This past Wednesday, I met with a reporter from a local newspaper who wanted to get to know me better since I am new to Chattanooga. This was not intended to be an interview. The paper had recently changed ownership, staffing responsibilities had been realigned, and the reporter was getting a feel for a new assignment. The reporter also attended one of our High Holy Day worship services.
We spoke about my background. I shared my deep love for Israel, the two years I lived there, my time as Executive Director of ARZA Canada, and my many visits over the years.
Then, warmly and conversationally, the reporter responded with something to the effect of, “Oh yes, I can see you care deeply about Palestine.”
The choice of the word “Palestine” did not strike me as incidental. I had been speaking specifically about Israel, about my relationship with Israel and about my years of involvement with Israel. Substituting a different word seemed to communicate a perspective without actually inviting a conversation about it.
I chose not to engage.
Not because I was unwilling to defend my convictions. There are moments when speaking forcefully is necessary. There are also moments when the more effective choice is to listen, to observe and to understand the person sitting across from us. If my goal is ultimately to build relationships that make honest conversation possible, I do not have to respond to every provocation in the moment it occurs.
Still, I noticed.
Bias is not always announced loudly. Sometimes it reveals itself quietly, through a word chosen, a word omitted, a fact emphasized or a fact pushed to the margins. Journalism aspires to fairness, accuracy and context, yet journalists, like all of us, bring perspectives and assumptions to the stories they tell. That is precisely why words, context and editorial choices matter so much.
Later that same day, a terrifying event unfolded aboard Flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv. The co-pilot attacked and stabbed the captain, and the aircraft plunged nearly 14,000 feet in less than thirty seconds. Despite his injuries, Captain Smit Machchhar managed to open the cockpit door, allowing passengers and crew to intervene and overpower the attacker. Other pilots traveling aboard the flight then took control of the aircraft and landed it safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. The flight was carrying 174 people, many of them Israelis.
The motive remains under investigation. What does not require speculation is the extraordinary courage displayed aboard that aircraft. A gravely injured captain, crew members, passengers and fellow pilots who acted with remarkable presence of mind and bravery and prevented what might otherwise have been a catastrophe.
How did The New York Times initially describe what had happened?
Its headline read: “Flight to Israel Is Diverted After Pilots Clash in Cockpit.”
My friend and colleague Rabbi Asher Gottesfeld Knight, Senior Rabbi of Temple Beth El in Charlotte, North Carolina, expressed the problem powerfully:
There is a peculiar magic trick that certain news outlets use when talking about attacks against Israelis. A co-pilot allegedly stabs the captain of an airplane. The plane begins to fall out of the sky. Passengers force their way into the cockpit and subdue him. Most of the passengers are Israeli. And at The New York Times, all of this emerges as: “Pilots clash in cockpit.”
A clash.
A remarkable little word. There is no attacker in a clash. No wounded captain. No knife. Two forces simply meet somewhere in the cockpit of a plane, each with roughly equal claim upon the verb. Perhaps the knife clashed with the captain. Perhaps the airplane clashed with gravity.
Sure, one could argue: “We do not yet know the motive. We should be careful about what we do not know.”
Consider what we do know. The co-pilot stabbed the captain and tried to crash a plane of Israelis. The aircraft plunged nearly 14,000 feet. The Israeli passengers broke into the cockpit and restrained him and thankfully the plane landed safely.
More than 170 Israelis were aboard the flight. Does that matter?
This has become painfully familiar in The New York Times and other outlets too. Violence becomes an incident. An attacker becomes a participant. Eventually nobody has done anything but “clashed.” Beneath that lovely, bloodless word, a wounded pilot and more than 170 terrified people wondering whether they are about to die.
Let’s be real.
Words teach people what to notice. They also encourage people to overlook important facts. Not much news in a “clash.”
So yes, let’s talk about motive and learn more about what happened. But treating the identity of more than 170 Israeli passengers as incidental requires its own kind of blindness and is an abdication of basic editorial responsibility. It certainly looks like and feels like a form of complicity in the erasure of the facts.
Earlier that day, a reporter’s choice of the word “Palestine” caught my attention. Hours later, I found myself thinking about the words chosen to describe what happened aboard this flight.
The two situations are not remotely equivalent in gravity.
One was an uncomfortable conversation; the other was an act of violence that endangered the lives of everyone aboard an aircraft. I place them alongside one another only because encountering them on the same day caused me to reflect on a common thread: words are never merely words.
The words we choose reveal something about what we see. The words we omit can determine what others fail to see. A single word can frame an entire story before the story has even been told.
That lesson feels especially resonant as we prepare to celebrate Sh’mini Atzeret and Simchat Torah this weekend.
On Simchat Torah, we reach the final words of Deuteronomy and immediately return to the opening words of Genesis:
“B’reishit bara Elohim – In the beginning, God created…”
What happens next is remarkable. God creates the world through language: “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3)
Again and again, creation unfolds through speech: “And God said…” God speaks and a whole universe unfolds. Extraordinary!
Our tradition begins by teaching us that words have the power to create. Words can illuminate. Words can obscure. Words can reveal truth, and words can distort it. Words can build relationships, and words can destroy them. Words can make visible those whom others would rather render invisible.
The Jewish people calls ourselves Am HaSefer, the People of the Book. That identity carries with it a particular responsibility to take words seriously.
On Simchat Torah, we do something else that I find profoundly meaningful. We reach the end of Torah and immediately begin again. We do not assume that because we have read these words before, we already understand everything they have to teach us. We return to the beginning and read them again, hopefully with different eyes, different life experiences, deeper understanding and a willingness to notice what we may have missed the first time.
That may be an important lesson for all of us.
None of us is free of bias. Not reporters. Not rabbis. Not editors. Not readers. The challenge is not to pretend that we approach the world without assumptions. The challenge is to recognize our assumptions, interrogate them, and refuse to allow them to obscure what is actually before us.
As we roll the Torah back to B’reishit and begin once again, may we listen more carefully to the words we hear. May we choose more carefully the words we speak. May we have the courage to notice when language illuminates truth and when it conceals it.
Because B’reishit reminds us that words do more than describe the world.
Words help create the world in which we live.
May we choose ours wisely.
Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Sharon L. Sobel