The Mosque on Park Place

More than any other holiday, Sukkot represents the idea of Israel not being an isolated nation concerned only with its only affairs—the am levadad yishkon of Balaam’s vision—but a people that lives in harmony with the family of nations not by ignoring the world but by embracing its place in the larger mosaic of peoples and cultures. Indeed, the Talmud itself interprets the seventy sacrificial bulls that were offered up in ancient times in the Temple during Sukkot were meant to bring merit to the nations of the world. (The nations of the world were traditionally supposed to number seventy.) And the idea has its own biblical antecedent as well: there is a vision at the end of the Book of Zachariah in which the prophet looks to the end of time and imagines the nations of the world, finally possessed of faith in the one God, coming to Jerusalem to celebrate Sukkot together with the Jewish people.

Where this specific aspect of Sukkot has its origin, who knows? Maybe it has to do with the lulav and etrog being representative of the bounty of the world or with the sukkah itself obliging the faithful to leave their homes and spend some serious time outdoors and in the world. Or maybe it has to do with the onset of the rainy season in Israel and the sense that the concept of weather itself unites the nations of the world, or should unite them, in a common sense of responsible stewardship for the world we all inhabit together. But regardless of the real reason, the bottom line is that Sukkot has a certain universalist feel to it that is distinctly less prominent at other festive times of the year.

All that being the case, perhaps Sukkot is just the right time of year for us to revisit the issue of the mosque the Muslim community intends to build on Park Place in lower Manhattan. I’ve lost track of how many op-ed pieces on the topic I’ve read in the last few weeks, but the very fact that something that might otherwise have been an innocuous building project has garnered this kind of attention both from the media and the public is itself something worth considering in its own right. Clearly, the proposal has touched a nerve! And so I’d like to suggest we use this festival of Jewish universalism to ask ourselves where we stand on the matter.

We could argue, not at all unreasonably, that there should not be anything to discuss. One of the hallmarks of American democracy, after all, is precisely that citizens do not need the permission of the government to exercise their civil rights. In that regard, I am reminded of the controversy that dogged the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 before President Johnson was finally able to sign it into law. That legislation was precisely designed to prevent individual states from erecting any barriers that might serve to prevent citizens from voting in national elections. Indeed, the concept was specifically that the right to vote, being among the most basic rights of the citizenry in any democracy, can therefore never be subject to artificial restrictions or requirements that exist solely to prevent citizens from exercising their franchise. We have, I think, moved so far down the road from where we were in 1965 that the right of citizens to vote without first having to get the government’s permission to do so now seems so basic as hardly to require defending at all. And surely all of us feel the same way about freedom of religion, that it may never be made dependent on permission would-be worshipers are required to solicit from the government. That doesn’t mean, of course, that every building proposal for a house of worship has to be automatically approved. But it does mean that legally defensible opposition to any house of worship being built must be rooted in factors unrelated to the basic right of the people involved to worship as they please. This should be obvious to all Americans, but I think it should be especially obvious to Jewish citizens. We, after all, know all too well what it means for the future of Judaism anywhere when the Jewish population is suddenly obliged by law to seek the government’s permission to build a synagogue or a mikveh or to open a kosher abattoir. In any event, it can surely never be in our best interests to see the basic
civil rights of citizens eroded even slightly, let alone grievously.

Two weeks ago, I read the essay published on the Op-Ed page of the Times by the imam who is the public face of the effort to build the mosque on Park Place, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Entitled “Building on Faith,” it is a piece that everybody should read and digest. (You can find it easily at www.newyorktimes.com just by typing the words “building on faith” into the search box at the top of the screen.) In it, of course, the imam says exactly what all Americans want to hear from Muslim leaders: that the mosque he is proposing to build will be a symbol of interfaith harmony, that it will offer an opportunity for people of all religions to gather together and learn about each other’s traditions, that it will provide a space that will be devoted to building bridges between different faith and ethnic groups. It is an inspiring essay, but just as I was reading it I suddenly saw the whole controversy regarding the mosque differently than I had previously…and as having something far more important to say about the way Americans think about religion than specifically about the way they feel about civil rights.

Imam Rauf’s essay could not be more encouraging. Here, finally, is a Muslim leader prepared to renounce and denounce terrorism, who speaks patriotically about the United States as his country (Rauf is an immigrant from Egypt), who is prepared to create places for Jews and Christians to conduct their own religion-specific worship services within his mosque. The only flaw in all of this is the problem of knowing whom to believe. To listen to Imam Rauf, we get the sense that Islam is a peaceful faith and that the people who perpetrated the crimes of 9/11 were renegades who were merely using Islam to justify their murderous hatred of the West. That, of course, is precisely what we all want to think! But it is also so, of course, that there are millions of Muslims who insist that Al-Qaida has it right and that the Taliban does, that Muslims are called upon by their faith to wage war on the world until all infidels are brought one way or the other to embrace Islam, that Islam and the West are already at war. Such people see nothing wrong with terrorism if that is the best way of advancing their aims and eventually of reaching their goals. And I have no doubt what such people think of Feisal Abdul Rauf: that he is the supreme example of whatever the correct term for a Muslim Uncle Tom would be, that he exemplifies the Western Muslim so eager to please the people among whom he lives that he is prepared to abandon the most essential lessons of his faith for the sake of appearing peaceful and unthreatening to his neighbors.

And that, I have come to think, is where the real issue surrounding this mosque lies. Most Americans are not professors of comparative religion or experts in Islam. We see an Islamic world before us that is divided sharply in two, a world in which two worldviews that feel diametrically opposed to each other both claim to be the “real” version of Islam that the faithful Muslim should embrace. We are drawn to want to believe the side that is proffering the version of Islam that we personally find the most appealing. But how self-serving is that approach? In the end, most of us aren’t sure what we think.

Of course, the same could be said of our Jewish world—that in our world there are both fundamentalist extremists insisting that their xenophobic, fanaticized version of Judaism is the authentic version of our faith and also thoughtful, tolerant, non-fundamentalists eager to insist that their kinder, more liberal, and less extreme version of Judaism is the real thing bequeathed to modern Jews by their forebears. And we have all known the frustration of seeing well-meaning non-Jews simply unable to decide which school of thought represents “authentic” Judaism, as opposed to some version of Judaism willed into existence by people who are primarily interested in using religion to buttress priorly held convictions, including political convictions, that they feel the need to anchor in something more respectable than their own wishes about the way things should be in the world.

In the end, I think our best interests are served by helping the Imam Raufs of the world to foster the version of Islam they have embraced. Indeed, we would only be serving our own best interests, both as Jews and as Americans, not merely to tolerate the Muslims in our midst but to embrace those who seek to transform their faith into the kind of religion that can co-exist in a world that will only endure if the peoples in it embrace the idea of living together in some sort of reasonable harmony. Jews have been laboring for centuries to develop a version of our faith that is tolerant, broad-minded, and respectful of others. Can Islam do the same? That, I suppose, remains to be seen…but it’s hard to imagine in what sense we would be acting wisely or in our own interests not to foster the imam’s efforts to open his Cordoba House on Park Place, and then to hold him to his promise that his house be a house of prayer for all people.

Thinking about Gilad Shalit

Sometimes the best way to understand the big picture is to focus instead on a small one and then let that experience frame the effort to look beyond the fame of the picture in focus to see what lies behind and beyond it. That thought came to me the other day when I read a letter purported to have been written by Gilad Shalit’s mother asking people around the world to pray for her son’s speedy release.
Gilad’s story is well known and easy to retell: when he was nineteen years old and a newly recruited soldier in the IDF in June of 2006, Gilad was abducted by Hamas terrorists who crossed into Israel from Gaza and has not been seen since. It is widely believed, however, that he is still alive. Partially, his capture became a kind of international cause célèbre because he holds French as well as Israeli citizenship, but mostly his case remains on the world’s radar because of efforts by the Shalit family to insist that his plight not be forgotten. And, amazingly, their efforts have succeeded. Demonstrations to demand his release regularly attract thousands of Israelis. Abroad, efforts by supporters have resulted in Gilad being made an honorary citizen of Paris, Rome, Miami, and New Orleans. Human rights groups around the world, including some almost invariably hostile to Israel, have begun routinely to call for his release. Most amazing of all, even the United Nations-sponsored Goldstone Report called unambiguously for Gilad to be released. You can find out even more by going to www.gilad.org. Click on the word “English” on the top of the screen and an English-language version of the site will open up in a separate window, and you’ll be able to navigate through the site easily from there.

In June of this year, Israel agreed to a German-brokered prisoner exchange deal that would have brought Gilad home in exchange for Israel freeing 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. That sounded like the usual lopsided but effective compromise to which Israelis have become inured over the years, but the deal was eventually rejected by Hamas because Israel refused to include in the deal prisoners convicted of especially violent crimes against civilian Israelis and also because Israel revealed that prisoners included in the swap would subsequently be barred from entering the West Bank lest they be able to find their murderous way from there into Israel. And that, barring any last-minute breakthrough in the context of this week’s continuation of the Middle East peace talks in Sharm-al-Sheikh, is where matters now stand.

Should Israel pay any price at all to gain Gilad’s release? At first blush, it seems strange even to ask such a question out loud. What could possibly be more important than bringing home an IDF solider captured by the enemy? And, indeed, there is very strong support in our sacred sources for taking just that approach to the mitzvah of redeeming captives, called in Hebrew the mitzvah of pidyon shevuyim. Maimonides, for example, opens up his discussion of the matter in the Mishneh Torah with these words: “Redeeming captives is deemed so crucial that it takes precedence even over supporting the poor with charity funds or clothing the indigent. Indeed, there is no greater mitzvah than seeking to redeem people held captive because, unlike the poor at home who are merely hungry, thirsty, and unclad, prisoners taken captive and held for ransom are in danger of being all those things and are also at risk of losing their lives. Moreover, to ignore the obligation to redeem captives is to go against any number of Torah laws, including the negative injunctions ‘not to harden your heart or shut your hand against the needy’ (Deuteronomy 15:7) and ‘not to stand idly by while another’s blood is being spilt’ (Leviticus 19:16)…and also the positive commandment to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18).” Other passages in other books go even further, some I noticed daring even to suggest that failing to redeem a captive who is then murdered by his captors makes those who might have redeemed him before he was killed at least partially responsible for his death.

On the other side of the ledger we have the obvious truth that the almost entirely one-sided prisoner swaps we have seen over the years in which Israel releases hundreds of prisoners in exchange for one or two captured Israelis only encourage terrorists to attempt even more abductions. And there are many sources in our literature that take that side of the issue into account. A thousand years before Maimonides lived, for example, the Mishnah already decreed that captives should specifically not be redeemed for outlandishly exaggerated sums of money lest the practice merely serve to make kidnapping even more attractive to people seeking to raise funds through the abduction of innocents. It is true that certain exceptions were eventually made and accepted as reasonable. The Shulchan Arukh, for example, excludes from the rule wealthy individuals who wish to pay for their own ransom with their own funds and makes further exceptions when the prisoner is a great scholar. Still, the general principle is taken seriously and for all it may be so that “every minute one delays in the redemption of a captive it is as though one is personally facilitating his murder,” it is also the case that we must also do what we can not to create a climate that leads to more abductions and consequently even more captives being redeemed in even more lopsided deals.

It was with these ideas in mind, I suppose, that Prime Minister Netanyahu said in July that although he sympathizes with the Shalit family and understands the hell they are living through, he is nevertheless obliged to act in the best interests of all Israelis. And then the prime minister went on to specify that although he was indeed prepared to pay a very heavy price to bring Gilad Shalit back home, he was specifically not prepared to pay any price at all to do so. Also highly relevant in this regard is the chilling detail that many terrorists released in previous swaps have indeed gone on to murder even more Israelis. (The prime minister specifically mentioned the 2004 swap in which four hundred Palestinian prisoners were released in exchange for one Israeli businessman and noted that prisoners among those freed were personally responsible for killing some twenty-seven Israelis in the months and years following their release.) So nothing is ever as simple as it sounds like it ought be.

Moral decisions are never simple. When we try to teach our children to distinguish between right and wrong, we usually use the simple model of someone coming to a fork in the road and then having to choose between left and right, good and bad, right and wrong. Everybody likes that model because it reduces the challenge of living a moral life to a game anyone can win: you face a choice between two options and you make the right choice and that’s all there is to it. But, as we all find out soon enough once we leave childhood behind, that is almost never all there is to it. Yes, of course, occasionally it really is that easy: you find a wallet somewhere containing someone’s driver’s license and a huge amount of cash and you have to decide between returning the money to its rightful owner and stealing it merely because you can. But how often exactly do we face choices that are that clear-cut and ethically transparent? Far more often in life we come to forks in the road at which both paths forward are right and wrong…and we have to choose between them not merely by willing ourselves to behave morally but actually by weighing the evidence and then obliging ourselves to decide which path is the least bad. It’s that kind of world…and thinking about Gilad Shalit and his fate is a good way to prepare for Yom Kippur precisely because it provides a small but extremely vivid picture of the kind of moral dilemmas we constantly meet in life and which we are called upon by tradition to adjudicate for ourselves as we stand before God in judgment on the holiest day of the year.

For Prime Minister Netanyahu, the choice must be excruciating even to try to think through. Is it better to save someone in real danger even if it means almost inevitably that others will pay with their lives as a result? Does a real person in real and constant danger trump the fear that crimes by unnamed parties may or even probably will be committed against unidentifiable innocents who themselves have no idea that their lives could conceivably be forfeit if the individual who might yet murder them is released from prison? It’s so easy to think about Gilad and to empathize with his parents and to yearn, as do we all, for his release…and another thing to imagine actually having to decide where to draw the line, how much is too much, at what point a government crosses over from behaving nobly to behaving recklessly. I can’t imagine having to make such a decision, yet Yom Kippur is our national season of taking ourselves seriously…and being happy that this specific decision is not any of ours to make should inspire us to own up to the countless decisions we do make in our lives, mostly without thinking about them too seriously at all, and asking ourselves how well we have managed, if we have, to choose the moral path forward at each of those crossroads.

It’s never simple! Almost any misdeed can be rationalized, even justified. But part of the process of atonement involves facing down that truth and understanding that life almost never offers us simple choices that anyone possessed of the desire to live morally could manage successfully to negotiate, that it is more or less always possible to explain away our own poor decisions with reference to the complexity of the choices we are forced to make and to the inevitable positive side-effects of choosing poorly or wrongly. At almost any crossroads both paths forward will have something to recommend them to the moral individual...which is what makes Yom Kippur such a complex experience to live through. Considering the complex morality behind any decision to negotiate with terrorists—and personalizing the issue by considering it specifically as it applies to any negotiations Israel might undertake to free Gilad Shalit—can inspire us all to think more carefully and more honestly about the decisions we have made in the past year and will be obliged to continue making into the future…and to resolve to live more carefully, thus also more morally, and never to sidestep difficult decisions merely because we can see something positive in both possible paths forward.

I know we all join together in the prayer that Gilad Shalit be released quickly from captivity and reunited with his family. If you are inclined, you can make a donation to the Keren Maor foundation that was founded “to assist and support the families of kidnapped soldiers in their struggle to free their sons” at the www.gilad.org website. (The foundation was founded when Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, both of whom were captured by Hezbollah in Lebanon and both of whom were subsequently murdered, were still alive. Of the three, then, Gilad Shalit is the one left on whose behalf the foundation labors.) What we can all do is include a prayer for Gilad in our Yom Kippur prayers and hope that our prayers will be answered speedily and effectively. I know he will be in my prayers…and I hope he will be in yours as well.

I wish all my readers an easy fast and a satisfying and meaningful Yom Kippur. May God look with favor on your work and listen kindly and indulgently to your prayers. And may God grant that the soldiers of Israel and all who serve in our American armed forces always be safe and secure wherever duty brings them.

Casting the First Stone

Like many of you, I’m sure, I read with great interest the story in the Times earlier this week about the Taliban’s revival of stoning in Afghanistan as the preferred method of execution. The details would be gruesome enough, but at the heart of the story was the detail that the “criminals” who were so executed were neither thieves nor murderers, but a young couple whose crime was that they had fallen in love. The story is simple enough. A young man of twenty-five named Khayyam fell in love with a nineteen-year-old named Siddiqa. The only problem was that Siddiqa had already been betrothed by her family to marry another (who, coincidentally, was a relative of Khayyam’s). Unable to convince Siddiqa’s family that she should be permitted to marry the man she loved, the couple eloped and fled to a province in eastern Afghanistan where they stayed for a while with some distant relatives. But then they were lured back to their home by people, including members of their own families, who told them that a new decision has been reached and that, as a result, they were going to be permitted to marry and live together as husband and wife after all. Fooled by these false reports, they returned home. Once they arrived, however, they were arrested by the Taliban, tried by a court of local mullahs, and sentenced to death.

The death sentence was carried out immediately. Khayyam, who already had a wife and two children (Afghan men are permitted to marry up to four wives), and Siddiqa were taken to the local bazaar, where they were encircled by about two hundred men who threw stones at them. Siddiqa died first, then Khayyam. The two hundred participants were supported by a large, enthusiastic crowd of supporters. A spokesman for the local body of Islamic clerics noted that stoning is the correct method of execution for people convicted of having engaged in illicit sexual relations. President Karzai deplored the whole incident, choosing to frame his remarks in terms of regret regarding the increased power of the Taliban rather than in terms of any specific sympathy for the executed couple. Otherwise, the world kept spinning. There was no follow-up story in the paper.

There are a thousand different reasons for this story to interest the American reading public. For me, however, the story was especially provocative because it reminded me—disconcertingly—of any number of passages I know from the Torah. In the Torah portion we will read tomorrow in shul, for example, the Torah decrees death by stoning for a woman who misrepresents herself as a virgin to a man who believes her and then, acting on that belief, marries her. Also in this week’s Torah portion is the law decreeing death, also by stoning, of an engaged woman who engages in sexual relations with a man other than her fiancé. (The woman, I should note, is given the benefit of the doubt. If the incident is shown to have taken place in the countryside where she can be presumed to have cried out for help, then only the man is to be stoned to death. Only if the incident took place in an urban setting where she would surely have been heard if she had called for help are they both to be stoned to death.)

Of course, Biblical law ordains capital punishment for many different offenses including sacrificing to alien gods, blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath laws, and sorcery. Nor are all who are found guilty of sexual crimes to be executed by stoning. The daughter of a kohen, for example, who is found to have behaved promiscuously is to be burnt to death. And there are also passages in which capital punishment is decreed for specific offenses, but in which the precise method of execution is not made clear. (Our oral tradition eventually worked out a precise list of which criminal ends up executed in which way. Adulterers, for example, are to be strangled.)

As horrible as the story from Afghanistan is, therefore, we are hardly in a position to throw the first stone. Or are we? Part of the test, I believe, of the vibrancy and spiritual worth of any religion is its ability to morph over the centuries into an ever-finer and ever-more-morally just version of itself. There is a reason most Jews would find the data in the preceding paragraph shocking, after all…and it is not because most Jews rarely if ever open a Chumash to peruse the weekly Torah portion. Perhaps even some of my readers who are regulars in shul and who hear the Torah read to them all the time responded by wondering if those facts could possibly be true and by asking themselves if this could really be part of Judaism, this kind of bloodthirsty willingness to punish people for sleeping with the wrong people or for making the kinds of decisions that Western society considers to be wholly reasonable for individuals to make for themselves without reference to the wishes of others.

It’s a good question, one I would normally hesitate to answer in public. But given the story about the Taliban that appeared on the front page last week, I feel emboldened to express myself on the issue directly.

By rabbinic times, our leaders had lost their taste for biblical legislation of this specific sort. Executions were almost never carried out. Rules were enacted that made it almost unimaginable that anyone could ever be executed…including for sins and crimes for which the Torah unambiguously decrees death. There must be witnesses to the act. That much must seem obvious, but there must also be witnesses who can attest in court that the individual or individuals involved were formally warned that the act in which they were about to engage is forbidden and could be punished by execution. And then the people involved have to make a formal declaration admitting that they know that and that they understand that and that they are going to proceed in the commission of their sin or their crime anyway. By the time our rabbis were done there was almost no possibility that anyone would ever face death by stoning for making what moderns would consider wholly private and personal decisions. And, indeed, by the time Maimonides created his magisterial compendium of Jewish law in the twelfth century, he could include a long section detailing the specific methods of execution ordained by Scripture for each specific sin or crime listed in the Torah secure in the knowledge that no one was actually ever to be put to death for any of them.

It would be easy to view this as a tragedy, of course, by noting that Jews lived by then under the rule of others, that there were no Jewish autonomous courts with the authority to put the Torah’s teachings into real practice. But that would only be one way to look at the situation and another would be to see the Jewish people clinging to their Torah as a tree of life not by slavishly insisting that its every rule must be followed literally, but by allowing us to focus legislation our tradition considers not merely sacred but divine through the prism of our own moral bearing, thus becoming true partners with God in the creation of a just society rooted in holy law yet ever-responsive to the evolving sense of right-and-wrong we bring to our spiritual lives.

The Taliban are literalists who don’t see why any practice ordained by traditional Muslim law should not be taken literally and acted upon as though it were ipso facto just merely by virtue of its appearance in a sacred book. And, of course, there are Jewish fundamentalists who argue the parallel version of that same argument with respect to Jewish law. Yet when the Jewish state was proclaimed in 1948, the great leaders of our people understood that not only would it have been impractical to take, say, Rambam’s code literally as the basis for the Israeli law, but that doing so would also have constituted a kind of betrayal of fundamental Jewish values: we are called upon to be partners with God not only in the ongoing work of sustaining the physical world, but also to be partners with God in the ongoing work of making divine revelation meaningful and responsive to an ever-evolving moral standard. I hope we are all in agreement that adultery is a bad thing, something that should be considered sinful by its very nature. But I believe that we need to take the lessons tradition teaches to heart…not by strangling adulterers but by understanding that the Bible uses that kind of violent language to express its sense that the betrayal of a spouse’s trust is not only wrong technically but a moral outrage that decent people should condemn loudly and clearly. (Does that sound obvious? When the governor of New York State publicly admitted upon coming to office that both he and his wife had previously committed adultery, he was widely praised for being forthright and frank about his and his wife’s past indiscretions.)

Like all of you I’m sure, I found it difficult even to read Khayyam and Siddiqa’s story to the end. Those of you who read Khaled Hosseini’s marvelous book, The Kite Runner, were exposed to a detailed description of how exactly execution by stoning is carried out in Afghanistan. (The book, if any of you haven’t read it, is wonderful and I recommend it highly. But there are passages in it that are so brutal that it’s hard to keep your eyes on the page without looking away.) Was this specific execution like the one in the book? I suppose it must have been, at least partially. But the point is not specifically to lament the horrific fate of this couple whose crime was to fall in love, but to wonder what it will take for people whose vision of Islam is so extreme and so violent to come to realize that the true test of fidelity to God’s word is not slavish obedience to the text as once written, but to the moral voice within as filtered through the medium of revelation. Like I said, we Jews have our own fanatics to deal with…but at least I can say with pride that the Jewish people as a whole has accepted the obligation to allow its faith to grow, generation by generation, into a new and finer version of itself. Will the members of other faiths join us in that particular way of understanding how religion should work in the world? I suppose that remains to be seen!

Elul in Argentina

For Jews all over the world, the first days of the month of Elul have a strangely ominous feel to them. (The first of Elul was last Wednesday.) On the outside Rosh Hashanah is still a month away, Yom Kippur even further down the pike than that. There isn’t any real hint of fall in the air. School is still out. There are families in our midst who have not even left yet on their summer vacations, let alone returned. But on the inside—in shul, I mean, but also internally, in our hearts—things are slightly different. We’ve begun to sound the shofar every morning. No blessing, no elaborate liturgy, no big deal attends the ceremony….and yet, each single morning, that monitory blast of an ancient horn somehow reminds us that we are approaching that strange season of the year most of us somehow anticipate eagerly and also dread slightly, the season of family gatherings and divine judgment, the season of eating too much and drinking too much…and also of looking just a little too deeply for comfort into the mirror the Machzor holds up to us and invites us to peer into and say honestly what we think of whom we see looking back. And we’ve begun to recite the twenty-seventh psalm every morning and evening, that ancient poem that gently (but also not that gently) calls us to courage in the face of self-knowledge.

Many Jews have the custom of adopting some special exercise during Elul designed to help the process along slightly. Some undertake some special study project that they hope will make the process of honest introspection less painful to face. Others find some special kind of tzedakah that they hope will by its nature help weaken the natural inclination we all feel to look away when tradition calls upon us to look deeply and carefully at the men and women we have become….and to resolve to grow into finer versions of ourselves than we have attained to date. Still others undertake to discipline themselves by eating less or waking earlier or giving up some or another comfort to which they have become used, but which they now feel may be impeding their ability to stand before God in judgment without flinching or looking away or seeking dishonestly to self-justify with untruths. It’s a lovely time of year…but also a challenging one. I’ve always liked it very much.

Myself, I like to travel during Elul. I’m not sure where this came from. I’m sure I didn’t invent it. I’m not even sure I didn’t hear about the custom somewhere along the way and simply find it appealing enough to adopt. I haven’t always done it, of course. Some years it just wasn’t practical to get away. (When the kids were younger, there were always all those camp schedules to juggle towards the end of the summer.) But when I can…I find that in the weeks leading up to the holiday season there is nothing I can do to prepare myself more meaningfully for the chagim than finding the time to travel to some different place, to allow myself to exist outside my natural environment, to provide myself with a different, unfamiliar background against which to observe myself…and see myself clearly and without the distraction that a familiar setting paradoxically seems to introduce into the mix.

As many of you know, I came back Thursday morning from a week in Argentina. I went alone. Normally, Joan and I travel together on trips like this, but I was invited to be the scholar-in-residence at the winter convention of the Latin American region of the Rabbinical Assembly—August is mid-winter in the southern hemisphere—and Joan needed to be in Toronto to help celebrate her father’s eighty-fifth birthday, plus it seemed like a lot of money for us to pay for her to come along when I was going to be busy most of every day and she would have been on her own. (The tickets were also very expensive. Mine was covered, of course. But hers we would have had to pay for ourselves!) And so I went by myself on an Elul journey that was exactly what the doctor ordered. I had the best time! But it was also an important experience for me spiritually, even emotionally. And that’s what I want to tell you about this week.

First of all, I have to say that I could not have been received any more warmly or graciously. I spent Shabbos in Buenos Aires and loved every minute. I went to the NCI-Emanuel synagogue on Friday night and found about 350 people gathered for a service that featured incredible singing and ruach, plus a real sense of intense fellowship and warmth. (I brought back two CDs of the music they use and I can’t wait to share them with our community here.) And I had a similar experience the following morning at the Amijai synagogue, where I was invited to teach a class in the weekly Torah portion following services. (These synagogues seem to attract their largest crowds on Friday evening, but that also has to do with the whole Argentine custom of having dinner in the middle of the night. We left shul after ten on Friday night, went to the home of the president of the community, sat down to a full-course, elegant Shabbos dinner at 11 and by the time I got back to my hotel it was after 1:30 in the morning. And even then the streets were filled with people.) And then on Sunday we travelled to Rosario, Argentina, the country’s third largest city located about 200 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. The whole experience was wonderful. I stayed in a lovely hotel, spoke four times in the course of the convention (since I don’t speak Spanish, I delivered my remarks in Hebrew), was treated not merely as a guest, but as a truly welcome participant in the convention. I was even a guest at a real Argentinian barbecue held at the Jewish Community Center in Rosario, which was just great. (Did I really eat that much? I surprised even myself…but it was worth it! And it’s completely true that in addition to being a nation of late-night diners Argentina is a nation of inveterate carnivores.) And Rosario itself is a lovely place. I had a few free hours to wander along the lovely, traffic-free, pedestrian streets in the center of the city, to do a bit of shopping, to take some pictures, enjoy the feel of the place. Really, I couldn’t have had a more relaxing, pleasant visit. And then I came home…to summer instead of winter, to a mountain of e-mail and real mail and voice mail and bills and appointments, to real life. I happy to be back! But I’m also very happy to have gone on this unexpected journey to a very far-off place. (Buenos Aires is almost exactly the same distance from New York as Tel Aviv. It’s an eleven hour flight. Argentina is not around the corner.)

But the details of my stay—the exceptional graciousness with which I was received and the fun I had getting to know my colleagues from Latin America—are not precisely what I want to tell you about. I did learn a lot about Argentina in the course of my travels, of course. But, keeping to the spirit of these Elul journeys, there was also a lot I learned about myself on this trip. Seeing myself against a new backdrop, hearing myself speaking to a room of people I’d never met before (and with whom therefore I had no history at all), challenging myself not to rely on what people who have known me for years know of me but to present myself not as a work-in-progress but as the man I have grown to become at this specific moment in my life…that was an Elul experience of great worth. I allowed myself to see myself not as I prefer to think of myself as being, but as I truly am, as I look not to people who know me well but to people specifically who do not know me at all, to people who are meeting me with no prior considerations of any sort, who don’t think highly or negatively of me at all because all they know of me is what they can see at the specific moment in my life in which they are encountering me. It’s not that easy to put into words how this all feels. A little, it’s unnerving. (How often do we rely on our friends to ignore what we have just said and somehow to know what we must have meant?) And a little it’s also disconcerting, something like having the tailor measure you and tell you what size suit you actually need (as opposed to what size you tell yourself you “really” wear). But it was also exciting, even thrilling, to measure myself against the shadow I actually cast, against the image I actually project, against the man that others see when they look at me without prejudice and without any prior inclination to evaluate me one way or the other. Speaking in Hebrew was healthy for me too…since speaking in any language other than your native tongue requires you to weigh your words and consider carefully what you are saying in a way that it’s all too easy to skip when you’re speaking in a language you know so well you barely have to think about what you’re saying at all. And being in a totally alien environment was also a good thing, since nothing encourages you to float along on automatic pilot more than finding yourself in a framework where you know how everything works and what role everybody plays…and thus specifically not to feel even remotely obligated to ask yourself if the role you are playing is reflective of the person you truly are or merely of the role you have self-assigned yourself to play in the world.

So the short version is that Argentina was great. The food was great. The coffee—man, these people drink a lot of coffee, including long after midnight—the coffee was excellent. The fellowship I encountered at the convention was marvelous and very satisfying. (I made a lot of new friends!) It was a long trip, but completely worth it…and not only in terms of what I learned about a different country and its ways, but far more to the point in terms of what I learned about myself. I feel ready for the holidays now in a way I didn’t even just a week ago before I left. And all I had to do was undertake a journey of slightly more than 10,000 miles to feel that way. It was a long trip, but now I feel ready for Elul…and for what lies beyond.

Swimming in Other Seas

In 1916, Hermann Hesse’s life was troubled in several different ways. His father had just died. (Coincidentally, my own father had just been born.) And his grief weighed so heavily upon him that he was eventually dismissed from military service. His marriage was coming apart, yet his wife’s ever-worsening schizophrenia made him feel that it would be impossible for them to separate. Perhaps even more painfully, Hesse’s youngest son (with whom I myself share a first name) was suffering from an undiagnosed illness that appeared only to become more virulent and terrifying as the months passed. But true artists exist at the intersection of repression and creativity…and that year was also the year Hesse published his novella, “The Beauty of Youth,” which later was to become the first full-length literary work that the college-aged me managed somehow to read from beginning to end in German and (more or less) to understand.

I’ve been thinking about that novella lately, remembering especially a line in it that has stayed with me ever since. In the story, Hesse writes about a successful young man who returns to his parents’ home to spend the summer there before heading abroad to take up some position he has been offered. As he settles back into his childhood home, he embarks on a kind of mental experiment to see if it could be possible to return to one’s youth. He wants not merely to recall the past, but actually to revisit it…and, if possible, to alter certain specific aspects of it. It’s a bit of a complicated story, although also a very moving one that I recall liking very much, but the eventual conclusion is that the past is a place, as Hesse says explicitly, from which roads only exit. You can move back into your parents’ home if you wish…but you cannot revisit your own childhood by doing so any more meaningfully than you can re-see a play you’ve enjoyed by revisiting the theater in which it was performed after the show has closed. Away from the past lead only one-way streets, Hesse wrote, and the difference between adults with respect to their youths has to do only with the degree of regret they bring to that thought. But, he writes, even those the most beset by regret cannot go back in time to redo or undo what was once done.

Those lines must have meant something to me when I was in college. I do after all remember them all these many years later! And I’m sure I agreed with what Hesse wrote. (In those halcyon days of my late teenagedom, I basically agreed with everything Hesse wrote.) And yet…the issue turns out, at least for me, to be more nuanced and interesting than the almost simple observation that time only flows forward, that you cannot revisit the past, that time machines are the stuff of science fiction precisely because they don’t exist and can’t exist.

Over these last few years, Joan and I have been revisiting the scenes of earlier versions of our lives. (We didn’t undertake to do this consciously, but it’s turned out that way anyway.) We were in Jerusalem and Heidelberg three summers ago. We were in Vancouver the year after that. This summer we’ve been to Boston, where we lived for six months in the early 1990s, and to southern California, where I served a congregation for the three years before I came to Shelter Rock. And next week we’re on our way back to Toronto, the scene of Joan’s childhood, to spend some time with her family. I was even in Forest Hills the other week and found myself driving past the apartment building in which I grew up. I needed to make some phone calls and the blue tooth device I use to talk on the phone while I drive wasn’t working properly…so I parked, sat down on a shaded bench in the park next to my parents’ building where I played as a child and spent a lot of time reading when I was in high school and college, and began to make my calls. It may even have been the very same bench I was sitting on on when I first read Hesse’s novella as a sophomore in college! (And even if it wasn’t the same exact bench, then surely the more important detail is that it was the same me sitting in the same park. And I really did spend a lot of time reading in that park during my college years.)

There’s a certain nostalgic aspect to all this revisiting of the scenes of our earlier adventures. But it’s also more than that, more than mere nostalgia. You all know that I believe in ghosts, but mostly when we speak about ghosts we mean the ghosts of other people and specifically of other people who have died. But that’s only one version of the concept. Many non-Western cultures speak about the ghosts of the living, about the way that the physical body anchored in space and time exists in some sort of parallel way to the spiritual body that exists outside of both and with enduring reference to neither. It sounds like the kind of concept only an undergraduate could love, but the truth is that I keep catching glimpses of myself—or do I mean: my self?— in these places we’ve been revisiting. Most recently, for example, I had that experience last week in Boston. Joan was busy with her course all day long—she was training in some very complicated computer music program called Logic—and I was free to work out at the gym, to write at the library, to have lunch with friends (of whom we have many in Boston). We took a room for the week in the same neighborhood we lived in back in 1993. It was a long time ago. I was thirty-nine and Joan was even younger than that! Our sons were nine and six. Lucy was three years old. We were who we were and who we still are…but although physically we have all morphed into our current versions—the kids are 26, 23, and 20 now—I was amazed continually to notice traces of our former versions still haunting Beacon Street and Harvard Street, still present in that ethereal way of the non-existent that somehow impresses without threatening and which feels fully real. When I went to Congregation Kehillat Israel to hear Eicha on the eve of Tisha Be’av, for example, I had the incredibly peculiar sense that I hadn’t really been away for seventeen years, that in a sense I hadn’t been away really at all. Indeed, I had the strange sense that my own ghost had just left the chapel when Joan and I walked in and took our seats. I almost caught a glimpse of him too! (Was I really that thin at 39? Maybe I was!)

Does all this sound ghoulish and strange? It does, even to me! Well, maybe not ghoulish...but definitely strange! Nevertheless, I remain possessed of the conviction that I have shared with you on many occasions, usually during Yizkor, that time really is only a kind of midrash that we have invented to explain our lives…and that there is also the possibility of existence without reference to time past and time future. We affirm constantly that God in heaven exists in a way that is unrelated to the passage of time. But nowhere do we insist that what is true of God cannot also be true, at least in some paler, derivative sense, of ourselves. And so have I come to think things are in this world now that I’ve encountered my own ghost, if that’s the right word, in so many different places. They don’t linger, these spectral selves of ours. (The ghosts of the departed don’t linger either, of course. But that we surely all know!) And they almost never speak, or at least they don’t speak to me. But this strange progression of visits to the places we’ve lived—including over these last years more or less all of them: Queens, Toronto, Manhattan, Jerusalem, Heidelberg, Vancouver, Boston, and California—has only made me clearer on the concept that, for all time is the sea in which we swim as physically real people anchored in the physically real world, there is also the possibility of existing in others contexts and of swimming in other seas.

In the corner of my eye, I noticed my teenaged self just leaving as I sat down in that park in Forest Hills to make my calls. Was it really me? My first inclination is to say that the answer to that question depends on what the person asking it means by the word “really” in the question. But now that I think more carefully, perhaps the matter turns more precisely on what the asker means by the word “me.” We are, clearly, who we are. And, in that we are the aggregate of our own experiences and histories, we are also who we were. The only real question open to debate, in fact, is whether those earlier versions of ourselves exist independent of our own recollective consciousnesses as…whatever name we choose to label these spectral versions of our out-of-time selves. But I recognized both that guy who left the chapel at KI on Harvard Street when Joan and I came to hear Eicha and that teenager who was just leaving the park in Forest Hills when I sat down to make those calls…and, contrary to what you’d think, I was very pleased to see him (or do I mean them?) even if just for the briefest of moments.

Tisha Be'av 2010

Tisha Be’av, the great midsummer fast day whose name is its own date, falls next Monday night and next Tuesday. (Tisha Be’av has no “real” name and is called simply by the Hebrew expression meaning “the ninth of [the Hebrew month of] Av.”) Like most of you, I suspect, I harbor a certain amount of ambivalence about the day. On the one hand, I know more than enough about the Jewish past to understand that both times Jerusalem was destroyed in ancient days, by the Babylonians in the beginning part of the sixth century BCE and by the Romans towards the end of the first century CE, were true threshold moments in Jewish history after which nothing was the same as it had previously been. And because both instances of mass destruction (and also, of course, the terrible loss of life both sieges entailed) coincidentally befell the Jewish people on almost the same date, the midsummer fast of Tisha Be’av has always been taken more than seriously. It is, for example, the only full dusk-to-dusk fast in our calendar other than Yom Kippur. (Other fast days begin at dawn.) And it is the only one with its own customs and ceremonies, and with its own scroll—the Book of Lamentations, called Eicha, written by the prophet Jeremiah who was himself an eye witness to the devastation and desolation of Jerusalem in his day, is read twice in the course of the day—and its own Yom Kippur-like set of rules and regulations. So clearly it is meant to be a big deal in our calendar and as such is it widely observed both in Israel and abroad.

On the other hand, we have the reality that Jerusalem is not in ruins and—just to the contrary—is the thriving, bustling capital of the Jewish state. Readers who have been to Jerusalem on Tisha Be’av, in fact, know that there is a certain absurd feel in the air as people walk through the streets of a vibrant Jewish city on their way to mourn the destruction of that very same city. If people we have lost came back to life, would we continue to say Kaddish for them? I suppose we wouldn’t! Of course, with respect to our parents and grandparents, it doesn’t seem like something we need to worry about too intensely. But when Tisha Be’av comes around we all face the urban version of that dilemma as we wonder if there is value or meaning in mourning for a city razed to the ground and then come back to life. So there is that set of issues to consider too…and it is, depending on one’s mood, either an amusing paradox to deal with or else an instance of cripplingly irrational conflict between history and reality.

And layered over all that is the history each of us brings to the fast. Other than when I have actually been in Jerusalem itself for Tisha Be’av, the most meaningful fasts I have experienced were usually in summer camp or at JTS. But as the years have passed I have occasionally spent the fast in unusual places that have added their own flavor to the mix of emotions I bring to the day. In 2004, Joan and I had the idea to drive from North Carolina to New York on Tisha Be’av and to mark the day, other than by reading Eicha and fasting, by stopping at the huge life-size model of the desert Tabernacle Moses and the Israelites constructed in the Sinai during their years of wandering (and which serves in Jewish history as the precursor to the great Temple in Jerusalem the was destroyed twice on Tisha Be’av) that the Mennonites have constructed near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It sounded like a good idea at the time! But it turned out to be inaccurate and cheesy—and, yes, in retrospect the whole concept seems peculiar to me too and even I don’t know what we can have been thinking as we planned out our route home—and we both ended up with huge headaches that even the gift shop with its wooden Aaron-the-High-Priest dolls and postcards did nothing to assuage. (We ended up sleeping in the car until nightfall, then breaking our fast and heading home in the cool of night.) And then there was the time shortly after we met that Joan and I had a tire blow out on us on Tisha Be’av right in front of Santa’s Village in Bracebridge, Ontario, and had to spend an exceptionally peculiar hour waiting for the CAA to arrive with a replacement. (The fact that Santa himself came over to chat—business was apparently not great in the 100+ degree July heat—only added to the Fellini-esque feel of our first Tisha Be’av together.)

But none of that is what I really want to write to you about today. The reason Tisha Be’av is meaningful to me, and the reason I encourage its observance and wouldn’t dream of not fasting myself, is not because Jerusalem isn’t the living capital of our Jewish state or because I really would continue to include resurrected relatives in my Yizkor prayers. What it’s all about to me has to do with the rabbinic lesson—meaningful and intensely monitory at the same time—that for all it felt as though Gentile armies of marauding invaders were destroying Jerusalem, the more profound truth is that the Jewish people were themselves responsible for the destruction of their most holy city because of sinat chinam, the sin of irrational loathing focused not on the enemy but on each other. (The Talmud passage I am thinking of, I should note, is speaking specifically of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and makes sinat chinam the functional equivalent of the three most heinous of all sins: murder, immorality, and idolatry. But I think we can broaden the scope to include all instances of devastation preceded not by inner-Jewish unity but fractiousness and internecine hatred.) And, regretfully, that is not something I think any of us can reasonably describe as an ancient memory or an antique feature of Jewish life we have long since moved past.

Two events in Israel last week will provide ample illustration of what I mean. First we were treated to the spectacle of David Rotem, a member of the Knesset who represents the Yisrael Beitenu party, introducing a bill into the Knesset that would undo the highly fragile compromise that has gradually emerged regarding the status of converted Jewish people in Israel by handing complete control over conversions to the chief rabbinate, a body that is almost entirely now under the unholy influence of the extreme right wing of the Orthodox movement. If this bill should pass—although Prime Minister Netanyahu said unequivocally the other day that it will never reach the Knesset floor, a pledge charitably interpreted as the expression of his fervently-held wish that it not do so—it will not only divide the Jewish people in two, but ineradicably demonstrate the contempt in which non-Orthodox Jews are held not only by the Orthodox establishment in Israel but also by their secular bedmates in the Knesset. We would not love Israel any the less if this bill passes. But it will be hard to feel that the Israeli government, by passing such a bill, has not taken a huge step forward towards encouraging diaspora Jewry to feel disconnected from Israel and uninterested in participating in its future. It’s hard to find words to say what an error of judgment the passage of this bill would constitute. And yet there it is, approved by the Knesset’s Law Committee for a first reading as though it were merely another piece of legislation duly to consider.

It is true, I believe, that MK Rotem’s bill has more to do with the 320,000 Israeli citizens, mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who are not fully Jewish according to Jewish law than with us or “our” converts. Many of these people have served in the army and almost all plan to make their permanent homes in Israel. So some solution has to be found…and the answer, apparently, is deemed to lie in finding rabbis lax enough not to care that the vast majority of these people are neither observant nor interested in observance but who themselves are still deemed pious enough rabbis enough for the chief rabbinate to accept their pro forma efforts at conversion. The hypocrisy behind such a solution to the problem would be breathtaking even if it did not entail alienating precisely the huge majority of world Jewry who do not self-identify as Orthodox and who reject Orthodox fundamentalism as emotionally untenable and intellectually unappealing. But given the possibility of the Knesset enacting a law that would create a two-tiered system of Jewishness that would have the potential to divide the Jewish people in two, our response has to be more than vigorous. To that end, everyone who cares about the future of Israel should write immediately to Prime Minister Netanyahu and encourage him to find the courage to fight back against the forces of sinat chinam that have brought us to this impasse. If you wish, you can simply sign the form letter available here: http://www.masorti.org/email/form-letter.html and that will suffice. If you wish to express yourself more personally, then you can write in English to the Prime Minister at pm_eng2@pmo.gov.il. But regardless of whether you choose to formulate your thoughts on your own or just to sign the prepared letter, all who care about Israel should find the time to send an e-mail to the prime minister as soon as possible.

The other event that occurred in Israel this week, also a stunning example of sinat chinam, involved the arrest of Anat Hoffman, the chairperson of the Women of the Wall group, for the crime of having held a Torah scroll in her arms. (The police explained afterwards that they had to move in for fear that she might actually read from the scroll, thus defying a 2003 High Court ruling prohibiting such provocative behavior!) So this is what it has come down to as we prepare to fast on Tisha Be’av. Jewish people who wish to worship at our holiest site, the Western Wall, can only do so if they obey the strictures of the ultra-Orthodox who have somehow become the lords of the manor. Women, even if they do knuckle under to the self-arrogated authority of the Haredim, risk arrest if they look as though they might wish to hear the Torah read aloud. In the Knesset, a bill that could well drive a permanent wedge between world Jewry and the State of Israel is introduced…and seriously discussed and approved for debate instead of being thrown out by the entire Knesset speaking with one voice in favor of Jewish unity and interdependency. I feel despair in my heart when I write of these things to you. And yet my love for the land of Israel, slightly paradoxically, is only heightened by considering these issues. And for the people of Israel as well—in both senses of the term—is my affection only heightened by these onslaughts against common sense and normal decency. Somehow, we will come through all of this intact. And Israel will not only do the right thing, but thrive and continue to be the beacon of democracy and hope in the Middle East as which it has served for more than sixty years. It will all be good…but fasting on Tisha Be’av to remind us that, should we allow it to happen, the worst can also befall us—that seems to me a worthy way to spend a day immersed in prayer, thoughtful consideration of the Jewish past and the Jewish future, and in renewed dedication to the future of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

The Isherwood Experience and the Jews

Sometimes life really does imitate art! And so, a scant three or four months after reading and enjoying Charles Isherwood’s piece in the Times about his apparently repeated experiences attending the theater and finding himself totally at odds with what everybody else appears to be thinking about the show being performed on stage, I had the same experience in the same theater at the same show just last evening when Joan and I went to see Tony Shalhoub and Anthony LaPaglia in the Broadway revival of the 1989 hit, Lend Me a Tenor. Why anyone stayed for the second act, I can’t imagine. (We did because we had someplace to go afterwards, and the Music Box, to give it its due, was very nicely air-conditioned. And, yes, also because Joan wanted to stay and see what happened.) Speaking for myself, then, I suppose I can say that if I had come to the theater genetically predisposed to enjoy farce and if the show was not as stale and little engaging as I found it to be—and also if the plot made just a bit more sense and it were just a bit more likely that two men who look nothing alike and who must have eighty pounds’ difference between their weights could be made indistinguishable from each other by one donning a wig and both appearing in minstrel-show-style blackface make-up—then perhaps I would have found the show to be as much fun as the guffawing man wearing cut-off denim shorts and a New York Mets cap sitting just behind me clearly did. And also as his wife clearly also did. (Or was she his girlfriend? There weren’t any rings on her ring fingers that I could see, but she did take her shoes off her sockless feet during the performance and extend them over the empty seat next to mine during the twenty minutes or so that led into the intermission. Would a date still hoping to move the relationship forward to the next level do that? But, of course, who knows why people do what they do? And aren’t we so often our own worst enemies, especially when it comes to matters of the heart?)

The audience—not all of it, but clearly a serious cross-section of it—loved the show. Some people, although not many, actually stood up in their seats during the curtain call in an unsuccessful attempt to initiate a standing ovation. That far the rest of the audience clearly would not go—even the people behind us didn’t stand up—but, still, the applause was strong and the general response, as eavesdropped on by myself on the way out, seemed beyond favorable. So what’s wrong with me? I have a sense of humor. (I heard that!) I like light-hearted! (I heard that too.) But this show was just the opposite: not funny or clever, and not particularly entertaining. But it is the Isherwood experience I want to write about here, not our evening last night at the Music Box specifically. After all, people don’t like the same foods or the same kinds of music, so why should everybody enjoy the same kind of theater? But Isherwood’s piece was not about the reasonableness of disagreement, but about the phenomenon of being alone in one’s view in a theater filled with people applauding wildly at a show one feels beyond noble for having stuck out to the bitter end.

You’d think Jews would be used to marching to a different drummer. (Since the expression is so often misquoted and also since I mentioned only last week what a fan of Henry David Thoreau I am, I suppose I should give it correctly here. The sage of Walden Pond wrote, “If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”) And, in a real sense, the concepts of swimming against the current, of resisting the temptation to suppose that the majority must ipso facto be right, and of championing the right of the individual to march to his or her personal drumbeat is at the heart of what it means to be a Jew in the modern world. Is that why Hans Christian Andersen’s story about the emperor’s new clothes is as resonant as it is with so many of us? Much more a cautionary tale for adults than a fairy story for children, Andersen’s story is specifically about a little boy who finds it in him to resist the temptation to go with the majority flow and to assume that something must be so merely because everybody says it is. (In the context of the story, the boy sees that the emperor is naked but then everybody assures him that their king is not only dressed, but is actually wearing the kind of gorgeous finery the sovereign of an empire would naturally don to go out in public. The boy dithers for a while, but then finds it in himself to trust his own eyes and to resist the temptation to join the majority. But clearly the story is not about emperors and clothing and little boys, but about the obligation of every individual to trust his or her judgment and to speak his or her mind without reference to the majority opinion of how things are.) So the real question at hand is not whether we need consciously to evolve the Jewish ethos to include this willingness to take even the least popular opinions publicly when they seem to us just and right, but whether we—by which I mean, our whole generation of American Jews—whether we ourselves have kept faith with this particular part of our heritage.

It’s not as simple a question as it sounds. When, for example, the world races to judgment against Israel as it did in the case of the flotilla incident of a few weeks ago, it doesn’t take much courage to refuse to go along with world opinion. (Indeed, there’s nothing like the prospect of rockets and missiles being put in the hands of terrorists who think nothing of murdering Jewish children to help crystallize our thinking even in the face of a tidal wave of contrary opinion.) But in other contexts, it is more complicated…and far more daunting to be a single voice, or a single set of voices, shouting into the wind. When, for example, people who are in favor of capital punishment attempt to buttress their arguments with reference to the fact that Judeo-Christian tradition itself (whatever that is) appears to endorse the concept, it clearly takes more courage than our organized community appears to have to speak out forcefully and with one voice to say that that is entirely incorrect, that the Torah’s concept of the circumstances under which a convicted person may be sentenced to death are infinitely more narrow and unlikely ever to occur than anything reflected in the sentencing guidelines that prevail in any of our fifty states. The death penalty may or may not be a good plan for America…but if its proponents really wished for American law to mirror its Judaic counterpart, more or less no one would ever be executed in this country except, truly, under the most truly unimaginable circumstances. (What exactly American politicians mean when the refer, usually deferentially, to the Judeo-Christian tradition is something I’d like to address in another context.)

Similarly irritating is when opponents of equal rights for homosexual citizens root their opposition in a single verse of the Torah which they cite endlessly but which actually occurs in the context of a large number of laws and rules those same people not only openly ignore, but which they would not in a million years even begin to consider obeying or taking seriously. Yet I do not see our leaders forcefully insisting that it debases the sanctity of our Torah for it to be picked apart like a smoked white fish at Kiddush so that one specific morsel may be put on display wholly out of context by people who neither respect biblical law in its entirety nor have even the slightest interest in obeying any of the rest of the Torah’s legislation regarding human sexual conduct. The specific questions relating to the place of gay people in our society are complicated in some ways and simple in others, but what I wish to stress here is not how we should respond to any specific issue but how forcefully we need to react when people co-opt our own tradition to make points which are all too often wholly inconsonant with our understanding of the plain meaning of the Torah.

I can think of lots of further examples too that suggest that we have relinquished our role as the group within society that invariably speaks up when the emperor is not wearing any clothes. To my way of thinking, this is not a positive development. Diasporan Jewish culture thrives at its finest and most creative in the context of a host society that not merely tolerates its existence but welcomes our loud, dissenting voices precisely when the majority seems all too ready to ignore the emperor’s nudity and buy into the prevailing sentiment regardless of what they know or ought to know about how things really are in the world. In the past, Jewish community has ever played that role as successfully and as well as has ours. That being the case, it does not behoove us—nor is it in our best interests—to relinquish that role to others now. Indeed, just the opposite should be the case: we need to redouble our efforts to train our children to be proud of the traditional role of our community as the gadflies of secular society…and to understand that role to be basic to the Jewish enterprise as it has unfolded to date in this place. It feels ominous that I don’t know of any textbooks pitched at Jewish children that emphasize that particular part of our self-assigned heritage. And it feels beyond ominous to note the failure of our leadership to speak out strongly and clearly whenever our tradition is co-opted by people untrained in its detail and uninterested in knowing or caring how we ourselves define our own heritage. It felt relatively easy not to stand up during the curtain calls last night because I really did find the show wanting. To transfer that sentiment to the truly public arena, however, is another thing entirely…and one that we should not only be teaching our children to do proudly but that we should be undertaking ourselves with the vigor that once seemed natural for Jewish people to bring to the larger enterprise of moral and just living in a world all too often given over to injustice and immorality.