Yoni Goldstein: Jewish law tells us how to deal with Avi Lewis

The Jews were well into their desert journey when Korach, a member of the privileged Levite clan, openly questioned Moses’ leadership. Two-hundred-and-fifty people, a tiny fraction of the nation that then comprised hundreds of thousands of adults, sided with him. Korach and his leadership group refused Moses’s summons, accusing him of leading the Jews out of Egypt for his own glory. Suddenly, God caused the earth to open up, and Korach and his family were swallowed alive. The 250 admirers were consumed by fire.

The biblical story of Korach presents a stark lesson in how Jews think about internal dissent, when it escalates to become a threat to the continued viability of the community itself. It is indeed an extreme consequence for eliciting communal harm, but then Jewish law is fairly clear on the subject: when a Jew endangers the Jewish community, the community is obligated to stop them.

Such is the case with NDP Leader Avi Lewis. Critics have accused him of laying blame for the deaths in Gaza at the feet of all Jews in a pre-Yom Kippur social media message. “Tonight Yom Kippur begins,” he wrote. “It’s a time of atonement — a time to grieve those who have been lost, a time to acknowledge and take responsibility for harms we have caused, individually and collectively.”

“For Jewish people,” Lewis continued, “the personal has always been political and the political always personal. This year I’m reflecting on the fact that we failed to do our part to stop an ongoing genocide committed in our name.”

Tonight Yom Kippur begins, the most sombre moment of the Jewish calendar. It’s a time of atonement – a time to grieve those who have been lost, a time to acknowledge and take responsibility for harms we have caused, individually and collectively. For Jewish people, the personal…

— Avi Lewis (@avilewis) September 21, 2026

Around an hour earlier, a gunman shot up a synagogue in Belleville, Ont., grievously injuring a police officer on Judaism’s holiest day of the year. It’s not clear to me that you can draw a straight line from Lewis’ post to the Belleville shooting, but, on their own merit, Lewis’ comments endanger Jews everywhere in Canada.

Lewis later tried to backtrack, saying he meant Gaza was the fault of “humanity,” not just the Jews — but the damage was done. And in any case, his original comments were completely in line with his other public remarks about Israel’s war with Hamas, and very much agreed upon within the ranks of the NDP, where Israel is seen as the enemy of all things right and good. In Lewis and his supporters’ construction, Israel and Jews are uniquely to blame for the bloodshed — and when there is blowback, that’s their fault, too.

Fortunately, the corpus of Jewish law and thought provides ample advice on what to do when one of their own threatens the safety of the community.

In Leviticus, God orders the Jewish people, “You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart,” but rather to, “Reprove your kinsman.” The rabbis generally understood this to mean that the Jewish response to a disagreeable community member is to approach privately and attempt to convince them, through honest discussion, to change their ways. Maimonides later added that the confrontation is an essential element — not only to impress upon the subject the seriousness of the matter, but also to avoid holding the contempt in until it boiled over into something worse.

None of this applies, however, when a Jewish person presents a clear and present danger to the Jewish community. When that happens, Jewish thought is much more forceful: you must prevent the perpetrator from causing harm.

Jewish law developed two character sketches to describe such scenarios. The first is known as a “mosar” — a Jewish person who informs to oppressive authorities, potentially leading to the imprisonment, torture or death of community members. The second, called a “rodef,” refers to a Jew who is actively pursuing another with the intent to harm or kill them. In both scenarios, the law is clear that a Jew is duty-bound to step in. Protecting the community and its members is the most important thing.

Judaism has a robust history of debate, codified by the Mishnah, Talmud and centuries of textual disagreement. Perhaps most famously, Hillel and Shamai, two great sages of the first century who headed competing schools of Jewish learning, disagreed about pretty much everything. And that was great, because the foundation of their disagreement was “for the sake of heaven,” which Judaism highly encourages.

But all of that goes out the window when a Jew endangers another Jew. There is no real debate to be had — only rebuke and, in extreme situations, removal from the community. In March 1363, for example, the Jewish community of Tudela, the largest in the Navarre kingdom located in what are now parts of Spain and France, made a resolution that any Jew caught informing against the community was subject to excommunication from all the city’s synagogues for 50 years. Such a person’s presence was simply not tolerated in the city.

Avi Lewis is unlikely to be swallowed up by the earth or officially excommunicated, whatever that might entail, but the story of Korach still offers some metaphorical guidance for a modern-day response to internal threats. Jewish thought does not treat every critic as an enemy. But when the community is endangered from the inside, reasoned debate and private conversations are no longer options. We are left with no choice but to say, “this person does not represent us, they have no connection with us and we will not tolerate being made unsafe, even if it’s by one of our own.” The wellbeing of the community comes first.

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