Let’s say this cleanly, without theatrics or euphemisms: calling Sholom Rubashkin a Jewish hero is not an act of compassion. It is an act of confusion. And confusion, dressed up as loyalty, is one of the most dangerous habits a community can cultivate.
A hero, in Jewish tradition, is not someone who merely suffers. A hero is not someone who draws sympathy. A hero is not someone around whom we rally because the outside world feels hostile. Our mesorah is painfully clear: “Eizehu gibor? Ha’koveish et yitzro” — Who is mighty? One who conquers his impulses.
Not one who becomes a symbol because the system overreached, but one who lives in a way that leaves no need for symbolism in the first place.
Yes, Rubashkin’s sentence was excessive. Yes, the prosecution was aggressive. Yes, there were legitimate questions about proportionality, prosecutorial conduct, and selective outrage. Many people of conscience — Jewish and non-Jewish — recoiled at the spectacle of a man effectively buried alive for white-collar crimes that routinely earn others far less. To protest injustice is Jewish. To demand mercy is Jewish. To mobilize politically for clemency is Jewish. That part of the story deserves respect.
But here is where the communal mind short-circuited: injustice does not transmute a defendant into a tzaddik. An unfair sentence does not retroactively launder behavior. The Torah does not work on a cable-news moral scale where outrage converts flaws into virtues. Two things can be true at once — the system can be cruel, and the man can be culpable.
What happened instead was something far more corrosive. Rubashkin was elevated not despite the controversy, but because of it. He became a vessel for collective grievance. He was turned into proof that “they are against us,” and once that transformation occurred, facts became secondary, nuance became betrayal, and moral accounting became verboten. That is not Judaism; that is tribal reflex.
Judaism does not fear teshuvah — it demands it. If Rubashkin repented, rebuilt, prayed, learned, inspired others in prison — all of that matters deeply. The gates of repentance are never closed. But teshuvah is inward work, not public coronation. Teshuvah restores a person’s relationship with God; it does not automatically entitle him to communal sainthood or historical absolution. Dovid Hamelech repented — and still lived with consequences. Yehuda repented — and still carried shame. Our heroes are great because they are judged honestly, not because we shield them from judgment.
The rush to call Rubashkin a hero teaches our children something dangerous: that communal pain excuses moral shortcuts; that suffering sanctifies; that loyalty means suspending discernment. It teaches that if the outside world is harsh enough, we will abandon our own standards just to spite it. That is not strength. That is insecurity wearing a black hat.
Worse still, this rhetoric hollows out Jewish moral language. When hero means “one of us who was punished,” then hero means nothing. When every cause célèbre becomes a martyr, true martyrs disappear. When every defendant becomes a symbol, justice becomes optional. A people that cheapens its words eventually cheapens its values.
None of this requires cruelty. None of this requires erasing compassion. We can say: the sentence was wrong. We can say: the prosecution was excessive. We can say: mercy was appropriate. And we can say all of that without rewriting reality, without mythologizing a businessman into a moral exemplar, without confusing communal defense with moral endorsement.
Sholom Rubashkin is not the villain the tabloids wanted — and he is not the hero some Jews desperately needed him to be. He is something far more uncomfortable: a mirror. A mirror showing how quickly fear turns into idolatry, how fast injustice morphs into myth, how easily a wounded community trades ethical clarity for emotional solidarity.
If we want heroes, Judaism has an endless supply — people who chose truth over tribe, integrity over convenience, humility over applause. If we want symbols, we will keep manufacturing them out of controversy and outrage.
But if we want Torah — real Torah — we will learn to defend our own fiercely without lying to ourselves about who they are.
REPUBLISHED