Ben-Gvir's Visit to the Temple Mount

Itamar Ben-Gvir is Israel’s Minister of National Security. He is also a criminal, having been convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. (The organization in question was the far-right Kahanist political movement called Kach.) He is known to have had at one point hanging in his home a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the physician-terrorist who murdered twenty-nine worshipers and wounded another 125 in the mosque located on the site of the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron on Purim in 1994, and who was subsequently beaten to death by the other worshipers. His views were deemed so extreme that he was actually not accepted for service in the IDF after completing high school owing to the violent extremism he espoused. For that, he is very well known in Israel. But he is also famous—or perhaps I should say infamous—for having stolen an ornament from Yitzchak Rabin’s car a few weeks before the latter was assassinated and then, while brandishing it aloft, saying to his followers that the next step after stealing the ornament should be murdering Rabin himself. Ben-Gvir finished law school, but was actually blocked from taking the bar exam by the Israel Bar Association because of his extremist views. (Who even knew the Bar Association could do such a thing? In the end, though, Ben-Gvir appealed and, after settling three different sets of criminal charges against him, was finally allowed to take the both the written and oral parts of the exam, both of which he passed and so became licensed to practice law.)

Today, Ben-Gvir’s party is the third largest in the Knesset, more than doubling its seats from one election to the next. And it was as leader of that party, called Otzmah Yehudit (“Jewish Power”), that he was offered the newly-created National Security Ministry that includes, among many other things, overseeing the Israel Border Police on the West Bank.

And it was this Ben-Gvir who led a small party of supporters to ascend to the top of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on January 3. There was no specific point to the visit other than to show that there are not and must not be any laws—much less laws imposed by foreign entities or governments—restricting the rights of Israelis to visit any part of their own country, which certainly includes Jerusalem, Israel’s capital city.

There are a thousand issues on which Ben-Gvir and I are on different sides. I have sympathy for the Palestinians, who have been betrayed so many times by their own leadership that even as keen a student of Middle Eastern politics as myself cannot remember how many chances to create an independent Palestinian entity have been missed by the Palestinians’ sclerotic and corrupt leadership. I believe that making Israel’s Arab citizens feel welcome in their own country is a positive, healthy goal towards which Jewish Israelis should strive. And I believe that the concept of using terrorism to fight terrorists is not only illogical but also misguided and, in my opinion, deeply counterproductive. Nobody becomes less violent by being treated violently.

But Ben-Gvir’s trip to the Temple Mount is in its own category and it is about that specific incident that I’d like to write this week. My feelings about the man’s brief excursion to a part of Jerusalem I myself have only seen from afar, mostly from looking across the valley that separates the Mount of Olives from the Temple Mount, are complex. I am sure that the point of the visit was to be provocative and confrontational, even incendiary. And that part repels me, as it should any person eager to promote peaceful relations between the various groups who call Jerusalem home. But the concept itself that a Jew should be forbidden to visit the holiest of all Jewish sites is also anathema to me. And the vitriolic response to Ben-Gvir’s visit—and particularly those that featured knee-jerk references to the importance of maintaining the status quo on the Temple Mount—those reactions repulsed me as well.

I should start by noting that it's not all that obvious that Jews should ascend the Temple Mount in the first place. I myself wrote the chapter about Israel in the Rabbinical Assembly’s landmark work, The Observant Life, in which I reviewed at length the various opinions regarding the halakhic permissibility of climbing up to the top of the mount given the relevant facts that all today are presumed to be in a state of impurity and that the precise location of the buildings and courtyards stop the Mount in ancient times can be only be presumed through scholarly conjecture today. (It seems clear also that the Temple Mount itself was distinctly smaller in ancient times. So there are a lot of details in play here. The relevant section in The Observant Life in on pp. 346–348.) And although Maimonides himself ruled that a Jew should avoid the entire Temple Mount area so as to be absolutely certain of not transgressing the law, there are many authorities today—both Conservative/Masorti and Orthodox—who find it permissible to climb to the top of the Temple Mount and merely to avoid entry into the Dome of the Rock and/or the central plaza to its south. The general halakhic sense of how things are has changed over the years. When I first visited the Old City in 1974, it was widely understood that religious Jews should not ascend to the top of the mountain. A large sign at the entrance to the path leading up to the Temple Mount says much clearly.

But things have changed dramatically over the years. And the further to the right one looks, the more widespread the belief that, not only is there nothing wrong with climbing to the top of the Temple Mount, but there is an important statement to be made—to the Jordanians (the self-appointed guardians of the mosques atop the Mount), to the Palestinians, to the United Nations, and to the rest of the world in doing so: that Jewish people do not need anyone’s permission to visit their own holy sites. And that that applies even, or perhaps especially, to sites in Israel over which foreign nations claim the authority of governance.

Ben-Gvir’s was brief, just about fifteen minutes in length  and it took place early in the morning. He didn’t attempt to recite his morning prayers. Nor was this his first visit to the Temple Mount, just his first visit as a cabinet minister. The responses were entirely predictable. The Jordanians were enraged. The Palestinians, ditto. But it fell to our American ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides, to pin the tail on the real issue involved. “To be very clear,” the ambassador said very clearly, “we want to preserve the status quo and actions that prevent that are unacceptable.”  And this was echoed even more officially by U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, who said that our nation “oppose[s] any unilateral actions that undercut the historical status quo.”

For me personally, it’s that notion of the “status quo” that sticks in my craw. The Latin words denote “the existing state of affairs,” but the ambassador’s and the State Department spokesman’s use of the term leaves unaddressed the highly pertinent fact that Ben-Gvir’s visit specifically did not violate the status quo. Or at least not the status quo that has pertained since Israel wrested the Old City from Jordanian control in the Six Day War, at which time Moshe Dayan decided to permit Jews to visit the Temple Mount but not to pray there. (The idea was that having regular prayer services, or even for individuals to recite their prayers there, would be too provocative, but that their mere presence atop the Mount would be something the local Muslims would have to learn to live with.) And that is precisely where things have stood since 1967. So to say that Ben-Gvir violated the status quo is simply not true: the man ascended to the top of the Mount, walked around for a quarter hour, then left. This was pointed out to the State Department spokesman, who responded to a question about what the status quo actually is by saying it would have to be a matter of negotiation between “the parties themselves, including the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” George Orwell couldn’t have said it better: the status quo is not the situation that currently pertains, but rather whatever arrangement the interested parties are able to negotiate into being—which is precisely the opposite of what “status quo” means.

On the ground, the question of Israel’s right to exist translates into the right of Israelis to behave as citizens of their own state with all that entails—and certainly the right to behave as masters in their own home. And that certainly should involve the right of unrestricted access to their own holy sites, something Muslims and Christians in Israel take for granted. The notion that a liberal, non-fanatic, non-fundamentalist person such as myself cannot see what exactly Ben-Gvir did to provoke the outrage of the world says more about the world than about Ben-Gvir. Muslims in Jerusalem do and should have the right to worship where and when they please. But so should Jews. What the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—the same people who forbade any Jewish presence at all in the Old City of Jerusalem during the years they occupied it—should have to do with the governance of the Temple Mount should be…nothing at all.

  

Chatting with the Bot

ChatGPT has only been with us for a little less than three months, but it has already garnered far more interest—and more nervous criticism—than any earlier chatbot has so far managed to attract. (For the as-yet-uninitiated, a chatbot—also occasionally called a chatterbot—is basically a computer program that knows enough of human language, culture, history, and dialogic technique to participate in a conversation in convincing enough a way to appear to be a human interlocutor.) They’ve been around for a while, too: I wrote a Friday letter five years ago about the efforts of James Vlahos to create a chatbot programmed so successfully with his father’s speech patterns, vocabulary choices, grammatical usages, and idiosyncratic ways of expressing himself that it felt possible for Vlahos to have an actual conversation with his father long after the latter died. (To see that letter, click here. And for a very moving account of the whole project by James Vlahos himself, click here.) At the time, it seemed more amusing than sinister to me, like a kind of living memorial to a late parent that would be a huge advance over just watching that parent in a home movie and being unable personally to step into the action. But it didn’t seem to me as much more than that.

We’ve come a long ways since 2017. Yes, it’s still easy enough to know when you are talking to a machine when you try to phone a bank or an insurance company. And some of those machine-generated partners-in-dialogue actually do a fairly good job of assisting you if you are patient enough to let them do their thing. Still, no one doesn’t prefer to speak to an actual human being, I don’t think. Certainly, I myself do. But no amount of machine-generated robocalls or chatbot-based customer service offerings prepared me even slightly for ChatGPT.

You may have heard about it already. There was, for example, a very long story in the Times just the other day about how the advent of ChatGPT, the latest offering by OpenAI, has transformed the way at least some college courses are taught. (To Kalley Huang’s article, click here.) That in and of itself is pretty amazing, since ChatGPT has only been around since last November. But I was intrigued. It wasn’t until I actually signed on to the OpenAI website and engaged personally with ChatGPT, however, that I realized just how remarkable a door has now been opened to all who dare step across the threshold. So I write today to share some of the details of that specific journey I’ve been on the course of these last few days.

I’m sitting in my study at home on Reed Drive. Joan is at school; it’s just me here. My computer is open and I’ve logged onto the OpenAI site. I can’t decide if I’m being bold or silly in taking this on but I’m also slightly worried. What if the bot really is more capable of intelligent theorizing regarding Jewish law or thoughtful rumination regarding the literary heritage of ancient Judaism than I am? Do I really want to surrender my superior human status that easily to a fancy piece of software? Or would I be acting foolishly not to see for myself how this works? A lifetime ago, I remember snickering when a fellow student in grad school purchased a home computer upon which to write his dissertation and wondering what he can have been thinking by wasting such a huge sum of money on a glorified typewriter. I was a bit hasty in that evaluation, I now realize. So let’s not make the same mistake twice, I tell myself. And so, throwing caution to the wind, I begin.

I figure I might as well start off with some simple stuff.

I ask the bot for the name of Abraham’s father. And the answer comes back instantly:

Abraham's father was Terah.

So that’s easy enough. Who doesn’t know that? But the point here is not just to test the breadth of the program’s knowledge, but to see if it can think. Or appear to think. So let’s go more subtle.

Was Haman a wicked man? I ask. It’s not as simple a question as it sounds and, amazingly, the bot seizes the complexity behind what sounds at first blush like a very simple question.

Haman is a character in the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible. He is depicted as a wicked man and the prime antagonist of the story, who plots to exterminate the Jewish people.

I’m impressed. The bot recognizes that Haman is a character in a book, not a historical personality whose existence can be corroborated by scientific evidence. And it seems to realize that what we know of Haman derives directly from the way he is depicted in the Book of Esther. So the bot hedges its bets, calling him a character in a book and then answering my question with reference to the way he is depicted in that book rather than as a simple historical fact.

And now I’m ready to wade into more challenging terrain. So it knows a lot of stuff. But can it think? Or can it appear to think?

What, I now wonder, will it do when the question is by nature unanswerable. Is it justifiable, I now ask, to steal food to feed an infant that will not survive without that food?

This takes a few seconds (the other answers were instant), but the answer, I have to admit, is remarkable:

Stealing is generally considered to be morally and legally wrong. However, there may be some circumstances in which it could be considered justifiable to steal food to feed an infant in order to save the infant's life. This could be considered a form of "necessity defense," in which a person commits a crime because they believe it is necessary to prevent a greater harm. However, it's important to note that whether or not this would be considered a valid defense in a court of law would depend on the specific details of the situation and the laws of the jurisdiction in which the crime was committed.

It's worth mentioning that there is usually help available to those in need, in developed countries, there are many organizations that provide assistance to those facing food insecurity, and it may be possible to obtain food for the infant through these channels without resorting to theft.

 Wow. I wonder what the bot would make of the storyline of Les Mis! (Could a chatbot even go to the theater? Where would it sit?) But the question isn’t only whimsical but also real: is the bot really thinking? It’s hard to say. The answer is intelligent, well-thought-out, reasonable. The bot knows the “simple” answer (i.e., stealing is wrong), but it seems able to weigh that thought against other principles in play (i.e., it can never be right to allow a child to die of hunger if you can prevent that from happening). And it did a pretty good job of weighing those principles against each other and coming up with a thoughtful, rational answer.

I wonder how it will do with questionable premises. Will it follow the question’s lead or challenge its fundamental basis?

If, I now type in, life begins with conception, is aborting a fetus no different than murdering a child? It’s a loaded question. Given the landscape in today’s America, it’s a very loaded question. But since I’ve formulated it as I did, will the bot “just” answer the question or will it attempt to nudge me off my premise?

It took almost half a minute to respond. But then it came up with this:

The question of when life begins is a deeply philosophical and moral one, and opinions on the matter can vary widely. Some people believe that life begins at conception, while others believe that it begins at some point later in pregnancy.

If one holds the belief that life begins at conception, then it could be argued that aborting a fetus is the same as killing a child. However, many people who hold this belief still believe that there are certain circumstances in which abortion may be morally justifiable, such as to save the life of the mother, in cases of rape or incest, or if the pregnancy is not viable.

On the other hand, others may disagree with the statement that life begins at conception and may argue that a fetus is not yet a person, and therefore not equivalent to a child. They may argue that a woman has the right to control her own body and make decisions about her pregnancy.

Ultimately, whether or not one considers abortion to be the same as murder is a matter of personal belief, and it is important to respect and consider the perspectives of those who may hold different views on this issue.

So that’s not a bad answer. If I were asked that precise question in my role as community rabbi, I think my answer would be similar. I’d agree that if the protasis (i.e., the “if” part of an “if/then” statement) is a given, then the apodosis (i.e., the “then” part) would also be correct. But I’d also hasten to point out that that the issue would only be a simple one if you could prove that the protasis were a simple truth and not the matter of intense controversy that it is in the world. And no one, at least so far, has determined definitively when life begins.

And then I think to wonder what the bot might have to say about the issue that concerns me the most in the world: the future of the Jewish people in a world of ever-mounting anti-Semitism. I type slowly, wondering if this is a good idea. But then I remind myself that I’m talking to a machine and I press the “submit” button. This one, it really has to think about. It ruminates for almost 90 seconds. But when it does respond, the answer is more encouraging than almost anything I’ve read on the topic lately.

It is difficult to predict the future, but it is likely that the Jewish people will continue to exist in the future. The Jewish people have a long history and a rich cultural heritage, and there are currently millions of Jews living around the world.

However, the Jewish people have faced significant challenges throughout history, including persecution and violence. Anti-Semitism still exist in some parts of the world and it is something that Jewish communities continue to confront.

The State of Israel, established in 1948, is the homeland of the Jewish people and it is a place where they can live in security and prosperity. The State of Israel is home to a large and vibrant Jewish community and it is likely that it will continue to be an important center of Jewish life in the future.

Overall, while it is impossible to know what the future holds, the Jewish people have a strong sense of community and history, and it is likely that they will continue to thrive and flourish in the years to come.

 I’ll take it! And that concludes my AI session with ChatGPT. (By the way, the GPT part stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, whatever that means exactly, and the AI in OpenAI stands for Artificial Intelligence.) Would you like to take it out for a spin? Just go to https://openai.com, then click on ChatGPT on the lower left corner of the screen. (You’ll have to scroll down a bit to get to the bottom.) And then you can ask away and see what comes back. 

A New Netanyahu Government

When Winston Churchill famously commented that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others,” he was being both witty and trenchant. There is, after all, something just and fair about the people—the demo part of “democracy” from the Greek demos, meaning “the people”—self-governing by choosing as their leaders individuals whose opinions about the issues of the day most closely suit their own. But there is also something deeply problematic about the concept of awarding to the people the right to self-govern without giving some advance thought to what should happen if the people should turn away from decency and justice to embrace principles that are at their core inimical to the wellbeing of the society in which they live. I never seem to tire of noting that the Nazis are believed by historians to have won the election of 1933 fairly, i.e., by getting a majority of voters’ votes—but surely no normal person would argue that that victory by definition made reasonable and just the barbaric laws enacted almost immediately by the demonic cadre of sociopaths who came to power legally in the wake of that fair and free election.

The Founders of our nation saw the problem easily and so invented a kind of democracy in which each of the three branches of government—the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary—all labor under certain restrictions designed to create and maintain a balance of power capable of keeping tyranny from gaining a foothold in our land merely because a would-be tyrant somehow manages to garner a majority of votes in a national election. Our Founders were dreamers, but they were also realists. And they clearly understood the dangers that inhere even in a democracy when a workable system of checks and balances is not put in place to keep any one part of the government from turning away from the core values upon which the republic was meant to rest.

I have been thinking about these issues all week because of legislation the Netanyahu government is planning to bring to the Knesset over the next few months that will effectively and dramatically diminish the power of the judiciary. The proposed bill is a complex piece of legislation, but two core innovations have garnered the most attention and the strongest opposition.

One is the so-called “override” clause that will dramatically constrain the justices of the Supreme Court from attempting to nullify legislation they find to be antidemocratic, discriminatory, of in contravention of Israel’s Basic Laws, the set of laws that function more or less as Israel’s constitution. Under the new law, the Supreme Court will be barred from deliberating at all with respect to the Basic Laws that function as Israel’s constitution, the interpretation of which will henceforth be almost solely in the hands of the legislature.

And the other, related to the first, will basically make it possible for the Knesset to override Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority of sixty-one votes. (There are 120 seats in the Knesset.) In other words, if the Supreme Court finds a piece of legislation to be in contravention of the Basic Laws, they could strike it down…but only with the assent of all the court’s justices. But even that won’t put the matter to rest, since the Knesset could simply vote again on the same law and recertify it as government policy with a majority of one single vote. This is, to my mind, a hugely dangerous move that could conceivably impact on the democratic nature of the State in many different profound ways. Nor am I alone in thinking that: David Horovitz, the founding editor of the Times of Israel, published a piece in his own newspaper earlier this week under the title “Justice Minister Sounds Death Knell for Israel’s Inadequately Protected Democracy.” (To read the piece, click here.) And I read a dozen other essays in the press and across the web expressing similar dismay.

In our nation, Supreme Court decisions can be overridden. But the process is complex, lengthy, and specifically designed to make it impossible for the Congress “just” to override a decision of the Court.

The Court itself, of course, has the power to overturn its own decisions, but the President has no such power: the best an American president can do if he or she is unhappy with a decision of the Supreme Court is to push for a review of a specific law in the hopes that the Court will override its own prior decision. But what about Congress? Article V of the Constitution allows Congress to amend the Constitution if two-thirds of the House and the Senate vote to do so or if two-thirds of the states request such an amendment, and that could in effect override a decision by the Court that a practice or a law was unconstitutional. But such an amendment must then be ratified by three-quarters of the states, and that is a process that can take years. In its darkest hour, for example, the Supreme Court determined in the 1857 “Dred Scott Decision” that enslaved individuals were not American citizens and were therefore not entitled to protection by the government or the court system. And it also determined that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from federal territory. Both parts of the decision were then overturned by constitutional amendment, the part about slaves not being citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted American citizenship to all people born in this country, and the part about the authority to ban slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment which, in fact, granted Congress the right to ban slavery and, in fact, banned slavery in the United States. So Supreme Court decisions in our nation can indeed be overturned. It just takes a long time and is a very arduous process.

The concept of an “override” clause that allows the government legally to act in contravention of the rights guaranteed to its citizens under the Constitution is not unknown to Western democracies. Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, is popularly called the “Notwithstanding Clause,” because it awards federal, provincial and municipal governments the right to legislate in ways that contravene the basic rights of citizens for some greater good. The federal government has never availed itself of this right, but some provincial governments, particularly the government of Quebec, have. In Ontario, I remember it being invoked to justify the inherently unfair policy of the provincial government of funding Catholic schools, but neither Protestant nor Jewish ones; the government admitted that this was inherently unfair, but insisted on maintaining the policy “notwithstanding” its inherent inequity because it derived from the original 1841 merger between Upper and Lower Canada that created the Province of Canada. (The Province of Canada was part of the British Empire until the British North America Act of 1867 created the nation of Canada as we know it.)  There is no specific parallel to the “Notwithstanding Clause” in American law.

But neither the American method of overriding the Court (i.e., by the long, arduous process of amending the Constitution) nor the Canadian one mentioned above is anything like the proposed legislation in Israel in terms of its ability basically to make it possible for the legislature simply to ignore the Court and vote its way around any decision issued by its justices.

The majority Netanyahu cobbled together to put himself back in power is in many ways an ultra-conservative one that includes among its ministers a criminal like Aryeh Deri, who was convicted of bribery, fraud, and breeching the public trust in 1999 and sent to prison for three years, and who was then convicted again of income tax evasion just last year and fined the equivalent of about $50,000 U.S. But far more troubling are the presence of extremists who have openly questioned the basic civil rights of Israel’s Arab citizens, its LGBTQ citizens, its female citizens, and its non-Jewish citizens. If there was ever a government that is going to need to be reined in by a vigorous, vocal Court devoted not to the political future of the PM or his party but to the moral future of the State itself, it is this one. That not being the case, I fear we are in for a rough ride indeed.

And yet, as I said from the bimah just last Shabbat, we cannot allow our concerns about the government to affect our willingness to support the State of Israel itself. America is more than its government and its political parties. So are all countries, including Israel. I am worried about some of the ministers Netanyahu has appointed—and certainly not just Aryeh Deri—and not sure if their extreme right-wing approaches can or will be vitiated by the presence in the government of calmer, more reasonable types. The future will unfold. Some developments, I suppose, will be regrettable. I have never allowed my distaste for any specific politician to affect the deep sense of patriotic loyalty I bring to my feelings about my own country. And I do not plan to allow any specific policies of the Netanyahu government to weaken my support for Israel itself—for the nation and for its people. 

George Santos Represents Me in Congress

Like most of my readers, I reside in New York’s Third Congressional District. In some ways, it’s a regular suburban place: a mixture of strip malls and fancy shopping malls and town centers, of wooded subdivisions and public parks and train stations. But in other ways, it is not that unexceptional at all. The residents of our district, for example, collectively have the highest median income in the state. (In the entire nation, only California Congressional District 17, which includes most of Silicon Valley; California Congressional District 18, which includes Palo Alto and Mountain View; and Virginia Congressional District 10, which lies just to the west of Washington, D.C., have higher median incomes.) Nor are we average in terms of our racial mix: our district has a higher percentage of white people than the American average (69.5% as opposed to 57.8% nationally), a dramatically lower percentage of Black people (3.1% as opposed to 13.6% nationally), a lower, but less dramatically so, percentage of Hispanic residents (10.6% as opposed to 18.9% nationally), and a much higher percentage of Asian-Americans than the national average (14.6% as opposed to 5.9% nationally). A mere 0.7% of the population of our district is constituted of people who do not self-define as belonging to any of the above groups.

We have sent many representatives to the House over the years. Egbert Benson, a jurist who had previously represented New York State in the Continental Congress, was elected in 1789 and then re-elected in 1790.

He was replaced by Philip van Cortlandt, who had previously served in the Continental Army, and who was re-elected four times after his initial victory in 1793. Van Cortlandt was replaced by Samuel Mitchill, who resigned to become a United States Senator and who in turn was replaced by George Clinton, Jr., an unfortunate fellow who died as a young man of thirty-eight after serving in the House for just four years.

Most of our representatives have been long since forgotten by all. Or almost all. Perhaps some might recall Henry Warner Slocum, Jr., a Union general in the Civil War who fought at Bull Run, Antietam, and many other battles, and who later represented our district in Congress. Or perhaps some might recall that we were once represented in the Congress by James Monroe, nephew of President James Monroe, or by James I. Roosevelt, grandfather of President Theodore Roosevelt. For the most part, though, the names of the people who have represented our district in the House in days gone by would be unfamiliar to most—which is a shame, because among them were men—and they were all men—of great renown.  The more recent, on the other hand, would surely be known to all: between them, Robert J. Mrazek, Peter T. King, Steve Israel, and Thomas Suozzi have represented our district for the last forty years! (Mrazek was re-elected four times after his first win in 1982; King was re-elected ten times. Israel and Suozzi were re-elected once and twice respectively.)

And now we have somehow sent George Santos, or whatever his name really is, to Congress. How can we have come to this? It’s a good question!

We actually know more about who George Santos isn’t than about who he is. Contrary to his own press releases and campaign literature, he apparently

·       did not attend Horace Mann Preparator School,

·       did not attend Baruch College,

·       did not attend New York University,

·       did not work for Citigroup,

·       did not work for Goldman Sachs,

·       does not actually own any of the eleven properties he claimed to own,

·       was not the grandson of Shoah survivors from Ukraine via Belgium,

·       is not Jewish (or even really Jew-ish, whatever that means; maybe Jew-ish-ish-by-self-definition a little, but probably not even that),

·       did not found Friends of Pets United, which alleged charity the IRS says is unknown to them,

·       did not lose his mother in the 9/11 attacks, although she apparently was present in one of the towers when the planes struck,

·       had no employees who were killed in the Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando,

·       is not married, at least not officially, and

·       is not biracial.

So that’s a lot of things not to be. And what does that leave him being? That, at least, is easy to answer, at least with respect to his new day job: he represents us in Congress. God help us all! Even his name isn’t all that clear: he appears legally to be George Anthony Devolder Santos, but has also used the name Anthony Zabrovsky and Anthony Devolder as aliases. Oy. (Special note to Jew-ish-ish readers: oy is a word in widespread use among actual Jewish people to denote extreme dismay.)

Nor is mopping up after his own mess the sole problem Representative Santos is facing. The government of Brazil has re-opened a 2008 investigation regarding a stolen checkbook our Congressman allegedly used to steal clothing from a store in Niterói, a town near Rio de Janeiro. Nassau County D.A. Anne Donnely has announced an investigation to determine if Congressman Santos has committed any actual crimes by lying to the people he hoped those lies would get to vote for him. A few days later, the State Attorney General launched a separate investigation into the matter. And then, finally, it was revealed that a federal investigation into the whole affair had been undertaken by the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney.  The Republican Jewish Coalition, which under other circumstances would have welcomed Representative Santos with open arms, has instead barred him from future meetings. Leading Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries have been merciless in their condemnatory rhetoric. A few Republicans have followed suit. Marjorie Taylor Greene, on the other hand, said that she didn’t see why voters shouldn’t at least give the man a chance. I suppose I see her point: it’s not like lying has ever disqualified politicians from plying their trade! But, even so, this seems beyond the pale in terms of its acceptability to normal people…and particularly to the normal people whom he is now employed to represent, including most definitely myself. (Congressman Santos won 54.1% of the vote, as opposed to Democrat Robert Zimmerman who ended up with 45.9%.) Jerry Kassar, the chair of the Conservative Party of New York, summed things up nicely: “His entire life seems to be made up,” he said. “Everything about him is fraudulent.”

Is it a crime to lie to would-be constituents? It turns out to be more complicated a question than I would have thought, although the Supreme Court ruling of 2014 known as Susan B. Anthony list v. Driehaus seems to have determined that campaign lies are protected speech under the First Amendment. (To read more, click here.) In belated response, Bronx Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY) has announced a proposed bill specifically to make it a crime for candidates for federal office to lie about the details of their own past history, a bill he has whimsically named after none other than our own George Santos: The Stop Another Non-Truthful Office Seeker Act. You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

But although lying to constituents may be permitted, the U.S. attorney definitely has the right to investigate and prosecute violations of federal campaign laws. And that too seems to be an issue for Santos, who has yet to explain where the $700,000 he lent his own campaign came from exactly.

And where does that leave any of us? In a not good place! The chances of Santos being able to crawl safely out from any of this seem slim. But what seems certain is that this guy’s personal woes are going to take up a lot of the time he should be spending representing us in Congress. At this point, the most dignified path forward would be to make a full public confession, to agree to seek professional help from a trained mental-health professional, to give up his seat, and to call personally for a new election to find a replacement worthy of representing our district. Will that happen? Given the razor-thin Republican majority in the House, I doubt it. And, yes, some of the blame certainly must fall on the rest of everybody: the news media who swallowed his story whole without investigating, his opponent who failed to see through the smoke at the actual man facing him, the public who swallowed his story hook, line, and sinker as though none of us could imagine a politician fibbing to get him or herself elected. So this debacle touches all of us. But as I write these words, the only two real questions of the day yet remain unanswered: what is there to do about all this and who is going to do it?