A Life for A Life

These ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are widely known as the Ten Days of Repentance, and so they are (or should be): the ten days of the year during which we finally find the courage to look into our own hearts without flinching, to resolve to repair what we find there broken, and to return to the Torah-based values that, when asked, we insist we hold dear…but which most of us are more than capable of ignoring entirely for most  of the rest of the year.  The rest of the season—the huge meals, the company of family and friends, the warm communal feeling that draws us to worship—is entirely pleasant and, for many, the part of the holiday season that is the most gratifying. But this other part—the part about there only being three tools in our hands, and t’shuvah foremost among them, that could conceivably avert a severe degree that might otherwise be levied against us in the heavenly tribunal and that it is never too late, nor is any sin or crime or indiscretion to major, to be atoned for through the medium of t’shuvah—that is the part that seems hard even to believe, let alone fully to accept. And yet we repeat words to that effect over and over in our prayers as though these were commonplace ideas that we are expected to find almost self-evident.

On the one hand, tradition insists that the gates of t’shuvah, of repentance, are always open. I always think in this regard of the lesson of Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani, who compared the possibility of prayer to the feasibility of repentance by observing that “prayer is like a mikveh, but repentance is like the sea: just as a mikveh is sometimes open and sometimes locked, so are the gates of prayer are sometimes locked and sometimes opened; but just as the sea is always open so too are always open the gates of repentance.” I’ve always liked that teaching, preserved. (For one thing, it makes me feel slightly better about occasionally finding the gates of prayer locked.) But, like it though I may, I also find myself wondering what it really means. Are the gates of repentance really always open? Does that not imply that, no matter how grievously we sin, no matter how horrific our behavior, we retain the capacity always to do t’shuvah, to return to God, to re-invent ourselves as people who do not sin or behave in that specific way? It sounds like it does!

I was thinking about these issues anyway in the course of this week—what rabbi wasn’t?—but they came to a head the other day when I read Ronell Wilson’s story in the paper earlier this week. Probably you saw it too—Wilson now has the distinction of being the first New Yorker to be sent to federal death row in more than sixty years, which distinction he richly earned by murdering two undercover New York City police detectives in cold blood. Even more remarkably, this was actually Wilson’s second experience being sentenced to death: although the verdict was eventually overturned due to some (in my opinion minor) prosecutorial violation of the defendant’s civil rights, Wilson was originally sentenced to death in 2007.  Clemency was rejected by the jurors partially because of the terribleness of the crime and partially because of his conduct in prison since his arrest, during which time he behaved violently, refused to cooperate with the correctional officers assigned to him, intimidated other inmates and, remarkably, managed to father a child with a  female prison guard. (The child, a boy, was born last June.)

I recall one of my teachers in rabbinical school constantly reminding us that philosophical ideas can be promoted in the academy but only tested in the crucible of real life. In other words, no one can answer any of the Big Questions that attend our existence in God’s world merely by thinking about them or by reading other people’s books on the topic. Instead, they need to be tested in the great laboratory that is the world in which we live: to know how you feel about a specific issue requires encountering that issue in the context of the real lives of real people…and then seeing how useful or ridiculous the idea under consideration sounds when spoken aloud to people in need of solace, not a lecture on Jewish philosophy. I’m not sure that I fully understood what a profound lesson that was back then. (What did I know? I wasn’t much more than a teenager myself when I began at JTS and what I knew of the real world was, to say the very least, limited.) Later on, however, I did understand.

And so I began to wonder about this specific case. A terrible crime. A violent, horrible offense against several of society’s most foundational ideas at once: the sanctity of all life, the need to construct a just justice system that includes peace officers being able to do their jobs without risking their lives, and the importance of society itself appearing unwilling to sanction mayhem in the streets of its cities and towns. Are the gates of t’shuvah open for Ronell Wilson? Maimonides would have thought so. Indeed, he wrote almost unambiguously that t’shuvah “atones for all sins so that even people who were wicked in the course of entire lifetimes yet who repent in their final moments will not [presumably in the next life] be reminded of any aspect of their wickedness as the prophet said, "the wickedness of the evil one will not cause him to stumble on the day he repents his wickedness" (Ezekiel 33:12). And for those who repent, Yom Kippur effects atonement, as it is written, “This day shall atone for you” (Leviticus 16:20).  That much seems clear, yet Rambam then goes on to complicate the situation by noting that if the sin is grave enough, then t’shuvah and Yom Kippur only pave the way to forgiveness…but that society still has an obligation to punish the wrongdoer, even possibly to execute such a person. In other words, t’shuvah can make a person right with God. But it cannot stave of punishment by the earthly tribunal, nor should it.

What that should mean to us as we approach Yom Kippur is that t’shuvah is the first, not the last step, towards grappling with sin. Identifying our errors of judgment, our poor decisions, all the instances in which we failed to live up to the ideals we spent the rest of the year professing to hold dear—of that should be viewed as preparatory work that leads up to the inner resolve to sin no more. That is what t’shuvah is…but the process of atonement begins, not ends, there…and Yom Kippur and the verdict of the earthly court are part of the process as well that leads to absolution, to catharsis, to peace.

I’ve been thinking a lot about capital punishment lately. I read, for example, Elizabeth Silver’s very compelling novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton, which is about a young woman on death row, her appeals (by her own decision) exhausted, her execution date looming.  Then I read Life after Death by Damien Echols, an innocent man who spent eighteen years on death row in Arkansas.  Written by a man without any literary training or university education, the book reads simply and forcefully as an individual’s plainly-put testimony regarding what happened to him when everything that could possibly go wrong in a death penalty case went wrong…with the result of him being not only convicted of a crime he didn’t commit—which has now been proven conclusively—but actually sentenced to death. And then, to complete the series (I tend to read books on the same topic in threes for some reason), I reread a book I hadn’t picked up since college, Victor Hugo’s remarkable 1829 novel, The Last Day in the Life of a Condemned Man, which I found just as compelling as I did all those years ago. It would make a good literary diptych with Echols book, the latter being about whether the death penalty can be administered fairly and the former being about whether it should be in use at all in civilized countries that truly value the worth of human life.

All this thinking about life and death seems to me to be precisely the right way to enter into Yom Kippur. Tradition teaches us, after all, that our lives too are on the line during these days of awe and judgment. To accuse the divine court of impropriety or misconduct makes no sense when the Judge is all-knowing and serves as the heavenly ground of earthly morality. To wonder if it is reasonable that any of us could be falsely convicted of sins we haven’t committed or written up harshly in the great Book of Life by error seems ridiculous. And so we are left to contemplate the simple idea that churns and roils at the heart of Yom Kippur: that if we are successful in identifying our errors of judgment and our missteps and we resolve to abandon them and to live finer lives…then Yom Kippur will put us in God’s good graces. The piper may still have to be paid. But the very fact that the piper may be paid is God’s gift to all humankind and, as Yom Kippur looms, particularly to the House of Israel.

I wish you all an easy and successful fast and a g’mar hatimah tovah.

Syria

There is a certain intractable feel to the situation in Syria, one that makes even trying to think clearly about the right course forward for our country and for the world—and, of course, for Syria itself—difficult to think about clearly or even all that rationally. I have come to think, though, that the decisions our government makes in the next few weeks—if not the next few days—have the capacity to alter the face of things in the Middle East permanently…or at least decisively.

On the one hand, the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, is clearly a tyrant at war with his own people. Nor does it help the man’s image to judge him by the company he keeps:  the Syrian president’s chief external allies in the struggle to prevent the Arab Spring (if we can still call it that) from reaching his country are Iran, which has provided the Assad regime both with arms and Revolutionary Guard combat troops; Hezbollah, the terrorist state-within-a-state organization that has held Lebanon hostage now for decades; and, at least tacitly, Russia, whose only military bases outside the former Soviet Union are in Syria and which currently supplies the Assad regime with tanks and missiles, as well as with the technological support necessary to keep the Russian-built Syrian air defense system working properly. 

On the other hand, the rebels themselves aren’t such good guys either. The Free Syrian Army, it is true, is mostly about bringing down the Assad regime. But it has the support of groups that have entirely different goals in mind. The Syrian Islamic Front and the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front, for example, are radical islamist groups. The Al-Tawhid Brigade apparently has ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and shares their ideology. And it seems now clear that the opposition is benefiting from the support of al-Qaeda itself, as Rania Abouzeid reported in Time Magazine as early as last May—you can access the whole article, entitled, “Is al-Qaeda Intervening in the Conflict?”, by clicking here—and as others have subsequently corroborated.

Seeing how things are, many have adopted the “a plague on both their houses” approach. Just this week, for example, the Times published a detailed argument by Edward N. Luttwak, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan Washington think tank originally associated with Georgetown University.  In his essay, Luttwak argues that the most cogent course forward for the United States and its allies would be to work towards creating a stalemate in Syria, one in which the struggle continues but neither side actually ever wins. Indeed, he writes that “it would be disastrous if President Bashar al-Assad’s regime were to emerge victorious after fully suppressing the rebellion and restoring its control over the entire country. Iranian money, weapons and operatives and Hezbollah troops have become key factors in the fighting, and Mr. Assad’s triumph would dramatically affirm the power and prestige of Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, its Lebanon-based proxy—posing a direct threat both to the Sunni Arab states and to Israel.”  But working for a total defeat of the Assad regime would “also be extremely dangerous for the United States and for many of its allies in Europe and the Middle East. That’s because extremist groups, some identified with Al Qaeda, have become the most effective fighting force in Syria. If those rebel groups manage to win, they would almost certainly try to form a government hostile to the United States. Moreover, Israel could not expect tranquility on its northern border if the jihadis were to triumph in Syria.” That’s not exactly what Shakespeare meant when he has Mercutio pronounce a plague on both the Capulets and the Montagues, but it’s close enough.

That all seems clear enough…at least on paper. But the revelations this week regarding the use of chemical weaponry—and particularly the use of poison gas against civilians—make the situation even murkier and less simple to unravel, for me and, I suspect, for most Jews trying to decide how they feel about the possibility of American intervention in Syria.

On the one hand, no Jewish citizen can think through these latest revelations other than by filtering them through our own national trauma regarding tyrants who have no compunction about murdering innocents for political ends. The situations aren’t exactly analogous—Hitler turned to genocide in the context of a poisonous brew of anti-Semitism and unbridled hatred for the “other,” not because he was facing a popular uprising and simply didn’t care who died as long as he himself ended up winning—but the willingness to use poison gas on innocents to achieve a political or military goal is just too close to the reality through which our people lived for years for any of us simply to turn away in precisely the way we never tire of indicting the world for having done when it was our people who were being arbitrarily singled out for asphyxiation and murder.  Nor is it especially important that the numbers are not on the same scale. On June 13, the United States government announced that it had definitive proof that the Assad regime had used chemical gas against rebel forces, killing somewhere between 100 and 150 people. On August 5, video tape of a chemical assault in the suburbs of Damascus was released with the activists who released the video claiming that about 400 people had been killed or hurt by the gas. On August 21, it was reported that at least 635 people had been killed in a nerve gas attack in the eastern part of the country. The Shoah numbers are much, much higher, obviously. But the archfiend didn’t begin with six million victims, just with the ninety-one killed and thirty thousand arrested on Kristallnacht in 1938. Auschwitz hadn’t been built in 1938. Neither had Treblinka or Sobibor. It didn’t start with millions in Europe, nor has it in Syria. But it is not impossible to imagine thousands or even millions dying in Syria if the war is allowed to continue and the civilian population is deemed fair game and the asphyxiation of innocents is considered an internal Syrian matter for other countries to deplore but not actually to prevent.

Complicating all these issues is the fact that both relevant international treaties, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, rely on the United Nations Security Council to enforce them, which basically renders them meaningless in the real world. Nor is it irrelevant that Syria is not a party to either agreement. The one relevant international covenant which Syria did sign, the 1925 Geneva Protocol which bans the use of poison gas in warfare, addresses the use of poison gas in wars between nations, not in the context of one nation’s internal effort to put down a rebellion by its own citizens. These points, and several other very pertinent ones, were brought together in an Op-Ed piece in Wednesday’s Times by Ian Hurd, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, which you can access by clicking here. Nor should we pass quickly by the main point of Hurd’s essay: that acting against Syria would be possibly moral, but almost definitely illegal. And so we come to the crux of our national moral dilemma: shall we hide behind the cloak of legality or step boldly forward outside the framework of international law, ideally together with other nations, to prevent the murder of innocents?  Would that be the just path to take forward? Or would we only be wading into someone else’s mud just because we can?

And so we are left with our original conundrum. A nation that has been at war with Israel since 1948 is murdering its own citizens in an attempt to put down a rebellion. Do we care? Should we care? It’s not an easy question to ask, let alone to answer.  Edward Luttwak’s argument that we should let the two sides battle each other down to a stalemate in which neither is victorious and neither the abject loser—which plan includes not caring much about the murder of civilians—sounds reasonable and unreasonable at the same time. (Luttwak clearly says in his opening paragraph that, as awful as the mass murder of civilians with poison gas may seem, we would do best to do nothing at all and thus not to intervene even ineffectively, because “a victory for either side would be equally undesirable for the United States.”)

I can’t go along with that. My entire life, as my readers know, has been framed as an elaborate, personal response to the Shoah. I’ve read so many books about the inaction of the Allies to intervene to prevent the annihilation of European Jewry—and particularly about FDR’s almost inexplicable, self-induced deafness to the issue—that I could never even begin to list them all here.  But I’ve also read books, and lots of them, about the unwillingness of the Catholic Church forcefully to intervene and about the reticence of Christian churches across Europe to bring the full moral force of their leadership and membership to bear to prevent the slaughter.  And I’ve also read endlessly about the willingness, even more inexplicable in my mind, of other countries—and many of them—who were at war with Nazi Germany to become complicit in the murder of their own Jewish citizens.  In the end, it comes down to whether it is moral or immoral to excuse the murder of innocents, including children, for any reason at all. Nor should we fall into the pit of moral relativism: I regret, as should we all, that babies died at Hiroshima and that there were children who died during the carpet bombing of Germany. But those incidents were part of an all-out war to defeat the greatest evil the world had ever seen, not part of a despot’s calculated effort to terrorize the citizens of his own country through the use of indiscriminate murder.

In my opinion, the path forward for our country should be to mobilize the nations of the world to act decisively to prevent the use of chemical weaponry against civilians wherever that seems likely to happen, including in Syria. To count on the United Nations for decisive action would be no less pointless than harboring the expectation that the Assad regime might rein itself in at this point. In the end, it will come down to good people refusing to be complicit in the murder of innocents…even if that complicity consists of nothing more than saying nothing, doing nothing, and—because it is, and by far, the path of least resistance—looking the other way and being content to hope for the best.

Fifty Years Later

Every reader my age or older knows where he or she was when President Kennedy was assassinated half a century ago. I myself was on the second floor of P.S. 196 in one of the fifth grade classrooms. My teacher was Mrs. Edith D’Antona, who was famous (at least among the boys in our class) for having been Whitey Ford’s fifth grade teacher twenty-five years earlier.  It was a normal day, a Friday, and we were all looking forward to the weekend. Lunch was over and it was already well into the afternoon when Mr. Tauschner, our principal, appeared at the door looking even more grim than usual and signaled for Mrs. D’Antona to join him in the hallway. We children sat quietly and waited, not sure what was happening but clearly sensing something afoot. The boy behind me—how funny is it that I remember this clearly after so many years?—suggested that the Russians must have already bombed Washington and that we were about to be told to run home to say goodbye to our parents before the bombers arrived over Queens County. Someone else suggested that we must surely have won some prize or award and that they were just figuring out the right way to tell us the good news. I had no idea what was about to happen, but I knew from Mr. Tauschner’s face that it wasn’t good news we were about to hear. After a few minutes, Mrs. D’Antona came back into the room. Her face was ashen. She told us that the president had been shot and that the entire school was to assemble in the auditorium where we would all together hear further details as they were released. The rest of the story, you all know.

But this year marks not only the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, but also of the March on Washington, the massive gathering of a quarter of a million civil rights activists and supporters in Washington in the course of which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.  (The exact anniversary of the speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, is next Wednesday.) That means that the March on Washington, more correctly called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, took place less than three months before President Kennedy’s death. Did people find it surprising that the racial divide that seemed so unbridgeable just months earlier appeared to close as the citizenry, united in grief, struggled as one to find a way past their misery into a future divested of the most charismatic leader our country had had since FDR? If there were those who did, I was not among them. Perhaps it just slid past me.  I was, after all, only ten years old.

I have returned to Dr. King’s speech many times over the years, including just recently. At sixteen minutes, it wasn’t that long. (If you haven’t heard it lately and you are reading this electronically, you can hear it on youtube by clicking here.  To read a transcript of the text, click here.)  But, even at just slightly over a quarter-hour, the speech covers a lot of ground. I would like to write to you this week specifically about the specific effect on our American destiny that resulted from the specific juxtaposition of those two events, the King speech and the Kennedy assassination.

First, let’s remember the speech. Dr. King begins by describing the situation of black people in America in his day, comparing it emotionally and extremely unfavorably with the principle of equality for all that underlies the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. He speaks about the civil rights workers’ plight, some of whom he acknowledges came to Washington direct from “narrow jail cells” where they had been detained because of their work for equality and justice, yet he optimistically qualifies their travails as “creating suffering” that will surely lead eventually to great things. He outlines the forms that prejudice took in his day—specifically making reference to discrimination in housing, in the hospitality industry, and in the nation’s polling places—and he calls  upon his audience to go back to their homes confident that “this situation can and will be changed.”  And then he gets to his dream, which he says is merely part of the larger “American dream.” 

Dr. King said that he was dreaming of an America that was living out the true meaning of its most basic creed, the one that declares that all are created equal.  He said that he was dreaming of a day when the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave owners could unselfconsciously sit down together at the table of brotherhood.  He said that he was dreaming of a day when even Mississippi, perhaps the state in which racial segregation was the most firmly entrenched, could become known as “an oasis of freedom and justice.” He said he was dreaming of a day in which Americans would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the strength of their character. He said he was dreaming of a day in which black and white children could easily think of each other as brothers and sisters. And he wrapped up his dream by connecting all of these events to the prophet Isaiah’s great vision of a world characterized above all else by equity, by righteousness, by equality, and by a leveling off of the valleys and the mountain peaks of the world so that the world itself becomes a level playing field on which all may play unhampered by prejudice and free to bring solely personal merit to bear in the pursuit of success and achievement.

In other words, the dream part of the “I Have a Dream” speech was not about rancor or hatred, but about a vision of an America that could somehow come to recognize the involvedness of all its citizens in the great mission to establish a republic founded on equality, fairness, and justice for all. 

The first great test of that vision came not three months later when President Kennedy died.  Kennedy had won more than 70% of the black vote in 1960.  Under JFK, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent hundreds of federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders who were working to desegregate public transportation in the south.  When riots broke out at the University of Mississippi after James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran who had been admitted to the university, attempted actually to enroll in classes, President Kennedy sent in five hundred federal marshals to accompany him to the registrar’s building to assist him in the registration process. In the spring of 1964, the president sent several thousand troops to an Alabama air base to restore order to Birmingham after rioting broke out in the wake of Dr. King’s arrest and incarceration in that city, which King himself qualified as “the most segregated city in America.”  And JFK also federalized the Alabama National Guard physically to prevent Governor George Wallace from standing by his promise never to allow black students to enroll in the University of Alabama. It is true that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was only voted by Congress into law after President Kennedy was no longer alive, but the groundwork for that piece of landmark legislation—which at once protected African Americans from discrimination in voter qualification tests; outlawed discrimination in hotels, motels, theaters, and “all public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce;” authorized the U.S. Attorney General’s office to file legal suits to enforce desegregation in public schools, required the government to withdraw funding from any program that discriminated based on race, and outlawed racial discrimination in any but the smallest businesses—was laid during the Kennedy administration so obviously that even Lyndon Johnson himself in an address to Congress just five days after he came to office in the wake of his predecessor’s death said clearly about the pending legislation that "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”

In retrospect, it seems to me that the first great test of Dr. King’s vision came with President Kennedy’s assassination. President Johnson could have turned back.  Many, including many in his home state of Texas, would have been happy if he had. But the nation was already in the thrall of Dr. King’s vision…and the notion that the bill that would be the crowning legacy of the Kennedy administration might conceivably not become law was simply more than the country could envisage. There was plenty of controversy.  About thirty percent both of the House and the Senate voted against even the compromise version of the bill. But the overwhelming majority of senators and congressman voted to enshrine in law the principles that Dr. King had imagined in his dream and that President Kennedy had brought the full force of the federal government to bear to make real. By crossing the line in time constituted by President Kennedy’s murder with its values intact, our country became committed to the realization of Dr. King’s dream.

When President Obama speaks next Wednesday in the same spot that Dr. King spoke fifty years earlier, no American will fail to note that even Martin Luther King didn’t dream of there being a black president in what could plausibly have been his own lifetime. (If he were alive, he would only be eighty-four years old. Kennedy, significantly older, would be ninety-six.) But the real shift in the politics of race in America has less to do with there being an African American president and far more with the sea change in attitude that has taken place since the 1960s, a shift so dramatic that there surely must be young people today who can’t quite imagine what the huge fuss back then was all about.

Americans have been bombarded for decades with books and articles detailing the character flaws both of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Some of these accounts have been lewd almost to the point of being defamatory. Others were merely nasty. I have no idea which stories are true and which not, but it seems clear that neither man was a saint. And yet somehow the brief trajectory in 1963 between August 28 and November 22 seems to me to have changed our country permanently. If President Kennedy had lived, he would surely personally have shepherded the Civil Rights Act through Congress.  The fact that he was able to do so posthumously testifies as much to his immense impact on the American psyche as it does to President Johnson’s principled fortitude. But it was the Reverend King’s speech, it seems to me, that changed everything…and which made unimaginable turning back from the course the country had begun to take towards civil rights for all. Before the end of 1963, President Kennedy was dead. Martin Luther King was murdered in 1968. Lyndon Johnson died in 1973, four years after leaving office.  All three men are, therefore, long gone from this world. And it is surely also true that all racial issues in our country are far from being solved. But those few months in 1963 set us on a course we continue to follow towards the vision from Isaiah prominently mentioned as part of Dr. King’s dream of a world with neither advantage nor disadvantage, with neither prejudice nor inequity, with neither justice for some nor injustice for all…a dream that so insinuated itself in the American psyche that even an assassin’s bullet could not weaken its hold on the future of a nation.

Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the institution of marriage these days, partially because of the recent Supreme Court decision regarding same-sex marriage (about which I wrote in June) and partially because we’ve had a summer full of weddings at Shelter Rock, but mostly because my own daughter’s wedding is coming up in just two days. I know many of you have been here before and know more about this experience my family has been having over these last few weeks and months than I myself do—or rather, did…other than by observing others go through this sole one of life’s major rites of passage that stars someone other than oneself. (Having a baby is more about the baby than its parents only in theory. And that I do know from experience!)

These last few months have actually been very good for all of us. My daughter is marrying a fine young man. The home they are on their way toward establishing together will be, I think, one suffused with the finest values. We’ve met my daughter’s future in-laws now many times and look forward to having them as part of our extended family. It’s all good!  But I’ve also been thinking about marriage itself, not just about this particular marriage, and wondering about the concept itself and its future.

The numbers don’t bode well. In the years following the Civil War, there were three divorces in the United States for every one hundred marriages. By 1900, that 3% figure had risen to 7%.  But thirty years later, in 1930, the rate had risen further still to 16%. In 1940, there were twenty divorces per one hundred marriages. Amazingly, the rate more than doubled by 1946, reaching an astounding 43% in 1946. But then, for reasons that sociologists are still debating, the rate began—for the first time since Reconstruction—to decline, reaching 21% in 1958, just one single percent higher than it had been in 1940.  And then it began to rise again. In 1980, for the first time in American history, there were more than half again as many divorces as there were marriages in the United States. (These numbers come from Health Resources Administration study, 100 Years of Marriage and Divorce Statistics in the United States 1867-1967, which those of you reading this electronically can access by clicking here.)  Today, the rate is about 41%, which is to say that there are 41 divorces for every 100 marriages in our country. 

You can, however, beat the odds. Or you can try! A study undertaken by the National Marriage Project sponsored jointly by University of Maryland and the University of Virginia in 2011 called The State of Our Unions, came to some remarkable conclusions.  If you make more than $50,000 a year, your risk of divorce decreases by about a third.  If you are more than twenty-five years old when you marry, the likelihood that your marriage will end in divorce drops by about 24%.  If your parents are or were always happily married, then the chances of your own marriage coming asunder decreases by 14%, and the same is true if you are possessed of what you yourself define as “strong” religious beliefs.  For some reason, if you have a college decree, your chances of ending up divorced decrease by 13%. (You can find that report on-line at www.stateofourunions.org, where you can also order the report in hard copy for $10.)  It also matters where you live: the world’s lowest divorce rates are in Central and South America, while the highest are in Eastern Europe. (Of the ten countries with the highest rates of divorce, seven are Eastern Europe: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Moldova.)  I should feel buoyed by those numbers—I don’t live in Eastern Europe and I fall into every one of the “right” categories listed above!

Religion also matters: the rate of divorce among Jews is (by American standards) a mere 30%. (We are speaking here, obviously, of Jews by self-definition, so there may be individuals counted in that statistic that the Jewish community itself would not consider fully Jewish.) But there is no room for smugness here—the rates for both liberal and conservative Christian churches are lower (although only slightly so) than for Jewish America. That this specific statistic seems dramatically higher than the reality I know at Shelter Rock (and, indeed, in all the communities I have served as rabbi) is a truth I will ponder with you on another occasion.

And so we—as a nation, as a community, and as members of society in general—are left with an institution in flux, one that a large majority of citizens say they esteem and understand to constitute the foundation upon which society rests, but which itself only actually works for a portion of the people who embrace it as the theoretical foundation of their actual lives.

Our Torah starts from an entirely different vantage point: that marriage is not a useful societal convention or a handy way to structure family life (or not just those things), but a stage of life into which healthy people should reasonably hope to grow as they shed the trappings first of childhood and then of adolescence, and then finally embrace mature adulthood as grown-ups. The story in Scripture is almost clear, but far from transparent. And so, in honor of Lucy’s upcoming marriage, I would like to propose a new way to read the biblical story that we all know almost by heart, but which reads, in my opinion, quite differently in the original text than in most translations.

I’ll start with the detail everyone knows: God, done creating the oceans and the stars, makes a human being. That being is traditionally presumed to have been a male, but an equally interesting way to read the story would be to imagine that first being as have been created without gender at all, thus neither male nor female. That being’s name, Adam, sounds in English like a man’s first name. But adam means “human being” or “person” in Hebrew, and it is used consistently in the opening chapters of the Bible as a common noun, not as a name. (The being is, for example, referenced as “the” adam a full 21 times in the first three chapters of the Torah and only one single time without the article.) 

This being, God sets in the Garden of Eden to tend its flora and to watch over it. But the being ends up lonely, not merely alone, to the remarkable extent that God, unprompted, takes vocal note of how things are and observes aloud to the angelic host that a world population of one single person may not have been such a good plan after all and that it might be better for the being below to have a mate to help out with its various chores. At first, the concept of gender doesn’t seem to suggest itself and so God, meaning well, creates the animals of the earth and the birds of the sky and then brings them one by one to the adam to see if they will do. The adam duly names them, but he does not appear to be able to see any of them becoming his lifelong helpmeet, his lebensbegleiter, in any meaningful way.

And now we get to the point. As I now propose to read the story, God, seeing that neither the penguins nor the yaks have prompted the desired response in the human being’s breast, has a new idea.  And quite the idea it is, this Plan B that is forever after going to alter the course of human history. God, taking on the temporary guise of divine Anesthetist, puts the being to sleep and surgically effects the remodel: from one being are now to be two, one male and one female, and they are to be each other’s mates. The traditional notion that the being was male all along and how from man has now come woman is only one way to read the story and is based on the Torah’s comment that this new creature was to be called ishah because she was created from ish, the original human being. But it is also possible to read the story to yield the conclusion that this unexpected surgical realignment of things yielded not one but two new creatures, neither of whom would be identical with the original adam. Indeed, that could well be why the text here shifts and calls them not adam and adamah (which means something else anyway), but ish and ishah, man and woman.

And so we replicate this process as we start out in life as simple creatures happily looking after our chores—tending our little gardens and watching over our toys—but slowly, as childhood ends and we pass into adolescence, discovering dissatisfaction in our breasts where there was once nothing but contentment. At first we aren’t sure what to make of it all, but then, as time passes, the situation eventually clarifies and we finally come to understand what it is that’s ailing us: we are lonely, unhappy to be by ourselves even the paradise that is the parental home (for most of us, a true Eden in which food magically appears in the refrigerator, clean socks magically appear in our dresser drawers, and no bill addressed to us personally ever arrives in the mailbox). We cherish the love of our parents, but are unfulfilled nevertheless. And so we set out to find our life’s companions. And that point the Torah makes clearly too: “…and so does it come regularly to pass that an ish leaves his father and mother to cleave instead unto his ishah,  a cleaving so intense that the two, as it were, become one.”

And it is that search for that life-companion that signals the onset of real maturity, of adulthood. Most people seek mates of the opposite sex.  Not all. But all do yearn to return to this paradisiacal state of oneness that prevailed when the human race consisted only of the adam. And in that paradox—that movement forward is also movement backwards, that the yearning for the responsibilities of adulthood is also yearning for the responsibilitilessness of childhood, that wanting nothing more than life à deux is also wanting to return to the state of undifferentiated oneness that we recall as being part of our lives before we were weighed down by life’s endless burdens—in that set of paradoxes lies the secret of what marriage truly is: the framework in which we find the strength in the arms of someone we love truly and absolutely to set it all aside and to find in love itself the balm that heals our riven souls and allows to know peace as adults long since banished from Paradise.

I like reading Genesis like that. It’s an approach I’d like to return to in my preaching this year, and perhaps in my writing as well. But for the moment, I’d like to offer it to you all as neither lesson nor sermon, but merely as a blessing for my beloved child, for Lucy, and for her basherter, Shuki Cirlin, as they prepare to face life together as wife and husband.  May God grant them love! And may God grant them a lifetime of common purpose, shared responsibility, and selfless dedication to each other and to their union.  I wish that for them, but I also wish it for my sons and for all of your children and grandchildren as well. I go to a lot of weddings, as you all know…but this really is something special!

Undoing DOMA

It seems to me that the most interesting aspect of Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision striking down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 as unconstitutional—Section 3 was the specific provision that effectively barred same-sex couples from receiving federal marriage benefits even if they were legally married in the states in which they lived—was the way in which the court appeared to be allowing itself to be led forward not by what the justices suddenly found hiding behind the original text of the Constitution with respect to the issue at hand, but instead by the sea change in public opinion that has characterized debate on the matter of same-sex marriage in the course of the last two decades.

I recall my father once telling me—this may have been in the course of one of our several million conversations about the Vietnam War, usually conducted in my parents’ living room at the top of our lungs—that the world is neatly divided into leaders and people who, either by choice or necessity or circumstance, spend their lives being led forward by others. Back then, my father’s point would have been that Lyndon Johnson, whom my father admired and respected but for whom I and my peers had little use while the Vietnam War was raging, was in the former category. Was he right? History has been kinder to LBJ, I think, than the large majority of my fellow eleventh-or twelfth graders back then would have expected it to be.  Even I myself have mellowed over the years and, particularly after reading the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power (which covered the years 1958 through 1964), have come to see in our thirty-sixth president a complex man who, in some sense despite himself, accomplished certain truly great things while in office.  In the end, I’ve come to believe that history will eventually consider LBJ to be far more than the inadvertent beneficiary of his predecessor’s horrific misfortune, but my father’s fundamental assumption that people either lead in life or are led by others is what I want to consider here because it no longer seems to me all that true at all.

The notion that there are two categories of people and you by nature belong to one or the other, to the leaders or to the led, is the specific detail I want to challenge because that model itself seems flawed to me and simplistic. True leaders, it now strikes me, are, yes, those who exercises the qualities of leadership…but also those who—and in this thought lies the distinction between truly great leaders and despots—those who also understands that part of leadership, and particularly in government, is being led by the people they are trying to lead by allowing those people’s responses to their leadership gently but seriously to refine their own sense of how best to govern. There’s no simple way to say that, but the idea itself isn’t all that complicated: by growing along with the people as they morph into new versions of themselves because of a leader’s leadership, that leader too grows into a finer, better version of him or herself and thus concomitantly becomes able to govern both more intelligently and more sensitively. 

In the context of teaching, this notion will be more familiar. In the traditional classroom setting, the teachers are the people who teach and the students are the people who learn. But good teachers will tell you always that part of excelling in the classroom involves learning from the students they are theoretically teaching, by allowing those students’ responses to their lessons to inspire them, the teachers, to move forward in new, possibly previously unanticipated directions. In the end, all true education is always dialogue and never diatribe…and dialogue by definition must be a two-way street. It is simply not possible, therefore, to teach without learning. Nor is it possible to govern sagaciously and justly without being led forward to new levels of moral insight by the people one is theoretically serving as leader.  Education is symbiosis. So is government. And so, I think I see behind Wednesdays’ ruling in the Supreme Court, is the effective functioning of the justice system even at the highest level.

I have written several times about the issue of same-sex marriage in the course of the last two years. (If you are reading this electronically, you can find some of what I’ve written by clicking here, here, or here.)  There is, obviously, a lot to say about the issue, but the part of the issue that strikes me as its most remarkable aspect—and particularly in the wake of Wednesday’s Supreme Court decisions—is how quickly things change, and how dramatically. I think that young people today, certainly including non-gay people for whom the issue has only theoretical rather than directly personal relevance, can probably not easily seize just how unimaginable it seems to people my age that this issue is being discussed at all, let alone sympathetically, at the highest echelons of political leadership.

The notion that same-sex marriage would be legal anywhere at all, let alone in two of the country’s three most densely populated states, New York and California, would have seemed unimaginable to most Americans even as late as just decades ago. And that is not to mention centuries ago: Thomas Jefferson’s efforts in 1778 to liberalize Virginia’s approach to gay people, or at least to gay men, by punishing the sexually active among them with castration instead of execution failed when the legislation voted instead to retain the death penalty. But that attitude was hardly peculiar to Virginia: prior to 1962, sodomy was forbidden in all fifty states and punishable, at least theoretically, with hard labor or imprisonment. It was in 1962, in fact, that Illinois became the first state to decriminalize same-sex relations. It took more than a decade for a second state to follow suit. By 2003, however, thirty-six states had repealed their sodomy laws and it was in that same year that the Supreme Court determined that the right to conduct one’s sex life as one wishes is one of the civil rights citizens are specifically guaranteed by the Constitution, thus making illegal all the remaining laws in the United States that restricted sexual activity conducted in private between consenting adults. 

In retrospect, it seems odd that the freedom to conduct one’s intimate life in accordance with one’s own proclivities was so widely ignored for so long.  The sexual revolution of the 1960s had almost nothing to do with gay people; it seems odd now to see a revival of the musical Hair (as I did a month ago at the Tilles Center) and to see people on stage modeling a mind-set in which civil rights is defined solely a racial issue—and to hear the same people presenting themselves as the models of “the mind’s true liberation” also making crass, unfunny jokes about gay people. Of course, the show only mirrored the rest of society in those days: the only gay people on television in those days were simpering, effeminate men or mannish, permanently unmarried women—and even they were never specifically labeled gay lest, I’m guessing, advertisers be scared off and the show end up being cancelled.

And yet things changed, and dramatically. How this happened exactly, who can say? Partially, the gay community itself mobilized after Stonewall and after Harvey Milk’s murder.  And partially the AIDS crisis led non-gay Americans to see their gay co-citizens in a new light, one that seemed wholly at odds with the unfunny stereotypes they saw on television or in movies. But the most likely explanation is simply that an idea whose time has come eventually gains steam on its own and slowly wins over people who are by nature fair-minded and reasonable.  From 1996 to 2013, the percentage of Americans favoring same-sex marriage rose from 25% to 58%.  The fact that an athlete or a movie or television star is gay is no longer considered shocking or scandalous. When a columnist in the Times wrote the other day that it seems unimaginable that the Democratic candidate for president in 2016 could be opposed to same-sex marriage, that sounded as correct now as it once would have sounded beyond unimaginable. If that doesn’t constitute a sea-change in public opinion, I’m not sure what would.

It’s clearly been a long time coming. When, in ancient times, a rabbi whose lesson was preserved in one of our ancient books opined that the sin of the generation of the flood that finally led to the annihilation of humanity was the public endorsement of same-sex marriage between men, his was a lone voice…but not one that would have been considered controversial, only perhaps a bit extreme. (He also mentioned the marriage of people and animals in the same context, apparently considering these to be parallel outrages.) And that was how things were for a very long time. The word homosexuality itself was only coined in the nineteenth century neutrally to name something that has always existed but which was not deemed real enough to warrant naming in a way devoid of opprobrium. (Other terms in use back then to describe same-sex attraction, all at least slightly insulting, were similisexualism, sexual inversion, antipathic sexual instinct, and psychosexual hermaphroditism.)  And yet…society has finally accepted that homosexuality is neither disease nor disaster, just an avenue of sexual expression that a distinct, but not minuscule, group within society finds natural and appealing. Nothing more, perhaps…but also nothing less.

When considered in this light, the Court’s decisions this week merely mirror that sea-change in public opinion. The sign of good government is the degree to which those who govern function not by issuing edicts and then punishing those who dare disobey, but as partners in a symbiotic relationship designed by its very nature to allow both parties, the governors and the governed, to grow morally and intellectually by learning from each other. The same, I now see, is true of the judicial system at the highest level: that the Court functions best when the justices understand themselves to be part of society as well as the ultimate arbiters of its rules, thus allowing themselves to grow along with the citizenry and to see fairness and reasonableness where they personally might once have seen the unimaginable or the ridiculous. The short term for that process is moral growth. And it is something we should not merely tolerate or begrudgingly accept as inevitable, but rather something we actively should foster, in government in general…and in the judicial system in particular.

Ozymandias

I found myself unexpectedly fascinated by footage shown on television earlier this week of President Obama speaking in Berlin. It wasn’t the specific contents of his remarks that I found so arresting, however, interesting though they were in their own right and particularly with respect to the offer the president made to reduce the American nuclear arsenal by one third if a corresponding reduction by the Russians were also to be made. Instead, it was the setting itself that drew me in, and particularly the image of the president addressing thousands of Germans massed at the Brandenburger Tor, the great neo-classical gateway at the top of the Unter den Linden that came first to symbolize divided Berlin when it was shut by the Communists in 1961 and then eventually instead to symbolize the reunification of the city when it was reopened in December of 1989 following the demolition of the Berlin Wall. It was in that place, in fact, that President Reagan had taunted Mikhail Gorbachev two years earlier to “open this gate” and “tear down this wall.” And earlier than that, it was exactly there that exactly fifty years ago President Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. It was there too that President Clinton spoke in 1994 about his vision for peace in Europe after the eventual end of the Cold War.  And just five years before that, it had been there that Leonard Bernstein gave the performance of his life when he led the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony just months after the fall of the Wall, one in which the words to Schiller’s Ode to Joy were restored to their original version so as to allow the singers to sing, not specifically of joy, but instead of freedom itself as the “spark of God, the daughter of heaven.”

I remember all of those events, including President Kennedy’s speech. (I was just wrapping up fourth grade in June of 1963, but I have a clear memory of my father responding—and not kindly—to the president’s declaration that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin” and that the proudest thing anyone could say of him or herself was therefore that he or she was a Berliner.  Uncharitably—or so the ten-year-old me thought at the time—my father wondered aloud if that thought included the 75,000 Jews left living in Berlin in 1939 after the rest, 100,000 in their own right, had already fled for their lives, if their greatest source of pride—had they not been almost entirely deported to the east and murdered, that was—would also have been that they too were from Berlin.) As the years have passed, my feelings have—oddly—both sharpened and mellowed. But the emotions that the images of President Obama at the Brandenburg Gate stirred up in me were not specifically connected to my memories of JFK or my father, but to, of all things, a poem I remember learning by heart as a schoolchild and which still has the power to affect me (even though it now strikes me that I must completely have misunderstood it back then). I am thinking of Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias,” first published in a London newspaper in 1811 and the bane of junior high school students ever since, yet (now that I am finally mature enough to read it seriously and listen to the poet’s lesson) a truly great poem about a traveler in an antique land nevertheless, and one I believe I still know by heart.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.

It was on January 30, 1933, the night that the archfiend became the chancellor of Germany, that his followers—mostly storm troopers but also including a wide variety of fellow travelers of various sorts—marched in torch-lit procession through Berlin to the Brandenburger Tor. (If you are reading this electronically, you can see an actual, bone-chilling 90-second-long clip of that march by clicking here.) Celebratory marches were held through the Gate to mark the fiend’s fiftieth birthday in 1939, following shortly by victory celebrations marking the conquest of Poland and the defeat of France in 1940. The Brandenburg Gate came to symbolize the Nazis’ rise to power and then, as it somehow survived all the Allied bombing raids and ended up standing all by itself in the center of a ruined city of rubble and ash, it came to symbolize the Nazis’ defeat and the annihilation of their dream of world conquest.  Like the statue in the desert Shelley’s traveler came unexpectedly across—two legs of a once monumental statue set upon a base made of stone—the Brandenburg Gate symbolizes to me (and, I think, to many) one specific aspect of the Nazi debacle: the overweening, megalomaniacal hubris of the Führer that led, when all was said and done, not to a thousand-year Reich but to the unwarranted, senseless deaths of over seventy million people including about fifty million civilians. It wasn’t all that was left, the Gate, but it might as well have been: once the gateway to a place of learning, culture, and sophistication, the Brandenburger Tor came at war’s end to symbolize only arrogance, evil, and the hubris inherent in self-arrogated superiority.

Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

But it is not only the rise and fall of Nazi Germany that the images of the president at the Brandenburg Gate awakened in me. It was, after all, the members of the Soviet Politburo that President Kennedy and President Reagan were addressing in their remarks, not the leaders of Nazi Germany. For the Soviets’ East German vassals, the Brandenburger Tor was also a kind of a symbol. Located at the western edge of what was to become East Berlin, the gate came to symbolize the foundational myth of the German communists according to which they were, not the perpetrators of German war crimes, but victims themselves of Nazi barbarism. It was beneath the Brandenburg Gate, for example, that Marshal Zhukov, the deputy Supreme Commander in Chief of the Red Army, received his decoration from Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery in July, 1945, celebrating his success in defeating the Nazis.

But where is that most powerful of empires today, the Soviet Union, that most terrifying of enemies from whose nuclear warheads we—and here I return again to the fourth grade—hid under our desks with our hands clasped over our heads during all those special take-cover drills at P.S. 196?  Young people today cannot, I sense sometimes, quite seize how real the Cold War was in those days, how seriously Americans took the war-mongering of the Soviet Union’s leaders in those days. And rightly so! Hadn’t the communist empire extended across half of Europe and huge portions of Eastern Asia, including China? Yet last week, when President Obama opened his remarks in Berlin by challenging the Russians to consider a reduction in their capacity to wage nuclear war, presumably against the United States, his words had an almost quaint ring to them. Are we still worrying about that? I suppose we are and we ought to be…but the terror Mrs. Drayson struck in our hearts as she instructed us to hide beneath our desks and to remain there until the danger of nuclear annihilation passed—for the moment!—sounds, even to me, hard to summon up nowadays even if the Russians still do have a huge nuclear arsenal. Near Ozymandias’ legs lay his shattered head, its lips alone protruding from the drifting, yellow sand. Once the scourge of the world, the “sneer of cold command” on those lifeless lips of stone could now provoke only amazement…and not at his great power but instead at how quickly things change, at how even the most powerful empires can lose their potency and their ability to provoke terror, and at how at the end of the day military might is mostly bluster and boastful rage that simply loses its ability to terrify when the statue falls over and the kings’ lips lie buried in the shifting desert sand.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

And that brings me to my actual topic for this week, the onset next Tuesday of the Three Weeks. Everybody knows that there is a cycle of annual Jewish festivals based on the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, their journey to Sinai, and their subsequent peregrination in the desert. But there is a second annual cycle impressed on the months of the Jewish year, one rooted in the story of the destruction of Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE and far less well known than the Exodus cycle. Starting with the fast of the Tenth of Tevet commemorating the onset of the Babylonian siege, the cycle moves forward through the fast of the Seventeenth of Tammuz (which is next Tuesday and which memorializes the breaching of the walls of the city by the enemies’ hordes) to the far-better-known fast of the Ninth of Av, the anniversary of the actual destruction of the Temple and the final defeat of its defenders. (A final fast on the third day of Tishrei, the day following Rosh Hashanah, memorializes the assassination of the Jewish governor put in place by the Babylonians by hotheads who considered him a willing collaborator with his people’s archenemies.)  And it is the twenty-one days between the Seventeenth of Tammuz and the Ninth of Av that is the Three Weeks referenced above.  The faithful observe those weeks by beginning the mournful practices that are amplified dramatically once the month of Av begins and which reach their somber apogee on the Ninth of Av itself. Why the Jewish people hasn’t jettisoned all of this now that Jerusalem is the proud capital of an independent Jewish state is a question for a different essay (and possibly a different author), but here I want to write instead about the Babylonians.

Except for university professors specializing in Near Eastern history, who has even heard of these people outside the context of this specific story? Once a powerful empire capable of waging and winning wars anywhere in the world its armies could reach, the Babylonian Empire was defeated in battle by Cyrus of Persia not fifty years after they themselves had destroyed Jerusalem, and with that they vanished by the stage of world history.  To those living then, their defeat and eventual absorption into the Persian Empire must have seemed unbelievable. But, in the end, nothing else remained, just as nothing eventually remained other than the pedestal upon which Ozymandias’ boastful words were engraved just a bit too soon for “round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare” lay only endless miles of “lone and level sands”…and the echoes of the arrogant past reverberating into an empty, impotent present.

And that is what the president’s visit to the Brandenburg Gate awakened in me as we segue from his trip to Germany to our journey into the Three Weeks.  To the victims of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, their eventual disappearance from the stage of history surely meant nothing at all, just as the defeat of the Babylonians meant nothing to those who had earlier died defending Jerusalem. But there’s also the long picture to consider here…and it is precisely that way of thinking of things that lends the Three Weeks their grandeur and enduring meaningfulness. The Jewish people has known the world’s most powerful empires as its enemies. Each foe had the capacity utterly to destroy and mercilessly to vanquish yet ended up itself destroyed and vanquished instead, then unceremoniously piled onto what President Reagan memorably once called “the ash heap of history.” When I contemplate fasting on the Seventeenth of Tammuz, I usually think that I ought to have an image in my mind of the Holy City razed and devastated. I suppose I do, but alongside that image is also a mental picture of Ozymandias’ “vast and trunkless legs of stone” standing all by themselves in the middle of an endless desert and symbolizing both the ultimate fragility of power and the eternal nature of the Jewish people…and its inviolate right to the pursuit of its own destiny regardless of the machinations of evil empires as they come and go.

Leaks and Snoops

We have surely all been following the news story revolving around Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee and contract worker for the National Security Agency, who leaked classified details to The Guardian and The Washington Post about the government’s clandestine electronic surveillance program known by the acronym PRISM. (PRISM stands for Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management.) As far as anyone knows with any actual certainty, PRISM is not used intentionally to gather information on any American citizen or on any individual present in the United States, but merely to listen in on foreign internet traffic that is routed through or saved on U.S. servers. This appears to be completely legal activity: section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008 specifically permits the gathering of foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S. citizens located outside the United States. So if that’s what the NSA has been doing, there appears to be nothing specifically illegal about it. Nor, in my opinion, should there be. Our country has been targeted repeatedly by terrorists, some of them members of sophisticated international operations like the 9/11 perpetrators and others of them apparently amateurs like the Boston Marathon bombers. (The last word on that incident, of course, remains to be written.) But even the brothers who set the bombs in Boston were acting on their own, they still managed to do great damage at the cost of innocent human lives. They, of course, would have been beyond the reach of PRISM according to the section of FISA cited above. But which of us can possibly not be pleased to think of our government exerting itself maximally to make us safe and to protect ourselves and our families from threats that originate beyond our borders but which nevertheless have the capacity to wreak havoc in the homeland.

I have very little sympathy for people who disclose secrets they are sworn to keep, and particularly when their actions could conceivably make our government less able to keep us safe from harm. So for me the sole question of interest is whether the government is obeying its own rules. Indeed, that is the only real question on the table as far as I am concerned. The president has said unequivocally that the government is indeed doing so. Discovering him to be dissembling would be a blow to his prestige and reputation from which I doubt he could or would recover. But there is no evidence, as far as I can see, of that being the case.

Of course, if it turns out—as so many out there in the blogosphere seem to fear—that the government is actually using its vast information-gathering abilities to spy on U.S. citizens and to muck through their—our!—e-mail and voice mail and phone calls and text messages and hard drives and Dropbox folders and Skydrive folders and iCloud folders to see what they might conceivably find of interest, then that will be another issue entirely. As noted, the president addressed this issue specifically last Friday in a news conference and unequivocally told us to trust him that the very last thing the NSA has the time to do or any interest in doing would be to listen into citizens’ phone calls for no reason. That sounds reasonable to me—and, believe me, I would only pity the NSA drone assigned to read my e-mail or, unless he or she is planning in the near future to open up a Jewish Nursery School, to listen into my voice mail messages—and yet it is also unnerving to think that the government apparently has free access, or some sort of access, to the data banks of companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Of course, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which requires that the search of any citizen’s home or possessions must be judicially sanctioned in advance with the issue of a warrant and supported by probable cause does not apply to foreigners, only to American citizens. There is, therefore, no problem…if the government is obeying its own rules. In the meantime, all we can do is hope the president was being honest and frank when he assured us that we have nothing to worry about. (On the other hand, what else was he going to say? But let’s not go there until the path in that direction is paved with actual facts.)

And then there is the side issue of the NSA facility apparently being built in Utah.

When the prophet of old imagined a day when “the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the seabed,” he was clearly waxing poetic. The sea, when you stand on the shore and look out, not only seems endless and immense but also appears to have the quality of spreading out to cover whatever space is allotted to it by geography and geology. And so did the prophet imagine a messianic age in which the infinite knowledge of God would spread out in every direction to cover the entire territory of the earth and thus make all its inhabitants, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, into faithful and wise servants of the Almighty. That much seems clear, but going further and asking how much divine knowledge exactly it was that Isaiah imagined covering the earth’s landmass seems ridiculous. It’s a metaphor, a poetic idea, a symbol…and, as such, meaningful in terms of the truth to which it alludes without being precisely, literally, or measurably correct. Can knowledge even be quantified in any meaningful way? There is, after all, a specific amount of water in the world’s oceans. (The best estimate I could find on-line was 362 million trillion gallons, which is a lot of water.) So maybe there actually is a certain amount of knowledge as well!

If you are old enough to remember back to the 1980s, then you will recall the average home computer having had a hard drive with a capacity of twenty megabytes. Just a decade later, in the mid-1990s, the average home computer had about four times that much memory. Hold that thought, and let’s start over at the beginning. In computer talk, a bit is a single binary digit, a zero or a one. A string of eight bits makes up one byte, the unit capable of representing a single letter or punctuation mark. 1000 bytes makes up a kilobyte, which was once an important measure, but the computer I am using to write this has one terabyte of memory, which is the equivalent of more than one trillion bytes or more than eight trillion bits. (I haven’t mentioned gigabytes, but a gigabyte is merely one thousand megabytes, thus one one-thousandth of a terabyte.) I know these are big numbers, but stick with me as we transcend the numbers that regular people such as ourselves can install on our machines at home and move into a different realm entirely. One thousand terabytes is called a petabyte. One thousand petabytes is called an exabtye. And one thousand exabytes is called a zettabtye. A zettabyte is therefore equal to a number of bytes equal to 10 to the 21st power. (Think of a one followed by twenty-one zeroes.)

Now the combined storage space of every computer hard drive in the world in 2006 was estimated in a report issued by the International Data Corporation, a market research firm specializing in information technology, at 161 exabytes or about three million times the information contained in all books ever written. That same report, written under the direction of John F. Gantz, projected that by 2010 the total of information stored on the world’s computers would increase about six-fold to about 988 exabytes, which would be not even equal to a single zettabyte. (To review, a zettabyte is the equivalent of one thousand exabytes.) Are you still with me?

Last April, Fox News reported that the National Security Agency was building a data center south of Salt Lake City that would conceivably be able to contain five zettabytes of information, or more than five times the information contained on every computer in the world in 2010 if the IDC report was correct. Does that give pause for thought? It does to me! (Just to hone the imagine, you would have to stack 62 billion iPhones one on top of the other—which pile of telephones would reach up past the orbit of the moon—to achieve storage equal to one single zettabyte. And Fox News reported that the facility in Utah will be able to manage five times that much data.) So while the current furor about the government gathering information on citizens by listening into uncountable telephone conversations sounds far-fetched, citizens need to realize that, supposing the Fox report was correct, the NSA is already at work creating a facility that has the capacity to contain all the data on every computer and every smart phone in the world. Could a government bound by the Fourth Amendment ever actually have unfettered access to the machines and hard drives of American citizens without there being a discernible probable cause to suspect wrongdoing? At the risk of sounding naïve, it certainly doesn’t sound plausible to me. But, and this I also admit, we really are relying on the integrity of the government…and not on the notion that it would simply not be possible to invade and seize the full contents of every home computer and smart phone in the country.

And so that is where I left off worrying about Edward Snowden’s revelations of the last week. Clearly, wars in the future will be fought just as violently in the cloud as on the ground. Being prepared to face what are probably inevitably cyber-attacks against our citizens only makes good sense. Betraying government secrets one is sworn to keep because one has unilaterally decided to betray one’s own commitment to secrecy is a crime and should be punished as such. (Nobility of motive could, perhaps, be taken into account when it comes to sentencing the offender. And Edward Snowden does not appear to stand to realize any personal gain with the revelations he made last week. If anything, actually, just the contrary is the case since he could conceivably end up spending the rest of his life in jail.) But Americans also need to be aware that the data they store privately is finite and could—all of it—conceivably be stored in a single facility. That we are protected against such an egregious invasion of our privacy by the Fourth Amendment is comforting…but that should not lull us into assuming our rights will never be trampled simply because they haven’t been—at least not on the kind of massive scale now possible—in the past. Forewarned is forearmed! And, although I hesitate to be choshed bi-kh’sheirim, I also don’t see what harm it could cause for us all to take a moment this week to write to the president and to our representatives in Congress to remind them that we do not wish to become obliged to choose between safety and privacy, and that it is the job of our elected officials both to protect our country from outside attack and to protect its citizens from any unwarranted erosion of their civil rights.