One Torah for Alll

Like all of you, I’m sure, I was very surprised to wake up the other day to news about the raid on Mar-a-Lago, Florida home of former President Trump. Whether or not possession of any or all of the seized documents rises to the level of an actual criminal deed that could lead former President Trump to prison is a question best left to experts. But behind the details of the raid, most of which still remain shielded from the public as I write today, lie two truly foundational democratic principles: one, that one set of laws must apply to all, citizens and “mere” residents alike and, two, that that principle must apply even to the wealthiest and most powerful.

To Jews, this notion will sound familiar because of its roots in Scripture. Indeed, when the Torah proclaims (at Exodus 12:49) that “one torah (meaning in this context, one set of laws) must apply both to citizens and to the strangers who dwell in their midst,” it could hardly be clearer. And when, later on in the text (at Numbers 15:15–16) the idea is fleshed out in slightly more detail (“One set of laws must apply to you and the strangers who dwell alongside you, one set of laws for all generations: just as you appear [in judgment] before God, so must also such strangers in your midst. One torah and one set of legal principles shall apply equally to all of you and to the strangers who dwell with you”), it sounds almost axiomatic. What else could be the case? That there be a different set of rules for one group within society and another for others? That was the case in medieval times when serfs had one set of rules to obey and nobles another. But we Americans, relying on the biblical idea as foundational to our own approach to law, would rightly consider a justice system in which the rich are judged differently than the poor to be corrupt and unjust. As well such a system would be!

And so we come back to Mar-a-Lago. Whether our former president committed a crime remains to be seen. He certainly hasn’t been indicted in a court of law, let alone convicted in one, and so must be presumed innocent until actually proven guilty. But the thought that a former President should somehow be exempt from the rules that govern the rest of the citizenry (other than in ways in which the Constitution specifically enshrines in law as specific perquisites of the office)—that notion should rightly be rejected by all. One torah has to apply to all—to the least powerful and to the most, to the wealthiest and to the least well-off, to the famous and to the least well known. That is what it means to live in a nation governed by law!

I came across a remarkable document the other day, a list of world leaders who were subsequently convicted of crimes after having left office and/or imprisoned. It’s a long list! Some stories were vaguely familiar to me—the remarkable tale of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for example, who was put on trial thirty-two different times until the state finally secured a conviction in 2012 for tax evasion. And I certainly remember the case of former Pakistani Prime Minister  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed in 1979 after having been convicted of having arranged the murder of a political opponent. As do I also recall the conviction of Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France from 2007 to 2012, who was convicted of corruption in two different trials and sentenced to years in prison. And which of us can forget Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009, who was convicted on bribe-taking and obstruction of justice charges and who was also sent to prison?

The list is actually remarkable, but it gives up its secrets only very slowly. (To take a look, click here.) Lots of the convicted leaders, it is true, were simply on the wrong side of history. Philippe Pétain, the vile collaborator who basically spent the Second World War on his knees in the service of his German masters, was tried and convicted of treason after the war and sentenced to death. (Because of his advanced age, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Odd how none of the French Jews sent east under his watch had their death sentences commuted because of their old age.) In a similar category falls Karl Dönitz, German head of state for the eight days between Hitler’s suicide and V-E Day, who was convicted of committing war crimes and sent to prison for a decade. Still others—like Louis XVI, king of France, who was beheaded in 1793 as punishment basically for being king of France—seem unjustly to have been executed, at least in retrospect. And other leaders’ stories are so peculiar truly to beggar the imagination. (I could mention in this regard, for example, the trial specifically of Pope Formosus, Pope from 891 to 896, for whose posthumous trial on charges of unworthy behavior his cadaver was exhumed from its grave, dressed up in papal garments, and then made to sit up in court on a huge throne as the proceedings against him unfolded. When found guilty, his corpse was stripped naked, three of his fingers—the ones he used to bless people—were chopped off, and the rest of him was unceremoniously dumped in the Tiber.)

But far more prevalent on the list are individuals—almost entirely men—who were just criminals: people who saw the opportunity to profit financially or politically by breaking the law and took it, only to be found out later on and forced to pay the price. Of these, there appear to be no end. (As noted, it’s a very long list.) But contemplating that list, horrible though the stories it references may be, is also comforting. The notion that even the mightiest cannot protect themselves from the consequences of their own poor behavior—not permanently and never completely—speaks well for our human society. There will always be those who allow themselves to succumb when the siren call of illicit gain beckons. Success as a politician does not imply imperviousness to greed. Being liked by the populace is not necessarily a sign of inner virtue, merely of good P.R. and a flair for politicking. The first kings of Israel were chosen by God and anointed by God’s prophets. And even they occasionally faltered when tempted to preference personal gain over the national good! So how can lesser mortals not occasionally falter in that same way?

What exactly the FBI found at Mar-a-Lago remains to be revealed. What precisely they were looking for is also unknown. Many theories have been put forward, but only very few details have actually been released. We must assume that the Attorney General Garland cannot possibly not have understood what a gigantic can of worms he was opening up by authorizing the FBI raid. What precisely former President Trump imagined there might be or could be to gain by holding onto documents unambiguously labelled as “top secret” despite the possibility of being charged under the Espionage Act for having done so has not been made even slightly clear.

All that being the case, what we don’t know is a lot more than what we know! But what I do know is that the notion that one set of laws must apply to all—and that commonality of responsibility under the law is crucial to the concept of democracy—that both those ideas are foundational in any democratic setting, most definitely including ours in this country. What happens next, who knows? But that no one gets a pass on breaking the law just because of status, wealth, power, or position within the political hierarchy of the political parties of our nation—that is encouraging and heartening. And, in a day when all Americans seem to do is worry about the health of the republic, being heartened and encouraged is a very good thing indeed! 

Coming Back and Coming Home

I am writing at my kitchen table on Gad Tedeschi Street in Yerushalayim. It is 6:15 AM, still last night in New York. The cloudless sky is already bright blue and sunny. The air still has a bit of nighttime chill in it, but the sunlight is warm and lovely. Birds of some sort are twittering around in the trees just beneath our balcony. (Joan’s cousin down the road actually has hummingbirds in the trees off her balcony, but we just have something like the Israeli version of pigeons.) I can see the no. 78 bus pulling into the bus stop across the street to pick up the dozen or so people already on their way somewhere at this hour of the morning. The first few days we were here, I woke up each morning at 4:30 when the muezzin in one of the mosques in Jabal Al-mukkaber, the Arab town on the other side of our neighborhood, cranked up the volume to announce morning prayers. But by the fourth or fifth day, I became able to sleep right through it and barely, if at all, to notice it. When I asked some neighbors about it, they appeared not even to know what I was talking about.

By noon, we hope to be on our way. Our tenant is returning in a few days from her summer back home in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. (She works for the U.N. and is stationed here in Jerusalem.) The cleaning guy is coming tomorrow morning to make the place perfect for her return; we ourselves are spending the night in Tel Aviv in a nice hotel on the beach (which we saved up the points on our Visa card all year to pay for), then heading to the airport tomorrow evening to fly home. So we leave here in stages—which is probably all for the best, since the kind of adjustment the whole re-entry thing requires is a process best undertaken one step at a time. It’s been a fabulous summer, a rich and rewarding stay in one of the world’s truly great cities. We’ve spent time—and lots of it—with Joan’s Israeli family and with friends of ours from back home and from all sorts of other places too. And we’ve had tine to go exploring on our own too, mostly extendedly on a lovely three-day trip north to the Upper Galilee where we went to all sorts of places we hadn’t ever been. I’d like to write specifically today to you about one of them.

Some of you may recall reading James Michener’s book, The Source, either when it came out in 1965 or later on. The story from the Stone Age through the mid-twentieth century of a single archeological site in Israel, the book somehow manages to engage the reader in the pageant of Jewish (and pre-Jewish) history without getting bogged down in endless dates and details. The book is a masterpiece and was surely one of the two of three most important books I read as a teenager fantasizing about a career in the rabbinate. (To this day it is the first book I suggest to people I meet who have come to see me because they are considering conversion to Judaism.) But the site, called Makor in the book, is fictional, a kind of composite of several different real-life sites that Michener created so as to be able to focus the action he wished to describe on one specific place. On the other hand, Tzipori, the city I want to describe to you today, is completely real.

Just reviewing its names will give you the general idea. The Jews in ancient times called the place Tzipori because the way its setting is perched atop a large hill suggested the way a bird (Hebrew: tzipor) might be perched on a branch. The Greeks called it Sepphoris, a Greek version of the Hebrew name. The Romans called it Diocaesaraea, but that name didn’t stick: the Crusaders restored the original name and called it La Saphorie and, eventually, the local Arabs called it Saffuriya. And the names it bore reflect its history: in one archeological site are visible remains of Hellenistic, Jewish, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluke, and Ottoman towns. Christians revered it once as the birthplace of Mary, mother of Jesus, and built a huge church on the site they assigned to her birth. But for Jews, the importance of the place lies in the role it played in rabbinic history: after the crushing defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, many famous rabbis established schools in Tzipori, which became known as a center of learning and culture. Rabbi Judah Ha-nasi, the compiler of the Mishnah himself, moved there after the revolt. (He eventually relocated to Tiberias.) For most of the ensuing centuries, Tzipori was a Jewish town exclusively. But the earthquake of 363, combined with anti-Roman unrest on which the Jews found themselves (again!) on the losing side, prompted the decline of the place. When Muslims invaded from the east in the seventh century, they found the place almost deserted and built a village on the remains of the ancient town. When the local Arabs fled rather than embrace citizenship in the nascent State of Israel in 1948, the place was abandoned entirely for the first time in millennia.

And now it is a huge site, a giant archeological site in which visitors are free to wander around and try to fathom the almost unimaginable history of the place. And there we were, trying to take it all in and only partially succeeding.

In a sense, our visit to Tzipi symbolizes our stay here in Israel. There’s a timelessness to this place that is hard to describe. The past feels real here, more like an actual presence than a mere memory. As I wandered aimlessly around the streets of ancient Tzipori and considered that not centuries but millennia before my people landed in our decrepit, unmissed Polish town (which I only am alive because my grandparents had the good idea to leave before everyone left behind was murdered in 1942), my people were wandering around these very streets, pausing in the cool shade of the buildings that lined those thoroughfares to catch their breath or to drink some cold water before venturing out again into the midday heat. To imagine Rebbi himself—the editor of the Mishnah and thus the father of all rabbinic learning—to imagine Rabbi Judah Ha-nasi himself strolling past the now-mostly-restored but once-fully-intact amphitheater on his way to teach or to learn, that would be a remarkable experience under any circumstances at all. But to feel the past as a palpable, real presence in a place that Maccabean king Alexander Jannaeus wrested from the Syrian Greeks in 104 BCE and no doubt visited personally as part of his campaign, to feel his presence and Rabbi Judah’s no less palpably than I felt Joan’s or the cousins with whom we were visited the place that July day just a few weeks ago—that was a truly remarkable, once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. And that is what I wanted to share with you all today—experiences like that are part and parcel of life here, the tangible, fully real, part of being a Jew in Eretz Ha-kodesh, in the Holy Land.

For those of you who haven’t experienced Israel, I can’t stress enough how fabulous an experience is awaiting you. For those of you who have been here before, including even those who have been here many times—there are places, as Tzipori was for me, that simply have to be experienced in person rather than read about in a book. To say that Jewish history—and, in a sense, Jewishness itself—comes alive in this place is barely to say anything at all. I return home not only invigorated intellectually and spiritually, but also emotionally. I’ve had a magnificent summer!