2 Jews, 3 Opinions, 11 People on Mute

A manager friend of mine was on a Zoom call with his team, walking them through the new project plan. When he got to the end he said, “This is just my opinion. What does everyone else think?” Crickets. A grid of faces, a few of them nodding, nobody unmuting. He waited. Then he moved on.

He told me about it afterward, and what struck me was how baffled he was. He asks his team for feedback constantly. He wants them to tell him he’s wrong. He wants an argument. What he gets is silence, or a nod, or “makes sense,” and he cannot understand why. He isn’t asking for politeness. He is asking for a fight, and nobody will give him one.

He’s an Orthodox Jew, and I think he’s running on an ideal he has probably never had to put into words, because it was in the water he grew up in. Jews don’t study alone. They study in pairs. The partner is called a chevruta, and the whole point of a chevruta is that they argue with you. There’s a practice called Daf Yomi where you read a page of Talmud a day, the same page every other person doing it is reading that day, and at 2,711 pages it takes seven and a half years to get to the end. A lot of people do it with a chevruta, which means signing up for seven and a half years of someone telling you you’re wrong.

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, gave a sermon on Yom Kippur in 2021 called “The Third Opinion: Why Jews Value Dissent.” It starts with the old joke. Two Jews, three opinions. She says the line always puzzled her. If the point is that Jews disagree, two Jews and two opinions would cover it. Where does the third one come from?

Her answer comes from the Talmud’s most famous study pair. Rabbi Yochanan was the head of the academy. Resh Lakish was a former bandit with no formal training who turned out to be brilliant. The two of them would go back and forth on every point “until the matter became clear to both of them.” That, Buchdahl says, is the third opinion. It’s the one neither of them walked in with.

Then Resh Lakish dies, and the community finds Yochanan a new partner, a gifted scholar who, every time Yochanan makes an argument, produces a text that supports it. Within days Yochanan is miserable. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him he’s right. He already thinks he’s right. He wanted someone who would raise twenty-four objections to everything he said, and now there is no one, and the story ends with him losing his mind and dying of grief.

Buchdahl’s larger point, and the one I keep turning over, is that this was a choice. In 325 the Council of Nicaea produced a creed, a single statement of what a Christian believes. The Talmud was being assembled in the same era and did the opposite. It records the minority opinion next to the majority. It answers questions with more questions. Later rabbis wrote their arguments into the margins, so that today you can disagree with someone across centuries. One tradition hands down what to believe. The other hands down how to arrive at a belief. That contrast is hers, and it’s the engine of the whole sermon.

Reading it, I found myself nodding along, and that is the trap. Of course you want a study partner who tells you you’re wrong. Of course the best answer is the one neither of you brought into the room. It’s obvious.

But it’s obvious to us. I work in an intensely multicultural place, and on any given call there are people who were taught the opposite and taught it as a virtue. It’s tempting to explain that with one idea, how seriously a culture takes rank. Erin Meyer, who teaches at INSEAD and wrote a book called “The Culture Map,” argues that’s really two separate dials. One is deference, how much respect you show authority. The other is argument, how comfortable you are with an open fight, and the two don’t move together. Japan and China are high on deference and low on argument, which is the combination people expect. France is high on both, which is why a French meeting can be rigidly hierarchical and still a brawl. Israel and the Netherlands are low on deference and high on argument, which is the room my friend thinks he’s in.

So the ideal he’s running on, the one about arguing until the matter becomes clear to both of you, needs both dials turned all the way up, and he has no idea he’s asking for either one. When he says “this is just my opinion” he thinks he has opened a door. Someone raised in Tokyo hears a senior person state a position and then invite the team to agree with it, which is what those words have always meant where she comes from, and she gives him what respect requires. She isn’t withholding. She is doing the right thing, exactly as she was taught it.

My friend has been handed the study partner who agrees with everything, and he’s the only one on the call who knows how that story ends.

Notes

Note 1: While writing this, Claude couldn’t help but point out that Buchdahl’s sermon names the study partner as Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, and the Yochanan in the Resh Lakish story is a later rabbi, Yochanan bar Nappaha.

Note 2: I spent years at AWS, where this whole idea is company policy. One of Amazon’s leadership principles is “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit,” and it says leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when that’s uncomfortable, and that they don’t go along with something to keep the peace. Then once the call is made, everyone commits. Which is more or less what the Talmud does. Record the dissent, follow the ruling.