely those that disturb any stable notion of the ‘we.’” In other words, obligation can ask something of us even when our sense of who belongs to us – and who we belong to – is unsettled.
I understand the desire for solidarity to be reciprocal. It’s hard to keep showing up for people when you don’t feel that they’ve shown up for you, and harder still when you feel hurt or misunderstood by them. I don't think chiyuv makes any of that irrelevant. But I do think it asks us to take a risk: to consider that what I owe another person might not disappear when they fail to give me what I believe they owe me.
Because if my obligation to another person exists only for as long as I believe they have earned it, then I am still the one setting all the terms. And, for much of my life, I’ve wondered whether an obligation that exists only on our own terms is much of an obligation at all.
–
There’s a moment from six years ago that I often think about. In June of 2020, my partner, Eric, and I were at one of the protests following the murder of George Floyd. We were on the Vine Street Expressway when police began firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd. Everyone started running.
The person directly in front of us was hit in the head by a tear-gas canister, fell to the ground, and began to have a seizure. So Eric and I didn’t run, even though the gas was coming. We stayed with him until he seemed okay, helped him get up, and eventually got him somewhere safer.
I don't remember Eric and me deciding to stay.
I don't mean that I know why we stayed, or that there was anything especially virtuous about us in that moment. But I have wondered in the years since about the absence of that decision. Maybe there are things we practice often enough that, when there isn't much time to decide, some choices begin to require less choosing.
Chiyuv, I think, does more than tell us what we owe. The obligations we practice can become part of who we are.
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The Maharal, the great 16th-century rabbi and Jewish thinker of Prague, describes the human being as an ilan hafuch, an upside-down tree.
A tree is rooted in the earth and grows upward. We are the reverse. Our root, the Maharal says, is above, in God, and we grow from that root downward into the world.
What does that mean for the part of the tree that is visible? If we are rooted in God, what grows from those roots is a life lived here, among other people, whose demands on us are not entirely ours to choose.
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That evening, when we studied chiyuv in Hineini, I introduced the students to what's called the “Universe of Obligation.” You are given a page with four concentric circles and you put yourself in the center – which, admittedly, doesn’t sound like the most promising beginning for an exercise in moral responsibility.
But hear me out. In the next circle, you put the people to whom you feel the greatest obligation – the people for whom you would take a significant risk. Then you move outward, placing people according to how responsible you feel for them.
The exercise makes visible something most of us already know. Our obligations are not evenly distributed. We may owe more to our children, our immediate family, or our closest friends than we owe to a stranger. There are people whose lives are bound up with ours in ways that other people’s lives are not.
But the exercise also assumes that we know where our obligations end. We are the ones holding the pen, deciding who goes in which circle and where the boundaries of our responsibility lie.
Chiyuv does not give us a radius. It asks us to relinquish the fantasy that we can determine that radius entirely for ourselves. We do not get to decide in advance that the people beyond the circles we have drawn can ask nothing of us.
Our community gives us somewhere to practice this. It is a mitzvah to show up for one another in both moments of joy and grief. We come to a baby naming or a b’nei mitzvah and help make a celebration communal. We show up for a shiva and make it possible for someone to mourn.
And we do these things for people we might never have placed close to the center of the page.
There is something countercultural about allowing ourselves to be formed this way – by obligations we did not invent, to people we did not choose.
Over time, the circles do not disappear. But their edges can become a little less certain.
We will keep drawing circles.
We have to.
But we can learn to hold the pen less tightly.