Democracy and Its Alternative

What a firestorm of criticism Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu set off last week with his announcement that the Otzma Yehudit (literally “Jewish Power”) party will be part of Israel’s next government, assuming he needs to form a coalition to govern if he is re-elected as Prime Minister on April 9! (The actual situation is slightly more complicated than that, however: what the PM actually did was to agree to include the so-called Union of the Right in his new government should he be elected and need to form a coalition to govern without caring—or at least without apparently caring—that the Union of the Right now includes under its right-wing umbrella the radical-right Otzma Yehudit party, under the leadership of Michael Ben-Ari and Itamar Ben-Gvir, as well the (slightly) less extreme Jewish Home party under the leadership of Naftali Bennett and the Tekuma party under the leadership of Betzalel Smotrich.) On the surface, this was business as usual: governments in parliamentary democracies, and particularly in Israel, form coalitions to govern all the time. But it was the specific decision to open the door to the possibility of Otzma Yehudit being part of a new government that served as the catalyst for the firestorm mentioned above: widely condemned as ultra-nationalist, anti-Arab, and unacceptably extremist, the party openly identifies with the philosophy of the later Meir Kahane, whose 1980 murder at age 58 in the Marriott East Side hotel on Lexington Avenue many readers will recall easily.

The responses were, to say the least, forceful. The Rabbinical Assembly, my own professional organization, joined with another dozen organizations (including my alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary) in issuing the following statement:

The Conservative/Masorti Movement condemns the decision to include Otzma Yehudit, a racist Israeli political party with roots in the extremist ideology of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and his Kach party, in a list that might be a legitimate coalition member after the elections. For decades, this movement has been widely recognized in Israel and throughout the United States as dangerously radical, including the Kach party being designated by the U.S. Department of State as a terrorist organization since 1997. Otzma Yehudit should not be further legitimized in any sense and we hope and pray that the party returns to a place of irrelevance.

Condemnation to irrelevance doesn’t strike me as being all that biting a curse and, indeed, other reactions were far more strongly put. Rabbi Benny Lau, for example, likened Israelis supporting Otzma Yehudit in 2019 to Germans in the 1930’s supporting the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws. (Lau is the spiritual leader of the Ramban Synagogue in Jerusalem and the head of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Human Rights and Judaism program.) Nor was this mere hyperbole: in context, Lau made it clear that he was of the opinion that the most bizarre Kahanist proposals—making sex between Jews and non-Jews a criminal offense and revoking the Israeli citizenship of Arab Israelis—were in his mind no less racist and shameful than the Nazi laws of 1935 that criminalized sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans and revoked the citizenship of Jews living in Germany, reducing them to the class of “state subjects” without any of the rights of privileges of citizenship. The Otzma Yehudit people did not take this analogy kindly, I hardly have to add, and are currently demanding NIS 100,000 (about $27,500) in damages from Rabbi Lau and are demanding a public apology if they are not to proceed with plans to sue the rabbi in court for defamation.

Even an organization like AIPAC that tries always to remain outside of inner-Israeli political disputes and works simply to lobby members of Congress on behalf of the State of Israel itself, decried Netanyahu’s decision not to exclude Otzma Yehudit categorically, labelling the latter’s policies “reprehensible” and vowing—slightly amazingly, given who they are and what they do—to have no contact at all with any Otzma Yehudit leader even if they somehow do become part of the next Israeli government. This was the first time in AIPAC’s sixty-eight-year history that the organization spoke out in this particular way.

I could quote more and more angry voices, but I would like to turn to a different, thornier issue today in this space, one that I raised tentatively from the bimah at Shelter Rock last week and would like to consider in more detail here.

I imagine all my readers feel as fully devoted to the concept of democracy as I myself do, and so accept as self-evident the inalienable right of nations to self-govern according to their own lights and in whatever way they feel accords best with their own national interests. That is hardly a radical position to take, and yet it leaves unaddressed a deep, nagging flaw in the larger picture: the one that presents itself when a nation democratically embraces reprehensibly prejudiced, immoral, violent, or racist policies. Do we still insist that every nation has the right to self-govern, thus to decide what that nation’s policies should be and how to apply them? It sounds like such a bread-and-butter issue, signing onto the notion that nations that vote freely and fairly on a national course forward have no obligation to justify that course other than with reference to the referendum that set it as national policy. But is that really what we think when that course forward is wholly out of sync with the values we presume to inhere in the concept of democracy itself? In other words, how should people who profess to believe in the democratic ideal relate to nations that embrace policies we find, to use AIPAC’s own word, reprehensible?

Since Rabbi Lau mentioned the Nuremberg laws in remarks he may well end up being sued in court for having uttered aloud, I should point out in this regard that historians do not believe the German elections of 1932 to have been rigged. Paul von Hindenburg, running as an independent, won 53% of the votes in the second round of voting on April 10 of that year; the Nazis came in second with 36.8%. According to the rules in place at the time, then, Hindenberg assumed the presidency and, on January 30, 1933, duly appointed Hitler as chancellor. Then, when von Hindenburg unexpectedly died on August 2 of the following year, Hitler simply succeeded him as head of state. There was no coup d’état, no popular uprising, no putsch. The Nazis won the largest plurality of the vote. (Hindenberg ran as an independent.) The rules were followed. The Nazis came to power…but do we proponents of the democratic ideal have therefore to concede that they had the right to enact the Nuremberg laws, which were, after all, voted into law by the democratically-elected majority party in the Reichstag? Surely, no normal person would say such a thing seriously. But how do we respond when democracy goes agley and reprehensible people who pursue scurrilous agendas are legitimately elected to office? That’s the question that, in my opinion, underlies the whole brouhaha surrounding Otzma Yehudit.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to the announcement that members of Otzma Yehudit were possibly going to be part of a new Netanyahu government this spring with reference to the nature of democratic choice-making. “We’re not going to get involved in an election, to interfere in the election of a democracy,” he said. And then he went on to note that American policy is going to be “to let the Israeli people to sort this out,” i.e., without Americans playing any sort of role at all. (If I wanted to be provocative, I would add, “…just as our nation also didn’t after the Nazis came to power, Germany being a democracy and all.”) And that, I think, goes directly to the heart of the matter and begs the question I’ve been pondering all week: whether we should feel obliged to leave other democracies to pursue their own paths forward in life because the notion of democracy itself implies accepting the will of the majority, or whether we should speak out forcefully when people who appear to be uncommitted to the democratic ideal seem poised to come into positions of power democratically?

I was influenced in my thinking in this regard by the work of Larry Diamond, a professor of sociology at Stanford, and particularly by his 2015 book In Search of Democracy, in which he analyzes the reasons that democracies thrive or fail to thrive. It’s a big book filled with interesting ideas, but the one I’d like to highlight here has to do with the author’s theory that the democracies that survive and thrive are the ones in which the basic principle of majority rule is tempered by three foundational ideas that inhere in the national culture so deeply that they simply cannot be ignored or sidestepped: the right of all citizens to participate in civic life and in politics, a devotion to human rights so deeply engrained in the national ethos that the legislation that enshrines those rights in law merely grants legal status to ideas that are universally accepted both by the governors and the governed, and the invariable application of all laws to all citizens regardless of status, wealth, gender, cultural or ethnic background, etc.  In other words, democracies that turn their back on human rights actually do lose the right to chart their own course forward without the interference of others. And, more to the point, it is not only permitted but requisite to interfere in the affairs of other nations when its elected officials—including those fairly elected in unrigged elections—justify human rights abuses of any sort…and particularly when they justify them with reference to their status as legitimately elected officials.

If Otzma Yehudit wishes to turn Israel into an ultra-conservative, Iran-style theocracy in which the rights of the individual are not considered sacrosanct, then it also stands for the end of democracy in the Jewish state. If that is not something all full-throated and unconflicted supporters of Israel can legitimately and unambiguously oppose, then what exactly would be?

When "Sorry" Isn't Enough

Like all of us, I suppose, I was surprised and more than just slightly taken aback by the revelation that the sitting governor of Virginia, a man known for his liberality and his commitment to civil rights, once placed a photograph of someone in blackface and someone else dressed up in a Ku Klux Klan outfit on his page in the Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook of 1984. Was either person in the photograph himself? He’s been oddly equivocal in answering what is in essence a simple enough question, but it hardly matters at this point—the bottom line was that he himself chose to place that picture on that page, which means that he either thought at the time that the photograph was funny enough to warrant permanent memorialization in that space or, even more disconcertingly, that it was in some way suggestive enough of who he was and/or what he stood for to make it reasonable for people looking back years later to remember him by looking at it.  As many have lately noted, it was a long time ago. But not that long! (The 1680s were a long time ago. The 1980s, not so much.) But the question isn’t really how long ago 1984 was, but whether the man who chose to adorn his yearbook page with racist images should be the governor of an American state now in the present, not in the distant or not so distant past. And another question asks itself as well: what kind of school would permit such pictures to be published in its yearbook in the first place? (Or is that one of those questions that is its own answer?)

But the focus in these last days has rightly been on the governor, not the school. Oddly, that confuses rather than clarifies the issue…because Ralph Northam has been a strong supporter of civil rights for all of his years in public service. So his non-racist bona fides—Northam left the field of pediatric neurology to become a United States senator in 2008—are not the issue at all. The question, therefore, is whether the past should outbalance the present…and whether apologizing for past errors of judgment should be enough to earn the right to move forward unencumbered by one’s own youthful stupidity.

The governor issued a statement in which he described the photograph as both “clearly racist and offensive.” And then he went on to apologize. “I am deeply sorry,” he said, “for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now. This behavior is not in keeping with who I am today and the values I have fought for throughout my career in the military, in medicine, and in public service…The first step is to offer my sincerest apology and to state my absolute commitment to living up to the expectations Virginians set for me when they elected me to be their Governor.”

That certainly sounds like a sincere effort to own up to what even his most ardent supporter would surely characterize as an error of judgment of monumental proportions. But is saying you’re sorry enough? Can you undo the past with mere words? Can regret in the present outweigh tasteless vulgarity in the past? Those are the issues I’d like to write about today.

At the heart of the matter is a fundamental philosophical question relating to the way the past relates to the present. Trees grow over the course of decades and their trunks become broader and thicker as the former outer layer of wood becomes one of the tree trunk’s inner growth rings and is superseded by a new outer layer. So, at least with trees, it’s all in there somewhere: the outermost layer of wood becomes interiorized as the past retains its physical presence within the ongoing tree. But is the same true of people? Is the eleven-year-old me in there somewhere? It’s hard to say. It feels as though he must be—where else could he be?—and yet the tree model doesn’t feel quite right: boy-me hardly lives within man-me in the same way that a tree’s inner rings are physically present within its trunk as living testimony to its past. Boy-me is more in there somehow than somewhere.

Nor is this mere philosophical musing: our entire criminal justice system rests on the principle that we bear responsibility for our own past acts because we are not ethereal projections or reconceptualizations of the people we were in the past but actually are those same people. And that, in turn, leads me to the pertinent question worth asking with respect to the governor’s racist tastelessness as a young man: since the deed cannot be undone but apparently does not rise to the level of criminal activity for which he could tried in a court of law, then what exactly should he do to address the issue? To that question, the chorus of responses has been varied and, each in its own way (I believe), off-mark. Giving him a pass merely because he doesn’t have a time machine and can’t return to 1985 to re-edit his yearbook page sounds idiotic to me. But maintaining that precisely because he can’t undo the past he should now withdraw into premature retirement and spend the rest of his days ruing a huge error of judgment from a quarter-century ago sounds not only excessive, but also profoundly counterproductive.

One of the features of our intellectual life at Shelter Rock is my annual series of lessons, undertaken every August and lasting through the High Holiday season, devoted to the section of Maimonides’ great law code, the Mishneh Torah, devoted to the law of t’shuvah. The Hebrew word, t’shuvah, is regularly translated as “repentance,” but the English words sounds to me like a slightly more august version of regret whereas t’shuvah involves constructively using some amalgam of remorse, shame, and guilt as a platform upon which to stand not while attempting to travel from the present into the past (which is impossible, see above) but while attempting to move meaningfully from the present into the future.

The text is rich and satisfying—challenging in some ways, but bracing in others and always inspiring. When considered alongside the book I think of as its companion volume, the Ḥibbur Ha-t’shuvah (“The Book of T’shuvah”) by Rabbi Menaḥem ben Solomon Meiri (1249-1306)—an understudied and underestimated work that I come to esteem even more highly each time I open it—a path opens up for poor Governor Northam to consider as a way forward out of his self-inflicted predicament.

In our tradition, the past cannot be undone but it can be addressed profoundly and meaningfully. The first step is always a public confession: t’shuvah cannot be done in private, let alone in secret. If the misdeed under consideration involved harm to another person, then you have to beg that person’s pardon in person and out loud. If the person is no longer alive, then you must gather a minyan by the side of his or her grave and there confess your sin and pledge to become a finer person in the future who has learned from the error in judgment that led to the event being repented. In every case, the viddui (that is, the public confession of wrongdoing) is an essential element in the larger process.

And then, having stepped into the world, you need to step out of it and demonstrate your resolve to grow into a finer iteration of yourself through a regimen of prayer, fasting, and self-denial. Jews, of course, have Yom Kippur as our national day devoted to doing exactly those things: fasting, engaging in various forms of self-denial, spending the day immersed in contemplative communal prayer. Rambam—as Maimonides is familiarly called even in scholarly circles—goes into all of this in great detail. And then, finally, he says this about the individual seeking to do t’shuvah for a specific misdeed: “Such a person,” he writes, “must be humble of demeanor and modest. If boors mock such a person by referencing the deed for which that person has repented by saying ‘you once did such-and-such a thing’ or ‘you once spoke in such-and-such a way,’ then the person who has done t’shuvah honestly will not respond in anger, but rather should listen carefully and take pleasure in their insults—because such taunts will lead to becoming even more ashamed of the past behavior in question and more filled with remorse, and that experience will not be degrading but elevating….”

And that is what I think Governor Northam should do. He seems to be a good man in many ways, but one who made a terrible mistake as a young man that now, all these years later, has hurt many people who must now wonder if they can trust him at all. There is a way forward and, speaking as a rabbi, I recommend our Jewish path of principled t’shuvah coupled with a public commitment to grow through this scandal into a finer version of himself, one even more devoted to the pursuit of civil rights for all than he has been in the past. A bit of public prayer probably wouldn’t hurt either.

And one more detail too, also from Rambam: “Once people have done t’shuvah for some specific misdeeds, it becomes absolutely forbidden to humiliate them by reminding them of their former misdeeds…and doing so is to break the commandment of the Torah that forbids individuals from oppressing each other unduly.”

Can this rule to applied to this last week’s other politician-apologizer, Representative Ilhan Omer (D- Minnesota), who seems so far to have made her mark on Congress solely by sending out anti-Semitic tweets and then apologizing for them? That will have to be the topic of a different blog posting!