8 | JULY 20 • 2023 

interview
Rabbi David Wolpe Wants You to 
Stop Arguing and Start Listening
D

avid Wolpe has been 
called one of the most 
quoted rabbis in the 
United States. As senior rabbi 
at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, 
one of the largest and most 
visible Conservative pulpits in 
the country, the decisions he 
makes and things 
he says are often 
treated as bell-
wethers of cen-
trist American 
Jewry. 
Wolpe has 
led an unusu-
ally diverse 
synagogue, with pews filled 
both by largely liberal Jews of 
Ashkenazi descent and Persian 
Jews with roots in Iran who 
tend to be more politically 
conservative. Bridging these 
divides has been a signature 
of his rabbinate, and in recent 
years he has been writing and 
tweeting about civil discourse 
in increasingly polarized times. 
Wolpe, 63, recently became 
emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple, 
where he had been the senior 
rabbi since 1997. As he pre-
pared to step aside — he’ll 
spend the next year as a fellow 
at Harvard Divinity School 
— he joined me recently in a 
public Zoom conversation. I 
especially wanted to ask him 
about the polarized political 
climate and his views on moral 
and political discourse.
“We’re much more polarized 
than we were in 1997,” Wolpe, 
the author of eight books and 
a long-running column in the 
New York Jewish Week, told 
me. “Everybody knows that. 
And you can get into much 

more trouble by expressing an 
opinion on one or the other 
side of a controversial issue 
than you could back then.”
Below is an excerpt of our 
conversation, edited for length 
and clarity, focusing on our 
discussion of civil discourse. 

You have a famously diverse 
synagogue. What were some 
of the cultural and political 
divides that you had to bridge 
and how have they changed? 
 There were political divides, 
first of all. I have right and 
left. I have some very ardent 
supporters of Trump and very 
ardent detractors. And there 
was a cultural divide because 
the patterns of language and so 
on of the Persian community 
and the Ashkenazi community 
were different. 
We don’t have a common 
culture. Nobody reads the 
same books. Nobody watches 
the same movies. Nobody 
watches the same television 
shows.
The one thing everyone 
has in common is politics. 
So, when people talk, when 
they meet each other, they 
start with politics, which is 
guaranteed to cause division. 
One of the things I tried to 
encourage in the synagogue 
was to get people to know 
each other in different ways 
than opening the conversation 
about politics. Talk about your 
kids. Talk about school. Talk 
about what you’d like to do on 
vacation, talk about food. Talk 
about life so that you know the 
person as a person before they 
express their opinion so at the 

outset of the conversation you 
wouldn’t totally dismiss them. 
And the other thing I 
encourage, which is difficult, 
is just listening. Understand 
that growing up in Tehran 
gives you a different view of 
the world than growing up in 
Philadelphia. And I have to 
respect the fact that it’s a very 
different orientation. And in 
order to understand it, I can’t 
tell someone else what to 
think. I have to listen to what 
they think and ask questions 
about it. Which is not easy.

There’s a big debate over 
whether rabbis should be 
talking politics from the 
pulpit. Where do you stand 
on that? What do you think 
are the limits of literally the 
bully pulpit?

I’m very, very opposed, 
actually, to rabbis talking 
politics from the pulpit, and 
I’ll tell you why I say that. 
First of all, it’s not like I know 
more about politics than my 
congregants. So, if I talked 
about gun control, for example, 
about which I have strong 
feelings, I’m talking to people 
who know as much or more 
about it than I do, who see it 
differently. And it seems to me 
it is an illegitimate arrogation 
of my role as a rabbi to say that 
“because I see it this way, this 
is Judaism’s position,” which is 
generally how it’s framed.
I actually gave a class 
years ago where I took a 
whole bunch of issues — 
immigration, abortion, 
women’s rights — and I gave 
all the Jewish sources on both 

sides, just so people should 
realize that Judaism speaks to 
both sides of these issues. 
I always ask rabbis who 
speak politically from the 
pulpit, “If you were not a 
rabbi, if you were not even 
Jewish, would your political 
position be different?” In 
other words, is your political 
position mandated by what 
you understand the Torah to 
be even though it’s not your 
personal position? Or is it 
just your personal position 
filtered through the Torah? 
And almost inevitably, it’s the 
personal position, filtered 
through the Torah.
That, to me, is just basically 
preaching politics with a little 
Judaic twist. And I don’t think 
that’s what a rabbi should be 
doing. If there is one place that 
can be a refuge in a country 
that is saturated with politics 
all the time, so that you can 
actually elevate your soul and 
hear things about your life 
and about Jewish history and 
aspiration, it seems to me 
it would be the synagogue. 
I should say as a caveat, I 
exempt Israel from that: Being 
pro-Israel seems to me a 
fundamental Jewish tenet and 
not a political one.

We look back with pride 
on rabbis like Abraham 
Joshua Heschel, who in a 
very polarized time threw 
his Jewishness and his whole 
self into the Civil Rights 
Movement.
 That is the example that peo-
ple always point to: Heschel. 
And I say that’s exactly right, 

PURELY COMMENTARY

Andrew 
Silow-Carroll
JTA

