The Ruminative Rabbi

Watching Downton Abbey

2012-01-26T11:55:00.008-05:00

Like many of you, I’m sure, Joan and I have been watching Downton Abbey, the latest BBC “Upstairs, Downstairs”-style melodrama set among incredibly wealthy (and even more incredibly overdressed) Brits who are in many ways (although clearly not in all) closer to their servants than to each other. But it’s not the whole dressing-for-dinner thing I want to write about here—although it would be interesting in its own right, and not especially flattering to ourselves, to compare these people’s dining habits with our own—but the backdrop to the entire story to date, which is the First World War. At first, the war is safely distant from Downton Abbey: it is being fought “over there,” wherever “there” is at any given moment. Mostly, the fighting is in France. And it’s the kind of thing the lower classes support by putting their sons’ lives on the line, while the upper classes hold endless charity balls to support “our boys.” (No one seems ever to notice that “our” boys aren’t their boys at all for the great most part, but their servants’ sons and their less-well-off neighbors'.) But then, as the years pass, the upper classes do become involved in the real way that people become involved in war, and a good deal of the drama in this second season involves the tension that inevitably evolves from the realization that the rigid class system Britain has self-servingly set aside to allow young men of all classes and backgrounds to die side by side in the trenches is not easily going to snap back into place at the cessation of hostilities, that something permanent has changed in British society. And, of course, it is equally obvious that no one is entirely sure what that change will bring in its wake or whether that kind of massive shift in societal norms will turn out to be a golden opportunity for a nation to advance forward into a new future or a Pandora’s box that only looks like a treasure chest before anyone figures out how actually to open it.

Ken Follett’s latest book, Fall of Giants, is built around the same set of themes and also has the First World War as its background. I’ve read all of Follett’s books, I believe, and I look forward to the next installment in the trilogy of which Fall of Giants is only the first volume. But that single notion that animates both Downton Abbey and Follett’s book—that the First World War was one of those watershed events in history that altered society so completely that what followed was in many ways a complete break with what came before—is what interests me in both works. I recommend Follett’s book to you all. It’s clever, engaging…and, even at a cool thousand pages, a brisk read. I’m not sure when the second book will be out, but I’ll read it as soon as it appears and tell you all what I think.

The First World War, the backdrop for both works, is in many ways the forgotten war of our time. Both my parents were born while it was raging, yet in our home—as, I’m almost certain, in yours as well—“the” war without any further qualification meant the Second World War, not the First. In some weird way, the angel of death passed over my family in this regard: my father was an infant when the U.S. entered the war in 1917 and my grandfathers were in their thirties, so no one was called up and none of my relatives was among the 116,708 Americans who died during the conflict. But that’s only my own personal story…and the numbers themselves are shocking even by the standards of the Second World War.

Consider, for example, that on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, Britain lost almost 60,000 men. That’s more soldiers than America lost in the entire Vietnam conflict. This is not a number to pass quickly by: imagine, if you can, that the entire Vietnam War took place on a single day—except that even more soldiers died—and then, when it was all over, the sun set, then rose the following morning, and the battle simply recommenced. By the time it was all over, there were over 627,000 dead on the side of the Allies. The Germans and their allies lost about 456,000, but not the one that might have made all the difference: the young Adolf Hitler, serving with the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division, survived the battle after being shot in the leg. Together, that makes well over a million casualties. What’s stunning about the Battle of the Somme, though, is not only the almost unimaginable carnage, the uncountable dead. What’s amazing is that after months and months of fighting—the battle began on July 1 and ended in mid-November—the entire result gained by all that horrific loss of life was that the German line was pushed back about forty miles towards the east. It doesn’t sound like much. It isn’t much. Obviously, the men fighting the battle could not have known that, when it was all over, nothing at all would have been accomplished that even the most sympathetic military historian could possibly consider to have been worth the loss of life. There were endless acts of bravery, of selfless sacrifice. But it should be possible for people like ourselves looking back almost a century later to honor the sacrifice of the dead without losing sight of the fact that it was, in the end, a draw. No one won anything too much. Some strategic shifts were recorded. The Battle of the Somme was the first battle in which tanks played a major role; the tank itself was regarded by the British as a secret weapon that it was hoped (apparently incorrectly) would prove decisive in overrunning the enemy’s trenches. But in the end…it came down to a retreat for the Germans of about forty miles and a concomitant advance for the Allies of about seven miles, a distance once famously set against the number of people who died at the Somme to yield the conclusion that every single centimeter of advance cost the lives of two young soldiers.

But what is true of the Somme is true of the First World War itself. The losses were staggering. On the Allies’ side, about 5,525,000 people were killed and almost 13,000,000 wounded. On the side of the Central Powers, there were over four million dead and well over eight million wounded. The number to consider, though, is this: on both sides, when the guns of August finally fell silent, the total number of people killed, wounded, or missing in action came to about 38,880,500. It’s a staggering number. And what did those people die for? That, actually, is the real question I would like to put forward.

I can remember sitting in Mrs. Gore’s American History class in eleventh grade in Forest Hills High School and, as I listened to her teach about the First World War, thinking even then that I had no idea what she was talking about, that she kept falling back on explaining how the war got started—the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in June of 1914 was the trigger, as we all learned somewhere along the way—without explaining how exactly someone shooting someone else could possibly have led to the deaths of almost ten million people. Worried about the Regents Exam in American History I would have to take in June (I was that kind of student), I duly memorized all the alliances and intricate treaties that brought nation after nation into the conflict. Barbara Tuchman’s great book, The Guns of August, had just been published a few years earlier—I started eleventh grade in 1968—and I remember reading it with great interest and still being unable to understand what the whole thing was about. One of the young men depicted in Downton Abbey as going off to war says that he’s willing to put his life on the line because he truly believes in the cause, by which he presumably means that he believes in it enough to risk his life in its service. But what exactly was the cause? He didn’t say. And that’s the question I’ve never been able to answer for myself with any degree of satisfaction.

As far as I can see, the war ended and everybody went home. There was no invasion of Germany. The survivors picked up their lives. France went back to being a country, not the world’s battlefield. The Kaiser was deposed and Germany became a republic. In the end, though, I think it could be reasonably said that this massive paroxysm of inexplicable violence that cost millions upon millions of people their lives led to some political changes in some of the participating countries, to some social changes in others, and to almost nothing meaningful in still other participating countries (like our own, for example). Yet the bitter legacy of defeat in Germany led to the rise of Nazism, which eventually plunged the world into an even more violent war, one that cost the lives of over 24,000,000 soldiers and another fifty million civilians. The numbers are beyond staggering. If there hadn’t been a First World War, would there have been a Second? That’s the question to ponder—and I say that both as an American and also as a Jew who has not known a single day since adolescence not at least partially devoted to contemplating the legacy of the Shoah. One could certainly make a convincing case that the Germans would never have embraced Nazism had their economy not been on the verge of collapse, a disaster that was a direct result of their defeat in the Great War. Is it pointless to ponder these questions now? It isn’t if such ruminative thought inspires us to consider how impossible it is to know the consequences of our actions—and I’m thinking here principally on the national level—in advance. Could Woodrow Wilson sailing to Europe to attend the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (for which effort he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) have imagined Treblinka in his worst nightmares? I feel certain that he could not have even begun to imagine the horror that the world would experience within a few short decades. Nor, therefore, could he have imagined the consequences of being party to a treaty that insisted that Germany alone was to blame for the war, a contention that a historian like Wilson should certainly have understood was only slightly true, or that the ultimate price of paying for the incalculable devastation should never have been Germany’s alone.

In the end, no one can see the future. But as we move forward as a nation, we should have the lesson of the First World War always in our hearts. Fought for no reason anyone has ever been able to identify clearly to me, it led, circuitously but eventually, to horrors that would have previously been considered unimaginable. Actions have consequences. We just can’t ever quite know them in advance. That thought need not paralyze us, however. Instead, it should instill in us a deep obligation to consider our actions as carefully as possible before going off on adventures that could conceivably lead us to places we haven’t even thought yet of going or having to go.

The Singularity Strikes Back

2012-01-19T12:38:00.004-05:00

Wednesday was an odd day. I opened up my computer and tried to look something up on Wikipedia—I needed to know whether Rabbi Isaac Alfasi, the greatest rabbi of eleventh century Morocco and Spain, was born in 1003 or 1013—and it wasn’t there. This was very serious. How could it not be there? It’s always there. Obviously, I understand the universe suffers various glitches and hitches on a daily basis. But that Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, could somehow be absent felt far too disorienting to be waved away as a mere hiccup in the matrix. But where was it? I looked again…and this time I noticed that the screen was more black than blank. And then, as the words formed on my screen, I finally got the point: Wikipedia had intentionally gone dark for a day to protest a bill currently before Congress. Later in the day, I tried to google some information that I would ordinarily have looked up in Wikipedia and found that google was, if not actually dead, than at least in mourning: it was wearing a black band intended, so I soon learned, to indicate its deep sadness regarding the same bill that Wikipedia temporarily stopped existing to protest.

I have to say that they both got my attention. The legislation the powerhouses of the ‘net have gone to war against is actually two different bills, the one before the House called SOPA, which stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the one before the Senate called the Protect I.P. Act. At first, it seemed like an odd thing to fight: surely the masters of Wikipedia and Google aren’t in favor of online piracy! But the more I read, the more I began to understand about what this is all about. Just a few weeks ago, these bills were considered obscure no-brainers, the kind that Congress would pass easily because it was hard to imagine why anyone would vote against them. The big “old school” entertainment industry powerhouses, led in part by the Walt Disney Company, were strongly in favor of legislation being enacted that would protect them from off-shore internet-based companies that distributed their private property for free or almost for free to their own clients via the internet. And, indeed, this is what really happens out there: companies that produce movies, books, music, even television shows, in the United States and sell them via the traditional media outlets to consumers have suddenly found themselves facing competition, if that’s the right word for it, from internet companies located well beyond the normal reach of American justice, who simply post the material for free (or not for free) on their websites without paying anything at all for the right, let alone royalties to the actual owners of the purloined property.

That part, I know all about. If you surf around the ‘net for long enough, you can easily find sites featuring Hollywood movies for download that are still in the theaters here. I found a site the other day quite accidentally that was offering a download of over 1000 books for my Kindle, including (the ad said) the entire New York Times bestseller list, for a fee less than the cost of almost any one of those books on the Times’ list. Nor is this only about intellectual property rights: the Motion Picture Association of America estimated the other day that this kind of off-shore piracy costs the American economy something like 100,000 jobs per year.
Clearly, the movie industry is still vastly profitable. But that’s hardly the point: the fact that a company is doing well doesn’t grant competitors the right to steal its product and sell it themselves, let alone give it away.

On the other hand, the government isn’t entirely innocent of wrongdoing: it has long conspired with readers to deny authors their royalties by buying up popular books and then simply letting members of the public read them for free via the public library system. (In other countries, such as the U.K. or Canada, authors are compensated for lost revenue due to library purchases, but not in the United States.) Still, that the government, even if its own hands aren’t entirely clean, wishes to address the problem of on-line piracy, who could be opposed?

Apparently a lot of people! The way to deal with these on-line pirates, apparently, is to make them undiscoverable by keeping them from appearing in the results when people use the most popular search engines to search for things like “free movies” or “free books,” or things like that. Instead, the search engines could then be made to direct people looking, say, to download a book or a movie, to the actual owner of the property rather than to a rogue operation that will sell what it does not actually own for a fee of its own devising. On top of that, the bills propose that the owners of intellectual property could then have payment companies like Visa or MasterCard refuse to do business with companies that are accused of internet piracy. The problem with all of this is that it means that that internet will become just a bit less like the Wild West and just a bit more like an actual place of business. Censorship is also part of the discussion: the single issue that appears to have aroused most opponents of both bills to action is the concept of censoring the ‘net in a way that could throttle its creativity by making it more like an old-style bookstore, albeit one that doesn’t exist in real space, and less like a freewheeling circus of creativity, artistry, and industry.

I myself see the issue from both sides. Clearly, I am not in favor of people stealing other people’s work and selling it as though they owned it themselves. But I also do believe that when the history—or at least the intellectual history—of human civilization is finally written one day by some thoughtful scholar from a different planet, the invention of the ‘net will take its place next to the invention of moveable type as one of the quantum leaps forward humanity will have made on its way to wherever it is humanity is going. Even though I wrote my dissertation by hand and then typed it on an IBM Selectric typewriter (which unimaginable task involved typing at least a hundred pages of Hebrew backwards since the typing ball only moved from left to right and couldn’t be told otherwise), I cannot imagine what it would mean to be an author today without the internet to rely on for information of every imaginable variety. Keeping people from stealing from other people is an excellent idea, therefore. But I also see the point of not regulating the ‘net out of existence, and part of its culture, as evolved to date at any rate, has to do with the freedom to access unparalleled amounts of information precisely because someone else has already posted that information…somewhere. So the challenge is to cure the disease without killing the patient. In this context, what that means is that Congress is entirely right to want to stop piracy. Who isn’t opposed to that? But we still have to move ahead carefully and judiciously so that the culture of the ‘net itself is enhanced, not degraded, by the government’s efforts to prevent theft.

The traditional Jewish attitude towards intellectual property is that it can neither be owned nor stolen. Ein baalut l’chokhmah is the quasi-traditional formulation: “Knowledge cannot be owned.” What that meant traditionally was that ideas couldn’t be considered personal property. As a result, stealing a book is a crime in a way that stealing an idea found in that book (i.e., and passing it off as your own) simply is not. Furthermore, in classical Jewish law, although all theft is considered wrong, only consequential theft is considered an actionable offense: stealing someone’s used coffee grounds is perhaps morally wrong (in that all theft is wrong), but in that the purloined substance is deemed to have no commercial value it is not considered an actual crime for which someone could be tried and convicted. That was then, however, and this is now: one of the challenges Jewish jurists are going to have to face, and have already begun to face, as we move further into the information age is how to revise laws that were developed in a setting in which the notion of knowledge without a physical medium was limited to the thoughts in one’s head. How the ancient rabbis would have responded to a world in which it is possible to encode thousands of books on a single disk, or in which it is possible for the iTunes store to have sold ten billion songs without any medium at all—not records, not CDs, not tapes, not any real thing at all, just the music as it exists in some binary code that has no discernible physical reality at all—how they would have processed that thought is impossible to imagine.

Or rather, not so impossible: they would have supposed whomever was telling them about iTunes was kidding. Then, when they realized it was true, they would have been looking around for the mashiach. Even to me, much of what we routinely do today seems almost unbelievable. (I subscribe, for example, to an on-line electronic Jewish library that makes available to me a full rabbinic library that would take tens of thousands of dollars to acquire, supposing you could acquire all the volumes present, but which is available to me with no physical medium at all for all of $50 a year.) So the googloids are right: we have something indescribably precious in our hands and we mustn’t strangle it. But surely that doesn’t mean letting thieves steal as they will either. My sense is that the Wild West wasn’t anywhere near as much fun as it seems to have been in the movies. Especially, if you were the one getting shook down by the bad guys before the sheriff and his posse managed to arrive….

Ministerial Exceptions

2012-01-12T09:47:00.003-05:00

Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve been following the latest round of Supreme Court deliberations regarding the so-called ministerial exception with great—and far greater than merely professional—interest. And, also I’m sure like many of you, I find myself of two minds with respect to the issue itself and particular with respect to the decision handed down yesterday in the case known by the unwieldy name of Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, a decision that has been hailed by some as the most important decision the court has handed down with respect to the independence of religious institutions in several decades. Whether that is true or not, I don’t feel qualified to say. But I find myself very engaged by the issue itself. And I also find myself on both sides of the fence, equally able to argue for and against the reasonability of the court’s uncharacteristically unanimous decision.

The concept of the ministerial exception is simple enough to understand and refers to the de facto right of a religious organization like a church or synagogue to choose its spiritual leadership without regard to the laws that forbid different kinds of discrimination in the workplace. Thus, for example, although gender-based discrimination is forbidden by law in most contexts, the government does not interfere in the hiring practices of churches that only permit men to serve as clergy. Clearly, though, there have to be limits to such a hands-off policy and I believe that all, or surely most, Americans would agree that the litmus test for the reasonability of the government refusing to become involved in the inner workings of a religious organization with respect to hiring policy should be whether the policy in question is rooted in actual church doctrine or is “just” discriminatory in nature. It is also important to remember in this regard that the exception, despite its name, does not only apply to the hiring of clergy, but to the way religious organizations conduct themselves in general. Here too, though, the litmus test has to be whether the discriminatory act in question is rooted in actual dogma or not. To give a simple example, the government does not and, I believe, should not object when an Orthodox synagogue insists that women sit in a segregated, cordoned-off area of the sanctuary even though gender-based discrimination in public settings is generally illegal. But if that same synagogue were to establish a similar restricted seating area for people of a specific race or for physically handicapped people, then I believe, as I’m sure most of my readers would agree, then the government should absolutely step in to prevent overtly discriminatory practices that have no specific basis in religious dogma and are, therefore, correctly to be labeled as “just” discriminatory.

And so we come to this week’s Supreme Court decision. The case involved a woman named Cheryl Perich, who worked as a teacher in a Lutheran school in Redford, Michigan. Ms. Perich suffers from narcolepsy, a chronic sleep disorder, and was in the midst of pursuing an employment discrimination claim when she was fired from her job not for being a narcoleptic or for being an incompetent teacher, but for pursuing her dispute with the Missouri Synod (which is the second-largest Lutheran denomination in the United States) through legal channels rather than within the church. In other words, the church fired her not because of any reason connected with her suitability as a teacher or her ability to teach, but because she violated church doctrine by seeking redress in the courts rather than in the church for what she perceived as wrongs committed against her. And this is where I find myself veering off in two different directions and uncertain which path is the one along which I prefer to travel. In the real forest, obviously, when you get to a fork in the road you can only take forward one of the two paths that lay open before you. That should probably be how things are in the world of ideas as well…and yet I find myself occasionally more than able to go off—and, at that, with a sense of certainty that I’ve chosen the right path—in two different directions at once. This is one of those moments.

Surely, American citizens have the right to expect the justice system to protect their rights. Isn’t that the whole point of there being a civil justice system, so that citizens can have recourse to it when they feel that they are being treated unfairly or unjustly, or that they are being discriminated against unreasonably? I think we’d all agree easily that that is precisely why the system exists. Yet the justices of the Supreme Court, all nine of them speaking in one voice, determined that Ms. Perich has no right to contest her dismissal, that the Lutheran Church has the absolute right to fire whom it wishes for non-compliance with church doctrine even when the doctrine in question is more in the category of church policy and does not appear to have any overt relation to spiritual dogma or to religious belief. Making the matter more curious is the fact that Ms. Perich is neither an ordained clergyperson nor a fulltime teacher of religion. In fact, she only taught religion for forty-five minutes out of an entire day’s worth of teaching assignments. Yet that alone—that single class she taught in religion—was enough for the court to determine that her employer could bring the ministerial exception to bear and fire her without having to answer for actions that, were they undertaken by any other kind of employer, would indisputably be taken as an open infringement of an employee’s basic civil rights.

Confusing the issue is the fact that the Court’s decision seems to imply that you don’t have to be a minister to be a minister. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, for example, that the question “whether an employee is a minister is itself religious in nature, and the answer will vary widely.” The fact that Cheryl Perich is specifically not a minister, and is not considered by anyone at all (including the Lutheran Church) to be a minister, is not enough for the church’s right to dismiss her not to be protected by the ministerial exception: the church apparently has the right, so Justice Thomas, to determine on its own that somebody is a kind of a minister even though that person lacks the title, ordination, training, education, or calling to serve in that capacity. Chief Justice Roberts clearly spoke for the majority when he summarized the decision as follows: “The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important. But so, too, is the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith and carry out their mission.” In other words, as soon as an employee is recognized as being involved in teaching or preaching religion, the employer—supposing the employer is a religious institution and not, say, a university with a Religious Studies department—is no longer bound by the standard laws that forbid discrimination in the workplace.

And that is where I part company with the court. On the one hand, the nature of religion requires that some of our normal disinclination to permit discriminatory practices be set aside: there is nothing wrong at all with permitting synagogues to decline to accept non-Jews as members or for allowing Lutheran churches to offer membership only to Lutherans. That is discrimination, of course, but it is to my mind rational discrimination—and nothing at all like a country club or a tennis club refusing to admit as members people of the “wrong” religion or race. And I certainly agree that the ministerial exception should apply to the hiring of ministers: for a Conservative synagogue to say that it is looking for a rabbi, but is not interested in meeting candidates other than ones ordained by Conservative institutions, seems rational to me as well. But I lose my momentum as I try to travel as far down this road as the Supreme Court went the other day: once you say that a teacher can be fired for going to court to seek redress for a wrong she believed to have been committed against her merely because she teaches one class a day on religion and the church teaches (more than just a bit self-servingly) that disputes between employees and the church, including ones that have nothing at all to do with religion, must be resolved in-house rather than in the courts—that already seems to me to be a clear infringement on that teacher’s basic civil rights.

The responses to the decision were as you probably can imagine. All sorts of religious groups, including the Orthodox Union, which joined together with several Christian groups including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Mormon Church, were delighted. I am less delighted. On the one hand, freedom of religion is one of the foundation stones upon which American democracy rests. The First Amendment to the Constitution rightly prohibits the government from becoming involved in the inner workings of religious institutions or from establishing a state religion. The ministerial exception that permits synagogues and churches, and all houses of worship, from hiring the clergy they wish without respect to anti-discrimination legislation, however, is only reasonable as long as it is applied judiciously and in a way that seeks to find a rational balance between the right of religious institutions to self-govern and the rights of individual citizens not to have to endure discriminatory hiring practices. I’m a rabbi, not a lawyer or a professor of law. But why Cheryl Perich should be barred from seeking the assistance of the courts in a matter wholly unrelated to religious dogma, I can’t quite understand. The rabbi in me loves the concept of synagogues being free to function as they see fit without reference to those irritating rules society imposes on other societies and businesses. But the citizen in me can’t quite understand how it can be good for society for institutions that self-define as godly and which profess to promote the finest civil and moral virtues to be exempt from the very rules society has put in place to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak, thus to ensure that society functions fairly and justly for all.

The Tipping Point

2012-01-05T08:58:00.005-05:00

The notion that there is something sacred, not merely practical, about the concept of k’lal yisrael—the indivisible unity of the Jewish people—is a very old idea, one that goes back at least as far as the poet whose words became the central part of the version of the Amidah we recite on Shabbat afternoons, the part that suggests that the unity of the people below is intended specifically to reflect the indivisible, undifferentiated one-ness of God on high. The idea is thus that the Jewish people, at least in theory, proclaims the unity of God not merely by declaiming the Shema twice daily but actually by modeling it in terms of the way they conduct their affairs—the way we conduct our affairs—in such a way so as to make of many Jewish people one nation, one people, one extended family.

That’s the theory, at any rate. (The expression k’lal yisrael, literally “the collective entity of Israel,” appears once in the Talmud, but without any clear theological overtone simply as an expression denoting the Jewish nation in general, as opposed to any subgroup within the people. The more usual rabbinic term for what moderns seem to want to call klal yisrael is k’nesset yisrael, literally “the congregation of Israel,” what Solomon Schechter slightly infelicitously called “catholic Israel.” Why modern usage has chosen to favor the former term over the latter, I’m not sure. Nor is it correct to say that the expression k’nesset yisrael has fallen entirely into desuetude: I noticed it just the other day in an essay by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief Orthodox rabbi of Great Britain, where he wrote: “The subject of covenantal promises is not the sub-community of pious Jews but k’nesset yisrael, the collective entity of the people of Israel….”) But whatever we call it, the concept that part of being a faithful member of the House of Israel means accepting as brethren all our co-religionists, including both those with whom we disagree about details as well as those whose entire approach to religion we find intellectually indefensible and morally off-putting.

It’s an easy sermon to preach. It’s distinctly harder and more challenging actually to take the concept to heart and truly to believe in it. Indeed, the events of the last few weeks in Beit Shemesh and elsewhere in Israel have pushed me almost to the point at which I wonder if any normal person can truly embrace the notion of k’lal yisrael without descending so far into the realm of the absurd so as to make the entire undertaking meaningless. Have you been following the story? It’s beyond upsetting. But it’s also important to take seriously and thoughtfully. As someone who has recited the words cited above as part of his afternoon prayers every Shabbat for almost four decades, I have a lot invested in the concept. And so, I think, should we all.

The story begins with a little girl, one Naama Margolese, age eight. Little Naama, an olah from the U.S., has the misfortune to live in Beit Shemesh, a bastion of haredi Jews, where she has been the subject of abuse, including being spat at, cursed at, and having the word “whore” screamed at her…for walking to school dressed like a normal Israeli child, i.e., absent the trappings of ultra-Orthodoxy her neighbors favor for themselves and their daughters. The incident caught the attention of the Israeli public and became a kind of flashpoint for the anger average Israelis feel towards the kind of deeply misogynistic, anti-everybody-but-us policies that have become regular fare in many cities in Israel. When police in Beit Shemesh, for example, attempted to remove posters the Haredim had put up demanding that women not walk on the same sidewalks as men, they were taunted and threatened by people who openly and shamelessly called them Nazis, a term that has become increasingly devalued, it seems, with each successive week of catcalls and insults hurled at Israeli policemen attempting merely to do their jobs.

Thousands of Israelis attended a demonstration in Beit Shemesh, a suburban town to the west of Jerusalem, in an attempt publicly to oppose the kind of extremism we in the Diaspora tend to view as peculiar but essentially benign—why else would so many of us decorate our homes with pictures of happy haredim dancing around in merry circles?—but which Israelis are beginning to understand as a true threat not only to the reasonableness of maintaining faith in the concept of k’lal yisrael, but to the social fabric of the Israeli state itself.

One thing appears to have led to another. Increasingly, Israeli women have refused to move to the back of the bus when haredi men have ordered them to do so. (That kind of gender-based segregation in public transportation is formally illegal, but has been the de facto rule for years on certain bus lines, apparently, that pass through haredi neighborhoods. It is the de facto reality that people are no longer prepared meekly to accept.) One Tanya Rosenblit, now being hailed as the Rosa Parks of Israel, began a kind of chain reaction a few weeks ago simply by refusing to give up her seat on the 451 bus traveling from Ashdod to Jerusalem merely because her presence in the front of the bus was upsetting to some of the male passengers. Then, on December 28, a haredi man on a bus in Jerusalem insisted that a female IDF soldier move to the back of the bus. When she refused to budge, she was subjected to verbal abuse so vile and extreme that the police arrested the man who was harassing her and charged him not only with misconduct on a public conveyance, but actually with sexual harassment. The tensions between the haredim—the extreme Orthodox who make up 10% of the Israeli population and 14% of the Israeli Jewish population—merely escalated from there, with violence and hysteria characterizing both sides: there have been several incidents reported in which haredi children were intimidated, insulted, and assaulted by people opposed to their parents’ extremism.

A new low, however, was reached on New Year’s Eve, when a huge demonstration of haredim in Jerusalem’s Kikar Hashabbat square featured large numbers of demonstrators dressed up like concentration camp prisoners, complete with striped uniforms and yellow “Jude” badges, the point—not subtly or covertly, but completely openly and defiantly—being that what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe, the State of Israel is doing to the haredim. The tsunami of criticism that followed—including by leaders of marginally less extreme elements of the haredi world, like the Shas party, as well as by almost every political party in Israel, plus the leadership of Yad Vashem, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and other organizations devoted to preserving the memory of the martyrs of the Shoah—does not seem to have impressed the demonstrators, who seem delighted to have caught the public’s attention with something as simple to assemble as prisoner’s garb. Indeed, an official of the organization that organized the protest was cited in the Jerusalem Post as saying that he had “no regret at all” about the use of Shoah imagery. As, I’m sure, does he not!

To us on the outside—and to me personally—this series of events is emblematic of how far from the Zionist ideal of a free Jewish people working shoulder-to-shoulder in the Land of Israel to create a state that reflects the finest Jewish values we have strayed. The haredi community in Israel is part of k’lal yisrael. They are pre-modern in countless ways. They seem proud of the degree to which they have rejected values that most of us find not only basic to life in a democracy, but basic to our sense of ethics and decency. I’m reminded of a rabbi, one of the few haredi types with whom I’ve had a personal relationship, who once bragged to me that he hadn’t ever read a book about Judaism, Jewish culture, or Jewish history that could possibly have challenged his faith or encouraged him to think about things even slightly differently than he had previously. This was years ago, but I’m sure he still hasn’t. As also haven’t the people in Kikar Shabbat who sewed yellow stars onto their kapotehs. I would like to think that was simply an act of ignorance undertaken by people whose knowledge of even relatively recent modern history is so rudimentary and so little sophisticated that they simply cannot see how grotesque it is even to suggest obliquely, let alone to say out loud and explicitly, that the way haredim are treated in modern Israel is related even tangentially to the way Jews were treated in Nazi Europe. I’d like to think that, but when I look into my heart I know that that is not what I really think.

What I really think is that the culture wars are only beginning, that the ultimate struggle to rescue Israel from the haredim is going to be as long, as protracted, and as painful as the struggle to win political recognition from the neighbors. I believe with all my heart in the concept of k’lal yisrael. But I also know that there is something counterintuitive about including in that concept people who themselves appear totally to have rejected it, who have made religious and political extremism into a virtue. There is hope, however. There are many in Israel, including many who are not formally members of Masorti congregations, who believe that it is entirely possible to be faithful to the commandments and to believe in the k’lal yisrael concept and to consider moral development to be something to embrace as a great good rather than to reject as something inherently evil. There are many Israelis who understand that the extremism of the haredi community—extremism that does not bridle, even, at insulting the memory of the k’doshim for the sake of making political hay—is not merely too much of a good thing, but something itself inimical to the future wellbeing of the state. Clearly, we have reached a tipping point. Where Israel goes from here will be the 2012 news story that will count in the long run.

Chanukah 2011

2011-12-22T08:55:00.005-05:00

So what’s the first thing you think of when someone mentions Chanukah? I suppose most of us would instantly conjure up a mental snapshot of a family—perhaps even our own family—gathered around the menorah, lighting the candles, and singing Maoz Tzur. Some of us might think first of the miracle of Chanukah, of the old story we all know about the tiny cruse of oil that should only have held enough oil for one single day but out of which miraculously poured eight times that much…so that the great menorah in the almost-inmost sanctum of our holy Temple could not only be relit, but would remain lighted until fresh oil could be prepared under the watchful supervision of the High Priest of Israel. Still others will think of the more gustatory trappings of the holiday: chocolate Chanukah gelt, fried latkes, deep-fried jelly doughnuts, or some other set of semi-poisonous delights we all seem to be entirely able to consuming without an ounce of guilt (perhaps I’m saying more here about myself than I meant to) for the course of eight long, cholesterol-laden days of family togetherness.

Myself, I try to spend at least some time in the course of the holiday thinking about the shikkutz m’shomeim. The what? For something that rests at the very heart of the holiday, it’s odd how few people even know about the riddle of what the shikkutz m’shomeim actually was—or even who have heard of it. But the shikkutz is at the very center of the story we tell, or at least it should be…and if its precise identity remains a mystery none has yet solved in a universally convincing way, then the riddle itself constitutes a puzzle we have lost interest in solving only to our own detriment. I’m guessing most of my readers won’t ever have heard of it. In some books it appears in its ten-dollar English-language version as the “abomination of desolation.” Does that help? Some translations offer the even less decipherable “desolating sacrilege.” Is that better? I didn’t think so. But the shikkutz m’shomeim is not only something you should know about, but it’s something I think we could all profit from discussing seriously.

The historical sources for our Chanukah festival aren’t that many. And they aren’t in agreement about many minor details of the story and a handful of truly important ones. There is the ancient book called the First Book of the Maccabees, written in Hebrew towards the end of the second century BCE by a Jewish author in Maccabean Jerusalem who wished to record the events that led to Jewish independence from the Seleucid empire (the sort-of-Greek empire from which the Maccabees wrested, if not de jure independence, than at least the de facto right to behave formally as an independent state) in the decades immediately prior to his own day. There’s the work confusingly called the Second Book of Maccabees—confusingly because it has no literary or historical relationship to the First Book, from which it is an entirely distinct work—which was written in Greek, probably in Alexandria, in the same time frame as First Maccabees, but which is itself only a one-volume summary of a much longer work in five volumes penned by one Jason of Cyrene (in today’s Libya) recounting the history of the Maccabees from the perspective of the Greek-speaking diaspora. (The Jews of Egypt and Libya spoke Greek in those days; it was their translation of the Bible into Greek, in fact, that today is the oldest still-extant full translation of Scripture into any language at all.) Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, also took a crack at the Maccabees, discussing their story in detail in his Antiquity of the Jews and drawing, apparently, on many no-longer-extant sources. And then there’s the Book of Daniel, the sole source for the story that actually is in the Bible.

The Book of Daniel is a complicated work that was clearly put together from several anterior sources, but which almost definitely reached its final form—the form in which we can find it in any Bible—in Maccabean Jerusalem. The reasons scholars think that would take us too far afield here for me to discuss in detail, but the short version is that the last few chapters of the book, written in obscure, gnomic Aramaic that only a true literary or historical sleuth could love, appear to be discussing not the story of Daniel, the personality featured in the first part of the book who lived centuries earlier at all, but rather the events of the Maccabean revolt itself. And at the center of that account, as well as the account in First Maccabees, is the shikkutz m’shomeim that is what I want to write about today.

At the heart of all these stories is the notion that the Temple was desecrated and then restored to its original state of unsullied purity through the brave actions of the Maccabees, itself a term of obscure origin that came to denote the five brothers who led the revolt against the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV. (Did you know, by the way, that there are reliable portraits of Antiochus? He’s the only person in the Chanukah story to have left behind pictures of himself, mostly on coins he had minted with his own image stamped on them, on of which is featured above.) That part, we all know: some version of the purification and rededication of the Temple is at the heart of every version of the Chanukah story. Indeed, the name of the holiday itself means “Dedication” (in this sense, “Rededication”) and references that specific event. But what exactly was going on in the Temple during the years leading up to its recapture, repurification, and rededication?

Let’s listen to the author of the First Book of Maccabees, describing the edicts set in place by the king to buttress those Jews who wanted to “reform” Judaism by turning it into a Hellenistic cult:
The king sent letters by messengers to Jerusalem and the cities of Judah ordering that the citizenry should follow strange new laws. He forbid the sacrifice of traditional burnt offerings and libations in the Temple, and demanded that the Jews profane the Sabbaths and festivals. Furthermore, he ordered that the sanctuary be polluted, and that there be set up altars, sacred groves, and special chapels devoted to the worship of Greek idols, and that in the Temple they sacrifice swine's flesh, and unclean beasts. Moreover, the king commanded that the Jews leave their sons uncircumcised, and make their souls abominable with all manner of uncleanness and profanation to the end that they might forget the law, and abandon its ordinances. And whosoever would not do according to the commandment of the king, the king further said, he should die. To that end, the king appointed overseers over all the people, commanding the cities of Judah to worship only in accordance with these new regulations. As a result, many evils were perpetrated in the land…and then, on the fifteenth day of the month of Kislev, in the one hundred and forty and fifth year (of the Seleucid empire), he had the abomination of desolation set upon the altar, and altars built dedicated to the Greek gods throughout the cities of Judah on every side. They burnt idolatrous incense at the doors of their houses, and in the streets. And when they had rent in pieces the books of the law which they found, they burnt them with fire.

That’s pretty strong stuff. But what exactly was this “abomination of desolation” that was set up upon the altar itself in the Temple? That, the author forbears to say. The Book of Daniel is no clearer. Cast here as a prediction rather than as a historical account, the author imagines old Daniel looking centuries in the future and seeing his, the author’s own day: “They (in context, the armies of an alien, yet unnamed king) shall profane the sanctuary…and take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall set up the abomination of desolation in that place. Furthermore shall (this king) corrupt by flatteries those who do wickedly against the covenant; but the people who know their God shall be strong, and eventually they shall take action….” But what actually was it? That neither author wishes to say.

Some scholars, relying on an old rabbinic tradition that permits mentioning the names of idols only when those names are deformed in some clever way so as simultaneously to insult the gods they are imagined to represent, that the Hebrew shikkutz m’shomeim was meant to reference Zeus, whose name in Aramaic was sometimes Baal Shamayim, “the Baal of heaven.” The word shikkutz would then be an insulting reference to Baal, just as the term has survived in the vulgar speech of some North American Jews in a slightly bowdlerized version not used in decent discourse. And the m’shomeim part would simply be a pun on Shamayim, not referencing the god as being “of Heaven,” but as being destructive and repulsive. So okay, it’s an insult…but the question of what the thing itself actually was remains unanswered. Some imagine it to have been a statue of Zeus that was set up atop the altar so that every animal sacrificed there would be offered up beneath the stony gaze of the chief of the Greek pantheon. Other scholars have imagined it to be a meteor of some sort, or to reference the pigs themselves that were now to be offered up in the Temple as a sign that the Jews had signed on to one of the cardinal elements of Hellenistic philosophy: that, there being only one God, it would be a sign of brotherhood for all to worship God in his most elevated and sophisticated manifestation as mighty Zeus, the name given him by the most elevated and sophisticated of his followers, the Greeks themselves.

The whole miracle story featuring the tiny cruse of oil appears first in the Talmud and has no real antecedent in any of these contemporary, or near contemporary sources, all of which understand the great accomplishment of the Maccabees to have been the removal of the shikkutz from the Temple. (There’s a different story featuring a miracle regarding Temple oil at the beginning of the Second Book of Maccabees, but it’s entirely different from the story we all know from the Talmud.) Whether it was an actual statue, or some other thing that so revolted the ancients who knew exactly what it was that they could not bring themselves to say its name aloud or to describe it other than cryptically, who knows? But in the contemplation of that riddle lies a lesson for us all.

What I get from this whole story about the shikkutz m’shomeim is that even the most sacred precincts can have introduced into them items that turn them from places of pious worship to places of grotesque depravity. The place, the sanctum, the sanctuary, therefore, is only space. Holy space, perhaps…but only when holy things happen there. To suppose, therefore, that the mere existence of a sanctuary is enough to guarantee that all that unfolds there is by definition sacred work…that is, if anything, the precise opposite of the lesson these ancient sources gather (at least in my own mind) at this time of year to remind us. For a community to be worthy of the designation of k’hillah k’doshah, it needs to do holy things, to do holy work, to seek to know God not merely by existing in some room designated as holy space, but to take to heart the ideals of faith that are preached in that place…and then to act on those ideals to nudge the world even just slightly close to the messianic moment that will herald the redemption of humanity. The Temple retained its sanctity, of course, even when the shikkutz was in place. But it was a dormant value in those dark days, not something that existed actively but only passively within the folds both of its history and its destiny. That could be a satisfying thought…but the Maccabees didn’t think it was enough and neither should we. To be worthy of being called a “holy community,” a k’hillah k’doshah, its members must further God’s work on earth.

Adventures in Facebookland

2011-12-15T08:25:00.008-05:00

I don’t have a Facebook page. For a long time, I considered that a mere detail, something to be owned up to if and when someone else asked about it, but otherwise one tiny item on a very long list of things I don’t have one of. Some of the things on that list, mind you, surprise even me, at least a little. I like to skate, but I don’t own a pair of ice skates. I like Mozart, but I don’t own a boxed set of the piano concertos. (When necessary, I borrow the cantor’s.) I am entering my second decade as editor of the quarterly journal, Conservative Judaism, but I don’t own a scanner or a fax machine. It never seemed odd to me, however, that I didn’t have a Facebook page. Joan has one, but she almost never goes there to see who’s posted what on her wall or formally to ignore who has invited her to be his or her friend. (She prefers, I believe, passively to ignore them by not making herself aware of their invitations in the first place.) I know what Facebook is, more or less. From time to time, I open Joan’s page to see what’s new with whom (and, of course, to spy on my children, although it’s hardly spying if everybody else in the universe can also see what’s on their pages), but I’ve never been drawn to the experience especially and certainly nowhere near arrestingly enough to want personally to dive into those waters. Maybe it’s an age thing: Facebook users in my age category constitute a mere 5% of the total number of users, whereas more than three-quarters are between the ages of 13 and 34.

All that being the case, you can imagine my response when I noted in the paper this week that something like two-thirds of the entire population of the United States have Facebook pages. Talk about being left behind! And those 200,000,000 people are only a quarter of the world-wide total of 800,000,000 users. That’s a lot of faces! And those, so the Facebook people themselves, are only active users. People who opened up pages once but then never visited them again are not counted. Nor are people who visit so infrequently as not to show up as “real” users at all in their statistics. It’s a big number. Of the countries of the world, only India and China have larger populations than Facebookland. The third largest country in the world in terms of population, our own, has fewer than half the number of citizens than Facebook has people signed up. The world has more people signed up for Facebook than all the countries of Europe together have citizens. (By comparison, Twitter has a mere 380 million users, Linked-In a mere 100 million.) You get the picture. A big number. A lot of people. If Facebook were a country, it wouldn’t be Liechtenstein.

And also a lot of money. Facebook is the third largest web-based business in the United States, right behind Google and Amazon. Facebook’s value was estimated a year ago at about $14 billion dollars. And now they’re making plans to go public, and hoping to raise about $10 billion in the process. No matter how you measure it, that’s a lot of money for a company that was only launched in February of 2004, not a full eight years ago, and which (and, yes, I know how old this makes me sound) doesn’t actually make anything at all. Except friendships. Sort of.

And that brings me to the topic I’d like to raise this week for discussion. Friendship, for all it feels like a basic feature of human life, is an elusive thing both to define and to cultivate. What is it exactly? We all have friends, obviously. And we understand that being someone’s friend is qualitatively different than being someone’s relative (or someone’s employee or neighbor or love interest or business partner). But what are the essential traits that distinguish friendship from other kinds of relationships? Has the concept evolved naturally over the millennia that human beings have been befriending each other? If so, then is the great innovation brought by Facebook to its four-fifths of a billion users—the notion that friendships have no natural course, that friendships are only dormant but never actually defunct and can always be resurrected, that one’s friends can always be located and (since they’ve already—and apparently permanently—been befriended) friended? Or maybe the right term in such a case should be re-friended, in which usage the re- (just like in refried beans) hardly means anything at all since they were, so the fantasy, friends all along anyway.

For the nation that gave Facebook to the world, Americans themselves are actually not very good at being friends. There was a study published a few years ago in the American Sociological Review (a journal published by the American Sociological Association), according to which Americans on the average have fewer closer friends today than ever before. According to the study, a full 25% of Americans have no close friends at all. And the number of close friendships people who do have such relationships reported having dropped by half from 4 to 2 in the twenty-one years from 1985 to 2006. Moreover, even the quality of the friendships we do maintain has dropped over the years. C.S. Lewis, one of the few Christian apologist-authors whose work for some reason I don’t find off-putting, wrote this in his book, The Four Loves:

To the ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. We admit of course that besides a wife and family a man needs a few “friends.” But the very tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as 'friendships', show clearly that what they are talking about has very little to do with that philía which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book.

I know what he means. I read Cicero’s book, called On Friendship, when I was in graduate school and was very impressed both by the clarity of his prose and, more to the point, by the picture of friendship he draws in the book. (Speaking of Cicero, have you all read the first two volumes in Robert Harris’s terrific, so-far-unfinished, trilogy about Rome in the age of Cicero? The first two books, Imperium and Conspirata, were two of the best pieces of historical fiction—and two of the best lawyer novels, to boot—I can recall reading in years. I loved them both and so will you! The third book is coming soon.) But I digress…and the portrait Cicero draws of friendship in his book is stunning. Friendship, he writes, improves the world because friends have the unique capability of making each other virtuous, of bringing each other’s nascent sense of virtue to the surface and to the fore. He writes with the deepest passion about friendship and the ways it provides the only truly suitable background against which people might conduct their family life in the foreground with dignity and purpose. Life, he suggests, without friendship is mere existence. I vaguely recalled this quote, which I managed to find on-line and which I think sums the concept up admirably: “All excellence is rare,” Cicero wrote, “and that moral excellence which makes for true friendship is as rare as any. On the other hand, it would be unreasonable and presumptuous for people to expect to find in their friends qualities which they themselves can never really hope to attain, or to demand from their friends an indulgence which they are not prepared themselves to offer. Friendship was given to us to be an incentive to virtue, and not as an indulgence to vice or to mediocrity! Although solitary virtue cannot scale the peaks of greatness, one may yet hope to do so with the loyal help of a comrade. And comradeship of this kind includes within it all that human beings most desire.”

Having a true friend is thus to be understood as one of life’s great boons. It is the platform on which greatness, so Cicero, rests, the springboard to the kind of virtuous living to which we all aspire but which none of us can quite attain on his or her own. More than love itself—another of life’s necessities, but one that speaks to the human need for passion and pleasure than specifically for virtue—friendship creates the context for life lived large and lived well.

And now we have the Facebook version, the kind that makes it possible not to need to spend a lifetime cultivating true friendship with two or three other souls one chooses as one’s intimates in the course of shared decades of moral and intellectual growth, but instead to “friend” thousands of people almost at once. Obviously, no one could ever have that many friends by following the old-fashioned model, but that is the beauty of the new concept: no matter how long ago you graduated from elementary school, those pals you played in the schoolyard with are still there, still out there somewhere in the ether, still available to you if only you choose to friend them and they you. That you have no real contact with them doesn’t matter. That you don’t really have any emotional ties to them is deemed irrelevant. The maximum number of friends you can theoretically have on Facebook is 5,000. But there are apparently ways to get around that restriction and there are reportedly people out there with hundreds of thousands of friends. I hope they don’t all expect birthday cards!

I believe that friendships, like most things, have natural life spans. The boys from my cabin at Camp Oakdale were true friends of mine when I was nine, ten, and eleven years old. (The camp closed after that and I, as must even eleven–year-olds under the right circumstances, moved on.) I don’t miss them. I suppose I’m mildly curious about where they are today, about what became of them. But the truth is that—to speak honestly—they’re just names from my past, albeit ones that evoke very pleasant memories. We’re not friends. Nor am I friends with the guys from my Hebrew School car pool. Nor with the boys with whom I shared my mercifully brief career in the Little League. Nor with all sorts of people I knew once, whose company I enjoyed, whom I thought of as my friends…and whom I haven’t seen in decades. I wish them well! But I don’t want to be friended by people who aren’t actually my friends. And I don’t need to be friended by people who actually are my friends. So who needs the whole thing? And that is why I don’t have a Facebook page!

I said I didn’t want a Kindle and now it’s my favorite toy. I said I didn’t want an iPhone and ditto. (I heard that! They’re both my favorites.) But I really don’t want a presence on Facebook. I certainly don’t want five thousand Facebook friends. I can barely keep up with the real ones I actually do have!

Going to Elmont

2011-12-08T08:39:00.008-05:00

Last week, I wrote about memory. And this week I propose to write to you about time. What is this, an undergraduate course in Too Big Ideas? (I suspect that question probably has more to do with the way I remember my undergraduate experience—for some reason I to this day cannot contemplate the nature of Being without reaching up to see if my mutton chops have grown back—than with anything else, but I want to write this week about time, not memory!) So let me start by asking out loud some questions most of us really haven’t asked ourselves since we really were back in college. What actually is time? Does it really exist? Or is it just something humanity has made up to help explain the universe, to impose order on events that would otherwise exist as discrete spheres of experience related to each other only by content and not by sequence or temporal proximity. Those really are questions only an undergraduate could love. But I had an experience last week that left me feeling outside time in a way that I’ve only occasionally experienced. And that’s what I’d like to write this week.

Regular worshipers at Shelter Rock have heard me say from the bimah many times, especially as we prepare for Yizkor, that time—the concept of “time” itself—is just a midrash. By that, I generally mean that we need to remember that the boundaries between time-past and time-present are more porous than we generally allow ourselves to imagine, that the historically dead are not necessarily the experientially dead, and that the ghosts are no less real for being unreal. I teach that lesson because it truly is reflective of my own experience of the world and the way I feel I have successfully—or at least semi-successfully—brought the evidence of my own perceptive consciousness to bear in deciphering the universe. The reality is that I miss my parents all the time. But the reality is also that they’re not quite as gone as I recall once thinking they were going to be. The French word for ghost, revenant, literally means “one who has returned.” I like that. The English “ghost,” is related to the German word Geist, meaning “spirit.” I like that less. And, in fact, the ghosts I’ve experienced in my life are far less relatable-to as spiritual constructs or as otherworldly metaphors than simply as revenants, as people who, turning out to be less done with the world than they (and their people) may well once have thought, come back for a brief—sometimes the briefest—return engagement.

One of the mysteries of my life was where my grandparents were buried. Both my grandfathers died before I was born, but I knew both my grandmothers. My father’s mother, though, died when I was only four years old. I remember her a little—her voice mostly, a little bit how her skin felt, plus some olfactory memory I can never quite pin down that must be related to some kind of perfume she liked to wear or to some kind of cooking or baking I associate with her for some by-now-long-forgotten reason—but not really much. But my other grandmother, my mother’s mother, I knew well. She lived in Bensonhurst. I’ve written before about watching the Verrazano Bridge being built in the course of innumerable Sunday visits to her home on 84th Street in 1963 and 1964. She died, regretfully, just before my bar mitzvah. That whole incident, I remember clearly. To say her death in February overshadowed my bar mitzvah in May is not exactly correct, but it’s not exactly incorrect either. (I only ran into her ghost years later, though…and at my actual simchah she was as spectrally missing as she was physically absent.) So she died that February during a teamsters’ strike and was brought to her grave in a rented station wagon rather than a proper hearse. (Isn’t it funny how you really do remember these things over the years, almost as though they really mattered!) But where that grave was, I had no idea. The funeral was somewhere in Brooklyn. The burial was somewhere else…but where that somewhere was I wouldn’t have known. How could I have? I was an upset little boy being schlepped along by events that any child would find at least mostly unfathomable. Nor did I ever undertake later on to find out exactly where that cemetery was.

If my mother visited her parents’ graves, I never heard about it. Or I never thought I did. (See below.) Probably she would have gone from time to time, but I was certainly never taken along. (My parents were a bit odd in that regard: a big part of their parenting concept was shielding me not only from death, but even from the reality of disease. My parents, both of them, even attempted—in this only semi-successfully—to shield me from the details surrounding my mother’s final illness. But I’ll write about that another time. Or maybe not, given how painful that whole sequence of events was for me then and still, at least in some attenuated way, is for me today even just to recall.) And then she died. If my father ever visited my mother’s parents’ graves after he became a widower, I never heard about it. Maybe he did. Maybe not. And then Joan and I left New York and were away for almost twenty years. Eventually, we came back. But by then whatever information my father had taken whatever information he had to impart on the matter to his own grave, yehi zikhro varukh.

And so I was left not only not knowing where my own grandparents were buried but also having no one to ask. My mother’s sister predeceased her, as did her brother-in-law. She herself had no contact with her father’s family, just as I eventually lost contact with hers. As a result, I knew no one at all who might have remembered. Plus, obviously, in the meantime a long time had passed. My grandfather died in 1948, my grandmother in 1966. We came back to New York in 2002. Even if I somehow was successfully somehow in resurrecting some sort of relationship with one of my mother’s first or second cousins—who’s to say that they would have remembered where my grandparents were buried? And how exactly was I going to find them anyway? Wisely or unwisely, I let the matter go.

And then, a few weeks ago, I found myself rooting around for some reason in my father’s papers and found my grandmother’s death certificate. (Why do I remember that my parents had tickets for the Broadway production of Peter Weiss’ play, Marat/Sade, for the night my grandmother died and that they never did get to see the play? Is that important?) I hadn’t known my father even had a copy, let alone that I did. I certainly hadn’t ever seen it or read it. But I read it once I found it…and found out all sorts of interesting things. For one thing, I learned what my great-grandmother’s maiden name was. (My grandmother’s mother was born Jennie Mehlman). But far more arresting was the detail at the bottom of the form that noted that my grandmother’s burial was to take place at…of all places…Beth David Cemetery in Elmont. I’ve been there a thousand times in the course of my years at Shelter Rock. Maybe ten thousand. It couldn’t be closer. In fact, no cemetery is closer to here, I don’t think. But who knew? Sometimes the challenge really lies more in knowing the right question to ask than finding its answer.

And so Joan and I set out to find my grandparents’ graves just last Sunday. After all those years of not knowing where to go, they were almost eerily effortless to locate. When I got to the office at Beth David, there was no line to stand on. When I asked the fellow at the window if he could locate my grandmother’s grave, he asked for her name and when she died. About fifteen seconds later, he was handing me a printed-out map of the cemetery with the location of my grandparents’ graves circled in blue ink. We got into the car, drove to the corner of Sinai and Wilson. (Someone, not myself, will eventually write an interesting essay about the names they give to streets in Jewish cemeteries.) The gate into the section owned, or at least once owned, by the Zembiner Benevolent Society was just where the man in the office said it would be. And there, in the row of graves furthest from the road were my grandparents’ graves.
This was last Sunday. I was twelve years old the last time I stood in that spot. The graves were tidy and neat, the yews trimmed and healthy-looking. (My mom must have paid for perpetual care, although there weren’t any stickers on the stones saying so.) I don’t know what I expected. I had hoped more of my family’s graves would be there, but it was just them. I had hoped the stones would say more about them, but they only note their names, the dates they died (weird that my grandfather died in 1948 on what would nine years later be the day Joan was born), and that they were loved by each other and by their children. (My grandmother was loved by myself as well, but I suppose there wasn’t room on the stone to go into that much detail. Or perhaps my mother and her sister were over-valuing the concept of the two stones having symmetric legends.) Nothing more. The phrase “Sinai and Wilson” sounded vaguely familiar to me. We had no friends or family in Elmont, but the expression “going to Elmont” also has a familiar ring to it—maybe that’s what my parents, zealous to a fault to shield me from the reality of death, called it when they actually did go visit my grandparents’ graves. What did I know? They certainly didn’t mean they were going to the track.

And so I was left with more questions than answers. Why the Zembiner Society? My mother once told me that she thought her father was born in Odessa. (Only in retrospect does it seem odd to me that she couldn’t say for sure where he was from.) Zembin, I’ve learned this last week, is a town in Belarus about forty miles from Minsk, the capital. Is that where my grandfather was from? (The Jews of Zembin, along with the Jews of nearby Borisov, were annihilated during the war. The www.jewishbelarus.org site doesn’t suggest that there is a Jewish community there today. And even if there was, would they still have records from so long ago? If my grandparents were alive, they’d both be 128 years old.) Or did my grandmother just buy burial plots from them after my grandfather died? And where are all the other graves—the gravesites of all my grandparents’ siblings, for example, or my great-grandparents’ graves? Joel and Jenny Kaufman, née Mehlman, lived on East 113th Street in Manhattan. But where they’re spending the rest of eternity, I have no idea. I suppose I should have asked at Beth David if they were in the data bank too. Next time!

The whole experience was, as noted, not what I had hoped it was going to be. (One thing I do know about the ghosts, however, is that they rarely show up where and when you’d think.) Still, I’m glad I went. There was certain peacefulness in that place, a certain sense of undisturbed-ness and permanence. I have my grandfather’s name as my middle name. Somewhere, I think I have his naturalization papers. I have quite a few of my grandmother’s paintings—she was quite a good artist—and, I think, some of her jewelry. The rest is all gone…but their graves aren’t gone at all, it turns out, as are also not their ghosts. This being real life and not a Hollywood movie, however, their ghosts just weren’t there haunting their own graves while they waited for over forty-five years for their sole living descendant (other than my children) to wander by for a visit. That part, I think, ghost story writers just made up.

Memory and Honesty

2011-12-01T09:02:00.004-05:00

Memory is the sea in which we spend our lives swimming forward (or at least: in which we spend our lives treading water), the context that gives meaning to the perceptive abilities we bring to bear in our efforts to decipher the world and grant meaning to what we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel of it. Moreover, an intact, healthy memory is considered the sine qua non of mental health itself: one of the chief hallmarks of mental illness is precisely the inability to distinguish between fantasies and “real” memories, between things we’ve once imagined happening and things that actually did occur, between dreamscape and landscape, between idle thoughts we really may once have had and events that really did once take place. No one has ever been charged with perjury for saying on the witness stand, “I got a clear, unobstructed view of their villainous faces when armed robbers burst into the Rite-Aid where I had gone after work to buy a toothbrush” when what that person, no doubt trying to speak honestly, can only really mean that he or she, while speaking under oath months later, remembers standing there in that drugstore on that fateful day and seeing what happened when the robbers burst into the place, their guns drawn and their larcenous intent all too obvious.

All that being the case, I was especially interested by an article that appeared in the paper the other day about the reasonableness of relying on memory in the adjudication of criminal trials. Perhaps some of you saw it as well. (If you are reading this on-line, you can find the article, written by Laura Beal and published in the Times last Monday, here.) It’s an interesting piece, and well worth your time, for a variety of reasons, but the detail that caught my attention had to do with the intersection of eye-witness testimony and DNA evidence: the author wrote, to my mind amazingly, that eye-witness testimony had been crucial in the cases of a full three-quarters of the 280 defendants whose convictions incontrovertible DNA evidence was subsequently instrumental in overturning. That is a detail that no citizen who cares about justice can feel good about passing quickly by.

Many of my readers know that I am a subscriber to the electronic newsletter of the Innocence Project, an undertaking founded in 1992 by Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld as part of the Cardozo Law School of Yeshivah University but that now exists in its own right as a non-profit organization devoted to seeking justice for the incorrectly convicted. The numbers tell the story, and they are astounding: 208 convicted individuals exonerated, seventeen of whom had actually been sentenced to death. Collectively, and even more astoundingly, those 208 individuals served over 3,600 years in prison for crimes none of them had committed. For the record, the same DNA evidence that gained freedom for the wrongly convicted also led to the conviction of the real criminals in 125 of those cases. So this particular sword cuts both ways! But, as satisfying a thought as that may be (and surely is), I find myself far more profoundly drawn to the statistic mentioned above: that the convictions of a full 75% of the 208 individuals who were subsequently exonerated were based on eye-witness testimony that was apparently incorrect and untrue. That, I believe, is a number that all Americans who care about justice should pause thoughtfully to consider.

There is a strong racial element in play here as well: in forty percent of the cases involved, the incorrect testimony involved a witness misidentifying an accused individual of a different race. There could, I suppose, be malice involved—and it is hard to imagine a more pernicious form of non-violent racism than choosing to lie about someone on the witness stand solely because of that person’s race—but my suspicion (and the opinion of the Innocence Project as well) is that something far more subtle is afoot here: people are simply less good at recognizing people of other races than they are at recognizing fellow white people or fellow black people or fellow any kind of people who are whatever it is they themselves are. The “other” is weird, strange, a bit unrecognizable. The old canard that all “those” people look alike is derogatory and insulting, but it’s not entirely untrue: people of distinguishable races and ethnic groups apparently do tend to look far more like each other in the eyes of outsiders than they do to each other. You can read more about the Innocence Project on their website at www.innocenceproject.org, but the detail I want to focus on here is the one relating to the reliability of eye-witness testimony.

Our Torah clearly understands that eye witnesses can simply be wrong. And, indeed, the Torah seems to address the issue through ancillary legislation designed to eliminate the possibility of error. Torah law, for example, specifies that no one may ever be convicted on the basis of one sole eye witness and that any such witness may only speak in court if the court has determined in advance that, at the very least, a second witness will testify to having seen the same thing. (The Torah laws prohibiting defamatory speech are set aside for witnesses testifying in court. But they are specifically not set aside if it is clear in advance that such testimony cannot possibly lead to a conviction.) Furthermore, there are two different kinds of questions which witnesses must answer, one set related to the specific details of the crime in question and the other related to what moderns would label as circumstantial details: not what the accused was seen doing at some specific place and time, but what color sweater she or he was wearing at the time or what kind of shoes. It is true that there is some extra leeway with respect to the questions we would label circumstantial: if either witness or both witnesses say that they do not know the answer to one of the circumstantial questions, the court may still consider their testimony. But if either witness cannot answer a specific question relating to the time or the place of the alleged incident, or to the identity of the person seen doing the thing the accused stands accused of having done, then such testimony is discarded as invalid and the trial cannot proceed unless new eye witnesses can be produced.

Furthermore, the Torah understands that people get it wrong all the time and so introduces the concept of hatraah, a kind of decisive check on the system that more or less guarantees that no one will ever be convicted falsely. Hatraah means “warning,” and the concept is simple enough: the witnesses must also testify to the fact that they personally warned the accused of the consequences of his or her actions. It sounds simple, but what the Torah is really saying is that we do not rely simply on eye witnesses claiming to have seen something, that they must personally have experienced the kind of relationship with the accused that will subsequently make it almost impossible, assuming their probity, for them to give false testimony. Rambam explains how the whole warning thing works: “How is a warning administered? They say to someone, ‘Desist, for the action you are about to undertake is a sin and you will become liable to be executed by the court’ or ‘Desist, for what you are about to do is a sin and you will be severely punished if you are convicted’ And then the person to whom they are speaking must acknowledge their words and say something like ‘I know, but I am going to proceed to commit this act nevertheless.’” And even that is not enough: according to Rambam, the individual being warned must then commit the act in question almost immediately. If more time passes than would be necessary for one average citizen to greet another, then the accused can only be convicted if it can be demonstrated in court that he or she was warned a second time.

For good measure, eye witnesses who insist that they knew the accused well enough to identify him or her and that they personally administered the requisite warning must then be formally threatened with having to bear the responsibility for the execution of an individual falsely convicted because of their incorrect testimony for the rest of their lives, and that it is not going to be solely the life of the accused for which they will bear responsibility but also for the lives of all of his or her now-to-be-unborn descendants.

So how many people do you imagine were ever convicted under such a system? The answer is…who knows? It’s mentioned in the Mishnah that any court that executes more than one person every seven years is to be condemned as one excessively willing to convict. As great a luminary as Rabbi Akiba is cited as having remarked once that he couldn’t really understand how anyone at all could ever be convicted under the Torah’s system. Nor is it entirely obvious that the Jews under Roman rule had the right to execute anyone anyway. But all that is beside the point, which is that our tradition clearly understands that even the eye witness testimony of the most reliable and honest individual can be fatally flawed. And its remedies—requiring always more than one witness, insisting that the witnesses not only testify that they saw the accused but that they actually knew him or her, demanding that the witnesses be able to say in court that they spoke to the accused and know for a fact that he or she was acting with malice aforethought—are clearly based on the assumption that even the most well-meaning person can simply be wrong. So you see how infuriating it is to me, and should be to us all, when someone announces that the Judeo-Christian tradition (whatever that is) supports the notion of capital punishment as it is carried out in our country. Yes, of course, our Torah demands that death be meted out for serious crimes and sins. But the detail that is rarely mentioned is that the same Jewish tradition would never countenance the conviction of anybody at all based solely on circumstantial evidence or the eye witness testimony of a single individual.

The sages of ancient times would have loved DNA. And they would especially have loved the Innocence Project, with its insistence on the basic unreliability of eye witness testimony that has not been shorn up so unassailably that the chances of it being incorrect are almost nil. That was what our rabbis were trying to do in ancient times with all the requirements they found hiding in Scripture just behind the texts that appear blithely to be decreeing capital punishment for all sorts of grievous wrongdoing. And it is what DNA testing is able to do today in a far more comprehensive manner. I can’t imagine the ancients wouldn’t have embraced the concept had they been able to imagine it, because in the end, the underlying principle is the same: to find someone guilty in court, the evidence has not merely to be compelling, but—to the greatest degree possible—incontrovertible.

Looking Away

2011-11-17T09:05:00.003-05:00

Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve been reading with some combination of horror and lascivious fascination about the scandal surrounding the arrest last week of Pennsylvania State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. I do not wish to write about the specifics of the case against Sandusky, however. For one thing, I have nothing to add to what everybody already knows, which is what has been repeated endlessly in the newspapers and on television and the radio in the course of the last week. Nor, as you all know, do I ever have any interest in looking past the civic obligation we all share to grant the presumption of innocence to people who have not actually been found guilty in a court of law. What I do wish to write about, however, is a feature of the case against Sandusky that actually has nothing at all to do with him personally.

Unrelated to the question of the guilt of the accused is the question of the behavior of all those others who saw evidence that he was guilty, or who thought they did, and who either did nothing at all about it or else contented themselves with passing the buck along to someone else who ultimately did nothing about it. Sandusky was arrested and charged with forty counts involving the alleged molestation of eight boys over a fifteen-year period. Are there more children involved who simply have not yet come forward? There’s no way to know if there are, or if any of those theoretical other children will now come forward, but the more interesting question to ponder is how abuse on this scale could take place—none of it behind locked doors and most of it in public space in a facility open to staff, students, and visitors alike—without anyone acting decisively to put an end to it. (The investigation that led to the grand jury indictment was undertaken only after the mother of one of the boys came forward to report her son’s abuse after it had been going on for three years. But that boy’s experience was recent compared with what the police now believe happened to some of the other alleged victims.)

The grand jury testimony is beyond chilling not only in terms of the horribleness of what the children involved allegedly experienced, but also in terms of what the story implies about human nature itself. A janitor walks into the shower room at Penn State in 2000 and sees what he takes to be the sexual assault of a child in progress before his eyes. He reports the incident to his superior, as he was told he was supposed to do in such a situation, but the superior in question does nothing at all, failing both to inform the police and to bring the charge to the attention of other school officials. Two years later, a graduate assistant walks into the same shower facility and sees what he too takes to be the rape of a child of about ten years of age in progress. He duly reports the incident to the athletic director of the facility, as he had previously been instructed to do in such an event, but the incident is never reported to the police. Nor does the athletic director bother to inform his own higher-ups. Procedure is followed, at least to a certain extent. But nothing at all happens to safeguard the children who come to that facility to enjoy a day of sports and competition. The matter is eventually buried, forgotten. The world keeps spinning. No one knows. And no one seems to care either.

Let’s put ourselves in the picture. We see something that appears incredibly wrong. We could be wrong about what we think we’ve seen, but we have no more reason to think that any more than any of us ever doubts what we see with our own eyes and our brains experience no difficulty deciphering or interpreting. Nor are we expected to go to law school and only then decide how or whether to proceed. Indeed, the specific legal question of whether the person we believe that we saw behaving poorly is guilty of an actual crime is hardly our call anyway—in our great land, people are found guilty by juries of their peers or by judges trained in the law, not by bystanders even if they walk in on them in flagrante delicto—but we surely understand that something very wrong is going on. And yet we either do nothing at all or else feel done with the matter once we report it, even though we understand perfectly well that nothing has happened, that the person we saw with our own eyes behaving incredibly poorly and endangering the welfare of young children is still at it, still hanging around, still bringing boys into the facility where he is apparently free to behave as he wishes. But, having technically complied with the instructions in some rule book, we allow ourselves to overlook the fact that nothing has actually happened to prevent the perceived offender from re-offending.

To speak about the Sandusky case itself for a moment, I suppose it’s possible that all these eye witnesses were wrong, that they thought they saw something very wrong but were simply misinterpreting what was nothing more than good natured, if excruciatingly vulgar, horsing around. I’m sure Sandusky’s lawyers will attempt to depict the allegations in just that light, but that is precisely my point: it is the job of the police to investigate allegations of misconduct and then to decide if the allegations are credible or not. And it is the job of the district attorney to determine if the behavior in question constitutes a crime of which the accused can actually be indicted. And it is the job of the grand jury to weigh the evidence and then either to return an indictment against the accused or not to return one. But the original witnesses—the individuals who saw with their own eyes what they had no difficulty understanding or deciphering—cannot feel morally done with the matter once they see clearly that nothing has happened to halt the abuse. And what about the boys’ parents? Is it possible they were all completely unaware of what had befallen their sons? I suppose it is possible to look and not to see, but it still seems incredible that the boys’ doctors, their teachers in school, their parents, the parents of their friends, their friends themselves, their principals, their clergy people, their neighbors, their coaches, their guidance counselors—that no one at all noticed the pain, the fear, the emotional distress, or any sign at all that something horrible had happened. Yet no one at all spoke up for, so the indictment, fifteen long years.

The whole question of people—and apparently lots of them—being capable of looking past one of the most heinous of crimes and doing nothing at all about it is the aspect of the case that calls out to me. I was eleven when Kitty Genovese was murdered on Austin Street, just a few blocks from my parents’ apartment house in Forest Hills. I was only in fifth grade at the time, but I can easily recall the brouhaha that followed once it became clear—or at least once it was widely believed—that dozens of people would necessarily have heard that poor woman screaming and yet chose to do nothing to help her. There has been a lot of debate over the years about what actually happened—although it appears to be basically true that she screamed for help repeatedly and no one phoned the police or came out into the street to offer her any assistance—but the whole incident somehow became emblematic of the ability of people simply not to hear what they do not wish to hear, not to see what they will only complicate their own lives by seeing, and not to feel responsible for actions that no one could credibly describe as any of their business.

For Jews, of course, this is an old story. There is a beautiful, tree-lined avenue at Yad Vashem on which each tree honors one of the righteous non-Jews who put his or her life on the line to save Jewish lives during the Shoah. It is a stirring place to visit, but, like all trees, these too cast a shadow—in this case on the vast majority of Europeans living under Nazi rule who were capable of looking on from afar as their Jewish neighbors were degraded, deprived of even their most elemental civil rights, and then eventually either murdered or deported to their deaths, yet who had it in their hearts to do nothing at all to help. In the New York Times the other day, David Brooks took his readers to task for allowing themselves smugly to assume that they would have necessarily have behaved better if they were in Joe Paterno’s shoes or in assistant coach Mike McQueary’s, that they would never have had it in them to look away when children were being abused, that they would have done the right thing if they had been living on Austin Street the night Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered. Brooks’ point, well made and well argued, is that none of us can say with certainty how we would behave in such a situation, that there are people who step up and do indeed do the right thing and other people who simply do not…and that none of us can know with absolute certainty in advance to which group we will belong until the opportunity to speak out or not to speak out actually presents itself. (You can find David Brooks’ essay, called “Let’s All Feel Superior,” here. It’s a good read and I recommend it to you.)

But saying that none of us can say with certainty how we would behave in such a situation and then leaving it at that is hardly enough. As I said before, I have no way of knowing in advance what the outcome of Jerry Sandusky’s trial is going to be and I see no point in behaving as though I do. But I do think we could all profit by taking the backstory to heart and asking ourselves whether we have earned the right smugly to condemn all those who could have stepped forward over a decade and a half and yet who found it in their hearts to remain silent and to do nothing…and, since we’re asking unsettling, stress-inducing questions, also by asking ourselves how sure we are that we would have earned the right to be honored with a tree at Yad Vashem when exerting ourselves to save a Jewish child would have put our own children’s lives at risk. Those questions too, of course, have no answers. But asking them of ourselves can itself be a salutary exercise: to grow morally throughout the years of our lives, we need consistently and repeatedly to look out at the world and, instead of taking smug satisfaction in condemning those who appear to have behaved disgracefully, asking ourselves if we truly know our own mettle…and then, once we admit (as we all must) that we do not, by then asking what we are doing constantly to grow spiritually and ethically so as to guarantee that no one will ever say of any of us that we had the opportunity to do good in the world but simply looked away.

Throw-Away Children

2011-11-10T10:03:00.006-05:00

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two different cases, both of which are predicated on the argument that sentencing minors—in both of the cases at hand, young teenagers—to lifetimes in prison without the possibility of parole constitutes precisely the kind of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

The background to the decision to hear these cases is instructive and has mostly to do with the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the case known as Graham vs. Florida, in which the justices concluded that the clause prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment “does not permit a juvenile offender to be sentenced to life in prison without parole for a non-homicide crime.” In other words, the court held that sentencing a juvenile to die in prison—which is the more stark way of saying that someone is sentenced to life without the possibility of parole—is unconstitutional if the crime of which the young person in question was convicted was not murder. The number of juveniles convicted of the kind of non-homicide crimes that resulted in that kind of sentence—rape, armed robbery, and kidnapping—is about 130. Those, however, are the small minority of prisoners in our country who were convicted as minors and sentenced to death in prison: if you include those found guilty of some form of homicide, the number rises to over 2,000 prisoners. Moving incrementally forward, the Court has now agreed to hear cases deemed representative of the about seventy people (out of that 2,000 figure) who were under the age of fourteen when they committed the crime that led to them being convicted of some version of homicide and then given sentences of life-long incarceration. And the Court has, I assume intentionally, chosen to begin with two cases that involve minors who themselves did not actually kill, but whose deeds were deemed participatory in murder. (I should make it clear that the Court’s earlier ruling does not imply that any young people currently serving life sentences without the possibility of parole is necessarily going to be retried or resentenced, let alone have his or her conviction overturned. All it means is that the young people in this category must at some point be given some chance to show that they have matured enough while in prison to warrant being permitted “to rejoin society” rather than staying in prison for the rest of their lives. What is on the table now is the question of whether the homicide exclusion is constitutional.)

In one of the cases the Court has agreed to hear, Jackson vs. Hobbs, the defendant, a fourteen-year-old named Kuntrell Jackson, participated in the robbery of a video store in Arkansas in 1999 during the course of which one of the other robbers shot and killed the clerk working in the store. In the other case, one called Miller vs. Alabama, a fourteen-year-old named Evan Miller and an older friend, both of them drunk and high on marijuana, administered a beating to a neighbor in 2003. They then set his house on fire, as a result of which the neighbor died of smoke inhalation. These are horrific crimes that resulted in the death of innocents. Surely, society cannot look the other way when citizens are murdered in the places of employment or in their homes merely because the persons responsible for their deaths did not specifically set out that day to kill anyone. I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with that thought, and yet I find myself strangely unsure about how I feel about the actual matter before the Court.

Just to provide a bit more background, the Supreme Court has already ruled that the death penalty may not be imposed on minors. (The original decision, making it illegal to sentence juveniles under sixteen years of age to death dates back to 1988. Then, in 2005, the Court determined that no one under eighteen may receive the death penalty.) But it is specifically not the death penalty that is under discussion here.

On the one hand, fourteen-year-olds are children. Our bar- and bat-mitzvah boys and girls are only slightly younger. Many need to stand on the box we keep on the bimah when they deliver their remarks so they can see over the lectern. They aren’t even in high school yet, and so it seems impossible to imagine them or other young people their age already beyond redemption, already so far beyond the pale of normal and rational behavior that the only reasonable way for society to deal with them is to lock them up forever and then to toss away the key. Would I feel differently if it was my brother who died in that house fire, or if it was my dad working in that video store? I’m sure I would, but that, of course, is precisely why we do not invite the brothers or sons of homicide victims to serve on the juries considering the fates of their relatives’ alleged murderers.

Where should Jewish people stand on an issue like this? On the one hand, our tradition is strongly in favor of using the justice system to make society safe. (And people—of any age—who participate in armed robbery or who set other people’s homes on fire are clearly dangerous and violent people who make society the precise opposite of safe.) On the other hand, our tradition is adamant that the gates of teshuvah, of repentance, are always open…and that there is no one at all who cannot turn around, who cannot renounce sin (and crime), and, through the sheer force of will and the power of faith, become a God-fearing person from whom society has nothing at all to fear. Of course, there is no way to know in advance who will choose that path and there are no guarantees, nor could there ever be, that even defendants who appear the most docile and chastened in the course of their trials will actually make the decision to abandon their evil ways and embrace goodness. If guarantees like that were possible, then that would make the administration of justice a whole lot simpler! Seen in that light, the question, really, before the court is not whether violent criminals are bad people, but whether we are prepared, as a society, to say that there simply are children—and fourteen-year-olds are children no matter how horrifically poorly they behave—of whom it can be reasonably said that there is no reasonable hope for them to grow past the badness of their earlier years and end up as law-abiding citizens from whom society needs to fear nothing at all. Isn’t that what we are saying to a fourteen-year-old to whom we deny even the possibility of parole: that there is no possibility of you ever growing past the out-of-controlledness of your youth and therefore no possibility of society ever no longer needing to incarcerate you. And, if that really is the case, then why shouldn’t we just say so out loud and save you from a lifetime of hoping in vain for mercy that will never come?

Our Torah, towards the end of Deuteronomy considers the case of the rebellious son. In my own translation, the passage reads as follows: “If someone should have a violent and rebellious son who does not listen to his father’s instructions or to his mother’s, then, assuming they have attempted to discipline him and he still refuses to obey, his father and mother should seize him and bring him…to the gates of their hometown. And there shall they say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is violent and rebellious, he does not listen to our instructions, and he is a glutton and a sot.’ All the inhabitants of his city shall then stone him with stones until he dies, and thus shall you eradicate evil from your midst so that all Israel hear and become chastened” (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). That sounds gruesome enough and, indeed, all those people who can’t find enough reason to hate religion and mock its teachings naturally can’t get enough of this passage. But for us, the question isn’t really what the Torah says, but what it means. And that requires considering the oral traditions that go along with a passage like this, traditions generally ignored entirely by people eager for any pretext to heap abuse on the Bible.

The most convenient place to find the laws relating to the rebellious son catalogued is in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. (The more precise place to find them in that encyclopedic work is in the seventh and final chapter of the section called Hilkhot Mamrim, the Laws Pertaining to the Rebellious.) And there we find the beginning of our answer regarding the proper Jewish response to the matter before the Supreme Court. For one thing, the laws pertaining to this rebellious son are so restrictive that it’s easy to understand where Rabbi Simeon was coming from when he declared that this law was never actually used to convict anyone at all and that it appears in Scripture merely to teach a profound lesson about the importance of obedience towards one’s parents. (His opinion is found in Tractate Sanhedrin on page 71a.) The son in question, for example, cannot be a minor—he must already have reached the age of commandments—but he also can’t be a full-fledged adult (because then why would the Torah reference him as a “son”?) So he must be thirteen, but not yet fully physically mature—and no boy exists in that state, so Rambam, for more than three months. On top of that, tradition declares that he must actually have stolen money from his parents and used the stolen funds to purchase meat and wine. (Not that many twelve year olds have a taste for wine, so that law represents a serious narrowing of the law’s applicability. But the Torah specifically requires that his parents condemn him as a glutton and a drunkard!) If such a precocious lad is located, then he must have eaten the meat and drunk the wine outside of his father’s house, but not by himself either. Instead, he has to have consumed the goods purchased with stolen funds in the company of hooligans and ruffians. The meat itself must be eaten raw, but not entirely raw—thus slightly cooked—and the wine must have been thinned with water before being drunk. If the meat wasn’t kosher, the law doesn’t apply. If he consumed the forbidden feast on a fast day, the law doesn’t apply. If he consumed the food at a feast connected somehow with the performance of the commandments, for example at the feast following a bris or at a wedding, the law doesn’t apply. If the value of the food is less than fifty dinarim, or if the meat alone was not worth that much, the law does not apply. If his parents forgive him, the law does not apply. Nor does the law apply in any way to daughters.

You get the picture. No wonder Rabbi Simeon wondered how anyone could ever be convicted! To be fair, a different rabbi, Rabbi Jonathan, is cited in that same passage as mentioning that he himself once visited the grave of such a boy. But, realistically speaking, how many such children could ever have been executed. My guess is none at all. Or the one whose grave Rabbi Jonathan came across and no more. The bottom line is that, despite the unimpeachable sanctity and authority of Scripture, the rabbis could not imagine that the simple meaning of the text—that inveterately rebellious children should be given up on and suitably and permanently punished—could be the whole story. They accepted the text as sacred. But, by focusing the law through the prism of their own moral consciousness, they found the courage to take the text as hyperbole intended solely to warn the faithful against taking a cavalier attitude towards the respect and obedience we owe our parents. In other words, they simply could not imagine that a boy of thirteen and a few months could possibly be so irretrievably bad that the only rational response to his poor behavior would be to end it violently and permanently by taking his life. And these were hardly people, our ancient sages, who treated the words of the Torah lightly!

I think the Supreme Court is on the right track. So were our ancient sages. Executing children is barbaric and wrong. But throwing them into prison and supposing that nothing—no amount of counseling, no amount of maturing, no amount of teaching, no amount of exposure to positive, moral role models, nothing at all—could ever help a troubled, violent boy or girl turn into the kind of adult who could live constructively and peacefully in the world, that seems to me to be as wrong an idea as anyone ever had. Would I feel differently if it was my dad who got shot in that video store? I’m sure I would. But I would be wrong. There are no children worth throwing away.

Mormons and Jews

2011-11-03T07:52:00.008-04:00

A Public Religion Institute Poll released last Friday indicated that less than half of registered voters could identify Mitt Romney’s religion correctly. The number of Americans overall who could say that Romney is a Mormon was even lower. (The numbers were 49% and 42%, respectively.) That would seem to suggest that, should he get the nod, the governor’s religion will not be a major factor in the race. Nonetheless, I do not believe that will be the case.

That, of course, isn’t to say that most of us won’t wish it to be so. My sense is that an overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans would easily support the notion that a candidate’s personal religious beliefs should be as irrelevant as skin color or ethnic origin when it comes to deciding which candidate is the most worthy. That, however, is clearly not the view of a significant portion of non-Jewish Americans. A Gallup poll from a few weeks ago came up with the result that a full 20% of Republicans would not vote for a Mormon candidate no matter how otherwise qualified he or she might be. The Reverend Robert Jeffress, an evangelical pastor who leads a gigantic mega-church in Dallas, made a huge stir last month when he declared that in his opinion Mormonism was not even a real religion, just some sort of cult, and that its members were kidding themselves if they thought of themselves as Christians. Rick Perry, Romney’s chief contender and the candidate the reverend is backing, politely distanced himself from that statement. But there’s no question that lots of evangelicals agree with the pastor. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant church body in the United States and the second-largest Christian organization in the United States (only the Catholic Church is bigger), has officially labeled Mormonism a cult as well. And the reverend was probably quite right when he responded to his critics, and they were legion, by referencing the Southern Baptists’ stand and adding that, in his opinion, “there are a lot of people who will not publicly say that's an issue because they don't want to appear to be bigoted, but for a lot of evangelical Christians this is a huge issue, even if it's unspoken.” For better or worse, I think he’s probably got that exactly right. (If you’re not sure how far some anti-Mormons are prepared to take this, take a look at www.exposemittromney.com and you’ll see what I mean.)

If we exclude information gleaned from watching The Book of Mormon or Angels in America on Broadway, most Jewish Americans know almost nothing about Mormonism. And most Jewish Americans don’t live anywhere near Broadway anyway! What many of us have heard about, and find beyond perverse, is the Mormons’ creepy custom of posthumously baptizing Shoah victims, thus making them—in their own minds only, of course—into ex-post-facto members of the Mormon faith. Correctly called “vicarious baptism” or “proxy baptism,” the practice—condemned by every other major Christian denomination, including the Catholic Church—involves baptizing a living person on behalf of a deceased individual and the Mormons have been doing just that since 1840. The practice, however, is not limited to the martyrs of the Holocaust. Other prominent Jews—including Maimonides, Irving Berlin, and Albert Einstein—have apparently also been baptized posthumously. Nor is the practice limited to Jews: just last year it was revealed that, of all people, President Obama’s late mother was posthumously baptized by Mormons acting wholly on their own. She thus joins Heinrich Himmler, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus in club of unwitting and unwilling after-the-fact Mormons. The whole thing is so patently ridiculous that it is hard to know whether the more rational response should be anger or incredulity. To their credit (and in response in no small part to the Jewish community’s outrage), the Mormons claim to have stopped the practice in 1995. And just last September they agreed to remove the names of all previously posthumously baptized Jewish Shoah survivors from their rolls.

The opinion Jewish Americans have of Mitt Romney should, of course, be a function of his record in the world of business and as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. I wish today, however, not specifically to write about Mitt Romney at all, but about another Mormon, one who seems to have been long forgotten by everybody but who showed uncommon insight and bravery in standing up for Jewish interests when the rest of the world noted the devastation wrought by the Nazis on the Jews of Germany on Kristallnacht, which occurred seventy-three years ago next Wednesday, and then quickly looked away. The man’s name was William Henry King, and he represented Utah in the United States Senate from 1917 to 1941. He was also president pro tempore of the Senate in 1939-1941, which put him third in line to succeed to the presidency should the president have become incapacitated. (Amazingly enough, he was not the only William King ever to serve as president pro tempore. William R. King, our country’s shortest serving Vice President, was president pro tempore of the Senate from 1836 to 1841 and then again from 1850 to 1852.)

By all accounts, Kristallnacht was the end of the beginning of the Shoah, the event that, at least in retrospect, serves as the watershed moment after which nothing was ever again the same for the Jews of Germany. In the course of one evening of terror, over 1600 synagogues were ransacked. Hundreds more were burnt to the ground. Countless Jewish businesses and shops were destroyed. Ninety-one people were murdered in the course of one single evening and over 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and carted off to concentration camps. (Of them, more than two thousand died as a result of the brutal treatment to which they were subjected and the rest were forced as a condition of their release to agree to leave Germany.) For those of us looking back on the horror after all these years, it seems impossible to imagine the world not finally awakening to the demonism that had seized Germany and responding dramatically and forcefully.

Mostly, the world yawned. No economic sanctions were put into place against Nazi Germany. America recalled its ambassador to Germany briefly as a kind of formal protest against the ferocity of the pogrom, but diplomatic relations were not severed. Nor were immigration quotas in the free world relaxed to permit the Jews of Germany to escape to freedom. Even something as innocuous and deeply humanitarian as the Wagner-Rogers bill, which would have allowed 20,000 Jewish children to come to the United States outside the quota system, was opposed by FDR and eventually died in committee. As chronicled just this week by Rafael Medoff in an op-ed piece published on the website of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Christian America was equally unmoved. (You can find Medoff’s very interesting essay here.) And then there was William H. King. Arguably the most powerful Mormon in the United States at the time, King chastised FDR for recalling our ambassador “for consultations,” correctly understanding that the Germans would understand the move as little more than a slap on the wrist. And then, when President Roosevelt—as unmoved by the events of Kristallnacht as he was apparently uninterested in risking his own political capital by moving aggressively even to rescue children from the Nazis—coldly noted in public that a revision of American’s immigration quota system was “not in contemplation,” King responded by suggesting that Alaska be opened up entirely as a haven for Jewish refugees.

Why don’t I know about that? I read Michael Chabon’s novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union a few years ago and liked it less than I had hoped I was going to, yet I somehow missed the fact that it was rooted in history rather than solely in the author’s imagination. It turns out that there was indeed such a proposal. Called the Slattery Report, it was named for Undersecretary of the Interior Harry A. Slattery but produced at the behest of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. And it specifically proposed that Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, then the extent of the Reich, be permitted to settle in four specific locations in Alaska. (The concept was that the quota program could be legally sidestepped in this specific way because Alaska was a territory of the United States, not a state.) In retrospect, it seems like a zany sort of response to Kristallnacht, but perhaps that is only how it seems this long after the fact. At the time, it had the support of an interesting range of religious organizations, including the Labor Zionists of America, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Federal Council of Churches. It could surely have made a difference in the fate of countless European Jews. And it was none other than William King who introduced the bill into the Senate. (Representative Frank Havenner, a Democrat from California, introduced the bill into the House of Representatives.) But without Roosevelt’s support, this bill too was buried in committee and never again saw the light of day.

Still, as people line up to decide whether or not Mitt Romney’s religion should impact on voters’ decision whether or not to support his bid for the presidency, it might be worth considering that when the Jewish people was facing the darkest of hours in its history, a concrete, dramatic, and eminently doable plan to save countless European Jews was introduced into the Senate by a Mormon. When America’s leaders could not bring themselves to act decisively even to save children, King took the Slattery Report and put his considerable authority behind it, proposing it be enacted into law. It came to nothing at all. Obviously, it hardly make sense to support or not to support Mitt Romney because of something William King did more than seventy years ago. But when I think of Mormonism in general—and I haven’t seen the musical, although Joan and Max, my oldest, did—I find myself able to look past the nuttiness of posthumously baptizing Anne Frank—a practice I believe even the Mormons themselves must now regret—and remember instead the fine and noble example set for us all by William Henry King, a brave man for whom the notion that it was “not in contemplation” to act decisively to save the Jews of Europe was reason enough to act outside the boundaries of political loyalty and to go up against his president to do the right thing.

Advice for the 99%

2011-10-28T09:57:00.002-04:00

Like many of you, I suspect, I’ve only been vaguely aware of the Occupy Wall Street people camped out in Zuccotti Park for the last six weeks or so. I don’t even think I knew where Zuccotti Park was until just recently. (It’s in Lower Manhattan between Broadway, Trinity Place, and Liberty and Cedar Streets. It was called Liberty Plaza Park until 2006, but I don’t believe I knew where that was either.) Maybe some of you know all about it, but I certainly cannot agree with Douglas Rushkoff, the CNN columnist who wrote the other week that, at least in his opinion, “anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful.” Yet, if there’s one thing Jewish history has taught me, it’s never to shrug off large numbers of unhappy people demonstrating in the street as irrelevant or unimportant merely because they don’t overtly appear to have anything to do with me personally. And so I set myself to attempting to figure out what this is all about. (And the numbers are not inconsequential. A few weeks ago there were, by police estimates, 15,000 people in the park. And they were joined by tens of thousands of others demonstrating across the globe in places as diverse as Auckland, Sydney, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, São Paulo, Paris, Madrid, Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Phoenix, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Were we to understand that these were all spontaneous demonstrations of support for the people in Zuccotti Park? That was how the media depicted the demonstrations…but that too caught my attention. What, I asked myself, could possibly have inspired all these people simultaneously to mount the barricades? Or is that just the kind of question someone would ask who neither has a Twitter account nor understands why anyone would want to have one? Maybe that is just how the world works now! But can someone really tweet and get tens of thousands across the world to respond? Apparently!)

As far as I can tell, the single theme that unifies all the protesters has to do with the unequal distribution of wealth in our country (and, for that matter, in every other country). The slogan “We are the 99%” references the claim, endlessly repeated in the media, that the wealthiest 1% of Americans earn 24% of our nation’s income. (I keep hearing the statistic quoted as 40%, but I believe that not to be correct.) It’s hard to know what to do with that number, however. By any measure, 24% of the earned income of Americans in any given year is a huge amount of money. But it’s not that dramatically different from how things have been historically in our country: in 1915, the year of my mother’s birth, the richest 1% of Americans earned 18% of the nation’s income. Still, it’s easy to amass statistics and difficult intelligently to analyze them. In 2010, for example, the wealthiest 20% of our nation’s citizens earned 49.4% of the nation’s income, while the poorest 15% of Americans earned 3.4%. (Those 15% of Americans are, not coincidentally, those who live beneath the poverty line.) Is that more or less significant than the 1% earning 24%? And yet another way to view the disparity between wealthy and poor is to observe that the mean after-tax income of the nation’s wealthiest 1% rose 176% between 1979 and 2005, compared to a growth over those same years of just 6% for the poorest 20% of Americans. Is that a sign of the degeneracy of American culture? Or is impressive that even the poorest are better off now than a quarter-century ago?

I am not an economist and I therefore find it difficult to find these statistics as arresting as the demonstrators clearly expect me to. Do the demonstrators have a point that things have changed in our country, and for the dramatically worse? Or is that just how things have always been, that rich people with plenty of money to invest have the means to make even more money while the poor—who spend their income on groceries and rent—do not. In a sense, the real question behind all of this is whether the disparity between rich and poor is itself a societal evil we should be working to eradicate or whether it is the specific width of the chasm that separates the wealthiest from the least wealthy Americans that we should be finding outrageous (i.e., and not the simple fact that such a chasm exists at all). Among Christians, Jesus’ comment that there will always be poor people in the world (found at Matthew 26:11, where Jesus justifies someone wasting a bottle of expensive perfume to anoint his head even though the perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor by observing that there will always be poor people no matter how much charity anyone gives away), has been used over and over—especially just lately, it seems to me—to justify the right of the wealthy to live lives of luxury when others have almost nothing. I suspect that’s a misreading of Christian tradition, but what do I know? It’s hardly my place to critique other people’s gospels…but instead I’d like to challenge myself here to say what our Torah actually does teach about the fact of income disparity. It’s not as simple a question as it sounds as though it should be!

On the one hand, our Torah seems clearly to suppose that poor people will permanently exist within Israelite society. Many laws, in fact, seem naturally to presuppose such a situation. A law in Exodus regarding the sabbatical year, for example, specifically discusses the land that must be left fallow every seventh year and, addressing the Israelites, says that they must “let it rest and lie still so that the poor of your people may eat…and so shall you deal also with your vineyard, and with your olive trees.” Another law, also in Exodus, cautions judges against favoring poor people when they appear in court as litigants going up against wealthy adversaries, the clear point being that the justice system derives its authority at least in part from its supreme impartiality and that this quality cannot be compromised merely because one litigant is less well-off than the other. Still a third law, this one from Deuteronomy, cautions against taking the tools of a poor person’s trade as collateral when lending him or her a sum of money. There the logic is obvious and impeccable: if you take away the tools of a debtor’s trade, how can that person be expected ever to earn the money to pay back the loan? And in a similar vein is the law, also in Deuteronomy, requiring employers to pay their poorest employees on a daily basis no matter how inconvenient that might be: if someone needs his or her daily wages to feed a family or to purchase basic necessities, then the inconvenience of the employer is not taken into account and the worker’s wages must be paid out daily.

All of the above-mentioned laws seems to suppose easily that the existence of poor people is a basic feature of society, and a permanent one. But there is one extended passage in the Torah that attempts to depict the process whereby people slip into poverty. The portrait is a moving one, beginning with someone short of funds who sells off some of his family’s land to raise some cash. He retains the right to redeem the land—that is, to buy it back—but even if he cannot afford to do so the land reverts to his possession in the jubilee year. That doesn’t sound so bad—he gets the land back and keeps the purchase price! (On the other hand, there are jubilee years only twice a century. So it’s not as good a deal in the third year of the cycle as it would be, say, in the forty-seventh.) But then the Torah moves forward and imagines a man with no more land to sell. This person has to borrow money, and then must pay it back. He does not have to pay interest—it is forbidden for one Israelite to charge interest when lending money to another—but neither is he working for himself any longer: whatever he earns must go not to raising his own standard of living but to paying back his debt. And then we imagine a third stage in the descent into poverty, the one in which a person can no longer borrow money in the normal way. Perhaps he lacks anything to use as collateral. Perhaps his debt load is already too high for anyone to risk lending him more money. Or perhaps he is deemed unlikely to pay back whatever money he borrows for some other reason. Once borrowing in the regular way is no longer an option, there is always another way however, one even less desirable than going into debt, to raise funds, and so this man sells himself into indentured servitude by agreeing to give up his freedom by being the unpaid employee of another Israelite to raise the money to pay back his previous debts. And finally, when there simply is no other way, the Torah imagines the worst of all fates for a faithful Israelite by imagining someone brought so low by circumstances to have to sell himself to a non-Jew who, not being bound by the laws of the Torah, will not scruple to treat him as an impoverished brother or as a landsman, but as a slave.

The passage is very moving, but I’d rather focus on its implications than its detail: here is the story of a man sliding into poverty, not born into it and certainly not condemned to it by mere circumstance. The assumption seems to be that, yes, there will always be poor people but that they do not function as a permanent caste within society that will always exist regardless of who its members might be in any given generation. Instead, the implication is that there will always be people who make poor investments, whose businesses close, whose crops fail, or who borrow unwisely. When poverty overtakes an individual, then, the Torah ordains practical ways for members of the House of Israel to relate to such a person not by regretting his or her misfortune but by lending that person money not on interest, by buying land even though it will revert to its original owner in the jubilee year, by taking someone in truly dire straits into one’s home as an unpaid employee (and thus providing such a person with a way out of debt that requires neither collateral nor property up front). In other words, the Torah views poverty as misfortune not as destiny, and ordains that the faithful strive to find ways to help not “the poor” as a class within society, but each individual who falls on hard times. And to do so kindly and respectfully as well, thereby transforming tzedakah from welfare into worship.

So where does that leave the people in the park? Since they are, as far as I can see, mostly referencing themselves as the have-nots in the equation they are putting forth (“We are the 99%”), their unhappiness has a certain self-serving ring to it that so far as failed to engage me. In an open society such as our own in which people with almost nothing can and do achieve great professional and financial success, it seems odd to argue that the chasm is unbridgeable. That only a fraction of the needy will manage to become truly wealthy is not really the point. What I think is probably the more reasonable attitude towards the disparity between rich and poor is not to whine or complain about it, but for each member of society—and certainly within our Jewish world this should be the norm, not the exception—for each individual Jewish citizen to feel personally responsible for those less well off than he or she, then to offer tzedakah within his or her means not merely by giving a few dollars to someone in need, but by creating opportunities for the needy to lift themselves out of poverty and to acquire marketable skills that will lead to gainful employment. To spend weeks camped out in a park chanting about how inherently unfair it is that society spans the gamut from poor to rich seems just a bit pointless to me. Better these people should spend a few weeks doing whatever it might take to reach out to someone even less well off than they themselves are and help that person achieve a level of prosperity in life that that person might otherwise never attain. That, it strikes me, would be a practical response to poverty in America…and in every other country as well.

Travels in Time

2011-10-07T08:31:00.005-04:00

Our Shelter Rock computer guy, Ron Kliot, put an interesting question to me the other day, one that’s been with me ever since. How, he asked, would I respond if it were to be announced tomorrow that a time machine has been invented, patented and manufactured, and that I personally have been selected to test it out. There are, however, some serious flaws, in the machine’s operating system: time travelers will only be able to travel back in time twenty years exactly, the duration of the traveler’s visit to the past will be exactly five minutes, and the only person in the past who will be able to see or hear the time traveler during his or her visit from the future will be the twenty-year-younger version of him or herself. (Anticipating my next question, Ron also revealed one other flaw in the system: that the younger version of the traveler, the person being visited in earlier time, will somehow be able to remember whatever the later version of him or herself has to say, but not the experience itself. That’s why, supposing this were to be true, none of us remembers meeting three-year-older versions of our current selves seventeen years ago.) And so, cast in slightly weird, science-fiction-y terms was the challenge Ron laid down just before Yom Kippur for me to accept or not to accept as I saw fit: if I actually could travel back to 1991 and visit the thirty-eight year old me, and if I had exactly five minutes to say whatever I would like for that version of myself to know without having to find it out for himself the hard way over the ensuring twenty years and if the younger me would be able to recall, if not the experience itself, then at least the message I will have traveled back in time to transmit…so what exactly would I say to the younger me?

It’s a good question. My first attempts at answers—“Buy Apple!”, followed shortly by “Buy Google!”—were unimpressive and a bit childish: if I really could talk to the twenty-year-younger me, would stock tips be the best I could do? (I heard that! But surely you don’t really think that the only thing that would make your life (or my life) better or happier now would be having made more money or acquired a more cleverly-put-together portfolio back then! Yeah, yeah…me too! But, seriously, is that really what you’d use your five minutes to say? Mind you, I don’t think insider trading laws could be made to apply to advice you give yourself!) But seriously, and clever-investment-advice jokes aside, what actually would you tell yourself? Or, since Ron put this to me, let me phrase that in a more personal way: what would I tell myself if I only could? (Just for the record, Google only went public in 2004. But Apple was trading at $47 a share on my birthday in 1991 and for $345 on my birthday this year. And it closed at thirty dollars or so higher than that yesterday, even after the untimely death of Steve Jobs. Oh well!)

My father was still alive in 1992. Would now-me have warned then-me that I had less than seven years less to ask him all the things I never actually did get around to asking about? That sounds like more worthy counsel than stock tips, but traveling that particular route opens other doors I have always preferred to leave shut. Why is it exactly that I never asked my dad about his first marriage—including not even his first wife’s name or her eventual fate—or about his parents’ apparently extremely complicated relationship? Why do I know more or less nothing at all about my father’s mother’s family. And why have I never met anyone at all from my father’s father’s family other than my father and his siblings themselves? My father graduated from high school in 1934 and married my mom in 1951. Why is it I have no clear idea where he lived or what he was up to for the intervening seventeen years? There’s a photograph somewhere in one of our albums of him in Florida…but I don’t really know why he was there or how long he lived there, or even, to speak honestly, if he lived there or was just visiting. Even typing these questions out is extremely stress-inducing for me and, as I find myself formulating them I simultaneously also know that I would never have used my five minutes in the past to go there, that if I really wanted all those doors open I would have opened them on my own during the many years I could have. I was, after all, forty-six years old when my father died! And I certainly wouldn’t have needed a boost from future-me to formulate the questions that would possibly have pried them open, just the courage I lacked then and no longer need to lack now.

Twenty years ago, we lived in Richmond, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver situated on half-rural, half-suburban Lulu Island in the alluvial delta of the mighty Fraser, the province’s longest river. It was a kind of a paradise, British Columbia. Growing up in Queens, I hadn’t ever seen bald eagles nesting in the wild or flying around overhead. I certainly hadn’t ever walked along a riverbank and seen seals jumping in and out of the water just a few yards off the beach or owned a dog that felt entirely free to jump into the water to join them for a quick swim. I don’t believe I even knew there were such things as snowy owls, let alone that I would be able eventually to recognize their call (something like a hoarse gawwwwh) from a distance, and to distinguish it from their alarm bark (which is more like quacking than gawwwwh-ing). You get the picture. It was beyond gorgeous. We throve there for as long as we stayed, or we thought we did. But perhaps if I could have five minutes with the 1991-iteration of myself I would suggest focusing a little less on the owls and a little more on my children…and asking myself if all that natural splendor was worth the price we paid for living as far as we did from the kind of Jewish life that they only got to know once we finally landed in New York. (California, if anything, was a step down, not a step up, in that regard. I’ll write about that whole experience some other time.) I don’t regret our time in B.C., not even a little bit. But I do think that now-me would have used at least a minute or two of the five to tell then-me not to linger too long at the fair…and to make sure we were back on the East Coast before it was too late for my kids truly to profit from the move.

So that’s possibly how I would use three of my five minutes: buy Apple (did you really think I’d skip that part?) and move east. But what about the other two minutes…what would I use them to say? Supposing there will be some magic mechanism built into the system that prevents time-travelers from revealing future winning lottery numbers or Kentucky Derby winners to their younger selves, I think I’d spend my final two minutes telling myself to stick with my fiction, to keep writing novels no matter what, to understand that, in the end, what my children will treasure most of my legacy will be the books and stories I leave behind for them to contemplate—biz hundert-tzvantzik—one day in my absence.

As you all know, I write a lot. I’m in the middle of a huge book project right now which you will learn more about as soon as you have a chance to read our October Shelter Rock bulletin. And the project behind that one, my Chumash (that is to say, my personal, slightly idiosyncratic translation and commentary on the five books of the Torah) is coming up behind that once I finally get The Observant Life off my work desk.

As many of you know, I do most of my writing in the morning before minyan and in the evening, if I can stay awake, after minyan if I don’t have anything keeping me at shul after that. I spend a lot of my Wednesdays at my desk trying to write. And Joan and I generally take our vacations in the summertime somewhere that I will be able to spend at least a few hours a day at my desk. But, for all I try to devote myself to my writing, it’s also so easy not to find the time, not to have the energy to focus on something that requires the kind of concentration I try to bring to my writing when what I really feel like doing is watching a rerun of Law and Order on television and going to bed. I do it…but I could do it more assiduously. And maybe that is what I’d tell my 1991-self if I could: that most of everything eventually fades away, but that not everything does. And that I should feel privileged, not burdened, by whatever ability I possess to express myself in words that could possibly end up constituted my most previous legacy. I feel that way about our congregation as well, by the way: I serve Shelter Rock in many different ways, most of which I have in common with most other rabbis. But my personal gift to our shul is my writing. I’ve been gratified over the years by the reception you have all accorded to Siddur Tzur Yisrael, and to its companion volume for the house of mourning, Zot Nechamati. I have been pleased as well by the way Riding the River of Peace, the book for young people that we published in memory of the late Dr. Jeffrey Siegel, was received by many of you. Just this year, I felt proud and very pleased to be able to offer you the three stories we brought out for the High Holidays, “Teshuvah,” “Tefillah,” and “Tzedakah,” and I was very touched and pleased by the response they elicited from so many of you. So I think that’s what I’d use the last two of my five minutes to do: to remind myself not to give up, not to imagine that it’s all for naught, that reading is a lost art cultivated by almost no one at all in our digital age. And I hope I’d listen too!

Of course, since in this fantasy I’m spinning out for you one of the rules is that you get to remember the message but not the messenger, maybe I did learn these things from myself…not, obviously, in 1991, but perhaps in 1993 or 1995, twenty years before some point in the future at which time travel finally is possible. True, that would still leave open the question of why I didn’t buy Apple at least then. (On my birthday in 1995, Apple was trading at $42 a share, even less than a few years earlier!) But it would at least explain why we eventually knew we had to come back east, and why I have made the writing of stories and books the foundation stone upon which I have attempted to build my rabbinate.

And that is what I learned from our computer guy the other day when he stopped by to fix something in the office and, while waiting for the damned thing to boot up again, had a few minutes to shmooze with me before he had to get back to work and I had to rush off to choir rehearsal.

Elul 5771

2011-09-16T06:46:00.005-04:00

Elul is our Janus, our god of looking forwards and backwards at the same time. Being monotheists, of course, we have no gods but God…but we still have Elul, this strange, holiday-less month that slithers through Jewish time at the end of the year as we prepare, yet again, to face the future by staring down the past, and then daring to advance the number of the calendar year by one and thus to wander forward bravely or timidly into whatever the new year brings.

It’s a strange month, suggestive in a dozen different ways of its (and our) native ambivalence about things in general. Is it the end of the year? Clearly, it is—by every reckoning Elul is the last month of the Jewish year—and yet it looks more to what lies ahead than to the past. Shul-Jews begin on the very first day of Elul to hear the shofar, the herald of the holiday season, being blown every morning in synagogue. The twenty-seventh psalm, the song singled out by our sages as the most supremely suggestive of the feel of the spiritual agenda of the yontif season soon upon us, begins to be read morning and evening. And, indeed, the faith-based bravery with which the poet recommends that his readers address the most daunting of life’s challenges—physical attack by vicious enemies, the death of our parents, the rage of people jealous of our successes in the world, denunciation at the hands of liars to whom the possible penalties for perjury mean nothing at all—is tempered by his wistful admission that only the fortunate few get only to see evidence of God’s justice and goodness in the land of the living, and by his dour understanding that one pays for the privilege to wait for God in this world with the years and decades of one’s life. It’s that kind of poem. It’s that kind of month.

So Elul becomes this strange mixture of things. Bounded on the one side by Tisha Be’av, the saddest (at least in the pre-Shoah world) of all Jewish days, the residue of Tisha Be’av in Elul is not melancholic at all but upbeat: all the haftarot that we read in synagogue during Elul during the weeks following Tisha Be’av are odes to faith, to hope, to confidence, and to the glorious destiny that awaits the Jewish people on the other side of the messianic moment. At the other edge of Elul, of course, is Rosh Hashanah, one of the happiest of holidays, an occasion for feasting, for family time, for apples and honey, But the run-up to the holiday is distinctly less merry that the festival itself: as we make our way through Elul we are all of us drawn to self-examine, to consider our flaws, our faults, our moral inadequacies, and our ethical shortcomings. So as we prepare to sit down to tables laden with the best foods and cakes, and with more wine than any of us should probably drink, we are also spending time on the dark side, visiting the chambers of our own hearts and either liking or, if we are being completely honest with ourselves, mostly disliking what we find there lurking. More ambivalence, more mixed messages, more crossed signals! That is what Elul is, I believe: a month-long festival of insecurity, uncertainty, and ambivalence out of which we come only slowly as the holiday approaches and we find it in us to place our faith in God, to resolve to grow into finer versions of ourselves, and, as ever, to hope for the best. Elul is my favorite month!

But this is not any Elul. Adding to our sense of ill ease in this specific year are a dozen outside factors, each of which all by itself would weigh heavily on all of our shoulders and all of which together feel beyond burdensome. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 last Sunday is in that category and has its own Janus-like quality: should we be more sad that so many innocents died on that horrific day or more happy that we have somehow managed to prevent any subsequent terrorist attacks of that magnitude on American soil for a full decade? The aftermath of the so-called Arab spring is in that category as well: as Americans we are obviously pleased by the fall of tyrants and the collapse of dictatorships. But as Jewish people whose hearts beat with Israel it is impossible not also to wonder what the future is going to bring. And if the recent events in Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey are harbingers of worse to come, then the future seems somewhere between troubled and truly bleak…and that makes it concomitantly more difficult simply to declare ourselves pleased with fall of a Mubarak or a Kaddafi and be done with it. They were, by all accounts, bad men who deserved to lose their power. But how can my pleasure at seeing despots deposed not be tempered by the realization that I have no idea what may yet come…and that the specter of all or most of these liberated (if that’s the right word) countries coming under the sway of violent, radical Islamism must be part of the picture for all thinking people?

Weighing the most heavily on me personally is the debacle about to be upon us at the United Nations. As all my readers know, I could not possibly have a lower opinion of the U.N., an organization that lost any pretense of moral credibility decades ago and which exists, as far as I can see, simply to further its own malign agenda. I didn’t used to think that! When I was a child, we celebrated United Nations Day in school every fall on October 24. We collected money for UNICEF. We had school trips to the U.N., where we were told excitedly by tour guides wearing pins bearing the names of their exotic homelands that we had left American soil and were in the only building in the entire world that was actually owned by the entire world—or at least jointly by all the member states of the U.N.—and which existed solely to further the cause of peace between nations. I do remember asking my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. D’Antona, why exactly it was that the Soviet Union got three votes in the General Assembly while the United States and every other member state only got one, but I do not recall being as put off by the answer—which can only have been because they demanded it and the rest of the world lacked the courage to say no—as it seems in retrospect that I should have been. Mind you, I was ten years old in fifth grade, so what did I know? But as the United Nations now prepares unilaterally to reward the Palestinians for decades of counterproductive terrorism and self-defeating intransigency with a cloak of unearned respectability—a step that will somehow end up making it seem that it is Israel that is being unreasonable by not cheerfully agreeing to its own demise unilaterally by withdrawing from territory it won in a war that was foisted upon it by others absent a real, enduring peace on which generations to come can rely—I find myself not especially surprised by the hostility of the world towards Israel (which I am nowhere near naïve enough not to understand in its larger context as merely the latest gilgul of the same Jew-hatred that has stalked the world for millennia), but flummoxed nevertheless by it.

In this month-long celebration of ambivalence, I find myself—what else?—ambivalent. Surely, I tell myself, the U.N. only means well. Surely, they feel that by bringing the Palestinians into the family of nations, even in a way that lacks any actual importance in terms of actual geo-politics on the actual ground of the Middle East, they will be encouraging them to accept the dignity of national identity, to renounce terror, to agree finally to live in peace with the Jews of Israel in a corner of the world clearly big enough to accommodate them both. Surely, I continue in my happy reverie, when Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon notes, as he did the other day, that he is “sympathetic” to the frustrations of the Palestinians,” he must imagine that he will make them less frustrated by encouraging them to refuse even more adamantly to negotiate in good faith with Israel. But why should they? (Why abandon a policy that has worked so well?) Has the Secretary-General noticed that Hamas continues openly to call for the destruction of Israel and continues to launch rockets against civilian targets? And that Hamas has explicitly distanced itself from the goings-on in Turtle Bay this week, the better later on to sound reasonable about continuing its terror war against the Jews of Israel? Perhaps the Secretary-General assumes that Hamas will just go away once the “good” Palestinians are rewarded for having been sufficiently impotent to prevent the bad ones from attempting to murder the children of Sderot in their beds in the first place. Sounds like a plan to me!

And so we attempt to gear up for the holidays. Elul is happy/sad and serious/joyous. What can I say? I’m a Jew—I like being off-balance! Even the weather is part of the larger picture, at least in the Northeast. Is this summer? Sort of, it is. (It was 87 degrees the other day.) But it’s also fall, also sort of. (There are leaves all over my backyard.) The ill ease I feel when I contemplate the murderous rage of the rioters in Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey this last week is tempered by my faith in justice, in human decency, and in God’s watchful guardianship of Israel. The ill ease I feel in the pit of my stomach as I contemplate the glee with which the United Nations will act this week in its ongoing effort to delegitimize Israel in the forum of nations makes me queasy, yet I also feel filled with hope as I contemplate our current woes against the larger pageant of Jewish history. In every generation, people rise up who would be only pleased to finish us off for good, yet the blessed Holy One somehow manages for the Jewish people somehow always to endure, always to survive, always to bear witness to God’s presence in history. Pesach is a long ways off, but perhaps that is the line for us to hold in our hearts as the world prepares to help us prepare for Rosh Hashanah by reminding us just how fragile this sukkah is in which we live and hope to thrive in the course the year soon to be upon us.

Goodnight, Irene!

2011-09-04T00:03:00.003-04:00

By the time all of you finally read this—or at least by the time all my local readers at Shelter Rock eventually do—I hope that power will have been restored to all of our homes. We ourselves lost our power at about 7 AM on Sunday and only got it back Wednesday evening. In the history of the universe, it was a blip of not even four full days. Speaking more realistically, the universe having been around for a really long time, it wasn’t even a blip. But irritating, slightly upsetting days they were nonetheless. Washing up at the gym. Downloading my e-mail in other people’s backyards or at Starbuck’s. Charging my phone in the car (but never quite completely, which led to even more irritation and upset). Shlepping the laundry to friends’ houses. Wandering around after dark with flashlights and never quite being able to find what I was looking for. Reading by candlelight and trying not to get wax all over the page. You get the picture!

Of course, there were also good things that Irene brought in her wake. I saw many instances of people being truly kind, generous, and hospitable to each other. We ourselves were invited for dinner each night that we were without electricity at home, as I know were many of you also, by people who hadn’t lost their power or whose power had already been restored. On our street, we actually spoke to neighbors from down the block with whom we hadn’t ever exchanged a word. (Okay, okay, so that was Joan engaging the neighbors, not me. But I could too have!) I noticed a noticeable upsurge in children actually playing outside in the street and in the park, children whom I’m guessing I hadn’t ever seen before in the neighborhood because they have generally been too glued to large and small screens of various sorts ever to venture forth into the daylight.

So, on the whole, it was a kind of a wash—good things and bad things, inconveniences and kindnesses, more stress than usual but also way more sleep than I usually get. And, of course, we were the lucky ones. Not as lucky as some, but still far more fortunate than many New Yorkers who are still flooded and uncertain whether their homes will ever return to normal in the simple way ours did the other evening when someone somewhere threw some unseen switch and the lights went on just as suddenly as they had gone off in the first place. And the damage outside of New York, both to the north and the south, was truly devastating to entire communities. On the whole, we should be grateful we came through this relatively unscathed!

But, as you know happens regularly, this whole incident got me thinking about things. Do you know the expression “the new normal”? I can’t quite figure out who coined the expression, which I do not believe I had heard until just a few years ago, but what it means is clear enough: society moves along quickly enough for things that would once have seemed instances of peculiar, faddish, outlandish, or at least highly idiosyncratic behavior quickly to become the norm. It happens all the time. Nor is this a feature particularly of our age. Cole Porter’s song, “Anything Goes,” from the 1934 musical of the same name, is specifically about how quickly things change, how patterns of behavior that once would have seemed scandalous or unimaginably vulgar can suddenly become respectable and reasonable in the minds of most neutral onlookers. And how the nature of society is such that not only do these things happen regularly and frequently, but how they also remain for the most part unnoticed and uncommented upon, how they do not merely become acceptable but how they become the actual norm, the “new normal,” the standard that people are considered to be acting outside of societal standards if they deviate from rather than if they hew to.

Watching myself flounder around all week racing back and forth from Starbucks to get my mail made me realize that what is true about the way people behave with each other is also true of the way they interact with the machines in their lives. There was a time, after all, not that many years back when I got mail once a day. It came, for readers too young to remember, printed out on pieces of paper or even handwritten and you found it in the mailbox when you came home at the end of the day from work or school or wherever. You could get mail at work in the Stone Age too, of course, but it also came once a day and was also available only in hard copy. You then answered it—reminding the person to whom you were writing what the issue at hand was that you were writing about, since there was no way simply to write a paragraph or two over the original letter unless you actually, physically, mailed the piece of paper itself back to the person who sent it to you in the first place—and then a few days later, or a few weeks if you were writing to someone overseas, it arrived in that person’s hands. And then that person could respond and that too would take a few weeks. Asking a question of a friend in Tel Aviv and getting an answer by return mail could easily take a month. It didn’t seem all that burdensome to wait, however. It was just what it was, the norm, the normal.

From there we moved on to e-mail. The letters could be transmitted almost instantly, but you still had to be sitting at your computer to get the mail. So I got my mail a few times a day—but only when I was at work or at home. People understood that. If an e-mail didn’t elicit a response, it usually meant only that the person to whom it was sent hadn’t found a computer to read his or her mail on, not that he or she was ignoring you. And then from there we moved on to Blackberries and other kinds of smart phones, so that your e-mail could follow you around. You could conceivably not have your phone with you…but, unless you were undergoing surgery (and then really only if you were fully, not just locally, anesthetized), why wouldn’t you have your phone with you? How quickly this all too became normal! Nor does it seem odd any longer to receive text messages instead of actual e-letters from people who for some reason can’t find your e-mail address but have your phone number, or who feel that texting is closer to actual communication and therefore to be desired not solely for its speed (which is no faster, I don’t think, than e-mail most of the time), but for its intimacy and its (perceived) immediacy. All of these things felt like huge advances at the moment they were first introduced, but then became features of daily life so quickly that it seems almost impossible to imagine how quickly they have become almost unnoticeable features of daily life. When I tell my kids that we had exactly one telephone at home and that it was on the wall in my parents’ kitchen, thus making it possible to speak privately on the phone only when no one else was home, they both believe me (because why shouldn’t they?) and don’t believe me (because how could someone only my age have lived, let alone survived, under such primitive conditions?) When I tell them the internet also didn’t exist, they respond roughly the way I myself would if some new friends were to tell me that they grew up in some shtetl somewhere where they didn’t yet have gravity and dropped things just floated off into the stratosphere.

And then, suddenly, it all goes away. No power means no computers, no cell phones, e-mail, or text messaging (at least once the phones die until you find some place to recharge them, if you do), no cold Coke in the fridge, no personal laundromat in the basement waiting for the next load of dirty clothing, no electronic security system guarding things while you’re out and about, no air conditioning, no television, no telephone, no internet. At first it really does feel as though gravity had somehow stopped existing. You tell yourself that people read by candlelight for centuries before Edison invented the light bulb, that candles themselves must have been an innovation somewhere along the way when the switch was made from smelly, dirty oil lamps to efficient, clean-burning, and scent-free wax candles. But for all you know that to be true, you still can’t quite believe that you can’t turn on the TV. Obviously, you can brush your teeth in the dark. But who ever imagined we’d have to?

So the first response, I think, for most of us was incredulity. This is how people used to live? Where did they wash their clothing, in the river? (The answer is, actually, yes. But that was before my day, so even I don’t really believe it.) From there we move on to irritation, then to frustration, then (depending on our sense of social equanimity) either to resignation or to rage. I myself experienced all of the above emotions, other than rage, over the four days we had no power. But I ended up feeling most of all amazed at the wonders of our world now that I finally had the opportunity to conceptualize life without them: without computers (like the one I’m writing this letter on and which I used just before to find out in about three seconds what year Anything Goes opened on Broadway by googling Cole Porter), without telephones, without electric lights, etc.

Instead of being depressed because our service was out for a few days, I found myself marveling at the world in which we live. And feeling grateful to live in the kind of world in which even in the year of Irene we are still likely to end up at year’s end having had 361 days of only-once-interrupted electricity powering up our indispensible machinery.

As we make our way through the month of Elul leading to the High Holidays, it would behoove us all to consider how fortunate we are, and in so many ways, and to ask ourselves how we can allow ourselves to take it all for granted…and then to be outraged when we are deprived of some small part of it for a couple of days. The correct emotion to cultivate during Elul is gratitude and beholdenness to God for all that we have, not irritation with LIPA for not working fast enough. In its own way, Irene wasn’t such a bad way to get Elul off to the right start.

Walking in Space

2011-08-26T08:29:00.006-04:00

Clearly, there are different ways to measure the passing of time. We count our birthdays. We keep track of family yahrtzeits. We celebrate the anniversaries of our marriages. It seems to me that a surprising number of people can say exactly how many years ago they finished high school or college without having to pause even briefly to figure it out. Mostly, these experiences involve looking out at the world and noting the degree to which things have changed since we were born, since we got married, since it was only twenty (and not thirty or forty) years ago that we finished college, etc.. And yet we ourselves, the people actually looking out at the changing world, generally feel that deep inside we are still who we always were, that—for all the many ways in which the world all around really has changed dramatically since some specific year in the past—our inner selves have somehow remained intact and essentially unchanged by the passage of time. On the other hand, I have now had the strangest experience of revisiting—and on three separate occasions, the most recent of them this last Wednesday night—scenes from long ago in which the movement forward was precisely in my own mind and not at all evident in what I was looking out at. Indeed, what I was looking at was not only unchanged but remarkably so! So if what I was looking at was unchanged and I myself am, as are we all, unchanged…so why was the experience unsettling? You’d think just the opposite would be the case! I’m being a bit obscure, I know—even I myself wouldn’t know what any of that meant if it hadn’t happened to me personally—so let me try to explain. Like so many New York stories, it begins on Broadway.

A few years ago, I wrote to you about my experience seeing the revival of Equus on Broadway starring Richard Griffiths and Daniel Radcliffe. It was an unexpectedly interesting evening at the theater, one I only had because Joan wanted to see the show but which I ended up enjoying immensely. I had seen the play before. In fact, I saw it on Broadway when it opened in 1974 starring Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth, and I liked it very much then too. But what I had failed to anticipate, and which really threw me for a loop, was the way I found myself relating to the play and specifically to its protagonists this time ‘round: when the show opened in 1974, I was just a little older than the Peter Firth-Daniel Radcliffe character, a young man in his early twenties trying to find his place in the world. Then, thirty-four years later, I was suddenly (suddenly!) the age of the Anthony Hopkins-Richard Griffiths character, the psychiatrist helping the young man grow past his issues into maturity. So if the whole point of theater is to allow the playwright to create a context in which audience members can deepen their personal self-awareness through the experience of peering into the playwright’s mirror and seeing themselves reflected in the personalities portrayed on the stage, you can understand just how disorienting this felt: my life’s trajectory in the thirty-four years between the original production and the revival took me from being a college student then to the rabbi I am now, from Firth to Hopkins, from Radcliffe to Griffiths, from seeing myself reflected (and not all that flatteringly) in the adolescent on stage attempting to wrestle with his demons to seeing myself reflected (also not especially flatteringly) in the portrait of the deeply unhappy doctor wrestling with his own related, but not identical, set of analogous inner demons. The play was about them, but somehow it ended up also being about me. I was partially enthralled, partially horrified, partially fascinated. Actually, I was entirely fascinated by the notion of thinking of my life as a journey from being the boy to being the shrink in the same play…and also by my realization that sometimes the viewer can be as much a part of good theater as the viewed. It was, as I wrote to you then, an unsettling experience.

And now it’s happened to me again. Twice. In the same week. (It’s been a very good week for theater going at the Cohens’.)

We started off seeing the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying starring Daniel Radcliffe—again!—and John Larroquette. I wasn’t quite old enough to see the original show on Broadway, which opened in 1961 and ran until 1965. But I do remember seeing the movie when I was in high school—it came out in the course of my sophomore year at Forest Hills High—and feeling at least semi-identified with the Robert Morse character, the up-and-coming young man who starts as a window washer and climbs his way up to becoming the chairman of the board of a huge company (albeit one in which no one seems ever to have any actual work to do, somewhat in the manner of the television show, The Office). He was young, eager, and entirely self-confident. I was at least young and eager. The old guy—played by Rudy Valle in the movie, recreating his Broadway role—was ancient and a bit of a doofus. I didn’t think of myself as either of those things! And although I still don’t actually—think of myself as either of those things, I mean—How to Succeed is basically the jokey, sing-along version of the same story as Equus, only without the creepiness and everybody stays dressed: an older man takes under his wing a younger man and brings him from nowhere to somewhere, from immaturity to adulthood, from clueless to savvy. And again I found myself in that same time-space-theater thing. When I first saw the show I was that young guy wondering how to find a way forward in life, not exactly a window cleaner but the academic version of the Robert Morse/Daniel Radcliffe character: somehow who wants a place in the world and has no specific idea how to go about getting it. And now, forty-odd years later, I’m the Rudy Valle/John Larroquette guy wondering how I can possibly have colleagues in the rabbinate who were born after I myself was ordained.

And then, Wednesday night, I went to see Hair. It’s not exactly a revival of the 2009 Broadway revival, just a visit by the national touring company spawned by that revival breezing through New York for a few weeks. It was clearly not a “real” Broadway cast on the stage. But it was a very odd experience for me to be there nonetheless, analogous although not precisely the same as the other two I’ve been writing about.

I’ve seen Hair three times in my lifetime and I have yet to pay for a ticket. The first time was in 1967 when I made the indescribably ghastly error of agreeing to go to see the show with my parents. Not a good plan! The only real question in retrospect—whether they were more uncomfortable sitting there with the fourteen-year-old me or whether I was more miserable sitting next to them—can no longer be answered other than by conjecture. Probably it was a tie. What can I have been thinking? What can they have been thinking? It was, to say the very least, as weird an experience as any teenager in 1967 could have had, something along the lines of running into your dad at the Fillmore.

The next time I saw Hair was at Herricks High School. It was, by all measures, a spectacularly inappropriate choice for a high school production. Yet it was done with humor and very skillfully, and I found myself enjoying it immensely. To say I had a better time sitting next to Joan in 2006 than I did next to my father in 1967 is really to say the very least. The show itself, though, stuck me this time ‘round as very strange indeed. Purporting to be all about love and the eradication of traditional prejudice, the show features only black people as its generic minority group. Weirdly, given the make-up of the actual hippy movement in the 60’s, the show features no Jewish characters at all, nor is there any reference, even in passing, to anything Jewish: not a Yiddish word, not a joke about overbearing Jewish parents, not anything at all. The show’s sole reference to gay people consists of the one obviously gay character insisting to the tribe that he isn’t a gay person at all, just someone with some sort of heterosexually-explicable crush on Mick Jagger. (So much for “the mind’s true liberation, Aquarius!”) Nor is it clear why, for a musical set in lower Manhattan, there are no Hispanics in evidence. Even the women in the show, for all they purport to be models of radical liberality, are there basically to be in the thrall of the men they’re, to use the show’s own word, “stuck on.” (Honestly, when the young women who has fallen in love with Frank Mills, a man she met once for a few minutes in front of the Waverly, sings her heart out about her feelings for him, it’s played entirely straight, as though it were entirely normal for a woman to self-define in terms of a crush on someone she met once briefly and will never see again.) Still, for all its weirdness, I liked the show. The kids at Herricks, costumed out of the trunks in their own parents’ attics (it seemed), did a great job.

And then I saw the show again Wednesday night, this time sitting not next to my dad but next to my son Emil, the younger of my two sons. As did my dad before him, he bought the tickets. (So of the three times I saw the show, the only time I actually had to pay was for the Herricks High School production!) And there I was…on that weird trajectory again—somehow having moved effortlessly from being fourteen squirming (a lot) in my seat at the Biltmore (now the Samuel J. Friedman Theater) next to my father to being fifty-eight and squirming (less) in my seat at the St. James next to my son. The show is much the same. It wasn’t the same theater, but that hardly mattered. The music, the costuming, the plot (thin as a reed but vaguely present to tie the musical numbers together), the whole 60’s thing—it was all as it’s always been. Only I changed…and yet, as I wrote above with regard to Equus and How to Succeed, I haven’t really changed at all. The inner self, the sense of personhood, of individual-as-psyche rather than individual-as-body—in that sense it’s still me, still as I was, still interiorly who I was then and who, I suppose, I always will be. It was, to say the least, a strange experience.

In the second act of Hair, there’s a song featuring a line about finding the beauty of life by walking in space with eyes wide open. In context, the line is about how great it is to take drugs. (This was, as noted, an exceptionally poor choice for Herricks!) But for me the other night, I actually felt that I was walking in space as yet again the older me met the younger me in the context of a Broadway show that I had thought was far in the past, but which turned out to be ongoing and unchanging, only with new people playing the ongoing and unchanging roles. Just like in my life!

When Oscar Wilde wrote in 1883 that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” he was writing about something else entirely. But his insight hits the mark here too, a truth I’ve been discovering lately as I notice art—in this case, the theater—becoming the context again and again in which the strictures of temporal existence fall away and the various versions of myself can somehow spend an evening together liberated from the burden of impossibility.

Suddenly Jewish

2011-08-19T11:00:00.002-04:00

I’ve always liked living in places like New York where the seasons of the year are so distinct and different from each other. But even more than the seasons themselves, I like the transitions from season to season. I like that first moment at the end of winter when it suddenly seems warm enough not to wear a coat. And I like that first day towards the end of May when it’s suddenly short-sleeve shirt weather even though the day before it felt entirely right to be in long sleeves. But most of all I like the bridge between the summer and the fall.

Are we there yet? Not quite so here, but just last week when Joan and I were up in Ontario I caught a glimpse, even now in mid-August, of the fall to come. The morning we left Lakefield, for example, there was a noticeable briskness in the morning air that hadn’t been there even a day earlier. I noticed an orange leaf here and there on an otherwise green tree. The water in the lake seemed a few degrees colder than even a few days earlier. I suppose I like those transitional weeks between summer and fall because they seem so perfectly to model how things are in the world, how the thick, green foliage of summer eventually fades to orange leaves, then to brown leaves, then to bare branches with no leaves at all on them not because someone comes along and takes the leaves away, but because they have within themselves the seeds of their own eventual destinies. And the first moment I catch a whiff of that process at work—that first time I notice an orange leaf where the day before there had been only green ones, the first time it strikes me while walking to minyan in the morning that I should have worn a sweater, the first time I notice Joan beginning to stockpile unusual quantities of honey for holiday baking—those first moments that I’m reminded just how flimsy the barrier between trees in full bloom and trees denuded totally of their foliage truly is, I am also reminded just how fragile it all is, how insubstantial the barrier between robust and frail, between success and failure, between having a great future and having no future at all. And that is also when it strikes me what a miracle it truly is that we have survived this long—as a people, as a community, and as Jewish individuals—and that we continue to survive despite the (apparently) endless cycles of ups and down, of successes and setbacks, of nightmarish degradation and unimaginable accomplishment that characterizes the history of our peculiar people.

I suppose all that made this exactly the right moment for me to read in the paper the other day the story about Ralph Branca. Do you all remember who he was? Now in his eighties, Branca pitched in the course of a long career in the Major Leagues for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Detroit Tigers, and the Yankees. But he is best remembered for having been the pitcher who threw the pitch that Bobby Thomson of the Giants hit for the pennant-winning home run on October 3, 1951. If you can’t quite remember the incident, click here. (How cool is it that such moments are now available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection?) That home run is regularly called “the shot heard ‘round the world” by baseball mavens, but there’s a back story too that features the Giants, then based in upper Manhattan at the Polo Grounds before moving to San Francisco in 1957, coming up from about thirteen games behind to catch up to the Dodgers at season’s end. Playoffs ensued and it was with that home run, the one heard ‘round the world, that the Giants won the National League pennant and went on to the World Series, which they then proceeded to lose to the Yankees (who were that year featuring rookies Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle).

So Bobby Thomson was the hero. Ralph Branca was the goat. The expression “shot heard ‘round the world” comes from an 1837 poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson about the opening battle of the American Revolution, but the phrase is probably more widely known and by more people because of its association with the 1951 National Leagues playoffs than the Battle of Concord. Don DeLillo’s novel, Underworld, is more or less about the whole incident and the unimaginable string of events that the author imagines following from it. In The Godfather, Sonny Corleone is gunned down at a tollbooth on the Meadowbrook precisely as Branca is pitching the ball to Bobby Thomson. For better or for worse, that homerun became a quintessential American moment. ESPN named the game it ended as one of only two baseball games on the list of the ten greatest sports games of the twentieth century. (If you’re interested, you can inspect the list here.

So now it turns out that Branca, ostensibly an Italian-American and a Roman Catholic, has his own back story as well and is actually a Jew. Or at least some sort of theoretical Jew. I was amazed. The story itself is amazing, although also sobering. It was the perfect story to read about on the same morning that I first noticed a chill in the air as a world still in full bloom gave advance notice—it felt as though to me personally—of its inherent fragility. The story itself is interesting. Joshua Prager, a reporter for the New York Times who has written about Branca and his career in the past, began to wonder if Branca’s mother, whose maiden name was Berger, could possibly have been Jewish. Branca himself thought not, but encouraged Prager to find out what he could. And what he found out amazed Branca and amazed me. Perhaps it will amaze you as well! Kati Berger, it turned out, was not only Jewish in the theoretical way her son would eventually be, but in the real and unambiguous way. She was the daughter of two Jewish parents, for one thing. And, for another, she had seven unambiguously Jewish siblings. Her youngest brother, in fact, was murdered by the Nazis at Majdanek and his wife and children at Sobibor. One of her sisters, Irma, was murdered at Auschwitz along with her husband and children. This was hardly some theoretically Jewish family!

Let me quote from Prager’s article in the Times regarding the moment he shared all of this with Branca: “When I phoned Branca and told him that his mother, Kati, was Jewish and that thus, according to traditional Jewish law, he and his sixteen siblings were, too, the loud man was quiet. But when I told him of the murder of his uncle, Branca looked for words. ‘Uh, oh, boy,’ he said. “My mother never mentioned this to me.’”

The rest of the story is, in a sense, less interesting. His mother apparently made a conscious decision to raise her children as Catholics after, or perhaps even before, she married John Branca, an Italian American trolley car conductor. Some of the details seem hard to believe, specifically the story Prager heard from one of Ralph Branca’s sisters-in-law, who reported hearing from one of his, Branca’s, mother’s sisters—a woman who came to this country before the war and lived openly as a Jewish woman—that Branca’s mother sought and received their parents’ permission not only to marry a Catholic man but to raise her children as Roman Catholics. I suppose anything is possible, but the point of me writing about this particular story isn’t to ferret out the truth about Ralph Branca’s mother and her motives for abandoning her Jewishness, but to reflect on just how fragile the whole thing really is.

A normal Jewish family in mid-twentieth century Hungary. Parents married by a rabbi. Eight Jewish children, several of whom died as martyrs during the Shoah. And just a generation later, it’s all gone. Ralph Branca himself has sixteen siblings, all the children of a Jewish mother and all gone, almost certainly permanently, from the Jewish people. I suppose some of Branca’s aunts and uncles who survived produced Jewish children and grandchildren. But I don’t write today specifically to lament one woman’s decision to raise her children in somebody else’s faith, but just to nod—as Elul beckons and the final weeks leading up to the holiday season commence and as the very first, earliest harbingers of summer’s end begin to make themselves manifest subtly and (for the moment) fleetingly—to nod to the fragility of it all, to the degree to which not centuries but millennia of Jewishness can vanish, never to be restored or even ever again to be restorable, with a single decision taken either thoughtfully or in haste. Gone is gone! Of course, we welcome new Jews into our midst too, people who make the decision as adults to embrace our faith and to live their lives as Jewish people. That’s obviously a good thing! Nor is the point to hire a sociologist to figure out if we’re gaining or losing as conversion in vies with the efforts of the world’s missionaries to lure Jews away from Judaism. That would be interesting to know, and possibly even not depressing to find out. But I find myself focused elsewhere as I consider Ralph Branca’s unexpected Jewishness.

We’ve been here before. There’s even a book about it: Barbara Kessel’s Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots, published in 2000 by the Brandeis University Press. (I haven’t read the book although I’d like to. I even know the author, or I did years ago when she was working at JTS and I was a student there. I’ll read it and then report back to you on what I find.) I’m sure her book is filled with Madeline Albrights and Ralph Brancas and all sorts of other types who suddenly discover their Jewishness as adults. But how many of these people actually are there? And how many respond to the discovery by embracing Judaism and formally taking their place in the House of Israel? My guess is not that many. Not none, I’m sure. But my guess is there are just a few.

And so those are my end-of-summer thoughts as Elul dawns and with it the vague intimation of the holiday season. It really is fragile. A bit like a garden that you can tend for decades only for the flowers still to die once you stop watering them, Jewish civilization can thrive forever in a family and then suddenly stop thriving. We need, I think, to respond to that thought not depressively or angrily, but thoughtfully and creatively. With all due respect to William Faulkner (whose writing I admire immensely), the past may not be dead-dead but it actually is past. Gardens don’t thrive because they were once watered. And Jewish communities don’t thrive because people once tended to them and lovingly built them with their own funds and their own sweat. Nor do Jewish families thrive because they once did, or because previous generations hoped they would. As we start watching out for that first orange leaf…the challenge is to accept as a given the inherent fragility of it all, then to respond by building in this place a community that will be able to serve our children and grandchildren as a sturdy enough foundation for them securely and proudly to stand on as they go out into the world and plant Jewish gardens that in turn will only thrive if they can get the next generation to take on the watering.

Freedom Riders and the Flotilla

2011-06-30T08:39:00.008-04:00

As all of you surely know, Israel is about to experience the arrival of a second flotilla of self-proclaimed humanitarian activists intent on “breaking” Israel’s blockade of the Gaza coast. There have been some interesting developments over the last few days—some shipping companies are refusing to allow their boats to be used now that it has become clear to them that they could potentially face prosecution for abetting a terrorist organization, while others are reporting acts of vandalism against their ships (particularly in Greece, where some of them are docked)—but the basic consensus, as reported in Thursday morning’s Haaretz, is that that a flotilla of about ten vessels will eventually set sail for Gaza from diverse European ports, possibly as soon as next week. Included will be an American ship capable of carrying thirty-four passengers. Signed on to travel along are the well-known American author, Alice Walker (who told NPR the other day that she was moved to participate because she is, and I believe I quote, “in favor of children and sunshine”) and about a minyan’s worth of Jews whose sense of Jewishness is apparently elastic enough to allow for the occasional act of succor and support to the murderers of Jewish children. It’s that kind of world!

Yes, of course, these people—and I reference here specifically the Americans and even more specifically the Jews in their midst—don’t say that they support terrorism. Just the opposite, they say that they are opposed to terrorism, that they hate terrorism. It is, they explain, not Hamas they support, but the Palestinian people themselves of whom they are trying to be supportive. Indeed, in this version of the narrative, the Palestinians of Gaza are not supporters of Hamas at all—this despite having voted them into office in 2007 and, by all accounts, openly approving of their elected leaders’ efforts to annihilate Israel and wage a war of terror against its civilians—but actually their victims! Observing that that version of the story appears to have no basis in fact seems unimportant. One of those planning to sail, a student at the University of Arizona cited in the Times last week, openly and apparently without any sense of irony compared the situation of the Palestinians of Gaza to the situation of black people in America that the civil rights movement of the 1960s came into being to address. According to that line of thinking, he said, those planning to travel with the flotilla are not supporting terror at all, but are continuing the principled work of the Freedom Riders of the 1960s. And the demonized Israelis are thus cast as the unreflective, unrepentant descendants of the white-dominated power structure that refused to allow the federal laws demanding the integration of the races in public places and spaces to be put into effect. The pursuit of this line of thinking is not the mere silliness as which most of us would tend casually to deride it. It is insidious and dangerous in a different sort of way. And it is that specific aspect of the issue I would like to take up with you today.

Do you remember the Freedom Riders? I had to refresh my memory a bit, but once I started reading the story came right back to me. It was 1961. Previously, in 1960, the Supreme Court of the United States in a case called Boynton vs. Virginia had declared racial segregation in interstate bus and train stations and on interstate buses and trains to be illegal. This resulted in some progress, but the law was widely ignored in most of the states in which segregation was the rule rather than the exception. And so, in 1961, a group of thirteen individuals, seven black and six white, chose to test the law by leaving Washington, D.C., on buses headed for the deep south.

For several days, nothing much happened. But in the second week of the journey, the self-proclaimed “freedom riders” were dragged off their bus near Anniston, Alabama, and severely beaten. The bus itself was torched and destroyed. In the wake of that incident, most of the participants were evacuated by the federal government to Louisiana. Some, however, refused to give up, among them John Lewis who later became a U.S. congressman and who currently represents Georgia’s fifth congressional district. The Congress of Racial Equality, the organization sponsoring the operation, sent in fresh volunteers. For a while, while the group travelled from Birmingham to Montgomery, things were calm. But when the group arrived in Montgomery, its members were savagely attacked by a mob of over 1000 angry segregationists. The unwillingness of the local police to take meaningful action to prevent violence eventually prompted President Kennedy to threaten to use federal troops to calm the scene, a move that was headed off at the last moment by the decision of the governor of Alabama to use the Alabama National Guard to disperse the rioters. Eventually things calmed down. The freedom riders continued their journey, ending up in Mississippi. There was violence, but not on the level the riders encountered in Alabama. And then, in the fall of that year, the Interstate Commerce Commission finally issued the orders necessary to bring its institutions in line with its own guidelines—in response at least partially to a petition to do so drafted and sent to them by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy—which action brought to an end the era of segregated waiting rooms, buses, toilets, lunch counters, and drinking fountains for white and black people in America’s bus and train stations and, by extension, on America’s buses and trains as well.

I was only eight years old in 1961, but I remember learning about the Freedom Riders in school. It would have been part of our Current Events lesson, I suppose, but what exactly our teachers told us—and how explicit they were regarding the issues to which the Freedom Riders were responding—I don’t recall. I was only in third grade. Was Miss Zenowitz able adequately to explain to our lily-white classroom in P.S. 3 why exactly it was that black people could not use the same restrooms as white people in Alabama train stations? I doubt it! But—and I say this not because I had a slight crush on willowy Miss Z., which I believe I did—she did find some way to express her admiration for the effort. And I remember it to this day! And so it was with those thoughts firmly in mind that I read the comment of the University of Arizona student, one Gabriel Schivone, comparing the passengers signed up to sail on the Gaza flotilla with the CORE Freedom Riders of 1961. I suppose, being who I am, I find it difficult to believe that anyone not blinded by sheer hatred of Israel could not find such a comparison beyond odious. And yet I also feel the need to respond to it, at the very least here. So here goes.

Gabriel, is that really what you think? That the people who put Hamas in office and who continue to support its program of terror aimed at civilians, its absolute and unyielding rejection of Israel as a partner in negotiation, its endless detention and illegal treatment of Gilad Shalit, and its willingness to sacrifice the safety of its own people by placing military installations in civilian neighborhoods—that those people are in the Arab-Israeli context the people playing the role of black people in the American South in the unhappy days of segregation and overt, officially sanctioned racial prejudice? The black people of Alabama and Mississippi were victims of an uncaring system of organized discrimination directed directly against them and designed specifically to deprive them of their civil rights. It was an odious part of our American culture for as long as it lasted, something of which even those of us who obviously played no specific role in bringing it into existence or in supporting it or maintaining it should still feel ashamed to acknowledge as part of our national legacy. The people who got on those buses and risked life and limb for what now, in retrospect, seem almost like trivialities—being free to chose where one sits in a luncheonette or where one waits in a bus station—were acting nobly against an evil that needed to be eradicated. Is that what you think Israel is doing by trying to guarantee that no ships bearing missiles or weaponry intended for use against Israeli civilians dock without first being inspected in a port controlled by Hamas, an overtly terrorist organization, Gabriel? Is your hatred of Jewish children so intense that you cannot see the difference between Israel attempting to do what it can to prevent people from murdering the children of Sederot in their beds while they sleep at night and the principled effort of white and black Americans working together to bring down a pernicious system designed to degrade and dehumanize American citizens merely because of the color of their skin? Do you really think that Israel wishing to prevent Hamas from carrying out its dastardly work is the same as that mob in Montgomery doing its best to prevent the Freedom Riders from using whichever toilet in the Montgomery bus station they were standing closest to?

The comparison is beyond obnoxious, Gabriel. It is revolting to me personally to imagine someone like yourself, someone educated in an American university, daring to compare yourself to one of the 1961 Freedom Riders as you prepare to grant your personal support to Hamas. And, yes, I am rejecting the lame argument that the flotilla is apolitical and that it is supporting the Palestinian people and not their government. In the end, saying that you are not supporting Hamas and then joining the flotilla anyway is meaningless rhetoric belied entirely by your actions. If Hamas is valorized, legitimized, and strengthened by your actions, how is it you imagine that you are not supporting them?

I’m sure you’re all excited about the prospect of being part of the effort to demonize Israel or, at the very least, to cast the State of Israel in the worst light possible by daring its navy to oppose your effort to support its unrepentant enemies. Will you eventually regret your actions? I'd like to think you will...but whether you do or don't come to realize that you are acting basely will not matter much once you will have done your part to support the terrorist effort to delegitimize Israel. Regret alone will not undo that. In the end, you will be free to regret or not to regret your actions. But, please, leave the Freedom Riders out of it, lest you compound your sin by debasing the memory of truly noble people who, unlike yourself and your flotilla friends, selflessly risked everything to improve the world in which they lived.

Thinking about Anthony Weiner

2011-06-16T10:50:00.005-04:00

“Lift up your heads, O -gates,” wrote (except for the hyphen) the ancient psalmist, a poet possessed of the gift of deep and thoughtful insight into the future. And so we Americans, used since Pilgrim times to venerating the Book of Psalms, have responded and in spades…with more -gates lifted up and set down on the front pages of more newspapers than any of us could ever count or hope to keep track of. First and foremost, of course, there was Watergate. But then there was Nannygate, then Billygate, then Monicagate, then (looking overseas) Camillagate, then Squidgygate, then so many more here and abroad that no one could possibly keep them all straight. (If you’d like to test yourself, there’s actually a Wikipedia page called “List of scandals with “-gate” suffix,” which you can consult for your own slightly prurient edification. Bring a pad of paper to keep score. Most, I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of.) And now, also of course, we are in the disagreeable throes of Weinergate, the scandal concerning Congressman Anthony D. Weiner, the representative of New York’s Ninth District in the House of Representatives.

The details, I’m sure you all know. Although apparently without actually breaking any actual laws, Representative Weiner has now admitted to having behaved in a vulgar, inappropriate way with a number of women he only knew as followers of his Twitter account and not in real life. He is therefore neither a criminal nor a real adulterer (except perhaps in the Carterian sense), just someone whose monumental lapse of good judgment may well have cost him his career. At first he lied about it. Then he came clean, more or less. I suppose that on some level he hoped that would suffice. It has in the past, after all: when the previous governor of New York State announced that both he and his wife had occasionally been unfaithful to each other, the public shrugged. Some, myself not among them, even commended him on his candor. But the bottom line is that there were, as I recall, no calls for his resignation or at least none that was loud enough for me personally to hear. (Mind you, Governor Paterson had the incredible good fortune to be making this announcement on the heels of his predecessor’s exceptionally indecorous exit from office. So perhaps it was merely by comparison that his confession failed to startle.) At any rate, Representative Weiner eventually owned up to having had a full half-dozen of these strange, physically contactless relationships with women he didn’t actually know and hadn’t ever met, some apparently involving the sharing of brief tweets and others, of tweeted briefs. (Am I the first person to think of that? It hardly seems possible, but I haven’t actually seen it elsewhere. At any rate, the psalmist—who moved on in his real poem from gates to doors—most definitely did not finish his poem off with the words, “and lift up too your everlasting drawers.” Maybe he should have. Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t do stand-up for a living. Or do I?)

Is any of this funny? The New York Post apparently thinks so. So does the Daily News. Jay Leno and the other late-night talk show guys can’t get enough of it. But hiding behind the guffaws and the standard school-for-scandal stuff—the earnest denial (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman!”), the eventual owning-up, the stalwart wife standing by her man (or at the very least not denouncing him in public), the jokiness with which the press covers more or less anything that occurs below the waist that does not involve actual criminal activity, the calls for resignation followed by counter-calls accusing the first group of overreaction fueled either by some sort of innate bigotry or by politics or by some prior hostility to the individual at the center of the scandal—are issues that do bear talking about.

And that is the aspect of this particular story I would like to write about today. My colleague and friend of a quarter century, Rabbi Gerald Skolnik, who serves as the rabbi of the Forest Hills Jewish Center in Queens, published an essay in the Jewish Week last week in which he focused on the role the so-called social media—Facebook and Twitter and the like—in the Weiner scandal. He pointed out, entirely justifiably, that the single greatest societal innovation of the first decade of the twenty-first century has been the arrival of the social media, these vast, almost limitless, countries outside of space and time that permit people to relate to each other also outside of time and space as friends or, apparently, as more than friends without every actually existing in the same place or, needless to say, ever coming into physical contact with each other. Is that a good thing? I suppose it cuts down on the possibility of STD transmission, but it also has created a weird netherworld in which people exist as sylphlike specters of their real selves as they make their way along a landscape that, because it does not really exist, is tolerant of vulgarity and aberration in a way that the real world would not or, at the very least, should not be. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t have a Twitter account. I’m as electronified as the next guy—and I can actually neither recall nor imagine what it was once like to write books and essays without a computer and without the internet at one’s disposal—but I have resisted wading into those ghostly waters precisely because, at least to a man of my age, the whole thing sounds just a bit silly. What can I do? I like having friends who exist in real space, not as seductive conglomerations of binary code. Man, I sound old even to me!

But the real issue in the Anthony Weiner story has to do with its aftermath. The world appears to have bought into the congressman’s explanation that there is something wrong with him, something that will require the intervention of a mental health professional to cure (or at least effectively to deal with). A statement released just the other day by his office reported, and I quote, that “Congressman Weiner departed [New York] this morning to seek professional treatment to focus on becoming a better husband and healthier person.” I suppose only good can come from troubled people seeking the professional counsel, but it strikes me as a peculiar comment on our society that lewd behavior can only be explained, it seems, with reference to the individual engaging in it being mentally ill in some diagnosable, thus treatable, way. I’m sure there are people in that category—I know there are, actually—but I don’t think it’s a healthy thing for our society for our default position on matters such as this to be that the individual at the center of scandal must, almost by definition, be mentally ill. Whatever happened to the notion of vulgar behavior being something that beckons to us all, that vulgarity is merely the best known latter-day equivalent of the “sin crouching at the door” that God explained to Cain was part of the human condition yet nevertheless something human beings—average ones like Cain, not tzadikim—can overcome by embracing goodness and resolving to avoid crudity and lewdness. In other words, our basic attitude towards the kind of vulgar behavior in which the congressman now admits to having engaged should not be automatically to suppose that he is an ill man who needs to be cured of his apparent propensity to self-destruct, but rather to take him as a man among the rest of humanity, all of whom (by which I mean: all of us) are constantly being drawn to inappropriate behavior. The yetzer horo¬—the inclination to behave poorly—is not a curse from heaven visited on the unlucky few, after all, but a basic element in the constitution of all human psyches.

To be drawn to vulgarity or to impropriety (or to loutishness or to boorishness or to any one of a thousand varieties of tastelessness) is therefore not a sickness at all but a basic part of what it means to be alive. All of us have all sorts of thoughts all the time. Most, we’d die a thousand deaths if anyone could hear. But that’s just my point—no one does hear them because we (mostly) don’t speak them aloud and we certainly (also, alas, most of the time) don’t act on them. The job of being a reputable human being consists not of somehow avoiding the experience of ever being drawn to unseemly behavior, but of facing down the inclination to behave poorly through some amalgam of faith, commitment, loyalty to one’s own standards, and internal resolve to be as fine a person as one possibly can be despite being constantly drawn in precisely the opposite direction.

I don’t know Representative Weiner personally and I have no idea what kind of person he is. That being the case, I have no interest in passing judgment on him or in expressing a thought formally on whether he should or should not remain in Congress. That should be decided by himself and by his constituents in Queens. But I do believe that society in general makes a huge error when it imagines that poor behavior is invariably the result of some sort of mental or emotional illness. Succumbing to the lure of the yetzer horo is the most basic of all human tendencies, not a symptom of disease. But it is, so the Torah (and also so common sense) one that can be combated successfully. When we choose our leaders, we should be looking specifically not for people who somehow, magically, have no yetzer horo, but for people who repeatedly demonstrate their ability to fight back the tendency to embrace vulgar or indecorous behavior and to embrace the qualities that will enable them to lead us forward in a manner consonant with the values they claim formally to espouse and which we ourselves too are proud to espouse.

No-Foreskin-Men

2011-06-10T09:40:00.003-04:00

Like most of you, I’m always inclined—possibly just a bit excessively, although I like to think not totally pathetically—to suppose the best in others, to imagine that other people, even when I disagree with them vehemently, are acting on principle and not out of sheer malice. And, indeed, one of the cornerstones of American democracy is exactly that basic assumption: that public debate about even the most important issues can be carried on in the context of discourse than is passionate and heartfelt without ever crossing the line from fiery to inflammatory. And so, with that in mind, I allowed myself to imagine that the benighted souls in San Francisco and Santa Monica who are spearheading the ballot-box campaigns in those cities to make infant circumcision illegal were being guided by principles that we clearly do not share and that their entirely reasonable interest in safeguarding the welfare of children was simply in this instance being applied insanely and unscientifically. And surely in this regard it also bears saying out loud that it is, at least generally speaking, the opposite of being in our best interests for us to see anti-Semites hiding behind every bush when policies that run contrary to the best interests of the Jewish community are proposed by people who simply feel otherwise about some specific issue than we ourselves do. But taking that as a guiding principle does not mean that there aren’t actually any anti-Semites out there, only that it does not behoove us as citizens of a democracy automatically to impute base motives to people with whom we do not see eye-to-eye on some specific issue without any actual evidence to support that assumption.

And then I started reading some of the literature these people are putting out, notably a comic book-style publication called Foreskin Man that features an Aryan-looking superhero who spends his days rescuing innocent babies from a series of mohalim and rabbis who look like they’ve stepped out of the pages of Julius Streicher’s venomously anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer. I cannot print the images here—they’re under copyright and I would not reproduce them even if they weren’t—but you can find them on-line easily enough for yourselves at www.foreskinman.com, where you can view all the pages of both issues that have so far come out. For people (unlike most of ourselves) who do not live with the Shoah on a daily basis, some of these crude, insulting images might almost be considered funny. But they would only elicit such a response from people unaware of the degree to which Der Stürmer laid the groundwork for the German people’s passive response even to the Nazis’ most overtly aggressive, violent, and virulent anti-Semitic policies.

Am I over-reacting to what is essentially a comic book? Maybe I am! But I also know the power of the printed word and the way that even the most innocent-looking documents, and especially those that appear “merely” to be aimed at children, can become cornerstones of a prejudicial worldview in which the “other”—in this case the Jew, but just as easily any other member of a disliked or misunderstood minority possessed of “weird” ways or too dark skin or peculiar facial features—eventually becomes identified with the forces of malignity in the minds of a populace that comes to believe “facts” about the minority group in question that appear to be part of the fund of shared public information, things that everybody somehow just “knows” to be true.

The effort to impede Jewish parents from circumcision their sons goes back a long way. Everybody knows of King Antiochus’ effort in that regard, as described in the First Book of Maccabees (a Jewish work written in the second century BCE), where we read that the king ordered his Jewish subjects “to build altars and sacred precincts and shrines for idols and to sacrifice swine and other unclean animals and to leave their sons uncircumcised, thus making themselves abominable by everything unclean and profane so that they would forget the Torah and its ordinances (1 Maccabees 1:47-48). We all know how the Jewish people responded to that situation, but less well known is that the Bar Kokhba revolt, which followed the Maccabean uprising by most of four centuries, came on the heels of the emperor Hadrian’s two-pronged attack on Judaism whereby he both banned the circumcision of boys and also attempted to build a temple dedicated to Jupiter on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The revolt, under-recalled by Jews today but once a central pillar of the Jewish worldview, was bloody and awful: the Roman historian Dio Cassius wrote that, in his estimation, more than half a million Jews were killed by Roman forces in the course of the revolt and fifty Jewish towns and almost a thousand Jewish villages were razed to the ground. Yet even in defeat the Jews were victorious in one specific way: Hadrian’s successor, a man named Antoninus Pius (who was emperor of Rome from 138-161 CE) specifically exempted from the general ban on circumcision Jews who circumcised their sons (although not their slaves or their male servants).

The initiatives in California have gotten most of the space in the discussion to date, but a bill called the Male Genital Mutilation bill was submitted to Congress and to fourteen state legislatures last January. No member of Congress has endorsed the bill, but the very fact of its existence has opened the door to those who are inclined to consider religious rituals by their very nature suspect and who find it natural to condemn any effort to grant religion a stronger foothold in American culture than it already has. It goes without saying that at least some of the people who support the MGM bill are not motivated by religious prejudice. But regardless of any specific person’s motivation, any effort to curtain the rights of Jewish parents to circumcise their sons has to be viewed by us as an outright attack on the right of American Jewry to self-preserve and to raise up a generation of committed, engaged Jewish young people who will eventually take the place of their elders. And for that reason alone we need to respond vigorously and without undue fear of over-reaction. In my opinion, this issue has nothing meaningful to do with the welfare of children and everything to do with the future of the Jewish people.

Part of the problem is that many opponents of these anti-circumcision initiatives base themselves on medical evidence. And, indeed, in every specific case I have investigated, it is better—although sometimes only slightly so—to be circumcised than not to be. Circumcised men, for example, have ten times fewer urinary tract infections than uncircumcised men. Uncircumcised men, by contrast, have somewhere between 1.5 and two times the risk of contracting prostate cancer than circumcised men. Being circumcised also appears to impede a man’s ability to contract the HI virus that causes AIDS. And it is also worth noting that sleeping exclusively with circumcised men reduces a woman’s chances of contacting chlamydia or cervical cancer by up to five hundred percent. So, on the whole, it is healthier to be circumcised and it is healthier for women to have as their sexual partners circumcised men. Nor is there any evidence at all that circumcision impedes sexual performance or the ability to experience sexual pleasure. Still, the whole set of health arguments has the feel to me of a set of red herrings because, even granted that all the statistics given above are correct, should it still not be a basic civil right of citizens not to undergo optional surgery—and surgery that is not addressing any actual condition with which the patient is grappling and is solely intended to ward off possible medical problems that only may occur in the future should certainly be considered formally optional—without first having their formal consent solicited? Surely, they should! And that is why I find the whole set of medical arguments unconvincing—because, in the end, they only buttress the opinion that circumcision should require informed consent of the kind no child, let alone an infant, could possibly give.

Perhaps the most profound part of the problem has to do with a basic difference of opinion regarding the place of children in society. In the world out there, children are generally seen as mini-adults, as scaled-down versions even in infancy of the grown-up men and women they will eventually become. They are thus basically to be viewed as autonomous beings capable of charting their own course in life except in those specific ways that children cannot be deemed capable of making rational decisions in their own best interests. But this view of children as tiny, if slightly restricted, grown-ups, for all it is pervasive, is at serious odds with the Jewish way of considering things. For us, our children are the natural extensions of ourselves into the years beyond our own lifetimes, the ambassadors we create specifically to send into the future and to create there a perfected version of the Jewish world we ourselves inherited from our own parents and have worked through the years of our lives to perfect as best we could. According to our way of seeing things, our children are not autonomous beings who should be free to go off in whatever direction strikes them as desirable or rational, but links in a so-far-unbroken chain of generational endeavor to bring the world from the past into the future, from hoariest antiquity to the redemptive moment that our faith teaches us to spend the years of our lives seeking to bring about.

As much as our children are themselves, they are also ourselves…and the profound distinction between parents and children that characterizes so much of American discourse with respect to childrearing techniques and the rights of children to chart their own course forward in life is as a result just a bit foreign to us. To usher every one of our boys into the covenant that binds God and Israel is not only our right, but our sacred duty. It cannot be subjugated to the whims of passing fashion or to bizarrely exaggerated arguments about the rights of children to be free of their parents’ beliefs or commitments. In my opinion the real debate here has to do with the right of the Jewish people to be left in peace to practice our faith according to the dictates of our collective conscience and to raise up children so that “Judah shall forever endure and Jerusalem, from generation to generation.” Is that what this is all about? Speaking both as a rabbi and as a father, I think that it is!

The Eruption Room

2011-06-03T09:57:00.005-04:00

I write today to tell you about the Eruption Room, but I should start off by saying that our being there in the first place was a kind of a fluke born of the fact that Joan and I had matinee tickets for Wednesday afternoon at Lincoln Center and plans to have dinner in the city later on once our younger son got out of work. That left us with about two and a half hours to kill in midtown and somehow Joan (who is even worse than I am at wasting time unproductively) conceived of the idea of heading to Times Square to see the Pompeii exhibit at the Discovery Times Square Exposition space. I had only barely been aware the whole thing existed—the exhibition space itself only opened up in 2009 in the basement of the old New York Times building—and I suppose I imagined that non-museum exhibitions spaces in Times Square would be the kind of cheesy wax museums that cater solely to tourists wandering around the neighborhood between Broadway shows and the meals that precede or follow them with nothing to do and money to burn. And there is a bit of that here too—the space also houses at present an exhibit of Harry Potter memorabilia—but there we were nonetheless ! And in we went to see what was new, or rather what was once new, in old Pompeii.

The basic story, everybody knows. On the morning of August 24 in the year 79 CE, not even a decade after the sack of Jerusalem, Mount Vesuvius erupted totally unexpectedly, spewing enough mud, ash, and poison gas into the sky to create a twelve-mile-wide black cloud over the several adjacent towns that lined the Bay of Naples in those days of which Pompeii was by far the most famous and probably the oldest, having been inhabited at that point already for over seven hundred years. (Herculaneum is the other town people have heard of, but there were other villages, smaller ones, as well.) Amazingly, the site was eventually forgotten and remained unknown and unrecalled until it was chanced across by some local farmers in 1749. Excavations began almost immediately and an entire ancient city eventually emerged from the calcified dust, revealing antiquity at a level of detail that had been known only from literary works prior to that point and never actually seen by any living person at all since ancient times. Here, at last, was Roman life not as it was recorded in books by later authors but as it was actually lived by the people on the ground. There were wine bars and shoe stores, fruit stands and bath houses, bordellos (forty-one of them, to be exact) and public and private gardens, temples to the gods of Rome and huge, luxurious villas for the super-wealthy. It was, in short, a real place inhabited by real people. And they met their end almost instantly, some escaping but most remaining anchored to their homes and their wealth by some combination of inability to believe that life as they knew it could end on a dime (or, rather, on a denarius), unwillingness to abandon their homes and their wealth, and unfounded security that destruction on the scale that was almost upon them simply could not actually happen in real life. If you want to learn more, the best place to start would be with Robert Harris’s very exciting novel, Pompeii, published by Random House in 2005, which tells the story of the last days of Pompeii in a way I found terrifically engaging.

And that brings me to the Eruption Room. Like I said, Discovery Times Square is part museum, part gallery, and part amusement park. The artifacts on exhibit are mostly real, but some are reproductions. (To their credit, the items on display are clearly marked in that regard so there is no difficulty knowing which is which.) As you enter, you feel yourself drawn into a world like and unlike our own. There are pieces of gold jewelry and gorgeous wall frescoes to admire, and all sorts of kitchen artifacts and mosaic floors to compare to their counterparts in our world. And then—this is the theme park part—you are eventually escorted into the Eruption Room where a kind of multi-media movie is shown that depicts the eruption of Vesuvius and the ensuing destruction of Pompeii on an hour-by-hour basis. The floor shakes. The surround-sound speakers rumble. The computer-generated images on the screen move you forward hour by hour through the day Pompeii was destroyed, not too subtly challenging you to wonder if you yourself would have seized the gravity of the situation before it was too late to flee or only long after any viable avenue of escape remained open. And then the movie ends and the screen rises to ceiling height, revealing a door where you hadn’t noticed one previously. The room stops shaking. The door, actually a double-door, opens. You have been told that you may not revisit the parts of the exhibit already seen once you pass through the Eruption Room. Beckoned forward by some combination of circumstance, logic, and curiosity—and having in any event no other obvious option to choose—you walk through the door into the next part of the experience.

This is the part that I want to write about specifically. You are now in the truly creepy part of the exhibition, the one featuring the plaster casts. It turns out that the people and animals who died at Pompeii, or at least some of them, died so quickly that they were simply encased in white-hot volcanic ash. As the centuries passed, their bodies disintegrated, leaving empty spaces within the ash that corresponded exactly to their dimensions. It was first in the 1860s that an Italian archeologist, a man named Giuseppe Fiorelli, had the idea of injecting plaster into these spaces, then breaking down the surrounding ash to reveal a perfect likeness of the person or beast that a millennium and a half earlier had died in that specific place. The results were somewhere between breathtaking and indescribably eerie. Men and women, even dogs, emerged from the ash so perfectly preserved that even their facial features were visible. You can see the design on a dog’s collar, the earrings a woman was wearing, the chains around a slave’s wrists that prevented him from fleeing. Some are mere outlines, of course. But you get the idea: a girl grabbing for her mother, a man with his knees drawn up into his chest awaiting his imminent end, a man trying to shlep himself up a flight of stairs. The forms are depicting writing, groping, reaching out towards something that turned to dust millennia ago. In case that might not be enough, there is also a tableau from Herculaneum on display featuring thirty-two skeletal remains huddled together in some sort of vain hope for safety in numbers. Of the thirty-two individuals whose bones are there on display, a grim sign informs the viewer than nine belonged to children under the age of twelve. You get the idea. The skeletons are beyond horrific, but it is the plaster casts that are the more evocative. Here are people who ended up, as will we all eventually, gone and not gone, absent yet present, real yet unreal. They aren’t there, of course, but are represented by the space they briefly occupied. Is it a metaphor? I think that it is!

And that is why I wanted to write to you today about the Eruption Room and the magic doors that lead you from the contemplation of almost unimaginable destruction to an other-worldly walk amidst the absent/present dead. That did it for me. I had enough. It was my birthday last Wednesday, so I was already feeling more than mortal enough. We passed up the overpriced knick-knacks in the gift shop and headed up to street level. I wasn’t at all hungry, but for some reason I couldn’t wait to get to dinner.

What the whole experience left me with was a question that has been with me every since. If this happened to me…if suddenly, out of the blue, unexpectedly and without the slightest warning, the world as we know it were to come to an almost instant end, what exactly would we—or let me say it more bluntly, what exactly would I—leave behind for people two millennia in the future, say in the year 4011, to contemplate? What would archeologists unearthing the remains of my life, of my home, of my office, of our synagogue, what would they make of us? How would they reconstruct our values based on what occupies the places of the most prominence in our private and public spaces? What would some tourist from the forty-first century make of a plaster reconstruction of the space I personally occupy in the twenty-first? Would they get an accurate picture merely from inspecting the home I live in or the office I work in or the study I write in or the car I drive around in? Does my space, does the specific way I have constructed, designed, and decorated that space, reflect the man I truly am or is it far more suggestive of the man I wish I was or, even more gallingly, the man I feel I ought to be. What would an exhibit of this place we live in together look like to tourists wandering around Times Square in an almost unimaginably distant future not really any further from us than we are from the residents of Pompeii? Other than noting the presence of a lot of books and a lot of neckties, what would an archeologist make of the space I would leave behind in the volcanic dust once the real me was gone from the world and only that space once occupied remained?

These are sobering thoughts bordering on the dour. Yet they are also provocative ones. I came away from my visit to Times Square feeling challenging to wonder what it is I am leaving behind, what it is I am actually doing with my life, what I am making of it, what the substance of my things would say to a disinterested party thousands of years in the future who, lacking my running narrative and self-serving explanations and justifications, would only have the goods to inspect before coming to a conclusion about me and my place in the world. These are slightly upsetting questions to pose and, worse so, to try to answer. But the kind of ruthless introspection to which their contemplation leads is salutary, I think, and useful. If you have a chance to visit the Eruption Room, you won’t be sorry! But the thoughts it will engender once the movie ends and unseen hands open a door that leads directly into the kingdom of the dead—that is the thing of real value you get for the price of admission.

Bonhoeffer

2011-05-19T10:46:00.006-04:00

I’m not a huge fan of biographies. I have, of course, read plenty of them over the years and some I really have enjoyed immensely. (Robert K. Massie’s biography of Peter the Great comes right to mind, for example. As do—to think off the top of my head of books I’ve truly liked—Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens, Joel Kraemer’s biography of Maimonides, Maynard Solomon’s biography of Beethoven, and Kitty Kelley’s great book about Sinatra.) Others, not so much. The problem always seems to be either too much detail (Peter Gay’s, Freud: A Life for Our Times come to mind in that regard) or, less often—as, for example, in the case of that same author’s book about Mozart—too little. For what it’s worth, I generally like autobiographies even less. Mind you, I just read one which will interest Shelter Rockers endlessly and regarding which I am publishing a separate review in the June issue of the Shelter Rock bulletin. But why give away that surprise here when the bulletin itself will come out in just a few weeks?

Having said all that, I’ve just finished reading Eric Metaxas’ biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His name, the author’s I mean, will be known to some of you for his book about William Wilberforce, the man responsible for bringing both the slave trade and slavery itself to an end in the British empire. (I haven’t read that book, actually, but I’d like to. It is, more formally: Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, published by HarperOne in 2007. Maybe I’ll make it next year’s pre-Pesach read when slavery seems a reasonable thing to be thinking about. I’ll let you all know what I think then.) But will the subject’s name be any more familiar to most of us? Like most of you, I think I vaguely knew that Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who lived and worked in Nazi Germany. But the details of his life—and specifically his role in the attempt to assassinate Hitler and the horrific story of his execution at the personal order of his intended victim on April 9, 1945, just three weeks before the fall of Berlin and a day short of a single month before the collapse of Nazi Germany—were unknown to me. Nor can I say that I would have been able to say anything at all about the rest of his life’s work or his legacy before reading Metaxas’ book. In fact, I only came to the book because it came highly recommended to me and, like you (I hope), I generally make it my business to follow up on a good lead when someone whose literary taste I trust recommends a book I haven’t heard about. Sometimes that doesn’t quite work out as planned, of course, but most of the time it leads me to all sorts of interesting books I would otherwise probably not even come across, let alone actually read. But I have to say this was an exceptional experience, reading this book. And I recommend it to you wholeheartedly as something well worth your time. The book's full title is Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, published in 2010 by Thomas Nelson.

Generally speaking, rabbis (I guess) are not supposed to recommend that people read deeply inspiring books about the clergy of other faiths. But why should that be, really? In the end, the quality I admire the most in clergymen and women of all stripes is not the specific degree to which they hew to details of the religious systems to which they subscribe, but the degree to which their work is characterized by a sense of absolute and unyielding intellectual and spiritual integrity. And it is in that light that I found myself not merely enjoying a masterful biography set in the first four and a half decades of the twentieth century against a backdrop that includes Berlin, London, and New York, but feeling beyond inspired by the story of a man who embodies the concept of spiritual integrity in a way that all people who subscribe to religious beliefs, most definitely including ourselves, should not only respect but also honor, and honor deeply.

Bonhoeffer grew up in Berlin. In every sense, his was a golden childhood. His father was one of Germany’s best known and most accomplished neurologists. His mother was from one of Germany’s most distinguished families. He had an older brother who died in the First World War and two sisters, one of whom later married a man who was also part of the conspiracy to kill Hitler and who was executed on the same day as his brother-in-law, and also who was eventually honored at Yad Vashem as one of the righteous Gentiles who risked everything to save Jewish lives. There was plenty of money, plenty of prestige, education at Germany’s finest schools, a large home staffed by servants, and large servings of pre-war Germany culture at its finest. Against all odds (and also against his father’s wishes), Dietrich chose theology as his field of academic interest. But (in this one way not unlike myself) he eventually found life in the academy to be too far removed from the actual lives of the people he truly wished to serve, and so he chose instead to pursue a career in the actual ministry. Eventually, he served congregations in Germany and then in England. He was in New York on the eve of the Second World War, where he was especially influenced by the preaching of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., then the minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He could have stayed. He could have settled into a nice life in New York and known about the war by reading about it in the newspapers. But instead he made the first of the decisions that would alter the course of his life permanently and lead eventually to the gallows because, even though he was totally free and safe in New York, he felt called by God to return to Germany and to attempt to influence the faithful to oppose Nazism and to depose its leader.

To give you more of a sense of the man and his moral worth, let me cite a letter he wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr, then a professor at the Union Theological Seminary across from JTS on Broadway, explaining his decision. “I have come to the conclusion,” he wrote in August of 1939, “that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people... Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from security." He returned to Germany on the last scheduled steamer to cross the Atlantic. And thus was the man’s eventual doom sealed years before he had an actual inkling of what exactly lay in store for him.

Metaxas’ book makes it clear in a way that no other book I’ve read just what this decision actively to work against the Nazis meant in the circles in which Bonhoeffer travelled in the first years of the war. For us, the Jewish question will always crowd out everything else. That is undoubtedly just as it should be: if we don’t remember our own martyrs, who will? As a result, though, we tend to think of wartime Germans as monolithically evil. I notice myself doing that as well, but there were also Bonhoeffers to consider, men and women who could not simply stand back and do nothing. In the end, none of them was successful. None brought down the government. None managed to assassinate the arch-fiend himself. But they existed and, at the risk of their own lives, they did what they could to topple a regime that was not merely criminal in terms of its activities but truly demonic in terms of its worldview, its ruthlessness, and its disregard for the elemental value of human life. Reading about these people would be stirring enough. But watching Bonhoeffer evolve in terms of his faith in God—and, yes, I mean to say his Christian faith, since Bonhoeffer was a deeply pious Christian in every aspect of his demeanor, behavior, and personal philosophy—from a merely concerned citizen who didn’t like the direction in which his country was headed to a man who, to quote the founder of his own church, simply “could do no other” because of the conviction that turning away from the struggle against Nazis would be tantamount to renouncing God and faith in God—watching such a man evolve is both stirring and very inspiring.

We talk a lot about the importance of incorporating the struggle for social justice into our religious lives. We mean it, of course, but, in the end, we also find it more than possible to look away—or rather most of us do most of the time—when what is involved crosses the line from talking to doing, from opining that right must be done to actually taking steps that could lead to danger or arrest in the cause of justice. Whether reticence to put oneself on the line for others is simply hardwired into the human condition as a feature of our very human will to survive or whether it would more accurately be described as self-serving fecklessness (and thus as a flaw in, rather than as a basic feature of, human nature) is a question for philosophers to ponder. But to be inspired by the story of a man who gave his life to bring down a tyrant and whose last words, imbued with the approach to martyrdom that is characteristic of religious faith at its finest, were “This is…for me the beginning of life“—that is not solely for philosophers to ponder but for all who adhere to any set of religious beliefs at all to admire, and to admire deeply.

There are lots of features of Christian theology I find perplexing. There is a long, bitter history of Christian anti-Judaism that gets in the way of any positive appraisal of the role Christianity and its adherents have played in the life of our people. The founder of Bonhoeffer’s church himself was the author of one of the most viciously anti-Semitic tracts ever published in the pre-Nazi era. And yet…you will find it impossible to read a book like Metaxas’ biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer without being moved. And it is therein that the book’s great merit lies and why I recommend it to you: here was a man who, for once, was the real deal, a man of faith whose beliefs led him only to good, only towards justice, only towards the conviction (for which he paid with his life) that life in the service of God cannot mean other than undertaking a lifelong struggle for justice in the world for all of God’s creatures.

Time Travel

2011-05-13T15:57:00.002-04:00

In all those Hollywood movies about time travel, the key concept is not just that you manage to travel to some earlier era (like in Peggy Sue Got Married or The Terminator) or into the future (like in Planet of the Apes or The Time Machine) or to travel both to the past and into the future (like in the Back to the Future trilogy), but that you get to take your own personal present along for the ride when you resurface in whatever era you manage somehow to attain. Indeed, in all of the above mentioned films (and also in a thousand others, I’m sure), the plot turns on the fact that, even though the time traveler is surrounded by people who are living in their own present tense, the traveler him or herself gets to know what’s going to happen (if he or she is visiting the past) or some crucial detail about something that has already happened (if the plot concerns visiting the future). And the same is true, of course, of all the great books on the same theme: when Mark Twain’s Hank Morgan leaves 19th century Hartford (of all places) to spend time in King Arthur’s England, the plot turns over and over on the fact that he knows all about what the world will be like a millennium and a half into the future while all the people around him are moored to their own present. (Do they still read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in high school? It was briefly my favorite book when I was fourteen or fifteen!)

There is no such thing as time travel. (Oh yeah? So where are all the visitors from the future?) Or, if there is, then it exists—at least so far—solely in the speculative realm of theoretical physicists, science fiction authors, and Hollywood screenwriters, not in the day-to-day lives of actual people who, as things are, cannot take a train to 1952 the same way any of us can take the PATH train to Hoboken for the price of a ticket. But although none of us can actually vacation in the nineteenth century, it turns out that what we can do is visit from afar…and it was that truth that came home to me as I spent time earlier this week wandering around in the newly launched JTA Jewish News Archive, which lives at http://archive.jta.org/.
JTA is the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Its very name suggests its origins in an earlier age, which is precisely correct: it was founded in 1917 by one Jacob Landau (who at first called it the Jewish Correspondence Bureau) with an eye towards collecting news stories about Jewish communities all over the world and making them available in digest form to newspapers, magazines, and other interested parties for further dissemination. In the world before the internet, this was, of course, a huge undertaking that involved the coordination and verification of correspondents’ reports gathered in dozens of different locales and under all sorts of different circumstances, including dangerous ones, and their integration with each other into some sort of coherent narrative. The JTA morphed forward through the years from telegraph to tickertape to fax machines and finally into its current status as an on-line site that now does electronically exactly what it used to do mechanically: collect news stories concerning Jews from all over the world, verify them as carefully as possible, and then disseminate them to the media and to the public. (Take a look at this week’s edition, for example, at www.jta.org.) You can also subscribe to a newsletter called “The JTA Daily Briefing,” which digests the major stories JTA is covering at any given moment by signing up at http://www.jta.org/user/register/.)

But the archive, with its own website, is something entirely new. And also something truly remarkable because it specifically does not provide readers with anything like the kind of thoughtful analysis a university professor or seasoned author would bring to an analysis of Jewish history. Books like that obviously have their place in the world. I read them myself all the time! But this is far more in the category of raw data than processed information…and spending time on the site is truly like traveling back in time. You can read the work, for example, of reporters in Vienna in 1938 who thought they well understood the beyond ominous implications of Austria’s willing self-annexation to Germany in March of that year, but who had no way even of beginning to imagine the extent of the horrors that were soon to ensue. But it is precisely because they did not know what the future was to be that their reports are so interesting and, at least in places, so touching. In other places, particularly in Shoah-related stories, the plain way things are said—without the embellishment someone controlling the larger picture would almost inevitably bring to the account—is chilling. The Babi Yar massacre (in the course of which more than 30,000 Kiev Jews were massacred in the course of two days in September 1941) was first reported in the West by JTA, but the report, filed on November 16, 1941, is all of two sentences long. The number of the dead is incorrect—the report speaks of 52,000 victims—but it is the tag line that is truly chilling as the reporter notes almost in passing: “Similar measures, though on a smaller scale, have been taken in other conquered towns.”

One way to browse the archive is to choose a day and to see what was going on. On that same day that the report about Babi Yar first appeared, for example, JTA also filed a report on the bravery of Jewish soldiers fighting in the Red Army against the Germans. And there were also featured that day a very interesting story about the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, manned in 1941 almost exclusively by Jewish refugees from Central Europe, embarking on its first Egyptian tour, as well as one about the formation in Ottawa of the first Air Cadet Flight Corps designed specifically to encourage young Jewish Canadian men to train as fighter pilots. I chose a few dates at random just to see what was going on. On my father’s tenth birthday, which fell on February 23, 1926, for example, JTA reported that after two failed attempts the Jewish students at the University of Chicago had finally managed to open a Jewish students’ organization. And also that unknown terrorists had managed to blow up a train on the Haifa-Damascus line. (Some things change and other things don’t seem ever to change. But how cool would it be to take the train from Haifa to Damascus!) And also that the Smithsonian Institute in Washington determined finally to abandon plans to build an observatory on Mount Sinai. And also, slightly chillingly—this is what I meant about visiting from the future—that America’s rabbis were being invited to enter a contest to find the best sermon preached in America on the subject of eugenics that was being run by the Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen of the American Eugenics Society. (Nazism basically ended any popular support for the pseudo-science of eugenics, the effort artificially to manipulate the gene pool of a nation or of a group within society. But how odd to imagine rabbis being invited entering such a contest just a decade before the Nazis came to power!) The rest of the day’s affairs feel entirely regular: a brand new JCC in Washington D.C. was dedicated, the Turkish press was chided by the chief rabbi of Turkey for publishing anti-Jewish stories, a new system for delivering fresh water into Jerusalem homes was announced by the municipality, etc., but the snapshot of how things were on that specific day is itself worth contemplating, coming as it does with neither the baggage of hindsight nor the burden of ex post facto analysis. And there are a lot of these snapshots to contemplate because every single day between January 1, 1923, and December 31, 2008 is represented on the website. Trust me, you’ll love time travel!

Some dates will call out all to be visited all by themselves. I spent time the other day at May 8, 1945 to see how V-E Day felt to the reporters writing for JTA as it was actually unfolding and May 16, 1948, to see how Truman’s recognition of the newly independent State of Israel was covered. I visited June 8, 1967, to see how they reported on the liberation of Jerusalem during the Six Day War. And I went to June 22, 1953, to see how JTA covered the funeral of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Of course, I also went to the day I was born! I’ve always known that I was born on the day after Sir Edmund Hillary reached the top of Mount Everest and the day before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in London. (My mom once told me those were three very exciting days, each in its own way!) But now I also know that on the day I was born in Manhattan, vandals destroyed the stained glass windows in the sanctuary at the Fresh Meadows Jewish Center, the police in Jerusalem announced the discovery of a large cache of weapons collected by a Jewish extremist group called Brit Kanaim (Covenant of the Zealous), Konrad Adenauer’s cabinet approved the a draft regarding future reparations payments to Shoah survivors, and the South African Board of Jewish Deputies celebrated its “Golden Jubilee Congress.”

As noted above, there really is no such thing as time travel. It is a fabulous fantasy, one that has intrigued people since ancient times. But the opportunity the JTA Archive website affords to travel back to specific days in the past and to see how the events of that day seemed to the people on the ground and in the moment, while not exactly time travel in the classical sense of the term, is still an amazingly rich experience. Now that I’m done watching the Eichmann trial on youtube—or rather, now that I’m done watching as much as I could take—I’ve taken to browsing the JTA Archive and seeing what’s there. So far, what I’ve found has been endlessly intriguing, and I think you’ll feel the same way.

Bin Laden Dead or Alive

2011-05-05T11:44:00.005-04:00

For the last few days, I’ve been challenging myself to say precisely why the death of Osama Bin Laden has not triggered in me personally the same jubilation that it appears to have sparked in the large majority of our countrymen and, indeed, in people all around the world. Partially, perhaps, his death almost seemed anti-climactic, coming as it did in the wake of an amazing winter and spring during which huge swaths of the Muslim world turned decisively away from the docile acceptance of totalitarian rule and, by standing up to demand the basic rights and freedoms we Americans so often—too often—take for granted, appeared publicly and forcefully to be repudiating the kind of fanatic islamicism associated with Bin Laden and his ilk. And partially I suppose it had to do with the sad truth that his death will not bring back to life any of the 2,977 people who died on the ground and in the air in New York, Washington, and Shanksville on that September day almost ten years ago. But I suppose I regret most deeply of all that the fiend responsible for so much misery and for so many deaths—and it would not be unreasonable also to add to our losses on 9/11 all those others who have died in the War Against Terrorism since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan, by some estimates as many as 1.2 million civilians along with almost six thousand American servicemen and women—I regret that the man who bore the personal responsibility for loss on that kind of scale was not taken alive and brought to trial.

By that thought, I do not mean to second guess the Navy SEALs who conducted the raid in Abbottabad by supposing both with the luxury of hindsight and from a very safe distance that they should or could have exerted themselves more strenuously to take their prisoner alive. Lacking even the most rudimentary knowledge of how military actions like that are conducted and disinclined always to question the integrity of our troops, the last thing I wish to imply is that the SEALs should have done differently or better. Yet, for all the outcome may have been unavoidable, I still find myself regretting that it didn’t turn out otherwise, that Bin Laden was executed not upon being apprehended but after having been found guilty in a court of law or in a military tribunal. As I mentioned to you last week, one of the movies that influenced me the most deeply during my adolescence was Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film, Judgment at Nuremberg starring Maximillian Schell, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, and many others including Marlene Dietrich and a young William Shatner. The movie, which featured actual footage of concentration camp atrocities taken by American soldiers after those camps were liberated, was the one of the first major movies with a Shoah theme and it affected me in a way that few other movies ever have. The plot itself was fictionalized—and the movie is specifically not based on the actual Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders and ideologues that took place in 1945 and 1946, but on a secondary trial of four Nazi judges that took place in 1947—but the moral lessons of the movie, that no one is above the law, that even individuals accused of the most heinous crimes against humanity have the right to defend themselves in court, and that the agony of the Nazis’ victims specifically did not obviate the need to bring their murderers to justice rather than merely to murder them in the same summary fashion in which they murdered those victims, are what impressed me the most deeply.

If you haven’t considered Nuremberg in a while, take a look at a contemporary American newsreel made in 1946 just after sentence was pronounced against the twenty-four defendants by clicking here. I’ve seen it before. I just watched it again. No one feels more strongly—no one could feel more strongly—than I that death was, if anything, too lenient a punishment for the authors of such unspeakable aggression against the Jewish people and against so many millions of others. And yet I find myself beyond moved by the fact that when the guns fell silent and Europe was at peace, the natural desire of all civilized people to punish the guilty was subjugated to a deeper sense that justice could only truly be pursued by prosecutors in a court of law. Would Hitler himself have been in the dock at Nuremberg had he not taken his own life? Surely he would have been, as equally surely would have been Himmler and Goebbels. In a sense, I regret that the three of them did not stand trial and that they had the luxury of choosing the hour and circumstance of their own deaths; that should have been denied to them just as they themselves denied to their victims. But even without them the trial at Nuremberg stands in my mind for the ultimate victory of civilization over anarchy, and of human decency over bestial depravity. If you haven’t watched Judgment at Nuremberg lately, or if some of my younger readers have never seen it, you should. I believe you will find it just as deeply moving as I did.

I feel the same way about Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister of wartime Japan who was not only responsible for Pearl Harbor but also for the murder of millions of civilians in China, the Philippines, and Indochina, as well as for the deaths of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners-of-war. He attempted to commit suicide before he could be arrested, but was unsuccessful—there is some gruesome irony in the fact that a man responsible for the deaths of so many millions could not quite manage to kill himself even though his doctor had drawn a charcoal circle on his chest over his heart—and was brought to trial, then convicted and sentenced to death in November, 1948. The sentence was carried out the following month. Why Emperor Hirohito himself was not tried as a war criminal as well, I can’t personally understand. But what matters to me the most personally is not whether any specific individual was or was not tried, but that in post-war Japan just as in Germany the rule of law was deemed sacred and even the worst war criminals, Tojo included, were not just shot, but given a fair trial and then executed after having been sentenced to death.

And, of course, I feel the same way about Eichmann. Last week, I wrote to you about the effect reading Gideon Hausner and Isser Harel’s books had on me as a young person and about the pride they instilled in the me. But that pride was not only in the daring and the expertise of the Israelis who successfully tracked Eichmann to Argentina and then spirited him back to Israel for trial, but in the fact itself that they did not simply shoot him upon finding him. Surely, they could have. They probably could also have managed to cover up the murder and make it look like some sort of crime that got out of hand. They could have done a lot of things, but the Israelis understood that simply to shoot a man like Eichmann would have been far too easy a way out for him. A man with the blood of millions on his hands needed not merely to be executed, but to stand trial, to be forced in a court of law to explain himself, to attempt to defend himself…or, if he preferred, to admit to his guilt and throw himself on the mercy of the court. In either event, he would have ended up dead. But as things played out, his death was not merely justice for his victims, but also catharsis for the rest of us. By extending to him the basic human right to mount a defense against his accusers that he would never have dreamt of according his own victims, Israel distinguished itself as a state motivated by the quest for justice, not merely for revenge. It was among Israel’s finest hours. I wrote last week about watching the trial over these last few weeks on youtube, an activity I continue to recommend to you. (You can see the trial in the original here and with an English voiceover here.) It is upsetting viewing, to be sure. But it is also ennobling and deeply satisfying to see justice take its course.

And that is what I would have wished for Bin Laden as well. I would have welcomed the opportunity to hear a case built against him, for him to have been granted the right to speak in his own defense, for him to be treated precisely as people put on trial in democracies should always be treated. Once convicted, I imagine he would have been sentenced to death. Of course, the outcome would have been the same. But the death I would have preferred for Bin Laden would have been so much the more satisfying one precisely because it would have come as punishment not as avoidable/unavoidable happenstance.

I suppose my reluctance to be overjoyed over the circumstances of Bin Laden’s death puts me in tiny minority of Americans. And surely I am beyond pleased to know that one of our most dangerous enemies has been permanently neutralized and his ability to harm others just as permanently ended. I just wish he had met his end after having been forced by a court to accept the full responsibility for his bad deeds and for the misery and suffering he brought to so many in our country and abroad, not in a hail of bullets. In the end, what’s done is done. But I challenge you to watch or to re-watch Judgment at Nuremberg and not regret that it was Osama bin Laden’s fate to be cut down while resisting arrest rather than tried and convicted in a court of justice.

Watching Eichmann

2011-04-28T09:54:00.003-04:00

Somehow Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, always catches me by surprise. Maybe it’s because it comes so soon on the heels of Pesach. Or maybe it just seems strange to focus on the Shoah, which I for some reason invariably image in my mind in black-and-white, just when color is returning to the world. Or maybe it is just in the nature of the unfathomable things also to be unpredictable and a bit random in terms of when it imposes itself unexpectedly in anyone’s consciousness. But for whatever reason I am always slightly unprepared when the Men’s Club delivers the yellow candle and the calendar suddenly notes that Yom Hashoah is around the corner.

It is a strange day. Neither a fast day nor a day on which even the most pious refrain from work, Yom Hashoah also has no specific liturgy—no additions to or subtractions from our daily prayers, no special Torah reading, nothing of the before-the-fast and after-the-fast feel of Yom Kippur or Tisha Be’av. Nor was there even universal agreement at first about when Yom Hashoah should fall or even whether there should be a specific day given over to remembering the victims of the Nazis during the Second World War in the first place. But whatever arguments were adduced in the 1950s against having this one day devoted to this one thing, they have been more or less universally set aside in favor of this day of nothingness with which we have finally ended up—a day of no special prayers, no special ceremonies, no special Torah reading, no special customs, and no specific rituals that has somehow come to represent by its emptiness the inability of any of us reasonably, let alone eloquently, to articulate our feelings about a tragedy of the magnitude of the Shoah. Perhaps there simply are times when the deepest response to disaster can only be to say nothing at all and to find in silence the sole appropriate medium for coming to terms with unspeakable things! And, indeed, as the years have passed I have come to like the concept of a Yom Hashoah devoted to remembering that is specifically not weighed down with ritual. To feel paralyzed by sadness is usually a non-productive response to personal tragedy; to respond to tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust, on the other hand, by staring into the whirlwind and saying nothing at all does not seem to me illogical or pathetic. Just the opposite, actually.

I was born in 1953, more than eight years after V-E Day, but although I had friends in elementary school whose parents were survivors, I don’t recall ever understanding that about them until years later. If they spoke about their wartime experiences, they didn’t speak to children like myself about them. But I sense that they didn’t much speak to anyone else either—the sense in those days was that the “healthy” thing for those who had survived was somehow to move on, to put the past behind them, to begin anew in a new place, to find the inner strength to live in the present, not the past. As a result, I learned about the Shoah almost exclusively from books and movies, mostly from books. I’ve written in many places about the profound effect Andre Schwarz Bart’s book, The Last of the Just, had on me as a young man. The same is true about many other works I’ve read over the years, especially including Anatoly Rybakov’s Heavy Sand, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and more or less all the novels of Aharon Appelfeld. And the movies that have affected me, although fewer in number—I should mention Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, and Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg in this regard—have been equally important in terms of my development as a Jew living his life in the shadow of the Shoah.

I am not by nature an especially brave person, I don’t think. I don’t like being terrified. I don’t like roller coasters. I am not even a big fan of horror movies. Yet I find myself able to watch these movies (again and again, I should add) and to read these and uncountable other books, especially including first-person non-fiction accounts like Anne Frank’s, Emanuel Ringelblum’s or Moshe Zev Flinker’s, without turning away. Or at least without turning away much. (Mind you, I don’t read them at bedtime.) But just lately I’ve been watching something that I had barely even known existed until it was brought to my attention just the week before Pesach: the endless videotapes of the trial of Adolph Eichmann. I suppose I vaguely knew the trial, which lasted off and on from April of 1961 to May of 1962, was videotaped. I had even see clips here and there, mostly of the witnesses giving testimony about their personal experiences during the war. And I definitely remember once seeing a clip from an Israeli news program reporting on Eichmann’s execution. (His was hanged the day before my ninth birthday and his ashes scattered over the Mediterranean the following day. I vaguely remember my father telling me that the entire Jewish people was having a party that day not just myself and my friends. I’m not sure I knew what he meant. Maybe I did. Probably not.) As the years passed, I read all the big books and re-read several times Gideon Hausner’s Justice in Jerusalem and Isser Harel’s The House on Garibaldi Street. But I never actually watched the videotape of the trial itself.

This was long before youtube, long before anything even remotely like youtube or any of the other on-line libraries of video clips. In those days to watch something like videotape of a trial, you had to start by figuring out where to find the tapes, then get permission to view them, then take yourself to wherever they were stored and watch them wherever that was. Now, of course, endless numbers of video clips stream almost automatically into everybody’s lives at such a pace that it feels impossible even slightly to keep up with what’s out there. But when I got an e-mail telling me that the entire Eichmann trial had been uploaded to youtube by Yad Vashem and was now available on-line I was drawn to the link almost like a moth to flame. It’s a lot of tape, four hundred hours’ worth. It’s available in two versions, one in the original Hebrew, German, and Yiddish (available at http://www.youtube.com/EichmannTrial), and one with an English voice superimposed on the voices of the original speakers (available at http://www.youtube.com/EichmannTrialEN). It’s easier to find than to watch, however.

You need a lot of things even to start watching, in fact, but most of all the nerve to encounter evil unadorned and unapologetic. Contrary to Hannah Arendt’s assertion, there is in my opinion nothing even remotely banal about the footage. It is slow going. There’s no way to race through to the more interesting parts, just as there would not have been any way to do so in real life if you were attending the actual trial. As is the case in all courtrooms (other than on Law & Order), there’s a lot of endless sitting around and waiting. People speak slowly and deliberately. Translators spoke slowly and took their time, including the time to revise their own work while the cameras were still rolling. Through it all, though, is Eichmann himself, seated in the bullet-proof glass booth the court had ordered fashioned specifically to thwart any attempts on his life during the trial and apparently not only unrepentant but clearly contemptuous of the whole proceeding. Over and over he says plainly that he was simply following his orders, doing what government officials do, behaving with respect to his government in precisely the same way that government employees the world over, including in Israel, behave when they receive orders from their superiors. The disconnect between the icy calm demeanor Eichmann displays as he speaks dispassionately about his work annihilating the Jews of Europe and the reality of what was actually happening on the ground when others carried out the orders he issued is so immense as to be almost unfathomable. Just last night, for example, I was watching Eichmann talking about the deportations from Bialystok, a city in which about one hundred of an pre-war Jewish population of 56,000 survived. Of the deportations to Treblinka and Auschwitz, including a final deportation of one thousand children, of the efforts of the Einsatzgruppen to round up thousands of Jews in the first days of the occupation and murder them, of the famous uprising in the last days of the ghetto when truly there was nothing left to lose—of none of this does Eichmann seem even vaguely aware. There was a job to do, he says plainly—apparently meaning the annihilation of the Jews of that specific place—and there was a time frame to do it in, and he did his job and saw to it that others did theirs. He speaks clearly and without bombast, rather in the manner of a university science professor calmly describing some experiment he conducted successfully a few years earlier. He exudes neither confidence nor pride. His voice is almost completely without emotion. He simply describes his work, then allows others to think what they will. His German is clear and precise without being at all pedantic.

You can’t watch the whole thing through, obviously, just longer and shorter snippets. Nor is there any clear program available detaining what precisely is in which film clip (and there are hundreds and hundreds of separate clips to watch). I see what Hannah Arendt was getting at, but, as noted above, it doesn’t seem that way to me at all. Here is evil itself, the embodiment of the demonic in a clerk with a clerk’s glasses, a clerk’s demeanor and a good clerk’s pride in the accuracy of his workmanship. If this be a man, then we need to revise our sense of what it truly means to be human…and of where the bottom line of depravity might lie, the one beneath which no true human being even could, let alone consciously would, ever allow him or herself to fall. There is something fascinating about these clips, these simple black-and-white films of a man describing suffering of such unimaginable magnitude without remorse, without emotion, without any visible sense that the children he sent to their deaths were actual boys and girls and not mere figures in a ledger. If you start watching, I think you’ll stay for a long while just as I did. And then, also like me, you’ll come back and watch more, almost unable to imagine that this little man with his receding hairline and his thick glasses was not only a criminal in the normal sense of the world, but the embodiment of evil itself.

If you are looking for a way to observe Yom Hashoah, let me invite you to spend some time in front of your screen watching a trial we have all read about actually unfold, at least slightly, before your eyes. You won’t enjoy the experience. But I doubt you’ll be able to look away. In this man’s eyes are reflected the ghosts of his uncountable victims…and also nothing at all. And that is the paradox I wish to leave you with as we approach Yom Hashoah this year: that the Nazis’ victims are dead yet also alive in us, whereas their murderers, as embodied by Eichmann on youtube, were left alive at war’s end but also truly and unutterably dead.

The Bigger Picture

2011-04-22T09:59:00.003-04:00

Towards the end of his life, my father became a vegetarian. This was not an expected development, at least not by myself. My father never displayed, at least not to me, any inclination towards vegetarianism, never expressed (also at least not to me) any specific disinclination to eat meat. But yet, somehow, there he was in his eighties frying up tofu and peppers for lunch and explaining himself with reference neither to his various digestive woes or to the price of kosher meat, but to the cruelty of the world. This, if anything, I expected even less. My father was a kind person. In some ways I would even say he was a gentle one. Certainly, he was goodhearted and good-natured. But he was the kind of person who generally accepted things as he found them in the world and never seemed especially perturbed by the way the world worked or by the way things were in the world as he was born into it. Once years earlier when I reported to him some horrific story I had read in the paper about the way veal calves are raised, he responded by observing that some people raise veal calves because other people eat veal and will pay for the privilege. If there weren’t purchasers, there wouldn’t be sellers. And if you have the misfortune actually to be such a calf whose future is bringing you directly to the abattoir, then ver-zhe heist dich zein a kalb? Who told you to be a calf?

But that attitude did not live on as long in my father as he lived on in the world and, as noted, towards the end of his life my father gave up not only veal but all meat. He seemed neither proud nor embarrassed by his decision, neither eager to spread the gospel of vegetarianism nor interested in defending his diet to others and least of all to me. He had, he said, grown weary of the misery of the world, did not want to be part of the machine that killed living creatures for profit. Mostly, he said, he did not want to be among the purchasers who justify the sellers. My father clearly did not expect his decision to alter the world and its ways. He barely told anyone. He only told me myself after I noted aloud that there didn’t seem to be anything to eat in the fridge that wasn’t made out of soybeans. But his conversion, for all it was private, was also heartfelt. And he never went back either, not from the day he made his decision to the day he died. My father, whose first job as a young man was as counterman in a deli on Church Avenue in Brooklyn, died years after he ingested his last piece of corned beef.

I’ve been thinking about that specific detail of my dad’s later years both while eating my way through Pesach and also while reading James Carroll’s exceedingly interesting and provocative book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. The Pesach angle is easy to explain because, interwoven throughout our yontif observance, is this effort to justify the misery of the world. As a way of nodding to the unimaginable suffering the plagues must have brought on innocent Egyptians, almost none of whom bore any direct (or, for that matter, any indirect) responsibility for the enslavement of the Israelites, for example, we diminish the wine in our cups by ten drops, one for each of the ten plagues. And then, as if that weren’t dramatic enough, we decline on the actual anniversary of the day on which Pharaoh’s minions drowned in the sea to recite the full version of Hallel and instead use the shorter version that is otherwise only recited on lesser festival days such as Rosh Chodesh.

It isn’t much. It’s actually hardly anything at all. But at least the notion that there should be no pleasure taken in the suffering of the innocent is in the mix, inspiring us to remember that there is nothing for us to celebrate in the death of the firstborn son of the indigent servant girl slaving away in her master’s mill whom the Torah goes out of its way specifically to mention in the context of the tenth plague. Could the Almighty not have wrought salvation for Israel other than at the cost of that innocent little boy’s life? The Torah doesn’t go there, but that does not mean we shouldn’t. Just the opposite is true, actually: why would that little boy, dead and gone from the world for more than three millennia, still be on our minds if the Torah did not wish us to contemplate his wretched lot and his untimely death…and to think of something to say. But what is there to say? Would any of us look at that doomed child, then steal a glance at our slightly diminished cups of wine, then respond by asking who told him to be a calf?

I wish to express myself in much more detail about James Carroll’s book in another letter to you later in the year, but what has been making the most profound impression on me as I have been reading his work this holiday are the staggering numbers the author tosses out to his readers effortlessly, numbers I seem endlessly capable of not remembering or even of feeling that I could not possibly ever have known, numbers suggestive of the capacity we human beings have to behave not merely violently but with almost indescribable violence towards each other. Normally, we voice this thought with reference to the apparently willingness of the world to forget the unspeakable horrors of the Shoah. And yet we ourselves also forget…and not just on the rare, atypical occasion but so regularly as to suggest that what is truly human is not to recall at all but to repress. Carroll writes at some length about the World War I campaign called “the Somme offensive,” an ultimately pointless operation that took place over five months in the year my father was born. The campaign, which accomplished nothing at all other than obliging the Germans to regroup some forty miles to the east of their earlier positions, cost over 500,000 British and French soldiers’ lives alone, not to mention another half million enemy losses. How could I possibly not have forgotten learning about a battle in my the century of my birth in which more than a million young men died accomplishing…nothing of consequence at all? I must have learned about it somewhere…but my ability to forget death even on the unimaginable scale of our own losses during the Shoah is staggering to me now that I face it head-on. I certainly know that more than 1.2 million soldiers died at Stalingrad between August, 1942 and February, 1943, but did I forget or never know that the population of Mexico fell from 25 million in 1517, the year the Spanish arrived, to 1.5 million a century later because 94% of the indigenes were murdered by their European conquerors?

And then there are wars I cannot even remember having heard of. Do you remember ever reading about the French Wars of Religion? I don’t…which is something, since by some estimates 4 million people died in those wars (which also accomplished nothing of lasting consequence) between 1562 and 1598. We expect the world never to forget the Shoah, but four million people is a lot of people and not only haven’t I remembered to remember, but I can’t even remember forgetting that they lived or died. The list goes on. Carroll mentions, almost just in passing, that it is possible that a full one hundred thousand women were executed between 1560 and 1670 for the “crime” of being suspected of witchcraft. Did I know that? How could I not have? I think I wrote to you in this space last year that I was astounded when I read in James Bradley’s The Imperial Cruise that by some estimates that a full million and a half civilian Filipinos died in the so-called Philippine-American War (which name I’m sure I also hadn’t ever heard spoken aloud) that followed on the heels of the 1898 Spanish-American War.

Other names are less unfamiliar, but still jumbled together in my memory. Surely, I must have learned in high school—this actually does ring a bell—that 24,000 American soldiers died in the first twelve hours of the Battle of Antietam in September, 1862. But who ever thinks of these people as individuals—and, for that matter, how many of us even know where exactly Antietam is or who actually won the battle? (The Union sort of won, at least strategically, but more realistically the battle was a draw. Antietam Creek is near Sharpsburg, Maryland.) Mind you, all the Civil War numbers are staggering. 24,000 soldiers died at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in April of 1862. 20,000 died at the Second Battle of Bull Run in July of that year. 50,000 died at Gettysburg, which at least constituted a huge victory for the Union forces and a major turning point in the war. But who can fathom numbers like that? Each soldier—each individual dead young man—was someone’s son, someone’s husband, someone’s brother or friend. Each one was an entire universe, an idea we find natural to develop with respect to our own dead…but which we find it more than possible hardly to consider at all when we think of the almost indescribable losses we don’t ever think about, don’t know much about, don’t insist our children learn about, don’t erect monuments to prevent others from forgetting about, and frankly find it just a bit irritating to be reminded by others about when all we want to do is to focus on how easily the world looks past Jewish suffering.

Mind you, we’ve also forgotten most of own history. More than 100,000 Jews were murdered during the Cossack Rebellion in the Ukraine during 1648 and 1649, but who bothers remembering those people, each individual one of whom was also a universe, these days? Once we steer into Jewish waters, I’m on firmer ground…but even then the point is really how easily we forgot, how little human life—Jewish and not Jewish—really means to us, how simple it is for us to nod to that little boy whose mother worked as a slave in one of Pharaoh’s mills without accepting his monitory presence in our holy Torah as a spur to opening our hearts to the suffering of the world and its peoples.

Monday is the Seventh Day of Pesach, the day on which Pharaoh’s army drowned in the sea. When the angels on high noted their deaths, they began to sing hymns of praise to God. The Talmud imagines God, displeased in the extreme, turning to them with a damning rhetorical question. “Creatures that I myself created are drowning,” the text imagines God asking acidulously, “and your response is to sing songs?” To celebrate the deliverance of our ancestors from bondage in Egypt and their subsequent deliverance at the Sea of Reeds, after all, is one thing. But to ruin that celebration by looking past the suffering of the innocent that it occasioned, no matter how successful we might be at justifying that suffering with reference to our own yearning to be free is, to say the very least, indecorous and unworthy behavior on our part. To be part of the world, we have to be part of the world…and that means, at least when the death of other people’s children is involved, to consider the history of Israel in its larger context and in terms of its impact beyond the borders of our own narrative.

Selling Chametz

2011-04-14T09:59:00.010-04:00

As most of you probably know, I’m not much given to subterfuge or to the kind of fancy legal, footwork that makes licit behavior that any outside observer would recognize easily as, at best, a clever way of avoiding the implications of having to obey the simple meaning of the law. I am, in that vein, not much of a fan of the eiruv, a way of erecting phony, non-existent walls around a neighborhood so as technically to create the kind of private domain in which one may carry things around on Shabbat. (If the law forbids carrying things around in the street on Shabbat, then how can it be noble or pious to figure out a technical end-run around the simple meaning of the law?) Nor am I especially enamored of the various techniques our tradition has developed to assist us in finding clever, formally legal ways to avoiding obeying the Torah’s instructions regarding the posthumous disposition of our estates. I’m not even wild about using a shamash when I light the Chanukah menorah so as to be permitted to use light that the law specifically forbids us to use. What can you do? Who ever saw a menorah without a shamash?

A surprising amount of these legal subterfuges seem to me to be centered around Pesach and in that regard I can also reveal that I am also only a theoretical proponent of the siyyum system of fast-evasion—the one we all, including myself (who actually am a firstborn son), participate on Erev Pesach to create the context in which we are encouraged to feel good about skipping the fast that our own tradition makes incumbent upon us merely because we “happened” to have been present at morning minyan when someone (or, in this year’s case at Shelter Rock, a group of people) formally celebrated the completion of one of the tractates of the Talmud. And then there’s the whole magic declaration we recite Erev Pesach somehow turning whatever chametz is still hiding undetected in our homes into dust. Surely that only makes us feel better about not having cleaned as well as we should have without actually making the elusive breadcrumbs turn into actual dust! But the single example that feels the most weird to me has to do with the sale of chametz.

I do it. I facilitate lots of people doing it. I accept the legality of it all. That part, actually, is easy to explain. The law forbids us to have any chametz at all visible in our homes throughout the eight days of Pesach, but only forbids us to maintain hidden away in our homes chametz that actually belongs to us. And upon that slender thread hangs the whole concept of selling chametz—since the chametz hidden away now belongs to someone else, it can be present in a Jewish home throughout Passover as long as it is not actually visible. For all these years that I’ve not only sold our own chametz but also facilitated hundreds, by now probably thousands, of others in selling theirs, I’ve found the whole concept peculiar. We sell our chametz legally, but not quite emotionally. If the non-Jew to whom I sell all the chametz of all the people who have charged me with selling theirs were actually to show up during the holiday to pick up his property from wherever we have it squirreled away, we’d all faint dead away. Nor has anyone ever actually bothered to ask me if the sale went through or if, as happens far more regularly, the purchaser failed to make the second payment, in consequence of which the sale fell through and the chametz as a consequence reverts to its sellers. (The first payment is one dollar. The second payment is one billion dollars less one dollar. The chances of the second installment being paid in full and on time are admittedly remote. But you’re not supposed to know that until after the purchaser fails to make his payment, not before. And if you know he is going to fail to make that payment, then have you really sold him the goods in question in any meaningful way other than the one that suits the precise letter of the law?) In a sense, it makes no sense. It’s the kind of legalistic sleight-of-hand anti-Semites can’t get enough of. It seems, at least at first blush, to make a mockery of the concept it purports to support: we are supposed to rid our homes of chametz, so we sell it specifically so as not to have to get rid of it.

And yet, as the years pass, I find myself more and more kindly disposed to the whole concept. As I said, I’ve always done it for myself and my family. But I’m feeling better about it now than I once did. In a sense, it’s part of the whole asymptotic thing that underlies even the finest spiritual endeavors. Do you remember what asymptotes are? (You knew in tenth grade, assuming you went to a school where they made tenth graders take geometry.) How it all works in the greater world of higher mathematics (if tenth grade geometry qualifies as high mathematics, that is), who can remember? But the simple answer, the one I’ve retained over these many years since tenth grade—and, just to put things into perspective, I began tenth grade the fall following the Six Day War—is that asymptotes are the possible/impossible combination of line and curve that meet only at infinity, at the infinitely distant end (that does not and cannot actually exist, but which also must exist) of the x- or the y-axis on a geometric grid. Outside the world of math, then, the word has come to denote the possible/impossible task, the doable/undoable, the possible/impossible, the finite/infinite. We are commanded to rid our homes of chametz, just as we are commanded to use the mitzvah as a spur to inspire us to rid our hearts of sin and the desire to sin.

Both are possible in theory. Why can’t a house simply have no chametz crumbs at all in it? Surely, it can. But, equally surely, it also can’t. Our homes are big, complicated things. Even modest homes have uncountable corners and crannies and nooks, endless numbers of movable/unmovable bookcases and breakfronts and dishwashers. You can wash a dish and satisfy yourself that it is spotless…but which of us could ever feel that certain about our homes, that there is not a crumb lurking somewhere behind something, that we have investigated every conceivable hiding place in which such an elusive crumb even could secrete itself. Who could feel that way? I’ll tell you who—the same people who can feel with absolute certainty that they have conquered the yetzer hara completely, that the propensity to sin has been totally eradicated from even the inmost chambers of their human hearts, that even in the most obscure of the labyrinthine byways of their intellects there lies in wait no unnoticed yearning to behave poorly, to turn away from God’s law, or to embrace vulgarity or depravity.

Which of us could ever say that and mean it? I’ll tell you who—the same people who feel completely certain that they have found every last crumb of chametz. Such people naturally have no need to bother selling their chametz to a non-Jew! Indeed, it would be slightly fraudulent to do so since the sale would involve receiving theoretical payment for something we are completely certain does not actually exist! But, needless to say, there are no such people, not in the Pesach category and not in the human soul category either. We are all works in progress, all of us curved lines heading towards a distant goal at the existent/non-existent end of a trajectory that itself exists, or appears to exist, for as long as we have the koyach to shlep ourselves forward through another year, through another yontif, through another couple of seders. And that, I have come to realize, is why we should all feel entirely reasonable about selling our chametz. Not because the whole thing isn’t a bit absurd—which it surely is—but because, in the end, it is far more noble than not doing it would be. It is, or should be, an act suffused with humility, with acceptance of our human frailty and endemic inability to clean our houses or to cleanse our hearts. It is the semi-desperate act, that sale, of people who want to be chametz-free for the holiday, but who know that it is no more possible to be certain than it is to be certain about what is (or isn’t) hiding within the matrices of our human intelligence or the darkest corners of our all too human hearts.

All you can do is all you can do. You can try. You can strive. You can work diligently on the house, cleaning it as best you can, hoping you found all those crumbs. But there will always be some you missed. How could it be otherwise? And while we’re selling chametz anyway, which of us doesn’t pack away a few things that we know perfectly well are still there in the basement but that it seems a shame to discard or give away. We’re selling the stuff anyway! I do it too. We all do. But the key is not to fall prey to the absurdity of the gesture, but to allow the underlying concept to instill a kind of humility in us that is crucial to taking Pesach seriously. Rabbi Tarfon, you may remember, said (in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers) that you should not feel free to desist from jobs just because you know you will not be able to complete them. Maybe you’ll surprise yourself. Maybe someone else will come along and finish the work for you. And—this is the Pesach edition of that thought—maybe you’ll realize all along that the point of the doing wasn’t the finishing, but the doing itself. Maybe!

The One State Solution

2011-04-08T10:41:00.001-04:00

The murder a few days ago of the well-known Palestinian actor Juliano Mer-Khamis seems ominous to me in ways that are only tangentially related to the victim’s life and work. He was, to say the least, a strange mix of things. Although his father was a Palestinian Christian, he was, technically speaking, a Jewish man, the son also of an Israeli Jewish mother. He had an Israeli passport. He maintained two homes, one in the Palestinian city of Jenin and one in Haifa. Since no one knew quite what to make of him, he was almost a professional outsider: most Israelis thought of him as an Arab, while his murderers, presumed to be Palestinian militants, clearly thought of him as a Jew (or at least as a kind of a Jew). He was fifty-two years old when he died, shot to death in a car nearby the Freedom Theater where he worked. He was buried by his mother’s side in her kibbutz’s cemetery. Yet even as his body was being brought to a Jewish cemetery for burial, he was already being acclaimed by Palestinians (presumably not including his murderers) as a martyr for their cause. Miri Aloni, a Jewish Israeli, sang at his funeral in Hebrew and in Arabic.

Juliano Mer-Khamis was clearly and openly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. He appeared in movies that are openly hostile to Israel. He specifically claimed not to be interested in the two-state solution, insisting that the path to a secure future for the region lies in there being one state for Jews and Palestinians in which each citizen has his or her own vote and the majority rules. Clearly, the state thus envisioned is not a Jewish state at all, merely a Middle Eastern country with a significant Jewish population. He was thus unwilling to imagine Israel as a state that self-defines as Jewish and that labors to preserve its Jewish identity. It is that specific approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I would like to write to you about today.

For Americans, the notion of a democratic state in which every citizen has a vote that carries the same weight has a natural feel to it. And, of course, the one-citizen-one-vote principle is at the core of our American democracy as well. But our country was designed as a melting pot from the very beginning when our country’s founders imagined people from all over the world coming together in this place to forge something new. (Our founders were broad-minded in that regard, but even they were not quite broad-minded enough to notice the degree to which they were excluding native Americans and slaves, not to mention women, from participating in the effort to create that more perfect union they were laboring so intensely to will into existence.) Yet many people, myself very much included, who feel completely certain that the ideal democracy is one in which each citizen is invited to cast his or her vote according to the dictates of his or her own conscience, also feel that nations have the right to secure their own character and to exclude from the mix people who are openly hostile to the establishment, maintenance, and furtherance of that character.

Another way to frame that same question is to ask if there is, or could be, a place in the forum of nations for the political equivalent of the phenomenon we know from the world of business as the hostile takeover. In public companies, the direction the enterprise takes is a direct function of the wishes of the shareholders. If someone acquires a majority interest in any specific company, then that individual simultaneously acquires the right to dictate the company’s future direction regardless of how its employees, including even its senior employees, feel about the matter. The consequences may be brutal for some, but the process itself couldn’t be easier to describe or even to justify because, in the end, a public company’s publicly traded shares constitute tiny pieces of the company itself. All of them taken together are the company. When someone owns enough of them to outvote the people who own the rest of them even if all of those other shareholders vote together as a block featuring no dissenters at all, then that individual could effectively be said to own that company and thus to have the right to chart its course into the future as he or she sees fit.

That possibility—that the people who currently own a company could lose control if someone else seizes a majority of shares in the business—is the big drawback to going public. Yet companies do it all the time, presumably after having calculated that the odds of that happening are sufficiently remote for the potential profit to be worth the presumed risk. As a result, it seems almost natural for those of us who live in mercantile societies to apply the lessons we learn from the world of business to the governance of nations as well and to suppose that when the majority of a nation’s citizens votes for a sea change the government should have no choice but to comply with the voters’ wishes. Yet even the right to self-govern through majority rule is not absolute. No one thinks the rogue regimes of recent history can justify their crimes with reference to the popular support they garnered in some election! Would anyone, for example, argue that the Nazi regime in pre-war and wartime Germany had the right to perpetrate their unimaginable bestiality simply because they were duly elected if not by a majority than at least by a plurality of voters in 1932? And in our own country too we have established a complex system of checks and balances specifically designed to prevent legislators representing a majority of citizens from enacting legislation intended to curtail or cancel the rights of citizens who belong to recognizable minority groups. And at the core of this notion that it is reasonable to place restraints on the application of the pure democratic principle is the idea that nations have an inalienable right to self-define.

Nations, like people, have national characters. And, as such, they have the right to do what it takes to preserve that character. The French have a right to insist that France remain French. We Americans have the right to insist that immigrants to our shores embrace the values we as a nation have determined to be basic to our way of life. Yet Israel’s most potentially harmful enemies are precisely those who come in sheep’s clothing espousing ideas which sound entirely reasonable. Why shouldn’t all the citizens of the land vote on what kind of country to have? Why shouldn’t the Jewishness of the state be on the line, or at least be negotiable, if a large majority of voters want nothing of it? Wouldn’t it be simpler just to create a unified nation founded on the one-citizen-one-vote principle and then let the electorate decide what culture it wishes to promote?

All of that sounds right, sort of. But what of the inalienable right of the Jewish people to live within a sovereign Jewish state in their ancestral homeland, in the Land of Israel? What of the right that Israelis share with the citizens of every other nation in the world specifically not to be honor- or duty-bound to admit to the electorate huge numbers of people with zero interest in preserving the national character of their country? The whole impetus behind Zionism was to provide a homeland for Jewish people in which they would always be safe from persecution, and in which Judaism and Jewishness would be permitted to flourish naturally as the dominant culture. The whole point of declaring Israeli independence in the first place was to create such a haven for Jews in which Jewish culture would not have to compete with a dominant culture. So to say that somehow the Israelis have less of a right to wish to determine the character of their state than the Norwegians or the Laotians or the Bolivians enjoy with respect to their own countries—that is not a denial of the democratic principle as much as it is an affirmation of the inalienable right of nations to self-define.

And so we return to the late Juliano Mer-Khamis. In life, he stood for the fantasy that he could somehow transcend the givens of the situation and personally exist as an Israeli and as a Palestinian, as a Christian and as a Jew, as a citizen of Israel and as an enemy of Israel, as a resident of Jenin and as a resident of Haifa. For his effort to promote the idea that such a one-state solution would be the ideal for Jews and Arabs in the Land of Israel, an idea that mirrored his own sense of himself as one person with dual identities, he was murdered last week and buried just yesterday. I didn’t know him personally, obviously. I have no reason to suppose that he was a terrorist or that he condoned terrorism. By all accounts, he was a talented actor. But his death only makes it clearer to me that the proponents of the so-called “one state solution” are enemies of Israel whose idea, whether they understand its implications or not, will lead first to civil unrest, then to civil war, then to unimaginable unhappiness for all concerned. The right of the Jewish people to live securely and safely as Jewish citizens of a Jewish state seems to me to be at the core of the matter and, that being the case, people fall in on either side of the dispute based on the degree to which they accept or reject that specific notion.

Majority rule is a sacred principle that correctly governs day-to-day life in republics such as our own. But there have to be exceptions to that general principle, and the right of nations to self-determination—and to pursue futures framed by their own sense of themselves and their national culture—that seems equally basic to my sense of how the world should work and how its nations should learn to live together in peace.

Happy People

2011-03-25T10:49:00.003-04:00

People unfamiliar with the Bible who open up the Book of Psalms for the first time are generally surprised to notice that the book begins, of all things, with a definition of happiness. Nor is that opening effort, according to which happiness is best defined as success in avoiding the company of scoundrels and training oneself to delight in the study of the teachings of God, the only effort in the book to come up with a reasonable answer to the question of how best to define true happiness. There are, in fact, twenty-four different efforts in the Psalter to address the issue. All begin with the famous word ashrei (“Happy is” or “Happy are”) which word most worshipers will know as the word that begins the opening two lines in the prayer that generally goes by that name. Some are banal (“Happy is the one who trusts in God”), but others are more surprising (“Happy are those who know the sound of the shofar”) and still others are as unexpected as they are provocative (“Happy is the one whom God deigns to punish”). Nor are these twenty-four the Bible’s only efforts to define happiness. The Book of Proverbs has its own “Ashrei” passages, some ordinary (“Happy is the individual who finds wisdom”), others more challenging (“Happy are the ever-anxious”). The Book of Daniel ends with the hopeful thought that only in awaiting the messianic moment does true happiness lie. The author of the Book of Job, a dour type at the best of times, echoes the sentiment from the Psalter mentioned above that real happiness consists of being taken seriously enough by Judge God to be punished for one’s sins, thereby (presumably) being able truly to move past them and embrace a finer future. God may wound the righteous, the author of Job continues, but the same divine hands that chastise also make whole.

Different people will have different answers when challenged to say wherein the path to real happiness lies. Their answers could be as useful as they would certainly be interesting too, in that people still in search of happiness could then just choose one of the suggested paths and attempt to travel down it. Still, the more reliable path towards learning exactly wherein happiness lies would be not just to ask random people what they think but actually to examine society itself and then to analyze the results thoughtfully to determine which specific groups of people within society define themselves as being happy people and which do not. Presumably the larger the number of these groups to which any one individual might belong, the more likely that person would be to know true happiness. And from there the rest of us could go on, if we were so inclined, to attempt to emulate that person and in so doing to find the path to personal happiness for ourselves as well.

Luckily for us, the Gallup Organization has been compiling statistics regarding happiness and has come to some interesting conclusions, some that anyone might have anticipated in advance and others which no one, myself very much included, would have thought too likely. The methodology employed was simple enough: they telephoned one thousand people chosen at random over a period of three years and asked them all sorts of questions related to the levels of satisfaction and pleasure they get from the different things they experience in life: work, family, marriage, food, drink, sports, hobbies, etc. And using the results, they developed something called the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index they then analyzed in terms of geography, ethnicity, gender, age, marital status, number of children, state of residence, height, profession, and other factors. The New York Times, hearing about this undertaking and curious where it might lead, asked the Gallup people to utilize their data bank to determine what the happiest person in our country would be like in terms of the categories just mentioned. In other words, the Times challenged the Gallup people to use the data they had gathered about which segments of American society are the happiest to determine what someone would look like who fell into all the happiest categories.

The results were very interesting. It doesn’t surprise me particularly that married people are generally happier than single people or that people who have children are happier than people who remain childless. I was certainly not surprised, nor will any of my readers be, that richer people tend to be happier than poor people. Nor was I amazed that taller people generally tested happier than short people, although I’m not sure exactly why that doesn’t surprise me. (I do, after all, know plenty of happy short people. Maybe I was unduly influenced by Randy Newman as a younger person.) Other details were more surprising. The state reporting the happiest citizens was Hawaii. Is it the weather? All those pineapples? The distance from the rest of everybody else? Or is it simply the natural beauty of the place that makes happy its residents? Who knows? But other results were more surprising still!

Being a man, I was amazed that men appear to be the happier gender. Being a rabbi, I was surprised that business owners were the happiest people in terms of their profession, followed by professionals. (For some reason, I would have thought it would be the other way ‘round.) And being the age I actually am, I was very surprised to read that, as a class, senior citizens (in this case defined as people over sixty-five years of age) were happier than any other segment of the population analyzed by age. Certainly everything in our youth-oriented culture suggests that just the opposite should be true. Everybody wants to be young. Nobody wants to be old. Plenty of older people do what they can to look younger. No young people have their hair colored gray so they can look older! But when it came down to asking actual people how they feel, the media’s basic assumption that young is good and old is bad turned out to be wrong. Young people may have blacker hair and firmer bodies, but it was senior citizens across the board who reported that they were more content than people in any other age bracket. Go figure! And also surprising, at least to me, was that Americans of Asian origin tend as a class to be happier (and by far) than white people, black people, Hispanic people…and every other ethnic or racial group.

In its own class of amazingness are the twin statistics that, when analyzed by religion, Jewish people turn out to be happier than the members of any other religious group and that, when analyzed as a group unto themselves, observant Jewish people are happier than non-observant ones. We are a happy people? We are lots of things, to be sure, many of them positive: clever, industrious, resilient, (at least so far) indomitable, loyal, charitable, and many other good things I can think of easily. But happy? I grew up thinking crankiness, not happiness, was the quintessential Jewish trait. (In my parents’ house, the crankier and more disgruntled somebody appeared, the more intelligent they were presumed to be.) But there it is in black and white for all to read in the Times of March 6: Jewish people are the happiest of people who self-identify in terms of religion. If my father were only here to know that, would that make him happy? Not likely! But still, I find myself wondering what he’d think.

Anyway, it turns out that the Times went one step further and located someone who meets all the above-listed criteria for happiness: an observant Jewish person who is also an Asian America, who is married and a parent, who is self-employed and a top earner, and who lives in Hawaii. His name is Alvin Wong. He lives in a kosher Jewish home in Honolulu. He owns his own business, some sort of health care management firm. He makes a lot of money. He is married. He’s a dad. At sixty-nine, he’s old enough to be one of America’s happy seniors. And at five foot ten, the same as your author (!), he is tall enough not to be considered short by the Gallup people. When the Times contacted him and told him that he met every one of the criteria he laughed and said, “This is a practical joke, right?” Just what you’d think a happy person would say upon being told that he wasn’t just happy, but that he met the statistics in exactly the right way to be on the right side of every curve and thus to be, almost by definition, the happiest man in America. He also confirmed, once he realized the Times was on the level, that he was indeed a very happy person. Could there be other Jewish Asian-American husband/dads in Hawaii who are tall enough and who make enough money to qualify? I suppose there could be. But the Times couldn’t find one. Other than in Hawaii, I also wouldn’t know where to look.

At the other end of the spectrum were gathered the unhappiest Americans. West Virginia is the state whose citizens are least likely to describe themselves as happy people. Among religious groups, the least happy are American Muslims. Among workers, people employed in the transportation industry and in manufacturing are the most miserable. The Times, at least to date, does not appear to have made any effort to locate a short, unmarried, childless Muslim woman in West Virginia who works in manufacturing but makes less than $12,000 a year and ask her whether she is as unhappy as the Gallup poll suggests she should be. My guess is that she’d be making the best of her situation and that whether or not she self-defines as happy would be a function not of her faith, her job, or her gender, but of her sense that she is doing the best she can with what she has to work with. In terms of my own life, I’ve felt the best when I felt that I was doing my best, when I’ve felt that I was playing the cards I’ve been dealt (as well as those I’ve dealt myself) to my own advantage as cleverly and thoughtfully as possible, when I’ve felt that was being the best version of the person I actually am even if I could make up some fantasy version of myself that would outdo the actual me in every rubric people bring to bear in determining whether they are truly content with their lives.

I wonder if Alvin Wong is happier now than he was before the Times identified him or less happy. Probably, he’s some combination of gratified and embarrassed. Or perhaps he simply is too happy to let something like an article in a newspaper he probably doesn’t even read affect him one way or the other.

Stupid and Bad

2011-03-17T10:17:00.004-04:00

Who is the real fiend of the Purim story? I know, I know…but, really, there are—or at least should be—two contenders for the position.

One is a touchy prig of a man capable of seeking the destruction of an entire people because he took offense when one of their countrymen behaved laxly with respect to the honor he took as his due. A craven sort as well, he was not above begging for his own life when things went south. But until that unexpected turn of events takes place he does not seem at all the type likely to beg, least of all while lying prostrate before a woman…and a Jewish woman at that! The portrait of the man in question, the man whose name we drown out in synagogue, is thus both complex and interesting. Arrogant, cruel, self-absorbed, heartless, pompous, touchy, egomaniacal…that’s our Haman!

The other man is depicted equally unappealingly, just with a different set of unpleasant features. Lazy, stupid, unfeeling, childish, rash, and gullible, he is recalled by most as a mostly benign but also incredibly powerful dolt. Like Pharaoh far before him—far before him, that is to say, both in terms of history and also in terms of the book in which they both appear—this other personality too possesses all the trappings of great power. He commands armies, reigns over a palace filled with servile ministers tripping over themselves to do his bidding, rules a nation with the absolute power of the absolute monarch (which is precisely what he is), and appears to be able to act wholly without restraint or limit. And although his portrait is less complex than the first fellow’s (and for that matter also less complex than Pharaoh’s), it is equally interesting. Disrespectful to women in general and capable apparently of being generous with a woman only when he expects a subsequent reward for his trouble, the king of kings is depicted as being essentially a dunce whose fiendish minister manipulates him with the ease of a child training a puppy to fetch a stick. Readers get the sense they are supposed to find his gullibility and, even more to the point, the ease with which he can be maneuvered around by others more amusing than sickening. As a result, he comes across as essentially benign, as a drunk too involved with seeking his own pleasure actually to rule the country over which he reigns. And, indeed, there is no scene in the Megillah in which the king of Persia is actually depicted as governing his country, as doing what kings are theoretically supposed to do with respect to the people they govern. As a result it is he, King Achashveirosh himself, who is remembered as a sot and lecher, while Haman gets to be Hitler.

But how reasonable is that, really? Let’s read along as the plot unfolds. I’ll print the parts I would like to suggest for special consideration in italics. “And so it came to pass. The royal scribes were summoned on the thirteenth day of the first month and ordered to write up the edict Haman had prompted the king to have issued, which was then duly transmitted to all the king’s ministers and to the governors of each province, and also to all local officials within the kingdom. Nor were these edicts promulgated solely in Persian. Indeed, different versions of the text were prepared in the languages and alphabets of every province and ethnicity in the kingdom, every single one of which was issued in the name of King Achashveirosh and sealed with the king’s own signet ring. Furthermore, all of these documents were distributed by trained messengers to every province of the kingdom and all made precisely the same announcement: that it was the king’s will that every Jew, including the children and the elderly, even infants and women, were to be annihilated, murdered and exterminated on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, that is of the month of Adar, whereupon their personal possessions would be free for all to plunder. Nor was this a secret plan of any sort. Just the contrary, in fact, was the case: the formal written documents publishing this new law in every province were displayed publicly so that the peoples of those provinces could prepare the pogrom in a timely fashion for the date specified in the edict. Of course, no messengers were needed to promulgate the edict in Shushan itself. And so, as the messengers raced off to bring the document announcing the impending massacre to the provinces in accordance with the king’s order, the edict was also publicly posted locally in Shushan, Persia’s capital city. Indeed, that very night as the king and Haman sat down to get drunk, as they did every evening, the city of Shushan itself was in a state of complete upheaval.”

So we have wily Haman scheming to punish Mordechai’s people for a slight probably not even intended to be taken personally and offering the king an unimaginable sum of money—something like three hundred tons of silver by most estimates—to get the king to agree to act as Haman wishes him to. But, in the end, Haman, for all his preening megalomania, is powerless. He appears to have plenty of money, but no real power…and certainly not the power to condemn an entire people to death. It is the king who has the power, the king (therefore) who must act. And that is just what the Megillah says happens and why the text returns in the passage cited just above again and again to the fact that this was the king’s edict promulgated at the king’s command in the provinces of the king’s empire. Even the copies of the edict intended for the provinces, the text notes in passing, were not merely issued over the king’s name but specifically sealed with his own royal signet ring. The king, therefore, is the “real” author of the Jews’ misery, the promulgator of the edict that threatens to annihilate them. By describing him as gullible and Haman as wicked, but then by stating over and over that the evil but essentially powerless Haman could do nothing on his own and that the edict of annihilation could and did come only from the king, the text is prompting readers to ask themselves which, in the end, is worse: stupid or bad.

It’s not that simple a question to answer and it would clearly be best not to be stupid or bad. But behind the obvious debate such a question could inspire is hiding a different lesson entirely. Haman, acting on his own, could have accomplished nothing. On the other hand, the king, as unintelligent as he is all-powerful, also would have done nothing on his own. It may be possible to be either bad or stupid—and it clearly is possible to be both—but the real lesson to derive from the story as told is that the destruction of Persian Jewry was only plausible once stupid and bad met and aligned their forces to create the kind of malign havoc that could conceivably have led to true catastrophe. So perhaps the lesson behind the Megillah’s exciting story is that the way to protect ourselves is to combat both wickedness and stupidity. Combating wickedness means working vigorously to see to it that the perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts are not just condemned but punished, that Holocaust deniers are not merely chastised but pursued in our country within the criminal justice system just as vigorously they would be in (of all places) Germany, that people who publicly spread lies about Israel and the work of its armed forces be charged with libel and pursued just as would anyone guilty of calumny or libel, and that people who foment hatred of Jews, Jewishness, or Judaism be pursued relentlessly as promoters of hatred and not just ignored or tolerated out of misguided allegiance to the First Amendment. Combating stupidity is harder. Combating stupidity means working to make sure that Israel is represented fairly and honestly in the textbooks our nation’s schoolchildren read, working to guarantee that the lessons of the Shoah are taught widely and correctly, working to be certain that Judaism is presented fairly not just in our nation’s textbooks but also from the pulpits of our nation’s churches and mosques and, in some ways even more challengingly, in the lecture halls of our nation’s universities.

To my way of thinking, the relative benignity of stupid and bad when considered separately and their exponentially greater capacity to do evil when their forces are joined is the lesson that Haman and Achashveirosh teach jointly through the narrative of the Megillah. There’s an old rabbinic midrash about two guards, one blind and one lame, who were once hired to guard a precious vineyard by a king who was more afraid of his own staff pilfering his grapes than he was of outside thieves. Figuring that the blind guard couldn’t see the grapes and the lame one couldn’t run off with them, the king felt secure…but that was only because he forgot to remember that they were only impotent as individuals, but that they were going to be capable of robbing the king blind once the lame guard was seated atop the blind one’s shoulders, which is exactly what happened. In its own way, the moral of the story is the same as the Megillah’s: you can only be fully secure when you defend yourself vigorously even against enemies who, for all they appear unable to do much harm on their own, could wreak true havoc if they ever combined forces. The Jews of Shushan learned that lesson the hard way. May God grant that we learn it the far easier way by sitting back on Purim and listening to the Megillah. And may God protect our people as well, both in Israel and in the lands of our dispersion.

Angels in America

2011-03-10T11:37:00.002-05:00

I probably shouldn’t admit this at all, and least of all in print, but I’ve always been a fan of “angel” television shows and, slightly less embarrassingly, of at least some of the more popular “angel” movies of recent years as well. I didn’t even live in the United States for the five years that Michael Landon starred in Highway to Heaven, but it aired in Israel and Canada on “real” TV and was available in Germany on U.S. Armed Forces television network, and I don’t think we ever missed an episode. (We didn’t have anything to do with the army during our years in Germany, but we lived close enough to one of the big bases to receive their television signal easily.) Partially, I suppose I liked the show because Michael Landon is a landsman who hailed, albeit as Eugene Orowitz, at least originally from my old neighborhood in Queens, but mostly I liked it because it corresponded so precisely to one of deepest fantasies, the one that God’s governance of the world is not solely left in our hands, that it isn’t all about finding elusive and allusive signs of God’s presence in the world if and when we can, that there really are people who walk among us and who know (and not symbolically or metaphorically, but categorically and verifiably) what it is God wants of us all. Or rather not people exactly, of course, but angels, divine beings who only look like people but who travel the highway to heaven not by ruminating about it or fantasizing about it but actually by traveling on it in the manner of real people going somewhere on a road that exists fully and really outside the fertile imagination of the traveler.

The Bible, after all, is replete with such beings. One of my favorite biblical scenes is the one in which Joshua at Jericho suddenly looks up and sees a man standing before him. Naturally enough, he, Joshua, asks the man if he is friend or foe. The man answers that he Is God’s angel sent to lead the Israelites to victory and that he has finally arrived. For some reason I have always especially liked the words ata bati, the Hebrew words corresponding to the “Now I have come” part in that story, and wondered what it would be like actually to hear Michael Landon—or someone!—say them to me, then reveal some crucial, otherwise unknowable, piece of my personal destiny. Which of us hasn’t had some version of that fantasy? And therein, of course, lay the real secret of the success of Landon’s show, which took the form precisely of a weekly elaboration of that exact scene as Michael Landon’s character said those words or their equivalent constantly to people into whose lives he stepped in that great Hollywood style to share the One Detail That generally Changed Everything. Ata bati. I’ve come…and not just to earth (which would really be cool enough all by itself), but specifically to you!

Later on, there was Touched by An Angel. Different cast, same concept. The show, which ran for nine seasons, was far more successful than Highway to Heaven and it had a different feel to it—slightly grittier story lines, darker both in terms of the dilemmas its angels were obliged to attempt to resolve and also in terms of the way the human beings on the show behaved both towards their would-be saviors and towards each other—but the show appealed to me personally because it provided a weekly midrash on the same fantasy that earlier generated its predecessor’s plot lines. And so there I was, almost twenty years older when Touched by An Angel ended than I was when Highway to Heaven premiered, and I still liked the idea of there being malakhim among us guiding us forward through the mazes that are our lives, hinting to us which direction to take at which crossroads, even shoving us out of harm’s way when necessary. Like all rabbis, I like to think of myself as a sophisticated theologian who turns to the sacred classics of the learned sages of previous generations to find spiritual solace and guidance. But the allure of these kitschy, melodramatic shows featuring actual guides appearing out of nowhere to whisper precisely the right counsel into the ear of precisely the right person at precisely the right moment—how can reading even the greatest of old books compete with sitting on the couch and watching a show with that kind of seductive appeal?

Movies, I’m less sappy about. For some reason, I always find It’s a Wonderful Life more depressing than uplifting. Still, I loved John Travolta in Michael. Loved Ben and Matt in Dogma. Didn’t love Denzel Washington in The Preacher’s Wife. Truly loved Emma Thomson in Angels in America. Loved Prairie Home Companion, but couldn’t quite figure out what the angel thing was really all about. And then, just this last Saturday night, Joan and I went to see Matt Damon and Emily Blunt in The Adjustment Bureau. It got great reviews. It features great acting by some very talented actors. It will probably be a huge hit. I hated it.

The basic premise of the movie is that God, coyly called “The Chairman,” is in complete control of the universe and specifically of all the people in it. Indeed, according to the movie, we are only allowed to think that we make decisions that matter in our lives but are actually mere pawns in an elaborate game plan none of us knows or can ever can know. Free will is real, but trivial: we can decide whether to have oatmeal or corn flakes for breakfast, but when we make truly important decisions that might inadvertently lead us away from The Plan, God (or Whomever) sends angels, coyly called “case workers” in the movie, who work for the celestial Adjustment Bureau and whose job it is either gently or not gently to nudge, or occasionally violently to force, us back onto the right track. These angels are odd dudes. They carry around magic Kindles detailing in some sort of electronic hieroglyphics the plan God has evolved for every single human being. For some unexplained reason, they are powerless when surrounded by water. They don’t have wings, but for some reason they have to wear hats. (An angel in the movie notes en passant that even a yarmulke will do. So there!) And those hats really matter because they somehow allow the angels wearing them to travel around the world at miraculous speeds by opening magic doors that reduce the distance between their location at any given moment and wherever it is they wish they were to the width of a threshold. (There’s something about the direction you have to turn the doorknob too, but all that I could seize about that part was that it is really, really bad to turn the knob the wrong way!)

The movie also has a “real” plot that involves its two stars bucking the system—there’s a surprise!—and eventually either ending up together or not ending up together. (I don’t want to ruin the movie for those of you planning to see it by giving away the ending.) But what I wanted to write about today isn’t the movie’s plot per se, which was developed from a short story by Philip K. Dick, but the notion underlying that plot that free will is a chimera and that the real work of God’s angels consists of making us follow some pre-conceived plan without respect to the shape we ourselves may want our own lives to take or the path we wish them to follow.

The notion that we are all always on track, that some celestial creature dressed up like a regular human being is specifically in charge of keeping each of us on track, that none of us therefore is even capable of living life not according to God’s plan—this is a powerful set of ideas, one that will appeal on some level to more or less anyone who believes in destiny. How could it not? And yet…there is also something silly about the notion that these plans exist. And when we are not in the actual throes of succumbing to the pleasure of feeling ourselves so securely in God’s hands that no decision we ever make actually matters at all, I think most of us know that perfectly well. In any event, and Hollywood movies and television shows notwithstanding, our Torah teaches us that precisely the opposite is the case. That every decision a human being makes has the potential to further that individual along the path towards his or her destiny or to lead him or her off in the opposite direction. That deeds matter precisely because free will is real, because God rules the world specifically not by making us behave according to pre-conceived plans but by allowing us to make our own choices and then letting us bear the consequences of those choices for better or for worse. That the ineffable sanctity of life derives not from the sense that we only imagine ourselves to be free people but are actually marionettes endlessly being yanked along by invisible strings connected to the celestial Puppeteer, but from the sense that we are absolutely free and unfettered in terms of our ability to choose right from wrong…and also in terms of the ability each of us has absolutely to muck things up, to make a complete mess of our lives, and to turn our backs on our own ultimate destinies.

Movies like The Adjustment Bureau are popular, I think, because they play directly to the fantasy, no less soothing than pernicious, that none of us bears any real responsibility for our lives, that faith in God can be manipulated to yield the almost corollary belief that we are mere clay on the cosmic Potter’s wheel…and that we can no more make real choices that truly matter in life than can inert, lifeless clay. It’s a seductive idea and the challenge, therefore, is not to refuse to enjoy a good movie but to refuse to live lives based on the insidious supposition that moral decision making in life is hardly worth the effort because, in the end, our lives will be adjusted by angels wearing hats (and staying away from large bodies of water) who are responsible for making our lives play out according to some predetermined and divinely inflexible plan. Are we up to the challenge? It’s an excellent question, but one each of us will have to answer personally for him or herself.

From One Generation to Another

2011-03-03T10:09:00.006-05:00

When I was a little boy of maybe seven or eight, I remember my father taking me to the Veteran’s Day parade in Manhattan and pointing out that there were veterans of the Spanish-American War marching right past us. I don’t recall being exceptionally impressed. Or maybe I was in some subliminal way—I do remember the incident fifty years later, after all—but I’m still almost sure it didn’t feel like a big deal to me at the time. This would have been in 1960 or 1961, I think. The Spanish-American War was fought more than sixty years earlier in 1898. Soldiers who charged up San Juan Hill in their twenties would have been in their eighties when I saw them on Fifth Avenue. So there were these old guys marching up the avenue, I think I would have thought…so what? Nor was I too impressed when my father attempted to set things into more interesting perspective by telling me that he himself could recall being a little boy in the 1920s—my dad was born in 1916—and seeing elderly Civil War veterans marching in the same parade. The parade would have been a new feature of New York life back then, the first one having taken place in 1919. But the Civil War ended in 1865, so, say, a nineteen-year-old at Appomattox would have been born in 1846 and then in his eighties when my father could certainly have seen him marching up Fifth Avenue most of a lifetime later. I don’t recall this revelation making that much of an impression on me either, however.

But the things our parents tell us when are children are never quite as gone as all that and I was brought back to that conversation with my dad a few days ago when I read the obituary in the paper of Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last remaining American veteran of the First World War, who died last Sunday at age 110. He had a long life and a correspondingly long obituary. Buckles, I learned as I read, was born on the first of February in 1901 and was just a boy of sixteen when he lied about his age and, after crossing the Atlantic on the S.S. Carpathia (the ship that a few years earlier had picked up the survivors of the Titanic), joined the American Expeditionary Force in France as an ambulance driver. So he only caught the tail end of the Great War, but had even worse luck years later when he found himself in Manila when the Japanese occupied the Philippines shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequently ended up spending more than four years in Japanese custody, a harrowing experience that lasted almost until the end of the war itself. But what caught my imagination were not Buckles’ recollections of France or the Philippines as much as his comment, mentioned only in passing in his obituary, that even at the end of his life he could still recall meeting veterans of the Crimean War when he briefly landed in England on his way to France.

The Crimean War! Now that was a long time ago. Do kids in school even learn about the Crimean War these days? In its day, it was a huge deal. Fought from 1853 to 1856, the war pitted the Russian Empire against a strange alliance of Britain, France, Turkey, Sardinia and the German Duchy of Nassau, and was started by, of all things, Napoleon III attempting to seize control of the Holy Land (as he would have called it) from the Turks. The Russians for some reason, probably because they were hoping to seize the property themselves, declared themselves opposed. One thing led to another. By the time it was all over more than a quarter million soldiers were dead as were, by some accounts, at least that many civilians. And in 1917, when Frank Buckles passed through England on his way to France, he met veterans of that almost forgotten war. I remember reading Tolstoy’s Sevastapol Sketches when I was younger and being fully engaged by the book and its exciting story lines and very expressive prose. But, aside from Tolstoy lovers, who remembers that there even was a Crimean War these days, let alone who fought in it or what it was all about? But let’s focus on Buckles’ meeting with those veterans in London and from there move on, as readers know I am always predisposed to do, into the realm of pure fantasy.

In my mind’s eye, I imagine those Crimean veterans Buckles met as young men meeting British soldiers returning from the New World after General Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. Why not? Men who fought in the Crimean War in their twenties would have been born in the 1830s and surely could have known veterans of the American Revolution in their younger years! (Didn’t Melville’s title character Israel Potter spend the fifty years following the American Revolution schlepping around England before he finally found the means to return home to America?) And so do the walls that generally separate the generations collapse slightly before us as America mourns a man who in his youth met at least some men who in their own youths could certainly have met veterans of the American Revolution. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so long ago at all that colonial soldiers were coming home from Yorktown and savoring their victory as citizens of the newly independent United States. Could Frank Buckles really have had personal contact as a teenager with someone who himself could have known someone who had fought under General Washington? It seems so!

Buckles was 110 when he died and it appears certain that he was America’s last surviving doughboy. He was, however, not the last living veteran of World War I. A certain Charles Choules, who served in the Royal Navy, and a woman, Florence Green, once a member of Britain’s Women’s Royal Air Force, are still alive and are believed now to be the only living people to have served in any capacity at all during the First World War. (The women in the Women’s Royal Air Force did not fly planes, by the way. Instead, they trained as airplane mechanics and drivers, the idea being to free men who normally did those jobs for military service elsewhere. Florence Green is the sole surviving member of the organization, which was disbanded in 1920.) Who they may or may not have met in their lifetimes, who knows? But I find myself focused not on the detail that there are two other First World War veterans still among the living. Far more interesting to me is the thought that our last surviving American veteran was when he died not merely a very old man and one of the few surviving survivors of a terrible war that in the end resulted in upwards of sixteen million deaths, but that he was a link to the past in a way that is as romantic to contemplate as it is slightly hard to believe.

The words “from generation to generation” appear and reappear in our liturgy, always reminding worshipers that the experience of communal prayer is intended to link them not only to others in the world to pray but also to countless generations stretching back into the past and (in a way slightly more difficult to fathom) forward into the future. There is a certain satisfaction in that thought, but we rarely pause to consider the concept itself of generations being interlinked. Surely, we are linked to our great-grandparents and (please God) to our great-grandchildren through ritual and belief. But we are also linked to them by people like the late Frank Buckles who somehow transcend the normal lifespan of most people—the man was 110 when he died, after all—and through some unexpected combination of happenstance, good fortune, and opportunity serve as physical links to the past in a way that no monument or battlefield ever could. Did my father, who only died in 1999, really in his lifetime encounter Civil War veterans? The grandparents of those veterans could certainly have served in the Colonial Army as well!

I remember when I was in rabbinical school one of our professors saying that modern Jewish history—or at least modern Jewish intellectual history—begins in 1204 with Maimonides’ death. Now that feels like a long time ago. But if two full centuries could collapse in my mind into a handful of encounters simply by reading a single obituary, so, really, what’s another six? The great-grandparents of soldiers who fought with Washington in the Battle of Long Island in August of 1776, after all, could surely have been born a mere two or three hundred years or so after the great-grandchildren of Maimonides’ great-grandchildren could still have been alive!

In the Defense of Marriage

2011-02-25T11:17:00.004-05:00

Like many of you, I’m sure, I was at first not at all sure what to make of the announcement President Obama and Attorney General Holder made yesterday to the effect that the federal government will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage act that Congress voted into law in 1996. That’s how it works? The president or his attorney general just decide to ignore an Act of Congress that they find personally unappealing or objectionable? Can I ignore laws that don’t appeal to me? (Don’t bother answering that one.) Or is something else afoot here, something that I didn’t fully understand when I read the article in the paper Wednesday on the plane home from our seventy-two fabulous hours in Key West? As I considered the matter more carefully, in fact, it struck me that that too could well be the case.

To understand what happened on Wednesday, you need to know about something called the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution, also known as Article IV, Section 1. Simply put, the clause requires each of the states to recognize the "public acts, records, and judicial proceedings" of any of the other states. This has not traditionally been a source of much controversy. A woman gets divorced in Idaho, then is still considered a divorced person when she moves to Alabama. How could that possibly be controversial? It never was, but then, as it became clear that some states in the union were going to permit same-sex couples to marry, the Full Faith and Credit Clause went from being a pareve administrative matter of interest only to students of constitutional law to being at the center of a huge brouhaha poised to evolve quickly into a major national debate. Were states that specifically did not permit same-sex marriage going to be obliged under the Full Faith and Credit Clause not only to recognize same-sex marriages performed legally in other states as valid but also to grant the parties to those marriages the same benefits for which they would qualify if they were in male-female marriages? It sounded that way to many, and so Congress voted into law the Defense of Marriage Act which decreed that no state needed to consider same-sex marriages in other states as legitimate or legally consequential. Equally meaningfully, the Defense of Marriage Act (sometimes called by the acronym DOMA) also forbids the federal government from acknowledging the legal reality of same-sex marriages by formally defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Readers inclined to dismiss this as solely a philosophical or intellectual issue need to reconsider that approach: in 2003, the General Accounting Office counted over eleven hundred benefits, rights, and privileges that are either fully contingent on marital status or in which marital status is a factor, and that makes this into a very big deal for a large number of citizens eager to be treated equitably and fairly.

Clearly, it is no one’s best interests for it not to be clear whether or not a citizen is considered married in the state in which he or she lives. In its own way, the DOMA was supposed to speak to that issue by granting the same right to states to determine who is married that the federal government simultaneously arrogated to itself. So the real question is not whether it serves anyone’s interests for the marital status of citizens to be unclear, but whether DOMA solved the problem in a way that did not by its nature trample on the civil rights of gay citizens to be treated equally under the law, the single most basic civil right of any citizen in a democratic state.

In the United States, only Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, Hawaii, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia permit same-sex marriage. Some other states, like our own state, recognize same-sex marriages that take place in states where they are permitted just as they recognize all out-of-state marriages. Still other states recognize such marriages as civil unions or domestic partnerships without calling them marriages. On the other side of the ledger, thirteen states, not content merely with not allowing same-sex unions, have actually enacted statutory bans forbidding such marriages from taking place. And more than half the states in the Union have enacted constitutional amendments formally defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, legislation presumably intended to guarantee that, whatever legal recognition same-sex unions eventually acquire, those unions will not be called “marriages.”

It was into this complicated situation that the attorney general and the president waded earlier this week. In a six-page letter to the speaker of the House of Representatives, the attorney general basically said that he and the president have concluded that the third section of the DOMA, the one defining marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman, is unconstitutional and that the current administration, lacking the power to repeal an Act of Congress, would simply no longer defend the statute in court. More specifically, the attorney general’s letter justified this decision by noting the administration’s opinion that gay people meet the criteria requiring the government to scrutinize legislation passed in their regard to guarantee that they are not being discriminated against. (The four requirements are that the group in question have suffered discrimination in the past, that the members of the group exhibit immutable distinguishing characteristics, that the group be a minority, and that the characteristics that define membership in the group be unrelated to its members’ ability to contribute to society or to perform the duties of citizens.) This is the part I think most citizens like myself did not fully understand when the story first broke: that the job of the attorney general and the Department of Justice specifically is to take an “affirmative position on the matter of scrutiny,” when it appears that citizens rights are being unjustly or unreasonably curtailed by discriminatory practices or legislation.

The question of whether same-sex marriages are a good or a bad thing for society is not really at the heart of the matter here and what the administration did on Wednesday should not be taken as an endorsement of same-sex marriage. The president himself has repeatedly spoken out in favor of establishing a kind of civil union that would grant same-sex couples the same advantages as male-female couples but without using the loaded term “marriage” to describe their union. Whether he will stick to that or not, who knows? He himself has referred to his opinions on the issue as “evolving,” but without describing the course of their ongoing evolution too clearly. So the last word on the matter is still a very long way from being written. But the attorney general’s letter of earlier this week addressed a different question entirely: whether gay citizens do or do not meet the four-fold set of criteria listed above that would require the attorney general to subject legislation in their regard to scrutiny with respect to the single question of whether any specific law is or is not discriminatory. The president thinks that gay people qualify. After reading the list of criteria myself, I don’t really see how anyone could argue otherwise.

As a rabbi, I am asked regularly how I feel about the issue of same-sex marriage itself. In my opinion, the heart of the problem rests in the concept of there being civil marriage in the first place. A religious institution at heart, marriage should be available to citizens who wish to embrace the concept as it exists in the context of their own religious traditions. In other words, Catholic citizens should be free to marry under canon law in Catholic churches. Muslims should be free to marry according to the laws of Islam in our country’s mosques. Jewish citizens should be free to marry in the synagogues with which they choose to affiliate and to be married in those synagogues by the rabbis who serve them as their spiritual leaders. Americans who are not inclined to affiliate with religious institutions should have the possibility of entering into civil unions with other citizens without respect for the criteria that would apply if the state government in question were a religious institution. In other words, as long as there are secular benefits to be had by living in legally-recognized pairs there should be a way for all citizens to acquire the status to acquire those benefits in a fully secular way that is not extended arbitrarily to some citizens and not to others. Using the religious term “marriage” to describe such unions is, I believe, counterproductive because it suggests that the secular government can formalize a bond that is traditionally and essentially a religious one. Religious matters, I believe, should be left in the hands of the nation’s spiritual leaders and secular governments should limit themselves to the pursuit of secular goals and the perfection of secular institutions.

I do not see any contradiction in feeling that Jews in synagogues should be married according to Jewish law, but that the federal and state laws that govern us as citizens of our country and states should be fully non-discriminatory in every way. I would take the greatest umbrage at receiving a letter from the attorney general informing me how I must conduct matters governed by religious law in the context of my own congregation. But I applaud the administration for taking a step earlier this week that I now understand was fully in keeping with their mandate to safeguard the civil rights of all citizens and to move aggressively against measures intended to erode those rights, let alone to trample on them.

Presuming Watson

2011-02-17T11:42:00.004-05:00

I’m not a huge Jeopardy fan. I’ve still watched the show many times over the years, however, originally as part of some never-actually-developed-in-real-life fantasy of applying to be a contestant and then eventually merely as a play-along-at-home type. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I don’t win. I have the sense it’s dramatically easier to play from the couch than it would be actually to compete for real on the actual program. Still, when I do watch I usually enjoy the show. And I’ve had plenty of time to form an opinion, as have had we all; the show was first shown on television in 1964 in the version featuring Art Fleming as the host and is currently in the twenty-seventh consecutive season of its current incarnation with host Alex Trebek.

I watch. I don’t watch. Jeopardy is not a big part of my life. Up until this week, I don’t think I could have even said with any certainty when exactly the show is on or on what channel. But I’ve been watching all week this week, as I know many of you also have, as the IBM supercomputer named Watson was one of the featured contestants. The other two contestants, both human beings, were no slouches. (One is the person who has won the most money on the game; the other is the one who has won the most games. Together they’ve gone home with more than five million dollars between them. For its part, the computer not only hasn’t ever won a penny but also won’t go home, so to speak, with anything this week either because IBM has pledged to give all of Watson’s winnings to charity.)

Watson is a big machine both physically and in terms of what it can do. It can perform eighty trillion operations per second. To put things more clearly, the machine has the equivalent of two million pages of information in its memory and can scan them all in about three seconds. (Computer savvy readers will be interested in knowing that Watson operates with fifteen terabytes of RAM. By comparison, the machine I am using to write this has four gigabytes of RAM, which means that Watson operates three-thousand-seven-hundred-and-fifty times faster than my computer. And this is actually a pretty zippy laptop I write on!) Watson is not linked to the internet, which would obviously have given it an unfair advantage on the show. Whatever answers it gave, it had therefore to find somewhere within the facts it already “knew,” just as the human contestants were obliged to do. So the contest was fair, assuming you don’t think one contestant having a brain the size of ten refrigerators lined up next to each other made the playing field sufficiently unlevel to make meaningless the results.

On the first night, the human beings and the machine appeared more or less evenly matched. At the end of the first round of play, in fact, the machine was actually tied with one of the human beings for first place. (Each had won $5000 and the third player had won a measly $2000. But these were only make-believe sums used to keep score; the real prize was $1,000,000.) By the second night, however, Watson roared dramatically into first place with a score of almost $36,000, while the human contestants ended up with less than half of that between the two of them. It was, I have to admit, a very exciting game. By the third game, played Wednesday evening, it was a rout and, in the end, the win went to the machine and the million went to charity. (Watson ended up with more than $77,000, while neither of the human competitors ended up with more than $25,000.)

What was of interest to me, though, was not so much that the computer answered a lot of questions correctly. After all, isn’t that what computers do, process information and produce it on demand? Okay, it’s incredibly impressive that the machine understands human speech, that it can deal with the nuance and wordplay that characterize a fair number of the clues on Jeopardy, and that it has the capacity to bet wisely when called upon to do so by analyzing the chances that it has the right answer and then placing its wager accordingly. But what was even more interesting to me were the things the computer messed up.

On the second evening of play, the machine made an astounding error. The category was “U.S. Cities.” The answer was “It has two airports, one named after a World War II hero and the other named after a World War II battle.” The correct answer, which both human beings knew, was Chicago. (O’Hare is named Lieutenant Commander Edward O’Hare, a World War II flying ace; Midway Airport was named in honor of the American servicemen and women who fought in the Battle of Midway, one of the most decisive naval encounters of the war.) But the computer answered, insanely, “What is Toronto?”, apparently unaware that Toronto is not a U.S. city at all. The IBM people had some instant answers of their own to explain the slip-up. There are, they noted, cities named Toronto in the U.S. (So what? None of them has two airports.) The Canadian Toronto, they further noted, has a baseball team that is part of the American League. (So what? Doesn’t the machine know that not all baseball teams in the American League are located in the U.S.? And what did the question have to do with baseball?) And it is also so that the real Toronto actually does have an airport named for a war hero, Billy Bishop, who was Canada’s most celebrated World War I pilot. (So what? The question referenced World War II, not World War I. And the other airport is named for Lester Pearson, a former Canadian Prime Minister, not a battle.) But they took comfort, which I do have to say is more than fully justified, in the fact that the machine was able to realize that it was giving a poor answer that was probably wrong and so wagered less than a thousand dollars, thus retaining its great lead even after having given a wrong answer.

The first night, Watson also gave a crazy response. The “answer” was “This word denotes both stylish elegance and students who graduate in the same year.” The correct question was obviously “What is class?” For what it’s worth, I got it right. The computer, however, came up with the meaningless “What is chic?” (The IBM people no doubt had an explanation for that as well, although I couldn’t find one published on the web anywhere.) On the other hand, in a practice round the machine was able to respond to the confusing clue “A Green Acres star goes existential (and French) as the author of The Fall” correctly. (The answer, obviously, is Eddie Albert Camus. The topic was “All Eddie-Before and After,” which barely means anything at all out of context. Now that is impressive. Maybe I would have gotten it. Maybe not. Okay, probably not. Of course, now that I know the answer, I will definitely get it right if anyone ever asks.)

What is worth noticing is that even with its unimaginably powerful memory, the machine didn’t know everything. It was incredibly good at answering questions. It was even good at figuring out puns and jokey plays on words to arrive at the right answer. But, in the end, it made errors that its human programmers had apparently failed to anticipate it would. Now, of course, they will fix things so that it will take those pesky categories more into account and avoid giving answers that correspond to only x or y in an “x and y” clue. But then more things will crop up. And then more things too after that.

After watching two nights of Jeopardy, I am awe-struck by IBM’s achievement of having created Watson, but I believe that what has been attained is far more the ability to teach a machine to mimic the human reasoning process incredibly well than the actual investiture in a machine of the actual human ability to reason. Does it come to the same thing? I am precisely the right age, as I know also are many of my readers, to have been extremely taken as a teenager with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when it came out in 1968 and to have assumed almost casually that HAL, the super computer in the “Jupiter Mission” part of the movie, was eventually going to exist once human beings learned how to create such a thing. HAL, you may recall, had the full measure of intelligence of the brightest human being but was also able to develop emotions such as love, hate, envy, and fear. And, as a result, it eventually also became susceptible to mental illness and, indeed, suffered a nervous breakdown that was terrifyingly depicted in the movie. So what I would really like to see is not a Jeopardy match featuring two really smart human beings and Watson, but a triple-machine show featuring HAL, Watson, and possibly Deep Blue, the supercomputer that defeated Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997. Now that would be a great contest. Deep Blue was a very smart machine. Watson, by all accounts is even smarter. But my own money would be on HAL (or rather would be on HAL if there really was such a thing in the world) even if advancing each letter in his—I mean, its—name forward by one spot in the alphabet does somehow turn HAL into IBM.

Clearly, 2001 has come and gone without HAL existing. Now it’s ten years later, and Watson still thinks that kids who graduate high school together are called a chic, not a class. Artificial intelligence clearly still has a long way to go before the word “artificial” in that phrase becomes meaningless.

Another Kind of Hero

2011-02-11T10:41:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago I wrote to you about the concept of heroism and invited you to consider what it means to be a hero. In that letter, I focused on the story of Cornelius Dupree, Jr., the man who chose to remain incarcerated in a Texas jail even after he was eligible for parole simply because he would have had falsely to admit his guilt and express remorse for criminal acts he never committed in order actually to be paroled and sent back into the world of free men and women. At that time, I asked you to wonder along with me what kind of moral strength it would take to pay that kind of price for the right to think of oneself as an honest person, and inevitably thus also to wonder what we ourselves would do if we somehow found ourselves obliged to make a such a ghastly choice with respect to our own lives and our own freedom. I submitted to you in my letter that the ultimate definition of a hero was someone whose commitment to his own values and his own virtues was not mostly unshakeable, but totally so.

Now that I think about it, though, it strikes me that there are other definitions of heroism as well. One, for example, would be the ability to look past the misery of one’s own situation to do good in the world not despite all the reasons not to do so but because of them. Perhaps that’s not the clearest way to put it, but the example I have in mind, the one I would like to write to you about this week, will clarify my point in the telling. I am thinking of an Israeli hero this week, a man named Yuval Roth whose life exemplifies a different aspect of the heroic character. I was very moved reading about his story and I think you all will be as well.

Yuval Roth’s brother Udi was murdered by Hamas terrorists in 1993. The story of his death was reported in the media and I think perhaps even that I remember reading about it at the time—several terrorists had the idea of dressing up as religious Jews and then going out to pick up an IDF soldier hitchhiking to or from his base and then to murder him. Yuval’s brother, on his way to his annual reserve duty, was their victim. Most of us would respond to an outrage like that with unbridled rage, with hatred, and with a barely containable desire for revenge. But Yuval Roth’s path forward from his family’s tragedy led him in a different, and entirely unexpected, direction. Uncertain where to turn for comfort, Yuval eventually found his way to an organization called “Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace,” a remarkable organization that gets far too little press in the West. (You can visit their website at www.theparentscircle.com to learn more.) The concept is that the foundation for peace in Israel can perhaps best be laid by those families who have paid the highest price for there not being peace, those who have lost their own children to violence. And by coming together, the Palestinian and Israelis who meet under the auspices of the organization have somehow managed to put their politics away and to share their stories, to resolve to live in peace, to work for the violence-free resolution of conflict, and to stand up for the values they find, probably at least slightly to their own amazement, they have in common. The stories you can read on the organization’s website at http://www.theparentscircle.com/stories.asp are remarkable moving; some are so painful that it leaves you in awe of the fact that the people you are reading about somehow found it in them to rise up over their own emotions to channel their grief in a positive direction. I recommend you find some time to visit the site; I think you will be as impressed as I was. In fact, I know you will be.

The Mishnah records the ancient sage Ben Azai’s observation that each mitzvah we perform has the ability to bring others along in its wake. And that was exactly what happened here. One day in 2006 a Palestinian member of the group expressed frustration over the fact that, although he was eligible for treatment in a hospital in Haifa and had in fact already been accepted as a patient there, it was nonetheless almost impossible for him actually to get there. And so was born a different organization called Derekh Hachlamah, the Hebrew words for “A Path to Healing.” The organization, founded by Yuval Roth, does only one thing. It isn’t well funded. It isn’t famous. But it’s two hundred members, all volunteers, have resolved to help the sick become well, in this particular case by personally arranging for the transportation of sick Palestinians from West Bank villages underserved, or not served at all, by public transportation to the hospitals in which they are to be treated in Israel. In wartime, only traitors aid or abet the enemy. But by looking at elderly, infirm Palestinians as human beings rather than as enemy soldiers, and by treating them compassionately and kindly, Derekh Hachlamah is, I believe, laying the groundwork for lasting peace by proving that, when properly motivated by common goals, Israelis and Palestinians can be good neighbors and look past their own history into a future based on mutual respect.

It is not only the elderly who benefit, however. CNN had a story about Derekh Hachlamah just this week about a three-year old Palestinian child named Aya whose kidneys and liver have failed and who requires dialysis to survive. Could she have survived this long without help? Probably not. Palestinians cannot drive into Israel proper. There are no busses. Aya needs to go to the hospital five times a week, but the only way to get to Haifa would be in two different taxi cabs costing a total of about $90 each way, a sum far out of the realm of possibility for Aya’s parents. Her life would surely by now have become forfeit in the un-unravelable mess that is the separate yet also endlessly intertwined lives of Palestinians and Jews on the West Bank and in Israel, but Yuval and his volunteers stepped in to help and have by now driven Aya from her West Bank village to the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa over five hundred times. Her situation is not great, but her chances to survive to adulthood, previously more or less nil, are now real. And her parents are grateful. She too is not a soldier or a terrorist, just a little girl with health problems most adults would find overwhelming. But somehow her parents’ hope in her future has not only not been extinguished by the cruelty of circumstance, but has been enhanced by the kindness of a stranger, a man to whom they previously had no connection at all who saw an opportunity to do good in the world and who seized it. You can see a short clip of Aya’s story at http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/02/01/cnnheroes.roth/index.html. The clip is narrated by Yuval Roth.

Cornelius Dupree Jr. is a hero in my book. But Yuval Roth is also a hero. Neither man went to hero school. But both recognized the moral imperative facing them when the far simpler, and far more expected, path would simply have been to tell the lie, to look away, to enjoy thinking of themselves respectively as honest and kind but without actually doing what it was going to take actually to be those things when doing so involved more than just talk. To me, the basis of heroism is the willingness to live up not to other people’s ideals but to our own, thus not to live the lives other people think we should lead but to become the men and women we ourselves feel we can and should be. Does it take real bravery to embrace one’s own values? When put that way, it sounds as though it shouldn’t. But which of us who lives in the real world would argue that it does not take the courage of a true hero to live up to one’s own ideals not occasionally or when the world is looking, but always and without regard for what others might think?

Signs and Wonders in Egypt

2011-02-03T10:02:00.003-05:00

So my latest obsession (they should all be this harmless) is visiting the Al-Masry Al-Youm (“Egypt Today”) website at www.almasryalyoum.com/en several times a day to see the latest news from Egypt not as NPR or the New York Times interprets it but as the actual Egyptians on the ground in Cairo perceive what is going on all around them. I recommend the trip. The view, it turns out, is actually far better from the ground than from the cloud! And Al-Masry Al-Youm really does seem to be a quality newspaper filled with intelligent, thoughtful essays and reasonable analyses of what is going on.

What to make of it all, however, is another question entirely. At first I supposed that we were probably looking at some sort of highly localized reaction to the events in Tunisia, one that brought Egyptians into the streets possessed of the vague conviction that this could somehow be their moment as well. But it clearly turned into something else very quickly as the numbers of demonstrators grew dramatically and as it slowly seemed to become clear that the army was, if not de jure than surely de facto, on the side of the people. Whether that turns out really to be the case or not remains to be seen, especially in light of the events of Wednesday in Cairo, but there were more than sheer numbers to consider in watching the clips of Tuesday’s immense demonstration in Tahrir Square on the Al-Masry Al-Youm website. Watching that footage, I was struck not only by the number of people defying the government but even more so by the specific kinds of people that appeared to be filling the ranks—young people, families with children, middle-class types holding what appeared to be Blackberries and cell phones in their hands, workers in overalls and work uniforms, elderly people walking with canes and some even with walkers. Apparently also present were a serious sampling of the nation’s intellectual elite, including novelists, film producers, and even movie stars themselves. These did not look to me like a mob of crazed radicals or fanatic Islamicists but far more like a cross-section of a nation yearning to overthrow what by all accounts is a brutal regime with no respect for the human rights of its own citizenry. But there is also something you can’t see when you look at images like this. And that part can be just as important as the part that is fully visible.

By most counts, there are just shy of eighty million Egyptian citizens. About ninety percent are Muslims. About seventy percent can read and write. Most live on about 15,000 square miles of land near the Nile River. (All of Egypt covers about 390,000 square miles, most of it inarable desert.)When considered against these numbers, the people in Tahrir Square turn not into a surging majority of Egyptians but a small minority of the citizenry. So the question becomes not whether the people on the video clips we can all watch on the Al-Masry website are sincere, but whether they truly represent the people who will be called upon to choose a new path for their country in the event that the demonstrators have their way and Mubarak goes, and then free elections are both scheduled and actually carried out. It could happen! But there is also the possibility that the openly proclaimed goals of the demonstrators—an end to the Emergency Law that has been in effect since 1967 except for one single eighteen-month break in the 1980s and which severely curtails human rights and freedoms in Egypt, an end to Mubarak’s political career, and an end to the detainment of political prisoners of whom some estimate there may be as many as 30,000—are not the first things on the agenda of the huge majority of Egyptians who have yet to check in at all. Will those people—constituting tens of millions of voters in their own right—understand the implementation of free elections as means to create a truly free Egypt or as an opportunity to vote for candidates who espouse political philosophies that are not even remotely democratic? Although the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest organized opposition group, was prohibited by law from running candidates in the 2005 parliamentary elections, candidates who openly identified themselves as members of the organization still managed to win twenty percent of the seats in the People’s Assembly, the lower house of the Egyptian Parliament, even though they were obliged to run as independents. Surely, they would do even better if elections truly were free and if the National Democratic Party, Mubarak’s party, is forced to campaign on its own record. And although it is also true that Egyptians have not traditionally put much faith in elections—in 2005, fewer than a quarter of the country’s thirty-two million registered voters turned out actually to cast a ballot—it is surely also the case that the chance to vote for real change would draw out many millions who have chosen to sit out previous elections either as an act of silent protest or simply out of the conviction that nothing would or could change based on that election’s results.

Americans are thus in a strange quandary as we attempt to make sense of the new Egyptian reality. On the one hand is our natural inclination as Americans to support the democratic right of any nation to choose the officials to whom it wishes to entrust the reins of government. In our national conception of how democracy should work, candidates put forward their views and the electorate chooses between them fairly and openly. But how should we respond, both as a nation and as individuals, when we see that the democratic process is likely to lead—or at possibly could lead—not to a nation of free citizens governing itself wisely and in accordance with the will of the majority but to a state in which an anti-democratic organization becomes positioned legally to seize power by winning that free election? The Nazis, as we never seem to grow tired of observing, came to real power in Germany in 1933 as the result of winning 43.9% of the popular vote, not by seizing it violently or illegally. The same could be said of Iran, which became an Islamic Republic in 1979 after the “yes” side won a landslide victory in a national referendum. (How many of those people who voted “yes” would have changed their vote if they fully understood the level of repression that was soon to come is, of course, an entirely different question.) Is Egypt now to join the ranks of countries that have democratically voted in governments fanatically opposed to real democracy? That too, of course, remains to be seen.

Jewish observers will find it even harder to formulate a cogent opinion regarding this and last week’s events in Egypt. The peace treaty with Egypt has brought enormous benefits to Israel. The portion of Israel’s GNP spent on defense, for example, was about 30% before the treaty was signed, but is now about 9%. If Egypt repudiates that treaty and Israel has seriously to worry about Egypt reverting to its former status as vitriolic enemy rather than (at least begrudging) friend and if the increase in military spending that follows that repudiation approaches the 30% level again, the results for the Israeli economy will be dire. And open Egyptian support for terrorist Islamicist groups like Hamas will make the possibility of a real peace treaty between the Israelis and the Palestinians, even more unlikely than it already is and could possibly scuttle all by itself any real possibility of such a treaty being signed any time soon. In short, Mubarak has been a horror for the people of Egypt, but he has kept faith with the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty signed by his predecessor, Anwar El Sadat, for his almost three decades in power and he has proven to be a reliable, staunch friend of the United States. And that is the crux of the problem for us as Americans and as Jews: the man who has to go is also a man who was good for us as Americans and good for us as Jews whose hearts beat with Israel. Does that oblige us to support him as he tries his best to hold on to some semblance of power until the end of his fifth term of office this September? Not exactly! Does it make it perverse, or at least counterproductive, for us to support the effort to depose him without any clear sense of who or what will fill the vacuum of power he will leave behind? A little bit it does! And in that paradox lies the issue the events in Egypt over these last days oblige us to think through carefully and intelligently.

It hardly seems possible that our interests, or even Israel’s interests, can be served by the Egyptian population being held captive in their own country and forced to live lives absent the basic human rights and privileges we Americans take for granted. And, for better or for worse, Hosni Mubarak has come to symbolize that unsavory aspect of Egyptian life as scores of millions have known it not for years but for decades. (It is also worth noting that something like three-quarters of the Egyptian population were eight born after the Emergency Law first came into effect or were young children when it did.) Clearly, his time to go has come. Our best interests will not be served, therefore, by attempting to prop up his government or impose him on a nation that has clearly had enough. Perhaps the best we can do is to attempt to buttress, including financially, candidates for office who understand clearly that no people can be free if they are denied the most basic human rights and that embracing Islamic fundamentalism, with all that entails regarding most basic of human freedoms to live as one personally sees fit without hindrance or persecution, cannot possibly be the right direction for a country that wishes to live free and not merely to trade in one dictator for another as they did in Iran. Democracy is always a crapshoot. Entrusting governance to the people unfortunately entails governance between entrusted to the people. Dictatorship, when not totally self-serving, is generally justified as a drastic way of saving a benighted populace from its own bad decisions, but we as a nation have rejected the kind of paternalistic thinking that makes that sound almost reasonable. We therefore have no choice but to stick to our guns, to affirm our national ideals, to encourage the Egyptians to choose wisely (and thus to make the Muslim Brotherhood run on its record just as Mubarak’s party will have to run on its), and otherwise to comport ourselves as friends of the Egyptian people and not as people out solely to further our own interests.

We actually have a president in place, I believe, uniquely able to reach out to the Egyptians and who already has a kind of a track record in Egypt. (I am thinking of the very well received speech the president gave in Cairo in June of 2009 and which, by all accounts, truly captivated the Egyptian people with its hopefulness about the future and its firm commitment to human rights and non-violence.) We should all encourage our president to speak out now forcefully and eloquently about the future, painting it as bright and filled with promise if Egypt can take the process its people have now set in motion and use it to fashion a country truly committed to democracy and human rights, and to peace.

Heroes

2011-01-27T16:34:00.008-05:00

As many of you know, I have always been fascinated by the concept of the hero. Like many of you, I read Joseph Campbell’s ancient book about ancient myths, The Hero with a Thousand Faces when I was still in college and found it beyond fascinating. (The book itself isn’t really ancient, it just felt that way when I was a college student in the 1970’s. It was actually written in 1949.) Even more compelling, though, was Otto Rank’s far older book, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, first written in 1909 and still available in Gregory Richter and E. James Lieberman’s lucid translation. Both books will be well worth any reader’s effort, but it was the concept itself that the younger me found attractive, even perhaps a bit seductive, and which I continue to find very interesting. I have written to you about the question of what constitutes “real” heroism several times in the last few years, in fact, most recently in connection with the death of Miep Gies, the woman who for no ulterior reason and at the greatest risk to her personal safety was personally responsible for hiding Anne Frank and her family in the Achterhuis for as long as the Franks and the others were able to stay beneath the Nazis’ radar. But even Miep Gies’ testimony was more confusing than helpful in terms of saying what precisely heroism is: she was famous for refusing to allow the word to be applied to her simply because she behaved morally and kindly in an extreme situation. Surely, she used to argue, decency and generosity should be hallmarks of normal human behavior, not qualities reserved for the moral supermen and superwomen we conveniently (and supremely self-servingly) label as heroes mostly so as to avoid feeling bad about our own general unwillingness to do the right thing when presented with the opportunity to make a moral choice that entails risk or even danger to ourselves.

In our own tradition, Ben Zoma’s famous definition of the hero as one who has the inner strength to quash his own darker inclination to behave basely is well known to us all. But that too rings just a bit hollow when filtered through Miep Gies’ rejection of the title for herself: surely having the capacity to distinguish right from wrong and then to refuse to behave poorly should be considered the natural and normal way for ordinary people to behave, not a hallmark of uncommon heroism. Or was Ben Zoma perhaps right after all because the kind of self-discipline necessary always to choose the path of goodness in life is so rare among people that it really is reasonable to give it its own name?

I was brought back to these thoughts just this week when I read the story of Cornelius Dupree, Jr.. Dupree is not famous. His name will not be known to anyone who didn’t see the same article in the paper last week that I did. But I find myself in awe of the courage he displayed in refusing to tell a lie that not only did the entire world appear to want him to tell but that it would have been almost unbelievably beneficial to himself to tell. Yet this man—not a famous ethicist, not a professor of morality, not a clergyman, not even a college graduate—had the inner strength to quash what must have been an incredibly strong urge to perjure himself in a way that could not only not possibly have entailed subsequent punishment, but which could very possibly have bought him his freedom.

The details of the story are simple enough to retell. On November 23, 1979, two men kidnapped a Houston couple at gunpoint, forced them into their own car, robbed them of their money, shoved the man out of the car, and then proceeded to a nearby park where they raped the woman. Two arrests followed shortly. The following April, a Houston jury returned a guilty verdict against Cornelius Dupree and another man, Anthony Massingill. Dupree was subsequently sentenced to seventy-five years in prison, but never stopped maintaining his innocence. And, as it now turns out, rightly so. He was released from prison on parole after serving thirty years of his sentence last July. Less than one week later, conclusive DNA testing undertaking by the Innocence Project (originally part of Cardozo Law School but since 2004 an independent nonprofit organization) proved categorically that Dupree was innocent of the crimes of which he had been convicted. On January 4, just a few weeks ago, Cornelius Dupree was declared innocent and a Texas judge vacated the his rape and robbery conviction. Massingill’s conviction is also expected to be overturned in the near future.

None of the above makes the man a hero in my eyes, just the tragic victim of a horrific error of judgment on the part of a jury and a judge. But what makes him heroic in my eyes is a detail that the newspapers brushed by, I thought, far too quickly: that Dupree had not one but two different chances to dramatically increase his chances to be granted early parole by admitting his guilt. It would have been simple to lie. Everybody expected him to lie. Those closest to him probably even wanted him to tell the damn lie. And surely most wrongfully imprisoned people would leap at the chance to go free no matter what lie the system demanded that they tell to do so. Surely Dupree could have wanted nothing more than to go free. But the system demands its due and to be granted parole the potential parolee must show regret and remorse, both of which must obviously be predicated on an admission of personal guilt. But that is where Dupree’s turned out to be one of the hero’s thousand faces. He was not a professional ethicist, but he also would not and could not speak a lie, even one that could possibly have brought him the one thing he must have wanted more than anything in the world but which would have permanently besmirched his reputation and his sense of himself as an honest person. “Whatever your truth is,” the man said to a local reporter after being exonerated, “you have to stick with it.”

The basis of Otto Rank’s book is that the reason people need heroes, even going so far as to invent mythological ones to admire (and then upon whose “real” existence subsequent generations somehow feel obliged to insist) is because we want to see far finer versions of ourselves than we normally notice in the mirror displayed in the way our heroes reflect their venerators. In other words, we know that most of us come up short all the time. (Ben Zoma surely had that unappealing aspect of the human story in mind when he made his famous remark referenced above about the meaning of “real” heroism.) And, indeed, when we look into our hearts—and I assure you all that I include myself in this thought—when we truly look within deeply and thoughtfully, which of us can say with absolute certainty that if a judge offered us our freedom after, say, twenty years of unjust incarceration, we would rise to the moral level of a Cornelius Dupree and refuse to lie? This is not the same as finding it pleasant to think of ourselves as honest people. Nor is it the same as justifying the lie with reference to the unfairness of a flawed system that, for all it purports to be based on the assumption that it is better for a thousand guilty persons to go free than for a single innocent person to be unjustly incarcerated or executed, has in Dallas County required that twenty-one wrongly convicted individuals be freed after decades of imprisonment in the last four years alone.

There is truly something of the heroic in Cornelius Dupree’s story, I think. Some of you may recall the old story about the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, also called Diogenes the Cynic, who used to wander around the marketplace in Athens in the middle of the day with a burning torch in his hand and then, when asked why he needed a torch in broad daylight, would answer that he was searching for an honest man. I’ve always liked that story, but the older I get the more unpleasantly monitory Diogenes’ words feel to me. Is it really that hard to be so unwaveringly honest that one simply never tells a lie, self-serving or otherwise? Our Torah makes room for the occasional white lie told to spare another person’s feelings, but surely giving false testimony in court (or before a parole board) is among the Ten Commandments not because it is situationally or occasionally wrong, but because it categorically and absolutely is. And yet which of us, holding up Cornelius Dupree as a mirror, can see ourselves reflected in his simple refusal to confess to a crime he knew in his heart that he did not commit? So maybe there are heroes in the world after all…and maybe Rank was exactly right as to the real reason we need to invent them when none is actually at hand for us to admire and emulate.

Blood Libels

2011-01-20T10:54:00.007-05:00

I wouldn’t have thought anything anyone could say in the wake of the shooting in Tucson would have drawn attention away from Gabrielle Giffords and the others who were killed or wounded on January 8. But Sarah Palin somehow managed to do just that by using the phrase “blood libel” to refer to the vendetta she perceives the media to have launched against her in the wake of that massacre over the fact that the website maintained by SarahPac, the federally registered political action committee that exists to promote her as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, included until just recently a map of the United States with Gabrielle Giffords’ district (and the districts of nineteen other Democrats) depicted in what appeared to be the crosshairs of a rifle’s scope.

The map was controversial even before Tucson, but it was after the assassination attempt against Congresswoman Giffords that the rhetoric really heated up. In a sense, it was a lot of talk about nothing. Even if Jared Lee Loughner, the man arrested and accused of the shooting, turns out to be guilty of the crime with which he has been charged and if it can be proven that he saw the map on the SarahPac website and that he naively or insanely misinterpreted it to mean that Governor Palin was calling upon her admirers to murder twenty sitting members of the House of Representatives, that would still hardly make Governor Palin personally responsible for his actions. But the map nevertheless quickly became symbolic in the minds of many of the overheated rhetoric that seems to have become the common coin of political discourse in our country. And thus too did it become symbolic of the degree to which people who engage in vituperative, borderline-violent, over-the-top language with respect to their political foes must share the responsibility for what happens when people of limited intelligence or virtue, or mentally unbalanced people, act on what they perceive to constitute their wishes.

Governor Palin did not respond well to the intimation that she bore any responsibility for the shooting at all, noting that “acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own” and that such acts “begin and end with the criminals who commit them." Later, though, possibly realizing that crimes rarely begin and end with their perpetrators with no one else at all ever being even indirectly responsible, she took a different tack, explaining that the SarahPac website designers never intended for the graphic to look like gun sights at all, but merely and innocently to resemble “crosshairs like you'd see on maps.” And it was in the context of her effort to respond directly to those whom she felt had impugned her reputation that she used the term “blood libel” to refer to what she perceived as their malicious efforts at calumny.

The Jewish world did not respond well to Sarah Palin’s specific mode of not responding well. Although there were those prominent Jewish figures who defended Governor Palin’s comments, most notably Alan Dershowitz and the well-known Chabad rabbi Shmuley Boteach (who published his thoughts on the matter on the Wall Street Journal website), most Jewish responses were negative, interpreting Sarah Palin’s comment as yet another attempt to devalue a monstrous horror that led to unimaginable Jewish suffering over the centuries and recast it as a mere turn of phrase. And it is that specific aspect of the issue that I would like to write about today.

I was first exposed to the concept of the blood libel as a teenager when I read André Schwarz-Bart’s great novel, The Last of the Just, which was one of the very first and remains in my opinion one of the greatest works of Holocaust-based fiction. (Published in French in 1959, it won the Prix de Goncourt, France’s highest literary prize, and almost all by itself established the genre of the Shoah novel. To this day when people occasionally ask me where to get started in reading about the Shoah, I almost invariably suggest they begin by reading Schwarz-Bart’s book.) Other books followed, notably R. Po-chia Hsia’s harrowing The Myth of Ritual Murder, published by Yale University Press in 1988, which I can also recommend very highly. The concept itself, though, does not require any complicated research to understand: the name “blood libel” is generally applied specifically to the malicious fantasy that Jews regularly, or at least occasionally, murder non-Jewish children to use their blood in the baking of matza or to perform some other religious ritual. Over the years, there have been thousands of such accusations, of which about 150 (so Walter Laqueur in his 2006 Oxford University Press book, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism) have resulted in the arrest, torture, and murder of innocent Jewish people, sometimes by an enraged mob and sometimes following a phony trial. Alan Dundes’ 1991 book, The Blood Libel Legend, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, details and provides eye-witness testimony regarding an array of such incidents that is as amazing as it is deeply distressing. Nor is this exclusively a medieval phenomenon. The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 took place against a blood libel accusation, as did the pogrom in Kielce, Poland, in 1946 in the course of which forty Jews were killed in the worst instance of anti-Jewish violence on Polish soil in the years following the Shoah. Nor even can Americans consider themselves exempt from all of this: there was a blood libel leveled against the Jews of Massena, New York, a remote town on the Canadian border, in 1928. (No one was tried or killed in Massena, but the very thought that such an event even could occur here on our shores should give us all pause for thought. Interested readers can consult Saul Friedman’s The Incident at Massena, published in 1978 by Stein & Day.) And so was it with all of these details in mind that the American Jewish community tried to unpack Governor Palin’s remark that she too was the victim of a blood libel.

We knew what she meant. The essence of the blood libel is the false accusation of murder and she too felt that she was being blamed, circuitously but meaningfully, for the murder of six people and the attempted murder of a member of Congress. Obviously, no one really considered her legally responsible. No grand jury would ever return an indictment of murder against someone merely for publishing a map on a website that no sane person would actually understand to constitute a suggestion that members of our government be shot to death. But her sense that she was nonetheless being tarred with the same brush, albeit one with considerably less tar on it, than the actual shooter is at the heart of her decision to use blood libel terminology to respond to the suggestion that she bears some responsibility for Tucson. On the other hand, there are some profound distinctions to make. The belief that Jews murder non-Jewish children because their blood is an essential ingredient of matza is totally false.But the graphic on Governor Palin’s SarahPac website could certainly be taken to mean that the ideal way to see members of Congress who supported President Obama’s health care bill would be through the crosshairs of a rifle’s telescopic sight. Clearly, that does not make her a party to murder. But it also seems beyond exaggerated to equate the feeling that former Governor Palin erred grievously by permitting her SarahPac website to introduce into the rhetoric of American politics the image of an enraged populace aiming guns at members of Congress with crimes committed against innocent Jewish people that include torture, exile, and murder.

In a sense, Governor Palin touched a raw nerve because her comment was only one of so many over these last years that appear to devalue the suffering of Jewish people by making too casual use of the vocabulary of anti-Semitism to make wholly unrelated points. I am not referring to using Holocaust-based terminology to refer to actual instances of genocide either, but rather to extended uses that appear to cheapen the memory of the dead, for example when the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) refer to the meat that comes from American abattoirs as a “holocaust on your plate” or when Representative Alan Grayson of Florida referred to the absence of national health care in America as a holocaust in its own right or when people refer to questioning the reality of global warming as the ecological version of denying that the Holocaust occurred. But even here our feelings are naturally mixed: on the one hand, we are the ones who want the Shoah never to be forgotten and for the memory of the martyrs to be an indelible part of the heritage of all humanity. Yet when people take that thought and run with it by applying it to unrelated events we find the effect jarring and unsettling.

In its own way, the issue is foreshadowed in the Torah itself at the very end of Parshat Ki Tetzei, where the Torah almost in the very same breath commands us eternally to remember the dastardly way the nation of Amalek attacked the Israelites in the desert and also to erase any recollection of that nation “from beneath the heavens.” The obvious incompatibility of the two commands—to preserve but also to eradicate the memory of Amalek—suggests the conflict we are experiencing in the wake of Sarah Palin’s remarks. We want the world to forget about blood libels, to consign the concept to the waste-bin of outrageously defamatory ideas leveled by a hostile world against innocent Jewish people. But we also want the opposite—for the world to know what it has traditionally meant to be a Jew in a hostile world, for the world never to forget the misery our co-religionists have had to endure in the lands of their dispersion, for the libelous lies leveled against us specifically never to be forgotten or treated as mere footnotes in the history of bigotry. We want it both ways! And Sarah Palin’s remark stung not so much because of what she actually said, I think, but because it exacerbated our frustration at not being able to have it both ways, at not being able to talk endlessly about the Shoah and to devote ourselves to keeping the memory of the kedoshim alive…and also to guarantee that no one will ever appropriate the vocabulary we ourselves taught them to say something unrelated to us and to our history.

Tucson

2011-01-13T11:09:00.004-05:00

The bare details of the shooting last weekend in Tucson we surely all know by now. Nineteen people were shot, of whom six, including the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Arizona, a congressional aide, and a nine-year-old girl born on 9/11, died. Representative Gabrielle Gifford, seriously wounded but not killed, is said to be in relatively stable but still very precarious condition at a local hospital. The alleged shooter, a twenty-two year old man named Jared Lee Loughner, was arrested at the scene. Federal prosecutors have already charge him with five crimes including the attempted assassination of a member of Congress. Arizona prosecutors have announced their intention to charge him with the murder and the attempted murder of those of his alleged victims who were not federal employees. And yet the precise motive behind the massacre remains unknown. (The accused, probably acting in his own best interests, has invoked his right to remain silent.) Perhaps the President was right Wednesday evening when he suggested that we may never know what twisted thoughts prompted the Tucson rampage.

An almost endless series of essays and articles seemed to appear almost instantly in the press and on the internet, essays speculating about the shooter’s “real” motive or about who his “real” victim was intended to be, op-ed pieces wondering to what extent the vituperative rhetoric of American politics could be supposed to provide the “real” background to the crime, articles attempting to figure out what to make of the reading list the accused posted on his youtube page (a list that included Plato’s The Republic, Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, and Ayn Rand’s We the Living), speculative musing about the relationship of the various conspiracy theories to which the accused appears to have subscribed and his decision to commit murder on this scale, and editorials attempting to address the shooting in the context of Arizona’s gun culture. For Jewish readers, the story will have special resonance, of course, because Gabriel Zimmerman, the congressional aide who was killed, was Jewish and because Representative Gifford herself is a member of Congregation Chaverim, a Reform temple in Tucson. But although no specific evidence has surfaced to suggest that the shooter targeted Gabrielle Gifford or Gabriel Zimmerman specifically because he hated Jews, most Jewish observers will suppose almost naturally that anti-Semitism must surely have been lurking among whatever other motives the shooter had. That will turn out to be either true or not true. But for the moment, the accused is speaking only to Judy Clarke, the lawyer who is going to represent him in federal court.

But the specific take on the story I would like to write about today is related only tangentially to the shooter himself or to his victims. Clearly, it is not a good plan for mentally ill people or for people with past convictions for drug abuse to be permitted to purchase guns and ammunition, and for it not to be illegal for them to carry their weapons concealed on their persons in public. Whether Jared Lee Loughton turns out to be mentally ill, of course, remains to be seen. His drug convictions, on the other hand, are a matter of public record. Therefore, even if it turns out that he is not mentally unbalanced, the nation will still want to ask Arizona lawmakers exactly how it could possibly be sound public policy for people with documented histories of drug abuse to be permitted to carry concealed weapons, loaded or not. (Arizona, Alaska, and Vermont are the only states that permit individuals to carry concealed weapons without needing a permit to do so.) But the real question I’d like to write about has to do with the Second Amendment itself, the amendment that has been interpreted to mean that Americans have a basic right to possess firearms and that the government therefore needs a compelling reason to curtain that right or to infringe upon it.

The actual text of the Second Amendment appears at first blush to be talking about the right to bear arms in the context of the federal government being barred from banning the states from forming their own, fully-armed militias, but has traditionally been interpreted broadly rather than narrowly. (The actual text is brief and sounds relatively to the point: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”) But whatever the framers of the Constitution had in their hearts when they made those words into the law of our land, the result of their work was to guarantee that American citizens would permanently be granted to possess firearms. And, indeed, the endless debate in our country about the reasonableness of gun control legislation has traditionally been framed precisely in terms of whether that right should be subject to limits based on the fear of crime or, as the ultimate guarantor of the freedom of the individual, whether it should be impervious to limitations based solely on fear.

The debate itself has its own interesting, and very long, history, pitting those who claim that the right to bear arms has led not to a more secure democracy but to the United States being the country with the highest number of people killed by people wielding guns in any developed country (almost 12,000 in 2004, the last year for which there appear to be reliable statistics, as opposed to 184 in Canada, 73 in England and Wales, 56 in Australia, and 37 in Sweden) against those who argue that the fundamental right of citizens to bear arms is precisely what makes our democracy secure against tyranny and thus a more, not less, safe place for its citizens. (Just for the record, the obvious problem in interpreting those statistics about gun deaths is that the populations of those countries are so different, there being, for example, about ten times as many American citizens as there are citizens of Canada. The homicide-by-gun rate per 100,000 people, however, is just as depressing: 4.07 for the U.S., 0.57 for Canada, 0.41 for Sweden, 0.28 for Australia, and a truly minuscule 0.12 for England and Wales.) The question of why forty times as many Americans per capita are killed with guns as English or Welsh people is its own interesting question, of course. But the deeper question brought to the fore by the Tucson shooting has far less to do with the differences between countries and more to do with the fundamental question of whether a death-by-gunshot rate like the one we have in our country is the price we must pay to be free citizens of a democracy that guarantees the civil rights of its citizenry absolutely, or whether it is merely indicative of a nation that has dressed up its own inability to safeguard its citizens to look more noble and less pathetic than it actually is.

For Jews the question has its own unsettling overtones, of course, overtones probably unintentionally stoked by Sarah Palin’s peculiar use of the phrase “blood libel” to describe the campaign of vilification she feels the media has been waging against her in the course of the past week. But even without former Governor Palin’s comments to goad us forward along this specific line of thinking, the history of anti-Semitic violence—a history that reached the level of attempted genocide during the lifetimes of many of you reading this—will be the background to any serious Jewish thinking about the issue of the right to bear arms. How different, for example, would or could things have been if the Jews of Vilna had been fully armed in 1941, or the Jews of Paris in 1942, or the Jews of Warsaw in 1943, or the Jews of Budapest in 1944? Would the Nazis have been able to overrun Holland in only five days had its citizens been armed? Would the collaborationists in France have had as free a hand to participate in the Nazi war against French Jewry if those Jews had been unwilling to go to the trains peacefully and had had the means to resist forcefully? You see where I’m going with this…but the real question, of course, does not have to do with what might have once been but with how things are in our country today. Surely, no one who interprets the Second Amendment broadly to mean that the ownership of guns should be restricted for only the most grave and most compelling reasons would justify that position by arguing that the alternative would eventually lead to the mass murder of American citizens by their own government!

In a sense, the debate has to do with the degree to which we really do think America is different. I think that. I think most of my readers think it as well. I know as much as any lay reader, so to speak, could about the Shoah, but I find it impossible to imagine anti-Semitism on that scale in this place leading to the kind of horrors the Jews of Europe faced seven decades ago. That our country has a long history of shameful discrimination to grapple with, including government-led initiatives that led to the deaths of countless thousands of Native Americans during the 1830s when whole tribes were forcibly deported from their own lands and their own homes and sent on thousand-mile-long death marches to unknown destinations in the west, is well known. But we have, as a nation, moved past that kind of rank discrimination as, one by one, laws in place for centuries have been replaced with legislation that guarantees the civil rights of all citizens without reference to race, religion, or ethnic origin. I suppose that by saying that I could be condemning myself to end up quoted in some twenty-third century textbook of Jewish history alongside all those German rabbis who preached to their congregants that Germany too was different, that the degree to which Jews were accepted and integrated into Germany culture and society both insulated and protected them from the prejudice of extremists, but I really do believe that our place in American society is made secure by our Constitution and also by our inclusionist national ethos, by our American disinclination to prejudge people unfairly, and by our American predilection for fairness in all things. Is American different? I think it is.

What we can all agree about, I believe, is that the level of gun violence we have come to accept as normal in our country should be considered intolerable. That citizens have a Constitutionally-based right to possess firearms cannot be undone and possibly even should not be undone. But surely we can all agree that there can be no sense of the personal liberty of peaceful citizens being infringed upon by a nation-wide effort to keep guns out of the hands of people who habitually use drugs or who have been convicted of violent crimes or who are mentally unbalanced or who have displayed depraved indifference in the past to the value of human life.

Carrying concealed weapons in public is not a guarantor of civil liberty but a recipe for disaster. Allowing people to purchase handguns without having to identify themselves or register their weapons is not an infringement against personal freedom but a way to enable criminals to acquire the tools of their trade without leaving a paper trail behind. The National Firearms Act, passed by Congress in 1934, seeks to regular private ownership of what were then called “gangster weapons,” such as hand grenades and machine guns. The Gun Control Act of 1968 sought to codify in federal law the precise categories of people who may not freely acquire firearms. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 put into place a national background check intended to prevent the sale of firearms to people forbidden to own them under the Gun Control Act. Taken all together, these three acts of Congress have at their heart the notion that there must be some rational, legal way to keep guns out of the hands of people who mean to use them to do harm or to commit crimes without infringing on the civil rights that the Constitution guarantees to all Americans. The job now is to take that concept and move forward with it as a nation to make ourselves safe by doing what it takes to keep guns away from people who wish to commit crimes or to participate in the political process by assassinating members of Congress.

Four of our presidents were murdered while in office, all of them shot to death by guns. That fact in and of itself should give us the impetus to find a way to safeguard our freedoms without putting guns in the hands of criminals.

Considering WikiLeaks

2010-12-23T12:16:00.001-05:00

Like many of you, I’m sure, I had only vaguely heard of WikiLeaks until this year. I’m not even entirely sure that I understood that WikiLeaks and Wikipedia were different operations or—since I’m being totally honest—that wiki itself has become an accepted word in English, albeit a newly minted one, with its very own definition. (According to the 10th edition of Collins Dictionary, a wiki is a web application that allows anyone who visits the site to edit content on it. It’s also used as a kind of an adjective, as in the phrase “wiki technology,” but it seems mostly commonly to be used as a prefix in the names of such sites.) But WikiLeaks itself is far bigger than its etymology, and that much by now everybody knows.

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by individuals who have never been identified, but is represented to the public by the now famous/infamous Julian Assange, who coyly describes himself merely as a member of the organization’s advisory board. The concept behind the operation is also a bit unclear. In its own self-conception, WikiLeaks exists to publish data intended to embarrass repressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet Union, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, but also, to cite their own website, “to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.” To further these ends, the organization claims to have amassed a data base of more than 1.2 million documents, all presumably obtained from self-proclaimed whistle blowers who wish to embarrass the organizations, governments, or individuals to whose files they somehow have access. What the “real” motivation behind all this effort is remains unclear, however. (Even the use of the “wiki-“ prefix is misleading in that the website run by the organization specifically does not allow readers or users to add their comments.) But real enough is the praise the organization has garnered. For example, WikiLeaks won The Economist’s New Media Award in 2008 for exemplary service to journalism.

Up until this fall, most people probably knew of WikiLeaks it because of the huge amount of purloined data the organization has made public relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (92,000 documents related to Afghanistan were leaked to the press in July of this year, followed in October by a staggering 400,000 documents relating to Iraq.) But now WikiLeaks is primarily known for its release on November 28 of the first 220 of an alleged quarter of a million diplomatic cables sent from 274 United States embassies located in almost every country of the world. These cables, most rated confidential but not top secret, cover an almost unbelievably wide array of subjects including nuclear disarmament, American efforts to bring peace to the Middle East, and the war against terror. Nor has WikiLeaks acted alone. Also complicit in the effort to bring these cables to the attention of the public are the five newspapers and magazines—El Pais in Spain, Le Monde in France, The Guardian in the U.K., Der Spiegel in Germany, and The New York Times—that have undertaken to publish them. For its part, WikiLeaks has announced its intention to release the rest of these diplomatic cables, presumably eventually all 251,287 of them, in small batches over the next few months. What the unpublished cables contain, who knows? But I think we can be certain that they are all being published specifically because they are deemed embarrassing to our government or our nation in some specific way.

The question I would like to discuss today has to do with the specific way we should relate to the release of these documents. Are the five news media organizations that have undertaken to publish the material acting illegally or immorally? Surely the essence of investigative journalism is the concept of finding out things and bringing them to the attention of the public! And in many other cases in which newspapers have uncovered information that has led to the arrest of criminals or to the public humiliation of people behaving immorally or deceitfully, it is surely true that the public has responded enthusiastically and positively. (Think, for example, of the decision by the New York Times in 1971 to publish the so-called Pentagon Papers, which effort revealed the degree to which the federal government had willfully misled the American public regarding the war in Vietnam and American activities in Cambodia and Laos.)

On the other hand, there is something that feels beyond wrong about taking what is in essence private correspondence between individuals and making it public. There was once a time when you could be pretty sure that no one had read a letter addressed to you merely because it arrived in your mailbox still sealed. Those days are, of course, long gone. I have no deep understanding of how e-mail works, but I know that the letters that appear in my in-box have travelled through the machinery of a variety of internet service providers on their way from my correspondent’s computer to my own. Surely it would be possible for any number of unscrupulous persons surreptitiously to read my e-mail as it makes its convoluted and complex way into my in-box. Is it reasonable to expect privacy this far down the pike from the concept of a sealed envelope being brought by a team of actual human beings from the mailbox in which it was deposited by its writer to the home of its intended recipient? That, I think, is the right way to frame the question regarding the morality of WikiLeaks’ behavior.

We have our own tradition to take into consideration. It’s amazing how little well-known the figure of Rabbenu Gershom, called by his admirers the Light of the Exile, is in our own day given the degree of renown he once enjoyed. Rashi who was born around when Rabbenu Gershom died, said that all Ashkenazic Jews were almost by definition his disciples. (Rashi actually was a kind of grand-disciple of his in that his own teacher, Rabbi Jacob ben Yakar, was Rabbenu Gershom’s student.) And Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel (1250-1327), popularly known as Rabbenu Asher and who himself was one of the greatest of all medieval rabbis, wrote that the teachings of Rabbenu Gershom were so widely accepted that they may as well have been handed down to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. Rabbenu Gershom was a leading figure in his day for many different reasons, but the most important event in his professional life was the rabbinical synod he convened in the year 1000 to ratify a number of radical innovations he wished to promulgate. It was at this synod, for example, that the formal ban against polygamy for all Ashkenazic Jews was announced and accepted. And it was also at this synod that the decision was made to prohibit any divorce from being finalized unless both parties to the marriage in question are in agreement that their union be ended, an enormous step forward for women and for women’s rights. The third matter the synod considered was how to relate to Jews who were forced to abandon Judaism. (This was a highly personal matter for Rabbenu Gershom because his own son abandoned Judaism in the wake of the 1012 forced expulsion of the Jews from Mainz, the city in which Rabbenu Gershom worked and lived.) And, finally, it was at this synod that Rabbenu Gershom promulgated his formal ban against reading other people’s mail. The concept was simply that written letters, clearly a form of speech, were henceforth to be considered subject to the laws of gossip and talebearing that govern oral communication. And so just as one has the right to presume that the words one utters will not be heard by anyone other than the individual to whom one is speaking, so does one have the right to suppose that one’s letters will not be read by anyone other than the party or parties to whom they are addressed.

In its own way, this is a parallel thought to the way people have the right to assume that their assets will be distributed according to their instructions after they die. They themselves will not be present to control the situation, but the right inherent in the concept of owning something is deemed to include the right to bequeath it posthumously to whomever one wishes. Similarly, one can obviously not control what happens to a letter once it leaves one’s hand. (How much the more so is that true for e-mail!) But one nevertheless has the right to expect that it will neither be diverted nor stolen, and that no decent person will read what has sent in writing by one party to another merely because the possibility exists to do so.

I think the same principle applies to WikiLeaks. It is one thing, after all, to publish public documents and thus to bring them forcefully to the attention of the public, and another thing entirely to steal letters sent from one individual to another—and diplomatic dispatches are in essence letters being sent from one person to another through the private mail system operated by the diplomatic service—and then to share their contents with anyone who can afford to purchase a copy of Le Monde or El Pais. Whether some greater good was served by making public these dispatches is hardly the point because the deed itself is forbidden, just as one is forbidden to gossip even if one can discern some salutary benefit that might somehow result from doing so. The fact that we live in an age that so little respects the privacy of the individual that such a thought sounds novel almost to the point of being radical, however, says a lot more about modern society and culture than about Rabbenu Gershom or the reasonableness and morality of his edict.