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Progress Requires Balance, and Change Must Be Accompanied by Caution
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
Let me introduce you to the Overton Window. It sounds like something out of a spy thriller, but it’s actually a brilliant way to understand how political and social change really happens. Named after Joseph P. Overton, a libertarian late 20th-century political scientist, the Overton Window explains how ideas go from being fringe and crazy to mainstream and acceptable.
Overton worked for the Mackinac Center, a right-wing think tank, and found himself constantly explaining to donors not just what think tanks do, but, more importantly, what they don’t do. Think tanks don’t directly push policies; they shift public opinion.
After hitting brick wall after brick wall, Overton came up with the concept of the “Window of Political Possibilities” to show that ideas have to pass through various stages before they’re ready to become policy, so they can be executed.
Here’s how it works: new, innovative ideas usually start off as “unthinkable,” in other words, way outside what society considers acceptable. If you bring them up in polite society, they’ll be laughed off as ridiculous. But slowly, through debate and exposure, and a little bit of savvy marketing, ideas shift through stages — they go from being unthinkable to being radical, and then acceptable, eventually becoming sensible, and then popular.
And eventually, with a good tailwind, they might even become policy. Once the ideas come in from the cold extremes of unthinkable and radical, they make it into the Overton Window of acceptable, sensible, and popular – the latter being at the very center of the window. That’s the Overton Window in action.
Of course, there’s a catch. When you push boundaries too far and too fast, society breaks down, and chaos ensues. Sometimes, trying to normalize extreme ideas doesn’t lead to progress; it leads to disorder.
History gives us plenty of examples. In the 1930s, radical nationalist ideas in Germany started small but quickly spiraled into the horrors of Nazism, when fringe ideas took over public discourse unchecked.
More recently, we see how efforts to push the boundaries on issues like transgender rights in sports — particularly in allowing biological males to compete in women’s events — have led to backlash and polarized reactions.
What might have been an opportunity for thoughtful dialogue instead ignited cultural conflict, with people on both sides of the debate digging in their heels. When society stretches too far without considering the consequences, it risks creating precisely the kind of disorder the Overton Window warns us about.
And if we look back, this isn’t a new concept. The Torah was already giving us cautionary tales about this thousands of years ago in Parshat Noach, with the stories of Noah’s generation and the Tower of Babel. Both narratives illustrate what happens when a society tries to force destructive ideas into the mainstream without limits. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.
Let’s take Noah’s generation. This was a society that had lost all of its moral bearings. Violence, theft, and immorality became the everyday norm. They had stretched their Overton Window until “unthinkable” and “acceptable” practically swapped places.
What should have been fringe behaviors — theft, cruelty — were so normalized that the entire world was engulfed in corruption. It was as if they had collectively decided that moral boundaries were passé, something they could shrug off without consequence. The Torah describes it succinctly: “the Earth was filled with corruption” (Gen. 6:11). It wasn’t a society living on the edge; they had jumped off the cliff into the abyss.
And what happened? The flood. Total destruction. This wasn’t some random punishment; it was the inevitable result of a society where moral limits had completely evaporated. When the Overton Window stretches to a breaking point, society collapses in on itself.
Noah’s world shows us that without a foundation of shared moral norms, everything falls apart. If everyone does whatever they want, all the boundaries dissolve — and chaos reigns.
Then, we have the story of the Tower of Babel. After the flood, humanity regroups. Instead of learning from past mistakes, they double down on their ambition, deciding to build a tower that reaches the heavens. “Let’s make a name for ourselves,” they say, as if human greatness is something you can just declare into existence.
The Tower of Babel wasn’t just a tall building; it was a symbol of human overreach, an attempt to stretch the Overton Window into a realm where it no longer belonged.
The problem wasn’t their ambition; it was their arrogance. They wanted to control the heavens, to challenge the very order of creation. It’s as if they were saying, “we’ve conquered the Earth — now we’re coming for the Heavens.”
And God’s response? He scrambles their language and scatters them across the world. The project falls apart, and confusion reigns. They pushed too far, and the social fabric tore. Like an Overton Window stretched to fit something it was never meant to contain, their unity fractured into a thousand pieces.
So, what do these stories teach us? That boundaries exist for a reason. Pushing ideas and exploring new territory is all well and good, but not every boundary is meant to be broken. Stability comes from knowing when to say, “Enough.”
In Noah’s time, they ignored that wisdom and were swallowed by their own corruption. In Babel, they dismissed their limits and ended up fractured and scattered. Both stories warn us that when society tries to push extreme ideas into the mainstream, the results can be catastrophic.
It’s easy in today’s world to think that every new idea deserves a place in the public discourse and that every radical notion is progress just waiting to happen. But Parshat Noach reminds us otherwise. Not every fringe idea belongs in the Overton Window, and not every boundary should be blurred. Actual progress requires balance — moral progress without moral decay, ambition without arrogance, change with caution.
The Overton Window is a powerful tool for understanding how change happens, but it also shows us why restraint is essential. The lesson from Noah and Babel? When you push too far, you invite chaos. And sometimes, the wisest thing we can do is remember that some boundaries are there for a reason. Maybe it’s time we start paying attention to them.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills California.
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Israel Declares Start of Gaza Ground Operations, No Progress Seen in Talks
Palestinians inspect the damage at the site of an Israeli strike on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, May 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled
The Israeli military said on Sunday it had begun “extensive ground operations” in northern and southern Gaza, stepping up a new campaign in the enclave.
Israel made its announcement after sources on both sides said there had been no progress in a new round of indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Qatar.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the latest Doha talks included discussions on a truce and hostage deal as well as a proposal to end the war in return for the exile of Hamas militants and the demilitarization of the enclave – terms Hamas has previously rejected.
The substance of the statement was in line with previous declarations from Israel, but the timing, as negotiators meet, offered some prospect of flexibility in Israel’s position. A senior Israeli official said there had been no progress in the talks so far.
Israel’s military said it conducted a preliminary wave of strikes on more than 670 Hamas targets in Gaza over the past week to support its ground operation, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots.”
It said it killed dozens of Hamas fighters. Palestinian health authorities say hundreds of people have been killed including many women and children.
Asked about the Doha talks, a Hamas official told Reuters: “Israel’s position remains unchanged, they want to release the prisoners (hostages) without a commitment to end the war.”
He reiterated that Hamas was proposing releasing all Israeli hostages in return for an end to the war, the pull-out of Israeli troops, an end to a blockade on aid for Gaza, and the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel’s declared goal in Gaza is the elimination of the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas, which attacked Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and seizing about 250 hostages.
The Israeli military campaign has devastated the enclave, pushing nearly all residents from their homes and killing more than 53,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities.
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Pope Leo Urges Unity for Divided Church, Vows Not To Be ‘Autocrat’
Pope Leo XIV waves to the faithful from the popemobile ahead of his inaugural Mass in Saint Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, May 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Alessandro Garofalo
Pope Leo XIV formally began his reign on Sunday by reaching out to conservatives who felt orphaned under his predecessor, calling for unity, vowing to preserve the Catholic Church’s heritage and not rule like “an autocrat.”
After a first ride in the popemobile through an estimated crowd of up to 200,000 in St. Peter’s Square and surrounding streets, Leo was officially installed as the 267th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church at an outdoor Mass.
Well-wishers waved US and Peruvian flags, with people from both countries claiming him as the first pope from their nations. Born in Chicago, the 69-year-old pontiff spent many years as a missionary in Peru and also has Peruvian citizenship.
Robert Prevost, a relative unknown on the world stage who only became a cardinal two years ago, was elected pope on May 8 after a short conclave of cardinals that lasted barely 24 hours.
He succeeded Francis, an Argentine, who died on April 21 after leading the Church for 12 often turbulent years during which he battled with traditionalists and championed the poor and marginalized.
In his sermon, read in fluent Italian, Leo said that as leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, he would continue Francis’ legacy on social issues such as combating poverty and protecting the environment.
He vowed to face up to “the questions, concerns and challenges of today’s world” and, in a nod to conservatives, he promised to preserve “the rich heritage of the Christian faith,” repeatedly calling for unity.
Crowds chanted “Viva il Papa” (Long Live the Pope) and “Papa Leone,” his name in Italian, as he waved from the open-topped popemobile ahead of his inaugural Mass, which was attended by dozens of world leaders.
US Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert who clashed with Francis over the White House’s hardline immigration policies, led a US delegation alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Catholic.
Vance briefly shook hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the start of the ceremony. The two men last met in February in the White House, when they clashed fiercely in front of the world’s media.
Zelensky and Leo were to have a private meeting later on Sunday, while Vance was expected to see the pope on Monday.
In a brief appeal at the end of the Mass, Leo addressed several global conflicts. He said Ukraine was being “martyred,” a phrase often used by Francis, and called for a “just and lasting peace” there.
He also mentioned the humanitarian situation in Gaza, saying people in the Palestinian enclave were being “reduced to starvation.”
Among those in the crowds on Sunday were many pilgrims from the US and Peru.
Dominic Venditti, from Seattle, said he was “extremely excited” by the new pope. “I like how emotional and kind he is,” he said. “I love his background.”
APPEAL FOR UNITY
Since becoming pope, Leo has already signaled some key priorities for his papacy, including a warning about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence and the importance of bringing peace to the world and to the Church itself.
Francis’ papacy left a divided Church, with conservatives accusing him of sowing confusion, particularly with his extemporaneous remarks on issues of sexual morality such as same-sex unions.
Saying he was taking up his mission “with fear and trembling,” Leo used the words “unity” or “united” seven times on Sunday and the word “harmony” four times.
“It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving, as Jesus did,” he said, in apparent reference to a war of words between Catholics who define themselves as conservative or progressive.
Conservatives also accused Francis of ruling in a heavy-handed way and lamented that he belittled their concerns and did not consult widely before making decisions.
Referring to St. Peter, the 1st century Christian apostle from whom popes derive their authority, Leo said: “Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him. On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters, and to walk alongside them.”
Many world leaders attended the ceremony, including the presidents of Israel, Peru and Nigeria, the prime ministers of Italy, Canada and Australia, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
European royals also took their place in the VIP seats near the main altar, including Spanish King Felipe and Queen Letizia.
Leo shook many of their hands at the end of the ceremony, and hugged his brother Louis, who had traveled from Florida.
As part of the ceremony, Leo received two symbolic items: a liturgical vestment known as a pallium, a sash of lambswool representing his role as a shepherd, and the “fisherman’s ring,” recalling St. Peter, who was a fisherman.
The ceremonial gold signet ring is specially cast for each new pope and can be used by Leo to seal documents, although this purpose has fallen out of use in modern times.
It shows St. Peter holding the keys to Heaven and will be broken after his death or resignation.
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The ‘Nakba’ Is Not Our Problem
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators during a protest against Israel to mark the 77th anniversary of the “Nakba” or catastrophe, in Berlin, Germany, May 15, 2025. REUTERS/Axel Schmidt
JNS.org – A smattering of Arabic words has entered the English language in recent years, the direct result of more than a century of conflict between the Zionist movement and Arab regimes determined to prevent the Jews from exercising self-determination in their historic homeland.
These words include fedayeen, which refers to the armed Palestinian factions; intifada, which denotes successive violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel; and naksa, which pertains to the defeat sustained by the Arab armies in their failed bid to destroy Israel during the June 1967 war.
At the top of this list, however, is nakba, the word in Arabic for “disaster” or “catastrophe.” The emergence of the Palestinian refugee question following Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence is now widely described as “The Nakba,” and the term has become a stick wielded by anti-Zionists to beat Israel and, increasingly, Jews outside.
Last Thursday, a date which the U.N. General Assembly has named for an annual “Nakba Day,” workers at a cluster of Jewish-owned businesses in the English city of Manchester arrived at the building housing their offices to find that it had been badly vandalized overnight. The front of the building, located in a neighborhood with a significant Jewish community, was splattered with red paint. An external wall displayed the crudely painted words “Happy Nakba Day.”
The culprits were a group called Palestine Action, a pro-Hamas collective of activists whose sole mission is to intimidate the Jewish community in the United Kingdom in much the same way as Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists did back in the 1930s. Its equivalents in the United States are groups like Within Our Lifetime and Students for Justice in Palestine, who have shown themselves equally enthused when it comes to intimidating Jewish communities by conducting loud, sometimes violent, demonstrations outside synagogues and other communal facilities, all too frequently showering Jews with the kind of abuse that was once the preserve of neo-Nazis. These thugs, cosplaying with keffiyehs instead of swastika armbands, can reasonably be described as the neo-neo-Nazis.
The overarching point here is that ideological constructs like nakba play a key role in enabling the intimidation they practice. It allows them to diminish the historic victimhood of the Jews, born of centuries of stateless disempowerment, with dimwitted formulas equating the nakba with the Nazi Holocaust. It also enables them to camouflage hate speech and hate crimes as human-rights advocacy—a key reason why law enforcement, in the United States as well as in Canada, Australia and most of Europe, has been found sorely wanting when it comes to dealing with the surge of antisemitism globally.
Part of the response needs to be legislative. That means clamping down on both sides of the Atlantic on groups that glorify designated terrorist organizations by preventing them from fundraising; policing their access to social media; and restricting their demonstrations to static events in a specific location with a predetermined limit on attendees, rather than a march that anyone can join, along with an outright ban on any such events in the environs of Jewish community buildings.
These are not independent civil society organizations, as they pretend to be, but rather extensions of terrorist organizations like Hamas and—in the case of Samidoun, another group describing itself as a “solidarity” organization—the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. If we cannot ban them outright, we need to contain them much more effectively. We can start by framing the issue as a national security challenge and worry less about their “freedom of speech.”
But this is also a fight that takes us into the realm of ideas and arguments. We need to stop thinking about the nakba as a Palestinian narrative of pain deserving of empathy by exposing it for what it is—another tool in the arsenal of groups whose goal is to bring about the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.
When it was originally introduced in the late 1940s, the word nakba had nothing to do with the plight of the Palestinian refugees or their dubious claim to be the uninterrupted, indigenous inhabitants of a land seized by dispossessing foreign colonists. Popularized by the late Syrian writer Constantine Zureik in a 1948 book titled The Meaning of Disaster, the nakba described therein was, as the Israeli scholar Shany Mor has crisply pointed out, simply “the failure of the Arabs to defeat the Jews.”
Zureik was agonized by this defeat, calling it “one of the harshest of the trials and tribulations with which the Arabs have been inflicted throughout their long history.” His story is fundamentally a story of national humiliation and wounded pride. Yet there is absolutely no reason why Jews should be remotely troubled by the neurosis it projects. Their defeat was our victory and our liberation, and we should unreservedly rejoice in that fact.
The only aspect of the nakba that we should worry about is the impact it has on us as a community, as well as on the status of Israel as a sovereign member of the international society of states. As Mizrahi Jews know well (my own family among them), the nakba assembled in Zureik’s imagination really was a “catastrophe”— for us. Resoundingly defeated on the battlefield by the superior courage and tactical nous of the nascent Israeli Defense Forces, the Arabs compensated by turning on the defenseless Jews in their midst. From Libya to Iraq, ancient and established Jewish communities were the victims of a cowardly, spiteful policy of expropriation, mob violence and expulsion.
The inheritors of that policy are the various groups that compose the Palestinian solidarity movement today. Apoplectic at the realization that they have been unable to dislodge the “Zionists”—and knowing now that the main consequence of the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom in Israel has been the destruction of Gaza—they, too, have turned on the Jews in their midst.
They have done so with one major advantage that the original neo-Nazis never had: sympathy and endorsement from academics, celebrities, politicians and even the United Nations. Indeed, the world body hosted a two-day seminar on “Ending the Nakba” at its New York headquarters at the same time that pro-Hamas fanatics were causing havoc just a few blocks downtown. Even so, we should take heart at the knowledge that nakba is not so much a symbol of resistance as it is defeat. Just as the rejectionists and eliminationists have lost previous wars through a combination of political stupidity, diplomatic ineptitude and military flimsiness, so, too, can they lose this one.
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