Most first-year law students are subjected to this old lawyer joke: “If you think you can think about a thing that is hitched to other things without thinking about the things that it is hitched to, then you have a legal mind.”

It’s a quotation ascribed to early 20th century American legal scholar and poet Thomas Reed Powell, and it is a backhanded compliment at best. After all, what value is there to think about something that is inextricably linked with something else, and yet not think about that other thing? Ordinarily, one would call that myopia, or tunnel vision.

And yet, in many spheres of our lives, we do exactly that. We think about something without thinking about the thing to which it is connected, most often because we are interested in the first thing, and not particularly interested in the second. 

Money generally interests us yet we fail to consider the strings that are attached to that money—and there are always strings. We relate to other people and think about what they can do for us, but not about what motivates them and their interests. The same holds true for organizations, institutions and political movements, including that operate in the Israel space on campus; while we may support an activity or agree with a viewpoint, it is rare to embrace every idea championed by any group.

None of this prevents us from functioning on campus or in the rest of our lives. For example, I recognize that while I enjoy long, grueling bicycle rides in the mountains, the rest of my family (indeed, most of the world) does not, and we can respect that difference: I’ll ride the mountains on my own time, and share other activities with my family. Life is full of such explicit or implicit acknowledgments that there are some things we do together because we share common interests, and there are other things we do separately.

The danger comes when we assume that we know someone else's motivations or interests, or that those motivations and interests are the same as our own. Without exploring those motivations, we may be able to function for a time, but there will inevitably come a moment that exposes the differences. If we haven’t been thoughtful enough to identify the points of divergence in advance, those can be very difficult moments indeed. Usually, they’re punctuated by one of the saddest phrases in human discourse: “You just don’t understand!”

Campus Israel advocacy is challenging enough without creating greater difficulty through lack of understanding. The network of campus Israel supporters is diverse; the campus community, and those to whom we seek to bridge and connect, is even more diverse. Inevitably there will be differences in viewpoint, methodology, and even ideology—and that’s a good thing. A healthy network capitalizes on those differences as strengths to address different challenges, precisely because we operate in an environment of tremendous diversity. 

Effective campus Israel advocates don’t expect every person, or even every organization or institution with whom they interact to share identical views. Instead, by being thoughtful and seeking to understand the motivations of others, we can identify and capitalize on points of common interest, while respecting the inevitable places of divergence. As long as one does not compromise on the common objectives of the network, that approach should yield greater -- not lesser -- results.

It may sound like common sense; tragically, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there are, of necessity, many differences in a networked community. For the lawyers, aspiring lawyers, recovering lawyers and even the non-lawyers in our network who may fall into the trap of the “legal mind,” we need to develop the conscious behavior of seeking to understand the motivations of those with whom we interact. Networks are not membership models. 21st century interaction does not involve an identity of interest that ascribes all the same interests and connections to each member of a network; my Facebook friends are not yours, even if you and I are friends, and even if we share friends in common. In this networked environment, particularly on campus, we naturally must be careful about those with whom we associate; but we need even more to be intentional and respectful of our differences.