On Being "One of The Good Ones"

I Am Feel Uncomfortable When We About Me?

One of the things my most famous twitter thread brought in its wake is a lot of people calling me “one of the good ones”, presumably talking about Orthodox rabbis/teachers and how I have a degree of tolerance that is unusual for that position.

I am honored that people feel that way about me.

I am also a little bit uncomfortable with it.

Why?

Am I using a numbered list to avoid having to put this into an essay format? No, and your tone is shrill and off-putting and I don’t like it.

1. It gives me credit for the bare minimum

There’s an essay by Voltaire on the Jews which is essentially two pages of vicious antisemitism followed by the sentence “still, we shouldn’t burn them”

I don’t feel exactly like I’ve done that, but what I’ve done is a little closer than I’m comfortable with. I haven’t actually advocated for any change in halakha, I haven’t actually done anything innovative, all I have said is that it’s bad when trans kids kill themselves, and that frum LGBTQ people belong at the table when discussing their place in the community. That is all I have done. I know that the bar is extremely low, but I feel very guilty about being seen by people as “one of the good ones”. I am, at best, “one of the polite ones”. We can do better than me.

2. It sets up a trap that I would rather avoid

One thing that I do worry about is that being anointed “one of the good ones” means that people assume your position on a given issue aligns with their own, and are disappointed when it is not. To a certain degree, this is healthy as a form of accountability to your audience, but can become an unhealthy dynamic when it precludes any possibility of an unpopular position. It is, to a certain extent, a trap that makes you unable to draw lines even when you feel they should be drawn. Especially when people are drawn to you because they’ve been told “he’s one of the good ones”, without any sort of qualifier to that about what positions I actually do hold.¹ Part of me quitting twitter was to put some degree of distance between myself and the expectations of followers. I still plan on being accountable, and I do not plan any sort of Rowling-esque heel turn. I just feel that being “one of the good ones” was beginning to create a dynamic I am uncomfortable with.

3. It turns the focus away from people who should be getting more attention

Calling me “one of the good ones” is giving me recognition for having institutional power and not being awful and doing the bare minimum, when there are people without institutional power who are doing the actual work who could use some recognition. I got 35 thousand likes and internet semi-fame for a tweet saying the bare minimum when there are people who are directly affected by these issues who have been doing activism on it their whole lives, and who are also way more interesting than me. Yeah, they’re not Orthodox rabbis, but many of them are just as halakhically observant as I am, it’s just that the Orthodox community bars them entry. I would much rather those people get attention than me. But when I told people who wanted to interview me after that tweet, hey, here’s a list of trans rabbis who are much more interesting than me, no article interviewing anyone on my list was written, far as I know.