Jeffrey Herbst is president and chief executive of the Newseum. He is a member of the Adas Israel Congregation in the District.

President Barack Obama established a tradition of having a conference call with thousands of rabbis around the time of the Jewish High Holidays to consult with them and convey his best wishes. But that tradition is under peril: Four organizations representing rabbis in the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements announced Wednesday that they will not participate in this year’s call with President Trump.

They cite Trump’s reactions to violence in Charlottesville for their decision, describing the president’s statements on the incident as “so lacking in moral leadership and empathy for the victims of racial and religious hatred.”

The rabbis are right to be outraged by the president’s statements, not least because the neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville made anti-Semitic chants so prominent at the incident. But the rabbis are wrong not to talk with the president, especially in this season of repentance and introspection.

We Americans engage with people we find abhorrent all the time, and rabbis encourage us to do so. I do not know of many religious leaders in these dominations who would counsel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to negotiate with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, despite the incessant incitement by the Palestinian leadership to kill Jews in Israel and the large payments they make to families of terrorists who succeed in their vile deeds. Similarly, few among this group urged Obama not to negotiate with the Iranian leadership about nuclear proliferation, despite the long-standing commitment of Tehran to the physical destruction of the Jewish state.

The conference call would have been an excellent opportunity for the rabbis to explain to Trump their correct belief that “responsibility for the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, including the death of Heather Heyer, does not lie with many sides but with one side.” Jews are repeatedly told that we are obligated to “speak truth to power.” Refusing to take a call is the very opposite: It may make the appearance of seizing the moral high ground, but it does not contribute to the difficult conversations that might lead to change.

If a conversation failed to alter Trump’s attitudes and behavior, it is always possible to consider refraining from participation in the conference call next year. Now, it will be very hard to reestablish this useful tradition.

Far be it for me to instruct the rabbis about our traditions. But it seems that the Exodus story, in which God repeatedly tells Moses to talk to Pharaoh about letting his people go despite Moses’s deep skepticism that anything will come of it, is an important message about the real and symbolic importance of engagement.

In recent times, there are few more notable moments of speaking truth to power than Elie Wiesel’s confrontation with President Ronald Reagan in 1985. Wiesel had come to the White House to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, but in a dramatic moment during the ceremony, he criticized Reagan for his scheduled visit later that year at a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where Nazi stormtroopers were buried. Wiesel could have avoided the controversy altogether and boycotted the event. But had he done so, we would not be celebrating his moment of courage today.

More generally, the decision not to talk with the president reflects an increasing tendency in our society to refuse to participate in civic discourse and instead simply boycott and condemn. There is no reason to believe that these actions, however dramatic in the short-term, will help improve our democratic discourse, which is so lacking in the empathy and peace that the rabbis rightly demand. Only engagement, however painful, will change minds.