Rabbi Dr. Sharon Shalom, the founder and director of the International Center for the Study of Ethiopian Jewry at Ono Academic College, recently wrote an article in the “Shabbaton” newspaper, entitled “Between Identification and Identity: On Pain, Interpretation, and Responsibility.”

In this piece, Rabbi Shalom begins with two painful, real-life encounters that raise the same deep question from opposite directions. In one case, a mother hears that her daughter was called a racial slur at school—an insult that wounds both child and parent and immediately demands a practical response. In the other, a yeshiva student shares a quieter but equally profound struggle: while the biblical term “Kushi (Nubian/Ethiopian)” is not inherently negative, he has encountered rabbinic passages that seem to portray “the black person” as an “other,” and he asks how he is supposed to understand those texts without feeling that they define him.

Rabbi Shalom frames both stories as a single human confusion: the collapse of *identification* into *identity*. Identification is what the eye (and the mind) grabs quickly—skin color, surname, accent, clothing. Identity is what lives beneath the surface—character, values, life story, and the person’s spiritual and human “DNA.” Much of social pain, he suggests, comes from treating external labels as if they were inner truths.

From this distinction he draws guidance that is both emotional and educational. Before escalating an incident at school, he argues, parents should first build a home conversation that strengthens a child’s inner self-knowledge: she is not defined by a word, a color, or a tag. Confidence grows when a person learns to “identify” themselves from within, rather than living as a reaction to how others identify them.

The same principle, Rabbi Shalom writes, applies to the yeshiva student’s difficulty with troubling texts. Here, the responsibility is intellectual and interpretive: to learn carefully, with historical awareness and humility, and to distinguish between literal description and the rabbinic use of metaphor, symbol, cultural context, or broader moral critique. Not every sharp-sounding phrase is a timeless ruling about human worth. The conclusion he insists on is simple and firm: skin color is an external identification, not an identity.

Rabbi Shalom broadens the lens to show how common this confusion is across society. People often “attach” themselves to identities that do not fully match their story—Israeli Arabs may identify emotionally with Gaza; Ethiopian teens once identified with African American struggles despite different historical realities; scholars at academic gatherings sometimes speak as if “the Black problem” were universal. He adds everyday examples of stereotype-thinking: a person who slightly changes the spelling of a surname and suddenly finds doors opening, or casual jokes and comments that quietly assume appearance carries meaning.

To explain why this happens, he invokes Daniel Kahneman’s model of two systems of thinking: the fast, intuitive, stereotype-prone mind versus the slower, reflective mind that checks and analyzes. The moral danger, he argues, is letting the fast system decide questions that require depth. Skin color, he says, is like height or wearing glasses—something visible, but not inherently tied to worth, quality, or value.

He then turns to Torah as a counter-education: Sinai was a meeting of souls, not a celebration of externals. He recounts a moving story from an Ashkenazi synagogue community founded by Holocaust survivors. When asked how they came to accept an Ethiopian rabbi, their answer was: “We don’t know an Ethiopian. We know Rabbi Shalom.” For Rabbi Shalom, this does not erase origin; it places the person before the label.

Finally, he notes that Israeli society—imperfectly, unevenly—can move from separation to encounter. He points to rising rates of inter-group marriage (between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, and between Ethiopians and other groups) as evidence that categories are not destiny. The world will remain complex, and people will often “identify” before they truly know. But our personal responsibility is clear: teach ourselves and our children to separate appearance from essence, and to measure a person by actions, character, and values rather than by skin color or surname. When a person truly knows who they are, the external label loses its power—and the question shifts from “How do they see me?” to “Who am I, really?”

The original article in Hebrew can be read here: https://shabaton1.co.il/?p=45628