Guided by the Haggadah, or Passover text—one of the most popular Jewish books ever written—Seder participants are led along in a series of prayers, texts, and activities. We talk and talk and talk about the miracle of liberation; we parse the details of its unfolding, enumerating the many miracles involved; we go over whether we are supposed to commemorate the blessing of freedom only in this life or also in the next one; we assert in words and song the gratitude we feel for being the lucky descendants of those who escaped from slavery.

One thing we do not generally discuss, however, are the Jews who didn’t leave.

“Now when Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although it was nearer; for God said, ‘The people may have a change of heart when they see war, and return to Egypt,’” states Exodus 13:17. But it is in the next sentence that a mystery emerges: “So God led the people round about, by way of the wilderness at the Sea of Reeds. Now the Israelites went up chamushim out of the land of Egypt.”

Wait—what? The Jews went out of Egypt how? What does “chamushim” mean? It is generally translated as “armed,” but nearly all commentaries note that its definition is, in fact, uncertain.

Into this breach arrives the legendary medieval Torah commentator Rashi, with a startling assertion. After acknowledging the “armed” option, Rashi offers, with casual sangfroid, another idea: That “chamushim” relates to the Hebrew word for five, and the text should be understood to be saying that only one-fifth of the Jewish people chose to leave Egypt.

What happened to those who stayed? Nothing good. “There were among Israel of that generation wicked individuals who did not wish to depart Egypt and they died during the three days of gloom,” Rashi continues.

Rashi’s contemporary, Ibn Ezra, was positively outraged by this interpretation, calling it “a sick evil.” But Shemot Rabbah finds Rashi’s explanation perfectly reasonable, and even adds to it: “There were sinners among the Jews who had Egyptian patrons, and they had wealth and honor there, [so] they didn’t want to leave.” In other words, they liked the good life in Egypt.

This, of course, flies in the face of what is commonly understood to be the definition of slavery. Jews who stayed behind were not inexplicably choosing a life of torture; they simply did not want to give up on the comforts of the life they knew. In the later words of Rav Yehuda Henkin, they were “disinclined to trade flesh-pots for freedom.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about these Jews lately.

I think about them when people refuse to accept that beloved blue-chip organizations—the ACLU, the ADL, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International—no longer fight for their own founding values.

I think about them when I talk to people who straight-facedly cite The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or other formerly great outlets as authoritative sources of news.

I think about them when friends text me openly antisemitic Instagram posts from artists they admire, or internal threads from storied museums in which Jews or Israel or America are maligned as evil, asking how they can “educate” these people.

I think about them when I meet people who can’t imagine—literally cannot make their brains consider—their child (or mine!) not going to a prestigious American college or university.

I thought about them when I watched as Ukrainian flags went up in a matter of hours in all of my friends’ social media profiles, the latest in a collection of pins for our lapels—the parentheses around Jewish names, #MeToo, #TimesUp, #BLM, #TransRightsAreHumanRights, #MaskUp, and more.

I think of them when I see people’s language change on a dime, and in lockstep: systemic racism, gaslighting, victim-blaming, platforming, deplatforming. And when I see people with previously solid moral compasses lose their footing in the face of this or that hysteria du jour—suddenly incapable of saying clearly “this is wrong” (or “this isn’t wrong”), regardless of how emotionally it is positioned by a collectivist swarm.

I think about these people, about the moral imagination needed to take risks, to leave old worlds and build new ones; about the confidence required to believe that it is you who makes a given institution or cause or idea legitimate and special, and not the other way around; about the bravery and faith needed to withstand the loneliness of the desert of outsiderness before getting to the Israel of a new life. I think about all of this, and suddenly Rashi’s insight becomes less mysterious.

In 2017, I was one of the few among my friends who didn’t attend the Women’s March. I recognized the legitimacy and even urgency of the cause, but I had concerns about the movement and its leaders. When I asked questions or noted inconsistencies, clear answers were never forthcoming. Instead, my impulse to examine and weigh evidence was suddenly considered suspect. I was sneered at, if not openly attacked: Was I against empowering women? Against the elevation of women of color? In favor of rape?

Once the answers were finally uncovered—showing the march to have been mired in financial mismanagement, to say nothing of the antisemitism espoused by its founders—some of the same people who questioned my allegiance to my own sex, or my politics, or whatever else they suspected, confessed to being shocked that they were putting money in Louis Farrakhan’s pockets while funding an organization that badly damaged the cause they meant to support.

In the summer of 2020, Jewish groups tripped over each other to issue press releases supporting Black Lives Matter—the movement, not the idea. Every Jew of goodwill agreed that nothing could be more important than adopting this slogan wholesale, painting it on walls, adding it to websites, stamping it on children’s clothing, putting it on lawn signs and, of course, writing out large checks from personal and communal accounts, immediately. The fact that the checks hadn’t been written yesterday, or years ago, was already a scandal.

When well-meaning people inside of communal life asked whether those Jewish leaders knew anything about the organization that would be cashing these checks, the questioners were reflexively branded as racist enemies of progress. I believe that many of the people who said these things sincerely felt, in the moment, like they were on the right side of history, and that those asking questions were not. But now that the truth has come to light—with one BLM organizer holding forth about how charity transparency laws make her feel unsafe—I wonder if they will ever be granted apologies.

When Tablet defended the Satmar community’s response to draconian COVID policies, including their insistence on sending their children to school or their commonsense inquiry into why one would close playgrounds—forcing people to stay indoors, often in close quarters, during an airborne pandemic—our writers were called medieval science-deniers. When people asked questions about mask mandates and vaccine passports, they were smeared as anti-vaxxers and right-wingers—even when they were obviously nothing of the sort.

In an age of uncertainty, it feels good to cast the habit of questioning aside and embrace the idea that the cautious weighing of evidence is unnecessary. Your side walks in light. The other side dwells in darkness. And indeed, there is nothing wrong with fighting racism, wherever you find it. Fighting for equal rights for people of any gender, orientation, or sexual preference is good. Promoting public policies that bring safety and security, and clear air and clean water, and needed medicine and economic opportunity to more people is a noble aim. Protecting the environment is also good. There is nothing wrong with opposing Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

What is wrong, as I now see it, is that none of this activism results in making anyone’s lives better. The Women’s March collapsed under the weight of the very sorts of problems raised by its few early skeptics. Time’s Up has been mired in one scandal after another. Barely a year and a half after garnering an Emmy, a $5 million book deal, and an army of “Cuomosexual” fans online, the former governor of New York left office in disgrace. According to New York Magazine’s Sean Campbell, Black Lives Matter spent $6 million on a mansion for its leaders. The word “science” was used to shame those who wouldn’t fall in line and boost the profit margins of large pharmaceutical companies that had been, barely minutes before, justly infamous for lying to the public and profiteering off of illnesses that they often did little to heal—and even, as in the case of America’s recent opioid epidemic, caused.

The public campaigns that utilize these virtuous slogans on social media are political tools, wielded by people who are interested in corralling the public toward a variety of unrelated ends—including their own self-enrichment. If you’re wondering whether or not your favored cause is a radical effort to help those who are genuinely in need or powerless, there’s an easy way to find out: