Election Day 2020

Is it possible that Election Day is finally upon us? Some other time, I’d like to write about the craziness of having these election seasons that go on endlessly—you can expect the 2024 campaign to begin in all but name about a quarter-hour after the new or not-new president is inaugurated in January—and particularly in light of the relative sanity that prevails in other countries, where political campaigns last mostly for several weeks or months. (The minimum length of an election campaign in Canada is thirty-six days, for example, but the longest on record was only eleven weeks. The candidates give a few speeches, the party publishes its platform, there are some interviews and a debate or two, then the polls open and the nation votes. Only here, where the date of the next presidential election has nothing to do with the fate of the current government, is it considered normal for people to spend two or three years campaigning for office.) Today, however, I’d like to use this space to write instead about the concept of participation in an election itself.

While perusing the corners of the blogosphere that are my regular haunts, I’ve occasionally noted the opinion put forward that the American system of government is an outgrowth of the specific kind of democracy invented (and named) by the ancient Greeks and that, therefore, it can only be supported by Jews and Christians willing to set aside what Scripture teaches us about the way people should consent to be governed to embrace a system unrelated to their own spiritual heritage. Generally written by people who know their Bible but who are wholly ignorant of rabbinic tradition, these essays are mostly the work of people who find the distinction between ancient Israelite religion and modern Judaism a triviality to be skipped past rather than a detail of profound importance. How this could or should work for Christians, I’ll leave for others more qualified than myself to puzzle out. But for Jews, the question itself of whether people guided by Jewish tradition should enthusiastically embrace or merely stoically accept the concept of representative democracy is the question I’ve been pondering in these last days leading up to the election.

It surely is so that the Bible does not envisage the ancient Israelites participating in anything like a Jeffersonian democracy. Indeed, biblical tradition imagines an ideal state governed by a king who acts solely in accordance with the law of the Torah and actually goes so far as to legislate that the king may only be seated on the royal throne when he is actually holding his personal scroll of the Law in his arms. How practical that was, or if the kings of Israel truly obeyed that injunction, who can say? But it is a stunning image nonetheless, something along the lines of our nation requiring by law that the President actually hold a copy of the Constitution in his hands whenever meeting with visitors in the Oval Office or making a public address. (That might actually not be such a bad idea, now that I think of it.) Interestingly, the king isn’t expected to be a Torah scholar who can personally puzzle out obscure point of law: in cases where Scripture does not directly address some specific issue with which the king needs to deal, a large squadron of court prophets is also imagined to be in place specifically to transmit the word of God to the sovereign on an issue-by-issue basis. So the model of which those authors I referenced above are so enamored basically features God ruling the nation through the agency of a king who gets his governing instructions from God one way or the other: either directly from his own informed contemplation of Scripture or indirectly from the squadron of house seers installed in the palace for that precise purpose.

But that ideal kingdom is not where any of us lives today. Yes, it is certainly so that Jews who say their prayers in the traditional mode give voice daily to the hope that the messianic era will feature just such a king of the House of David empowered to rule over the Land of Israel in the mode described just above. But in our pre-redeemed world, the footfalls of the messiah have yet to heard even in the distance. For better or worse, we are—for the moment, at least—on our own.

I suppose it could be possible to argue that the kind of democracy that has evolved as the basis for government in these United States is thus merely an attractive stop-gap measure that traditionalists should support until the aforementioned footfalls become audible in the distance. There is, however, a rabbinic idea that actually corresponds precisely to the notion of participating in an election to choose a national leader. And that suggests to me a way to frame voting in a national election as a personal decision fully in sync with tradition.

In Jewish law, the concept of agency guarantees individuals the right to appoint agents to act on their behalf. When put baldly like that, it sounds almost banal. But behind that apparent banality is the legal force that enables the individual to act profoundly in ways that would otherwise be either impossible or, at the very least, impractical.  For its part, the Talmud speaks about the concept of agency in absolute terms, going so far as to say that “the agent of an individual is legally empowered to act as though he or she were the individual him or herself.” There are exceptions, of course. For one, the Talmud makes clear that “the concept of agency is inoperative when the agent has been appointed specifically to commit a sin.” In other words, you can’t escape the consequence of wrongdoing by appointing an agent to commit the deed for you. So you can avoid the need to travel to a different locale by appointing an agent to marry your future spouse on your behalf or to act “as yourself” in divorce (or any) court, but you can’t escape the consequences of murdering someone by hiring a hitperson to pull the trigger. Nor was this “just” a regular feature of classical law in ancient times: it appears, at least in the broad way it was construed by the ancient sages, specifically to be a feature specifically of Jewish law. (The second exception, however, regards the commandments themselves: it is not deemed legally possible to hire an agent to fulfill obligations to God. You cannot, therefore, appoint someone to say the Shema for you or to put t’fillin on during morning prayers as though that person were you. Nor can you appoint an agent to eat matzah for you at the Pesach seder or to dine in a sukkah or to hear the shofar blasts during Rosh Hashanah.)

That set of ideas creates an interesting framework for considering the role of the individual in a republican democracy, because it leads directly to thinking of elections as opportunities for individuals to appoint as their agents the individuals they wish to see lead the nation forward. That we do this collectively—i.e., as a kind of contest in which the winner becomes the agent of us all—is just a function of the fact that no nation could function if each individual were to appoint his or her own congressperson or choose personally to serve him or herself. For practical reasons, then, we do this as a group…but the basic principle that underlies the effort is           still that, by voting, we are appointing individuals as our agents to represent us in the Congress and to serve as President. We send them not to commit sins that we don’t want to sully our own hands by undertaking (that wouldn’t be allowed) or fulfill our own spiritual obligations to God, but specifically to act on our behalf to ensure the security of the nation, to guarantee justice for all its citizens, to create a safety net into which people unable to care adequately for themselves may fall, to oversee the education of our children, to care for our veterans, to guide our nation to its rightful place of leadership in the forum of nations, to watch over the planet and prevent humanity from irrevocably soiling its collective nest, and to guide our nation into solid, mutually beneficial alliances with other countries. By casting my vote on Tuesday (and, yes, I am planning to vote the old-fashioned way: in person and on Election Day), I understand myself to be participating in a national effort to appoint the individuals who will lead the nation forward.

Because I think of our representatives in Congress and as the President as agents appointed by myself (and several hundred million others) to act on our behalf in the world, I feel a concomitant freedom to inform those people regularly how I wish them to act and what I wish for them to attempt to accomplish.

It sounds a bit passé these days to refer to members of the Congress or to the President and Vice President as servants of the people, but the way the word “servant” is used in that expression comes close to what I hear in the Hebrew shaliach, the standard word for “agent.” So, to answer those who feel that participation in representative democracy is by definition an act undertaken outside the concept of tradition, my answer is that there really couldn’t be a more traditional way to think about governance than by imagining the citizenry banding together to appoint an agent to do their bidding and lead them forward.

 

The Soul of the Nation

I know I keep saying that I have finally reached the bottom, that there simply is nothing left in the universe’s bag of tricks that could or will surprise me. But it consistently turns out that I was wrong and this morning, as I opened some of my usual news sites to see what was being featured as the morning’s news, I found myself so flabbergasted—and so outraged—that, yet again, I have to eat some crow: I thought nothing could surprise me any longer, but I was clearly wrong. Again.

I am referring to the news report published this morning revealing that the team of lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify the specific would-be migrant families whose children were taken from them at the border, that this team of especially appointed legal eagles have admitted that they have failed, not once but in 545 different cases, to track down the parents of the children involved. And also, just to make the lot of these poor children even more dismal, the likelihood is that about two-thirds of their parents were deported to Central America without any mechanism having been set first in place to keep track of their whereabouts so that they could be reunited with the children taken from them once they were sent home.

This is America? It hardly seemed possible to me then that children were being separated violently from their parents in the first place. But infinitely less possible for me to fathom is that we have somehow failed to create a foolproof mechanism for reuniting this families torn asunder by agents of our own government.

I am not a believer in open borders. I understand the need for would-be immigrants to follow the rules and apply for admission in a dignified, decorous way that conforms to American law. My own wife is an immigrant to this country and she carefully played by those very rules when she came here in 1999. But if the parents involved were attempting to circumvent the law and illegally sneak into our country, what crime did their babies commit? Or children so young then that they are incapable of saying clearly now where their parents were originally from, thus where they would likely have been deported back to. My guess is that some of the children who were taken as babies are probably not even able to say what their parents’ full names are, let alone their original addresses.

This will be addressed in future weeks, I suppose. The current administration is under court orders dating back to 2018 to reunite families separated at the border. Is it even remotely possible that there simply is no way to do that? Jewish readers even moderately familiar with their own history will certainly know the answer to that question. And it does not at all redound to the credit of our nation.            

In my opinion, this issue, almost more than any other, goes to the question of our nation’s soul.

The notion that the national soul is in play in the current election is hardly original with me, of course, as witnessed by Joe Biden’s remark the other day that the campaign for the White House isn’t “just about winning votes,” that is it “about winning the heart and, yes, the soul of America.” For its part, the Trump campaign has lately been using the same language: the slogan “Save America’s Soul” surfaced just last week to encourage donors to contribute to the campaign. Reporter Elizabeth Dias wrote an interesting essay in the Times the other day about the use of this specific kind of language to suggest what’s really at stake on November 3, but she didn’t turn to the text I wish to present here with my interpretation as my own contribution to the discussion. (To read Dias’s article, click here.)

She did cite a lot of interesting sources, that I do have to give her. Referencing authors like Frederick Douglass (who felt that the struggle against slavery had to lead to the abhorrence of slavery being “fixed in the soul of the nation”), Lyndon B. Johnson (who spoke about the nation finding its “soul of honor” on the battlefield at Gettysburg), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (who described the mission of the organization now known as the Southern Christian Leadership Congress as one “to save the soul of America” by promoting civil rights and racial equality), she sets a good literary base upon which to stand while expatiating about the meaning of the concept under consideration and asking what it means—or could mean—for a nation to have a soul that animates and guides it along, presumably in some analogous fashion to the way the human soul animates and guides the body that houses it.

But she didn’t get to Whitman, the greatest of all American poets and—at least in my opinion—the author of the greatest of all American books, Leaves of Grass.

Whitman’s poem “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” opens with a vignette that goes to the heart of the matter. The poet imagines himself wandering along on the U.S. side of Lake Ontario shortly after the end of the Civil War. (I’m citing the poem’s final version; the first was written before the war.) And there he is sauntering along when all of a sudden “a Phantom gigantic superb with stern visage” accosts him. “Chant me a poem,” the phantasm demands, one “that comes from the soul of America.” And then, in case the poet still didn’t quite understand the task being laid at his feet, the creatures restates the challenge:  Sing me, it says, “the song of the throes of Democracy.”

That’s quite the challenge, defining the soul of a nation. But Whitman was up to it…and what he had then to say about the soul of the American nation is as relevant and inspiring today as it was when the poem reached its final state in 1867.

“By Blue Ontario’s Shore” is a long, complicated poem. But the single idea that comes through again and again is that, while other nations exist primarily as entities that subsume their own populations, the American concept is precisely the reverse: that the individual (and, by extension, the rights of the individual) are sacrosanct and the nation is merely the aggregate of the individuals who constitute its population. In other words, what makes America unique is the idea that the nation exists for the sake of its citizens, not vice versa, and that the identical set of basic human rights are thus at the core of both citizen and citizenry.

America, Whitman writes, is “Underneath, all individuals / I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals, / The American compact is altogether with individuals, / The only government is that which makes minute of individuals, / The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual—namely, to You.” That, he is saying, is why the most basic American document is the Bill of Rights, which delineates the rights not of the nation or of the states, but of the individual. This corresponds precisely to what Whitman wrote in the Preface to Leaves of Grass: “The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors…but always in the most common people.”

And that idea, so Whitman, is the soul that animates the American ethos, the notion that the nation can hardly even be said reasonable to exist at all other than as an aggregate of its individual citizens.

In that concept of the supreme worth of the individual rests the mission that destiny has laid at the nation’s feet, making of it not a declaration to inform or a riddle to be solved, but a kind of physically-real poem intended by its author/founders to inspire others to resist the siren call of self-serving nationalism that sees the individual as a cog in a giant machine and instead to embrace the notion that nations exist solely to promote the worth of the individual citizen possessed of inalienable rights and limitless potential. To fit that thought into the question of the children I wrote about above, the fact that the government behaved with respect to those poor children in a way that not a single American would countenance in a million years with respect to his or her own children—that they be seized, warehoused, and lost track of as a way of punishing the wrongdoing of their parents—means by definition that the nation’s leaders have betrayed the people who entrusted them with the mantle of national leadership in the first place.

“These States are the amplest poem,” Whitman writes. “here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations, / Here are the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doing of the day and night, / Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars, / Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul loves / Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the soul loves.” I love those words because they correspond to my own sense of what makes America unique. Like many, I fear we may have lost our way and need to find a path that will put us back on the track of our own national destiny, one that will lead us to embrace the Founders’ vision of a union of states that exist to create the legal and societal context in which individuals can flourish and reach the fullest flower of their potential. The nation is the individual. No act that the individual citizen would find abhorrent can reasonably be rationalized because it was undertaken by the government and specifically not by the individual. The nation is its citizens. The citizens are the nation. Their moral bearing must therefore be their nation’s as well. Policies supported by none cannot be pursued by the government without the nation sinking to the level of tyranny it was founded specifically to resist.

To me, that is what America is…and wherein lies the specific way it differs from other nations—and particularly from the nations from which its original founders and later immigrants hailed. That intense, unselfconscious celebration of the individual is how Whitman responded to the gigantic Phantom superb with stern visage who demanded of a definition of the American soul. I personally would be incapable of ripping a baby from its mother’s arms at all, let alone doing so without guaranteeing to myself in a dozen different ways that that family will end up reunited when its parents are either granted entry into our country or sent home. That obliges me to speak out when my government appears to have failed in the most elemental way possible to watch over the children in its care. I respond therefore to this week’s revelation not merely with regret, but with rage born of indignation and shame.

The Barrett Hearings

 Like most Americans, I have been watching the race to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett as an associate justice of the Supreme Court with a strange brew of mixed emotions:

• awe at how fast the Senate can move when properly motived (which is apparently not the case when it comes to acting decisively and meaningfully on behalf of America’s COVID-era unemployed),
• amazement at the impressive, almost astounding, hypocrisy the Barrett nomination has elicited from both sides of the aisle as the Republicans effortlessly and unselfconsciously put forward the precise argument the Democrats put forward at the end of the Obama years in the wake of Justice Scalia’s death and the Democrats just as fervently insist on the correctitude of the position embraced at that time by the Republicans, a line of thinking that they could not possibly then have opposed more vociferously, and
• anxiety regarding the prospect of there being on the Supreme Court a justice so openly and unabashedly committed to her conservative Christian faith. It’s that last thought that I’d like to write about this week.

The point that Judge Barrett is a deeply involved, fully committed member of her faith community has been made repeatedly in these last weeks. Like most Americans, I suppose, I was unfamiliar with the People of Praise community until the Barrett nomination brought it to the attention of the public. Nor is that at all odd that I hadn’t heard of it before—the community has, all together, about 1700 members, about a tenth of the number of students who attend Nassau Community College! But, even with such small numbers, it is an interesting community to consider from the outside: an organization that self-defines as a “charismatic Christian community” and membership in which is open to all baptized individuals regardless of their denominational affiliation. And that definition seems to mirror how things actually have worked out for the People of Praise: their website notes that among their members are professed and affiliated Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Pentecostals, as well as a selection of other kinds of denominational and nondenominational Christians. (To read more on their own website, click here.) The group has its meetings on Sunday afternoons, in fact, precisely so as to allow members to attend church services in the congregations of which they are actually members. The website is very clear that People of Praise is a community of like-minded Christians working together to attain specific goals, not a church in the conventional sense of the word.

There’s no question that this is a very conservative operation. Until recently, the highest position a woman could hold in the community was that of “handmaid.” (The name has lately been changed to “woman leader.”) Each member is assigned a spiritual advisor called that person’s head. Men have male heads and single women usually have women as their heads, but the heads of married women are invariably their husbands. You get the idea.

No one is arguing, nor (I hope) would anyone, that Judge Barrett doesn’t have the right to affiliate with whatever spiritual community or faith group that she wishes. Nor, as I perceive it, is the problem some are having with the idea of her sitting on the Supreme Court tied specifically to the fact that she is a religious woman whose sense of purpose in life is strongly tied to her religious affiliation. It’s more bizarre than that, actually: the problem at least some of the people opposing her nomination seem to be having with Judge Barrett isn’t that she is affiliated with the religious group of her choice but that she clearly take the tenets of her faith seriously and has allowed them to shape her worldview. According to this line of thinking, it’s okay for Samuel Alito or Sonia Sotomayor to be Catholics because they are perceived—rightly or wrongly—as not being especially fervent believers. (Whether that is actually true or not, I have no idea.) Nor is this a specifically Christian issue: RBG’s Jewishness was celebrated, or at least tolerated, in at least some quarters precisely because she wasn’t actually a religious person who lived her life in strict accordance with the dictates of Jewish law, just a proud Jewish woman who saw no need to dissemble regarding her Jewishness. And the same is surely true, albeit in different ways, of Elana Kagan and Stephen Breyer, both of whom are openly identified as Jewish individuals but neither of whom is perceived—again, rightly or wrongly—as being especially observant. According to this line of reasoning, then, you can be publicly identified with a specific religious tradition and serve on the Supreme Court as long as you don’t take the tenets of that faith all that seriously. But Judge Barrett clearly does take her religion seriously. And that is where she is running into all sorts of trouble.

Traditionally, this race has been run in the other direction. The Constitution says unambiguously that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office of public trust,” thereby making it unconstitutional for anyone to be barred from any public office as a result of having failed a “religious test,” which is to say, because of not holding the dogmatic beliefs connected with any specific religion. In other words, not being a religious Christian (which is certainly what the Founders had in mind when they wrote about “religion” with no other qualification) may never be considered a just reason for not permitting someone to run for public office or, if elected, to serve. But here we have the inverse of that idea: someone who is being considered for public office whom many would bar because she does hold specific religious beliefs. When Senator Diane Feinstein turned to face Judge Barrett in 2017 at the latter’s confirmation hearing for her seat on the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals and observed that “dogma lives loudly within you,” she did not mean it as a compliment. Nor did anyone miss the point.

I was very impressed by an essay I read this last week by Meir Soloveitchik, the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel on Central Park West in Manhattan. (Click here to read it too.) In it, the author—whose writing I’ve long admired—argues that religious affiliation has been deemed not to bar any citizen from holding public office, including judgeships, since the founding of the republic. In this regard, he cites the 1790 letter George Washington wrote to Moses Seixas, the leader of the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in which he wrote that in the American republic citizens of all faiths would be granted the “immunities of citizenship,” including, obviously, the right to serve as public officials. And he—Soloveitchik, not Washington—concludes that it should be considered both morally and legally wrong to disqualify a nominee to the Court a priori because of the perception that that person is possessed of even fervent religious faith.

Rabbi Soloveitchik’s analysis of Washington’s letter rings true to me. But not invalidating someone merely because of her or his religious beliefs does not invalidate the actual question of an individual’s worthiness for the Supreme Court. Indeed, the whole point of having these hearings in the Senate in the first place is precisely to determine Judge Barrett’s suitability for the job. In my opinion, however, the question of whether she should be confirmed should be a answered primarily with reference to the degree to which she is prepared to commit herself unambiguously and wholly to upholding the Constitution and is prepared openly and no less unequivocally to say that she will never allow her religious beliefs to lead her into decisions that, for all she personally may feel them justified, run counter to her own interpretation of the Constitution. In other words, her confirmation hearings should be about the likelihood that she will adjudicate the cases brought before her in accordance with the Constitution, and that she will do so even if doing so runs counter to her own Christian values. To disqualify her for consideration because she cannot commit to upholding the law even when it runs counter to her personal beliefs would be wholly legitimate in my mind. To disqualify her because she is passionate about her religious beliefs or because of the specific nature of those beliefs, would not only be wrong, but would be a denial of the basic freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment.

 

Bad/Good Karma

Even the President’s fiercest critics were able—at least for the most part—to choke out at least some version of a get-well wish when the positive results of his COVID test were announced. But in most cases it didn’t take long for the writer (or speaker) to get to the real point.

There was Joe Biden’s wish for a “swift and successful” recovery for the President, followed by his acerbic observation that, of course, he wasn’t at all surprised that the President fell ill since he failed to follow the most elemental rules for fending off infection. Then there was the New York Times’ “Get Well, Mr. President” lead editorial in last Sunday’s paper, a wish the Editorial Board then felt the need to justify in twelve different ways lest anyone think they were motivated merely by sympathy for a sick person infected with a potentially deadly virus. Even better, at least in my opinion, was Bret Stephen’s column in Tuesday’s paper. (I admire Stephens and read his columns with great enthusiasm and interest, so I mention him in this context merely to illustrate a point.) He began by using a quote from John Donne (“Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankinde”) to explain his wish that the President have a “full and speedy recovery,” then, lest anyone think he actually had any actual sympathy for the actual patient, went on to justify his get-well wishes in as many ways as he could think of (including the remarkable thought that we should wish the President well because, should he die, Mike Pence would make an even worse President). Stephens’ wrap-up line said it all. We should wish the President well, he wrote, “because it’s the right thing to do.” I’d just love having someone visit me in the hospital—poo poo poo—and tell me they had come to wish me a speedy recovery “because it’s the right thing to do.” Hah!

As far as I can see, however, there lies a single concept at the core both of all the editorial pieces I read and all the late-night TV hosts’ hilarious comments regarding the President’s illness: the concept of karma. What goes around comes around. You reap what you sow. At least in the end, you get what you deserve. At the end of the meal you prepare, you eat your own just deserts!

The concept of karma derives from the Hindu notion of rebirth after death and in that context means that the circumstances of your next life will be a function of the way you have conducted yourself in this and previous lives. Most non-Hindus will find the concept of endless reincarnation at least unlikely, but the underlying principle that—one way or the other—you eventually get what you deserve remains resonant with the public. I’d certainly like to believe it myself! The President mocked his own advisors who called for the nation to wear face masks in public. The President made a public display of the degree to which he refused socially to distance himself from others. The President repeatedly encouraged people not to take the possibility of infection with the novel coronavirus too very seriously, including at White House receptions hosted by the President himself. And so the universe finally took matters into its own hands and baked the man the cake he surely earned.  The universe, according to this line of thought, does not like being mocked and has no problem addressing the issue forcefully and, if necessary, virally.

The President’s comment the other day that his infection was a kind of “blessing in disguise” would work well with this line of thinking if his point had been that now, having experienced the terror of infection and the relief of recovery, he had learned to take the pandemic very seriously and was encouraging precisely the correct kind of behavior that the experts feel could go miles towards reining this crisis in. But that isn’t at all what he meant.

You don’t have to embrace Hinduism to seize the concept here. A famous verse from Proverbs (22:8) reads “Those who plant injustice will harvest disaster.” That sounds clear enough. But the prophet Hosea is even clearer: “You have sown wickedness,” he says to his wayward countrymen, “and now you shall reap evil.” Lady Wisdom herself steps forward in the Book of Proverbs and sums the whole concept up in three Hebrew words: v’yokhlu mi-p’ri darkam, she declares: In this life, you eat the fruit of the trees you plant along the way. Much later on, the first-century Sage Hillel would offer his own version in a much-quoted lesson from Pirkei Avot (2:6). Seeing a human skull floating on the water of a nearby stream, Hillel addressed the skull directly: “Because you drowned someone else, you yourself have now been drowned. But not to worry—the people who drowned you will eventually be drowned themselves.” That’s how it works in the world, Hillel was teaching. You harvest what you plant. You reap what you sow. You eat the cake you bake. You become what you make yourself into. You don’t always get what you want…but you always—at least eventually—get what you deserve.

Arguing to the contrary are all those people who smoke for decades and don’t end up with any of the various diseases associated with smoking cigarettes. And what about the righteous who suffer grievously in the course of their lives—if karma is such a thing, then why doesn’t the universe grant them the boons they deserve for living decently and behaving justly? And the corollary question also bears asking: if those who sow badness reap the disastrous consequences of self-made bad karma, then why does there seem to be now obvious correlation between moral bearing and wealth or, even more to the point, between moral bearing and good health? If karma is a thing, then how can decent people ever meet bitter, miserable ends? Maybe the Hindus are right that this only works in the very long run.

It’s a bit amusing to be pondering these thoughts with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur so close in the rearview mirror: if one single idea underlies both holidays, it is that human beings are judged with respect to their ethical bearing, moral rectitude and fortitude, and commitment to justice and decency…and then, if found worthy, are granted another year of life suffused with God’s blessings. We sing it out with great gusto (or did in a pre-pandemic world), but we certainly don’t take it to the point of really thinking that the people who die in any given year were personally responsible for their own demises because of the bad karma they brought personally to their own life stories!

In the end, the President didn’t get COVID because of bad karma or because the universe wished to make an example out of him. He tested positive because he failed to observe the most elemental rules of safe conduct in this pandemic age we are living through and ended up hoist with his own petard.

When the psalmist wrote, “I was a lad and now have become old, yet I have never seen a righteous person abandoned or the child of such a person begging for bread,” he was giving into the same urge to believe that we are the authors of our own karma and then either reap the benefits or suffer the consequences in the context of our lifetimes. That line, familiar to all traditionally minded Jewish people because it concludes the Grace after Meals, is surely the most famous expression of the idea in the context of Jewish liturgy. Less well known—although invariably observed by myself—is the custom, also quite old, of reciting those words sotto voce, thereby nodding to their supreme logic at the same time we accept as obvious the fact that they are not literally true.

In the end, we are the masters of our destiny and fragile, brittle things that suffer in all sorts of ways that we have specifically not brought upon ourselves. Our own tradition lives with that paradox, with that discrepancy between what we believe and what we know. We say that the fate of all is written up in the great Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah and the judgment sealed on Yom Kippur—but we also know that people die between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which should be impossible if their verdicts are only made final on Yom Kippur!

In the end, we live our lives seeking to control our own destiny through the creation of good karma and submitting to the will of God and knowing that in the fragility of human life inheres the arbitrariness of our personal destinies. Still, why tempt fate? If wearing a face mask is responsible behavior and socially distancing myself from others is the sign of decency and conscientiousness, then I will do those things to keep myself and others safe. I won’t say no to good karma. But I also drop my voice at the end of Birkat Hamazon lest I hear myself saying something that sounds vaguely pious but which is ultimately not a truth I can actually discern in the world.

What One Person Can Do

I was intending this week to write about Tuesday’s presidential debate, but then I had the idea to write in a different vein entirely. I actually do have a lot to say about the debate and what its general tenor says about the state of our nation. But as we make our way through these days between Yom Kippur and Sukkot—which is to say between the day on which we own up freely and prayerfully to our own ethical shortcomings and the festival devoted to the formal acknowledgement of the fragility of the human condition and its ephemeral nature—in the course of these specific days, it struck me as a far better use of this space to invite you all to join me in looking at a specific individual, no less brittle and human than the rest of us, who nonetheless had it in him to live up to the image in God in which all are created. Why look down when we can look up?

Some of you may have noticed the story in the paper the other day about a thirteen-year-old Nigerian boy named Omar Farouk who lives in the northwestern Nigerian state of Kano and who had the misfortune to be overheard when, in the context of an argument with a friend, apparently spoke disrespectfully about God. Someone overheard him and made a report to the police, after which the boy was arrested, tried in a Muslim court of Sharia law, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years at menial labor in a local jail. (Nigerian law apparently countenances the existence of this parallel legal system and permits it actually to execute people convicted of capital offenses.) Nor can anyone accuse the Islamic court of being inconsistent: that same day that young Omar was sentenced, the court also sentenced a young musician of twenty-two named Yahaya Sharif-Aminu to death for having committed the same crime. So they must have considered that they were letting the boy off easy by only putting him in prison for the next decade of his life. And all this despite the fact that the Nigerian Constitution guarantees citizens freedom of expression and freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

I also noticed the story.  And then, pausing only long enough to be amazed that I, who have read so much about the Shoah and other instances of genocide, can still be surprised how harsh and cruel people can be, I turned the page and went back to reading about the dozen other disasters reported on that day and allowed the boy’s fate to fade quickly into the background. And I say that as someone who abhors the concept of blasphemy and who tries (mostly successfully) to avoid taking God’s name in vain. On the other hand, lots was going on. California was on fire. The Breanna Taylor grand jury decision had just been released. COVID numbers in New York were (and are) slowly rising. So a boy I never heard of living in a place I also never heard of was treated harshly in a way that no child should ever encounter. What was I going to do about that?

So that’s the difference between people who talk the talk and people like Piotr Cywinski who walk the walk. You’ve probably never heard of him. I also hadn’t, but I probably should have since he is the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and so a man charged with the preservation of the physical remains of a place of such unparalleled horror that even those words themselves seem inadequate. (For more about Piotr Cywinski, click here. For more about the museum he heads, click here.)

Like myself, Cywinski also read in the paper about Omar Farouk’s trial, conviction, and sentencing. And also like myself, Cywinski has no specific connection—or any connection—to Nigeria at all, let alone to the trial of one specific child in Kano State, a place to which he obviously also has no connection. It is true that Cywinski welcomed the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, to the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum in 2018, at which time the Buhari toured the site and spoke movingly about the experience. (For the official Nigerian government press release regarding President Buhari’s visit, click here.) But other than that one single meeting, there was no ongoing connection between the two. And yet Cywinski saw in their chance encounter a crack in the harsh escutcheon of a mostly uncaring world and the concomitant opportunity to shine some light through it into the darkness.

And so he sat down and wrote a letter to the President of Nigeria, a man whose visit to Auschwitz lasted, so the press release mentioned above, precisely one hour and ten minutes. And in that letter he asked the President to intercede on the lad’s behalf, writing as follows, “As the director of the Auschwitz Memorial, that commemorates the victims and preserves the remains of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where children were imprisoned and murdered, I cannot remain indifferent to this disgraceful sentence for humanity. Regardless of what [Omar] said, he cannot be treated as fully aware and responsible, given his age. He should not be subjected to the loss of the entirety of his youth, be deprived of opportunities, and stigmatized physically, emotionally, and educationally for the rest of his life.”

So far, so good. But then he made an exceptional offer: as the master of a place in which countless children were murdered, he offered personally to go to Nigeria for the sake of a single child and serve a month of the boy’s sentence…and, at the same, time, to sign up another 119 adults from around the world to do the same thing so that the child’s 120-month sentence would be served by adults far more able to withstand the deprivations and menial labor of prison life than any child could or should.  Who these other 119 people are, Cywinski hasn’t said. Just that they exist and that there were far more than just 119 people ready to sign up and travel to Nigeria if the President would permit this actually to happen.

This would not be a popular decision for the Nigerian President to make. A mob of angry citizens took matters into its own hands the other day and burnt Yahaya Sharif’s home to the ground. Young Omar’s own mother had to flee from a similar mob intent on punishing her for having raised a blasphemer. Mobs in Nigeria have also killed individuals merely accused of blasphemy without waiting for anything as time-consuming as an actual trial.

And yet…whatever President Buhari’s decision finally is, the notion that the director of the Auschwitz memorial would offer to leave his home, his family, his workplace, and his nation voluntarily to accept incarceration in a Nigerian prison to spare a child he hasn’t ever met and of whom he only heard the other week when his sentence was announced—that is precisely the kind of gesture that gives true meaning to the old rabbinic notions that there are people who can acquire a portion in the World to Come with a single gesture…and that the possibility of bringing healing and repair to the world is not solely in the hands of saints and heroes, but also in the hands of ordinary people possessed of eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that cannot bear harshness and cruelty at all…and particularly, perhaps, when directed towards a child. Piotr Cywinski’s gesture is an illustration of just how profound a lesson a teacher possessed of the courage to do good in the world can teach merely by leading by example. Yesh adam she-koneh et olamo b’shaah achat. There are those who struggle for years and years to justify their place on earth…and others who do precisely that in as long as it takes to write a letter and make it public.