For most of my life, I believed that institutions were civilisation’s safety net. They were the places we instinctively turned when facts were disputed, when principles were tested and when society needed moral leadership.
The media pursued truth, universities pursued knowledge, international organisations defended universal values, encyclopaedias separated fact from opinion. Or at least, that was the promise.
Over the past few years, many of those promises have been broken. Not just here in Britain, but across much of the democratic world.
The institutions we believed would provide moral clarity have too often become sources of moral confusion. Institutions we trusted to defend universal principles have applied them selectively. Institutions we expected to challenge prejudice have too often excused it. Institutions created to protect minorities have, in many cases, abandoned Jews.
Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. That does not mean institutions no longer matter, it means we can no longer outsource our principles to them. Because institutions do not possess courage, people do.
This week, four very different people reminded us of exactly that.
This week’s Shabbat Shalom is dedicated to those who chose principle over popularity, conviction over conformity and moral clarity over institutional convenience.
Shabbat Shalom to Mathias Döpfner.
One of the greatest failures of modern journalism has been confusing impartiality with moral neutrality. This week, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, described the rise of antisemitism among today’s young people as “the greatest disgrace of our time."
That should not require courage, yet in today’s media landscape, it undoubtedly does.
More significant still is the position his company has taken. Every employee is expected to support Israel’s right to exist and oppose antisemitism. Those unwilling to uphold those principles are free to work elsewhere.
Predictably, critics have accused Döpfner of politicising journalism. The irony is that journalism has already become politicised. What Döpfner is attempting to restore is something much older than politics, moral confidence.
He is not speaking simply to the readers of The Telegraph. He is issuing a challenge to an industry that has become so afraid of drawing moral boundaries that it increasingly struggles to distinguish between legitimate criticism and prejudice.
Leadership is not following the tide, leadership is being willing to stand against it.
Shabbat Shalom to Mathias Döpfner and to those who remind us that truth requires courage long before it receives consensus.
President Herzog presenting The President’s Award to Axel Springer CEO, Mathias Dopfner
Shabbat Shalom to Larry Sanger.
There are few things more revealing than an institution punishing the very person who helped create it.
Wikipedia was built upon a revolutionary promise, not that every article would be perfect, but that every article would strive for neutrality. That principle was not an afterthought, it was one of the foundations upon which the world’s largest encyclopaedia was built.
This week, one of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, was indefinitely banned from editing the very platform he helped create after campaigning for greater intellectual diversity and a return to the principle of neutrality that defined Wikipedia in its earliest years.
His criticism has been straightforward.
That on issues including Israel, Zionism and other politically contentious subjects, Wikipedia has drifted away from presenting competing viewpoints fairly and towards promoting a single prevailing narrative. His argument is not that Wikipedia should favour one side over another, but that it should return to the neutrality that made it trustworthy in the first place.
The response was telling, not debate, not reform, not reflection, a ban.
There is something deeply symbolic about that. When the founder of an institution is no longer welcome because he asks it to honour the principles upon which it was built, the issue is no longer the individual, it is the institution.
Wikipedia did not become one of the world’s most trusted sources of information because millions of people agreed with its conclusions. It became trusted because millions believed it was trying, however imperfectly, to reach them honestly.
The moment neutrality becomes subordinate to ideology, an encyclopaedia stops documenting knowledge and begins manufacturing consensus.
Shabbat Shalom to Larry Sanger and to those who remind us that institutions do not lose their purpose because their principles stop mattering. They lose it because they stop defending them.
Co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger
Shabbat Shalom to Ilana Gritzewsky.
Institutions have an extraordinary ability to hide behind process, reports, committees, investigations, statements. Every layer creates another degree of separation between those making decisions and those living with their consequences.
This week, Ilana Gritzewsky removed every one of those layers.
Standing before the United Nations Human Rights Council, she did something no report, no inquiry and no committee could ever do.
She looked directly at the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Reem Alsalem, whose response to October 7th has been marked by hesitation and scepticism over the sexual violence committed by Hamas, and she simply asked her to look back. Not at a document, not at a statistic, at her.
“I am not a report. I am not a statistic. I am a woman who survived."
Then came the question that should haunt not only the United Nations, but every institution that failed Jewish women after October 7th.
“When I, and other Israeli women, begged not to be raped, why were you silent? Please look at me. Do you believe us now? Will you apologise?"
There was nowhere left to hide, no procedure to defer to, no committee to establish, no report still to be commissioned. Just a survivor confronting an institution with the human cost of its own moral failure.
The United Nations was founded upon the promise that human rights are universal, not conditional, not ideological, but truly universal.
When an institution cannot bring itself to recognise the suffering of a woman because acknowledging her pain is politically inconvenient, it has ceased to uphold human rights. It has become an obstacle to them.
Ilana did not simply confront a UN official, she confronted an institution that had forgotten the very reason it exists.
Shabbat Shalom to Ilana Gritzewsky and to those courageous enough to strip away the protection of bureaucracy and force institutions to look directly into the eyes of the people they have failed.
Former Hamas hostage Ilana Gritzewsky confronting the UN
Shabbat Shalom to the Israeli emergency teams serving Venezuela.
Perhaps the easiest thing to do in today’s world is to reserve your compassion for your friends.
Over the past two years, it has become deeply unfashionable to stand with Israel Across much of the democratic world, governments have demanded ceasefires without first demanding the release of the hostages. Others have rushed to recognise a Palestinian Arab state before requiring those who planned, celebrated and continue to defend the atrocities of October 7th to surrender. Some have restricted the sale of defensive military equipment to Israel as tens of thousands of rockets have been fired indiscriminately at its civilian population. Time and again, governments have found ways to reserve their harshest condemnation for the world’s only Jewish state.
That has become the prevailing current, yet this week, Israel swam against it.
Following the devastating earthquake in Venezuela, Israeli emergency teams mobilised to help. Not to an ally, not to a strategic partner, but to a country whose government has spent years defining itself in opposition to Israel.
A country that recognised a Palestinian Arab state more than fifteen years ago. A country that has consistently voted against Israel at the United Nations. A country whose government has built one of the closest alliances in the world with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the regime that funds, arms and directs many of the terrorist organisations committed to Israel’s destruction. None of that mattered.
Israeli men and women are now risking their own lives to rescue Venezuelans trapped beneath collapsed buildings. They did not ask how Venezuela had voted at the United Nations. They did not ask who its government had chosen to stand beside. They did not ask whether the people they were pulling from the rubble had stood with Israel after October 7th.
They asked only one question. Who needs our help?
There is something profoundly Jewish about that. It is easy to show compassion to those who stand beside you, but it is infinitely harder to extend it to those who have not.
Yet that is precisely what Israel has done, not because it expects gratitude, not because it believes this will change Venezuela’s politics, but because principles are only principles if they survive inconvenience. If they apply only to your allies, they are not principles at all.
At a time when so much of the world has chosen to define its relationship with Israel through condemnation, Israel quietly chose to define hers through compassion.
The easiest principles to defend are those that cost us nothing. The ones that define us are the principles we uphold when every reason exists not to.
Shabbat Shalom to those who remind us that true principles are revealed not by how we treat those who stand with us, but by how we treat those who do not.
The Israeli rescue team on arrival in Venezuela
Every week there are people who restore a little of our faith, not always in institutions, but in humanity.
This week, Mathias Döpfner reminded the media that journalism without moral confidence cannot fulfil its purpose. Larry Sanger reminded Wikipedia that knowledge without neutrality loses its authority. Ilana Gritzewsky reminded the United Nations that human rights either belong to everyone or they belong to no one. Israeli emergency teams reminded the world that compassion is something we do, not something we simply proclaim.
Together, they tell the same story.
For generations we believed that institutions would safeguard the principles upon which a civilised society depends. Increasingly, they have failed to do so and not because those principles have changed, but because too many institutions have lacked the courage to defend them.
That is an uncomfortable truth, because once trust in an institution is lost, make no mistake, it is almost impossible to rebuild. Trust is earned over decades, it can be squandered in the blink of an eye.
But perhaps there is also something strangely hopeful in all of this, because principles do not belong to institutions, they belong to people. Institutions can fail for many reasons, but principles only fail when ordinary people stop defending them.
Perhaps we relied on institutions for too long, perhaps the responsibility was always ours.
Shabbat Shalom.