Define Judaism: Are we a religion? An ethnicity? A nation?

You may notice that Judaism tends to raise more questions and challenges than it does answers and reassurances. We have a history of identifying Judaism, the Jewish People, and individual Jews by what they are not rather than by what they are. This might be because nobody can come to a consensus on what exactly we are or ought to be.

There’s an old joke of a Jewish man, stranded alone on a deserted island. When he is finally saved, his rescuers find three buildings: his home, and two synagogues. “But why did you build two synagogues?” they ask him. “This is the synagogue I go to, and this is the one I never step foot in!” This story asserts that, as Jews, we are certainly not monolithic. And yet, we still identify with one meaningful Jewish collective identity.

Funnily enough, we have a history of reclaiming and adopting the names and descriptors that come from outsiders. We call ourselves “b’nei Yisrael,” the children of Israel, but the first person to use that moniker was Pharaoh in Parashat Sh’mot. Similarly, we call ourselves the “People of the Book,” a name we adopted from the Quranic term, “Ahl al-kitab.” And why? Because we are, indeed, a people who have centered our communal lives and collective identities around books.

Whether it was Ezra bringing the first edition of the Hebrew Bible to Israel from Persia, or the early rabbis pouring over that precious text and writing the Midrash and Talmud, or the luminaries of the middle ages, who studied and wrote profound philosophy, poetry, and prayer, or the Yiddish writers like Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer who told the stories of the shtetl, or the Israeli giants in Rachel the Poet, Amos Oz, Etgar Keret – I could keep going, but that list would be yet another book to add to the Jewish library.

Yes, we are a people deeply committed to learning and reading and books. And so, perhaps this is why for us Jews, we are so affected by the images and videos coming out of classrooms in Florida this week, showing empty or covered bookshelves. In Manatee County, school district officials directed teachers to remove or cover all classroom libraries until their materials can be reviewed. Teachers, already overworked and undervalued, have rushed to follow the directive. According to the Washington Post, teachers in Florida are under legal threats of fines reaching $5000 and up to five years of jail time for exposing students to unapproved content. And so, we have videos of empty book shelves, images of bookcases covered with butcher paper, and an ever-growing teacher shortage.

This is not just happening in Florida. In 2022, Texas banned over 800 books across 22 school districts, the majority of which were written by or included narratives of black and LGBTQ+ people, though titles also included two of the greatest-known pieces of Holocaust literature, Maus and the Diary of Anne Frank. Just last week, a teacher in Pennsylvania was told that their poster of Elie Weisel violated a school policy barring educators from “activist activities.”

The arguments that politicians and activists make in promoting these bans revolve around the idea of protecting children from indoctrination. We do not need to dwell on the irony of governments’ claims against child-indoctrination while banning Holocaust literature and labeling one of the most famous and influential survivors as inappropriate for a public school setting. It is an absurd argument, one that should set off alarm bells in every Jewish heart. As the 19th century Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.”

Limiting access to information is an affront to the values we hold as the People of the Book. We uphold freedom of inquiry, we value the greatest possible breadth of thought, and, more than anything, we lift up our children. We cultivate curiosity, we encourage exploration, we support our children as they struggle to define themselves in relation to the world around them. We always aim to protect them, doing so through knowledge — never ignorance — knowing that hiding information does nothing but harm. Instead of holding children back, censoring narratives and limiting information that may challenge them, we lift them up, supporting them and staying by their side as they freely ask and explore.

In what is one of the funnier moments in Talmud, Rabbi Akiva follows his teacher, Rabbi Yehoshuah, into the bathroom and observes his behavior. Akiva’s student Ben Azzai asks, aren’t you kind of invading his personal space? Akiva responds, “Torah hi, v’lilmod ani tzarich” — “This is Torah, and I must learn.” In a following similar yet spicier story, Rav Kahana hides under his teacher’s bed to learn about his bedroom behavior. When Kahana is caught, he says, like Akiva, “This is Torah, and I must learn.” Side note: this entire page of Talmud — Berakhot 62a — is objectively hysterical, mostly talking about how to keep yourself safe from bathroom demons.

In the context of Jewish learning, we do not shy away from that which is impolite, improper, or uncomfortable. Indeed, “Torah hi, v’lilmod ani tzarich” — “it is Torah, and I must learn.” Nor do we avoid learning from disparate sources. In Pirkei Avot, Ben Zoma teaches, “Who is wise? One who learns from everyone” (4:1). In this week’s Torah portion, we find that Yitro — who is not only not an Israelite but is, in fact, the high priest of Midian — is the visionary behind the entire Israelite judicial system. We do not limit ourselves when it comes to source or scope of information. It is all Torah, and we must learn.