Chevruta for the Common Good: What I Learned Arguing with Mark Oppenheimer

Chevruta for the Common Good: What I Learned Arguing with Mark Oppenheimer

If there’s a single moment from my conversation with journalist and scholar Mark Oppenheimer that lingers, it is the sense that, for him, disagreement isn’t a symptom of crisis or a problem to be solved. In the Jewish tradition that shaped him—and in which he’s become both a voice and, to some, an irritant—argument is a sacred obligation. It’s the rhythm of the chevruta study partner; the way in which synagogue, kitchen table, and city council all grow a little sharper and, paradoxically, a little closer through the clash.

Mark—a master interviewer, detail-keeper, and prober of the American soul—embodies this in both his writing and his life. As I sat with him, it became clear: where many traditions (including aspects of my own) still parse out heresy from orthodoxy, member from outsider, Judaism revels in the relentless tension of the argument not yet finished.

What follows is a brief “casebook” of our differences—on privilege, philanthropy, politics, and the limits of faith. But above all, it is a grateful celebration of what can happen when argument is cherished not as a threat, but as a bond.

1. Privilege (and the Many Ways to Count It)

Mark’s stories of Springfield—of being privileged but not quite “privileged privileged”—and his nuanced view on class, race, and inheritance poked gently at a recent undertow in my own writing. Coming from a far rougher upbringing (for those who haven’t heard: childhood kidnapping, trans-Atlantic separation, a tent for a senior-year home), I sometimes bristle at blanket claims about “privilege,” especially when rendered in partisan memes.

Mark, for his part, avoids self-loathing or triumphalism: privilege is real, he says, but it comes in more “fascinating vectors” than just wealth or whiteness, and—and this is key—being reflective about it shouldn’t mean being paralyzed by it. He names his advantages and his “gifts” (like a temperament that wakes up happy), but he also insists that everyone walks “a gauntlet of difference.” Importantly, he made me see how my own wrestling is not unique, but the norm for any honest accounting. In the world of Jewish argument, your perspective isn’t threatened—just expected to show up prepared.

2. Philanthropy: Noblesse Oblige, Branding, and the Strange Case of the Living Billionaire

Mark’s critique of modern elite giving hit home: The old money, he says, “atoned” through public gifts—libraries, parks, tools for the whole community. Today’s billionaires, by contrast, brand their giving, sometimes magnanimously, often performatively, and rarely with the Carnegie-style aim of widening the circle of civic belonging.

Anticipating the charge that wealth concentration and “scale” have changed since Carnegie’s day, I tried to defend the new class: Isn’t it simply a different world, a more massive economy, more gigantic needs? But Mark caught me flatfooted. He was right. In actual dollars and relative terms, the wealth amassed by today’s tech titans dwarfs that of earlier eras. If anything, they could bless more towns, more parks, more libraries—yet for the most part, they haven’t.

What only struck me upon reflection is this: nearly all the billionaires who dominate our headlines—Bezos, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg—are still alive. The Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Melons? Dead, their names affixed to wings and parks only after their stories were over. Perhaps that’s the difference. The legends of old philanthropy were written posthumously, by descendants and communities reaping the fruit. Today’s ultra-wealthy are living in real time, their fortunes still growing, their own internal battles between self-preservation and legacy unresolved.

So maybe what I was reaching for, awkwardly, with my “scale” idea was this: the reckoning—giving, legacy, that final page—often requires distance, even death. You can’t build your own monument while your story’s still unfolding. Mark’s rebuttal remains true—but so does this: the unfinished lives of today’s richest may yet surprise us, for ill or for good, when the final chapter closes.

What I learned here was not to pine for a romantic past or to sneer at new strategies of impact. Rather, Mark’s unsparing argument reminded me of the importance of visible public responsibility—whatever the moment of reckoning or the speed of wealth. Argument may never resolve whether the “best” gift is a library or a climate-tech nonprofit, but it ought to keep us from both complacency and cynicism.

3. Politics as Meaning-Maker (and Its Limits)

One of the best parts of this meandering hour was digging into the question of “team politics.” Both Mark and I see how America’s obsession with identity has shifted from little league, church, or Elks Club to voting precincts and cable news. But his take—quieter, even skeptical—pulled me up short: “We are overinvested in politics now.” The pull to make politics carry existential weight has weakened not just our civic center, but our neighborliness.

Here our traditions diverge and overlap. In my Christian background, I am wary of politics as idol—“serving” left or right in place of seeking reconciliation. For Mark, it is less about idolatry and more about misplaced curiosity: let politics serve policy, let argument form relationships, but let ultimate meaning flow elsewhere—kin, community, faith, or even the love of a baseball box score.

4. Reason, Faith, and the Spheres of Knowledge

Jewish life, in Mark’s view, is not a practice of supernaturally resolving transportation budgets or climate threats. If God’s command is to “dress and keep the garden,” the actual know-how belongs to the magisterium of science, data, expertise—not, as he put it bluntly, “the scriptural toolbox.” Faith can motivate—but then must get out of the way of true expertise.

This brought me up short: I do often entwine my spiritual convictions with how I see public issues. For climate or justice, I look to Genesis and prophetic tradition not simply for poetry but for a directional nudge—a reminder of values and the high calling of stewardship. Mark’s argument reminded me why humility (a virtue celebrated in both our faiths) is needed on both fronts: scientists and believers alike must accept the limits of both inspiration and empiricism.

5. The Sacred Obligation to Argue

What I most admired in Mark—what, indeed, I want more American Christians (and citizens generally) to learn from—was not an answer but a method. The Talmudic habit of chevruta, of “turning the text” and returning with new angles, transcends the clickbait outrage of the day. Jews, he reminded us, often struggle passionately over the sacred—sometimes exiling, rarely excommunicating; never making “unJews.” We could use more of that capacity: passionate, identity-affirming, honest, and just irrepressibly curious.

Mark’s career, from Unorthodox to Arc Magazine, is a living argument for taking nothing for granted: not privilege, not consensus, not even the boundaries of faith and reason. Where I sometimes rush for closure or synthesis, he prefers (and has taught me to welcome) further friendly mischief—one more probe, one more page, one more respectful disagreement.

Closing: Sacred Clash, Shared Table, and the Unfinished Lives of Giants

Our world will not mend its divides by suppressing argument or flattening disagreement. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote, “The shining spark of truth cometh forth only after the clash of differing opinions.” What Mark Oppenheimer showed me is that, for the argument to be sacred, it must not destroy relationship but deepen it; not end in shunning, but in a bigger table—one that can welcome all comers and their inconvenient questions.

And perhaps the same is true not just for communities or faiths, but for lives and legacies on a grander scale. The richest, most public stewards of our age are all still at the table—their record, their monuments, even their failures, unfinished. The reckoning, as with any honest argument, is seldom written in real time. Sometimes we simply need the patience to keep “turning the text,” waiting for the last word to come not from certainty, but from the open clash, the honest reckoning, the story’s true end.

If you, like me, hunger for more than slogans—for the genuine, uneven clash that births not just policy, but humanity—may you find in these habits of “argument as sacred obligation” a model for your own practice, at church and work and in your own restless heart.

You are created in the image of God. And God loves His creation.

—with gratitude for honest sparring,
Wade

If this conversation nudged you, delighted you, or even made you argue back, leave your own hard question or reflection below. And, as always, keep the table open—the next guest may surprise us all.