Profiles in Courage

 

In anticipation of the celebration this week of the 248^th anniversary our nation’s independence, I undertook to re-read President John Kennedy’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1956 bestseller, Profiles in Courage, a book I first encountered when it was assigned to me by Mrs. Gore in my eleventh-grade American history class. If I remember correctly, it impressed me then. But it astounded me now, and in several different ways. Of course, I am more than aware of the widespread belief that the book was substantially written by Theodore Sorensen, at the time a Kennedy speechwriter with a strong interest in American history, and that a good deal of the research that went into the book was undertaken by Jules Davids, a professor of diplomatic history at Georgetown, where he had among his students the young Jackie Kennedy, then still Jacqueline Bouvier. (Sorensen’s remark that he wasn’t the book’s author, merely the guy who wrote “the first draft of most of the book’s chapters” says more than enough.) Of course, I was unaware of any of this when I was in Mrs. Gore’s class and took the book to be the work of our martyred thirty-fifth president, whose memory we all revered and whom we all believed would have gone on to do truly great things if he had lived to the end of a second term in the White House. For better or worse, I will refer here to John Kennedy as the book’s author.

The book itself consists of a series of essays, eight in total, describing acts of moral heroism undertaken at various moment’s in our nation’s history by sitting senators. Most of the senators in question served in the Senate in the decades leading up to the Civil War or in the ones that followed; all are depicted as men who, rather than following the advice of their party or even the wishes of their constituents, chose instead to do what they perceived to be the right thing regardless of the consequences of their actions. These senators, in Kennedy’s opinion, were therefore heroes: men who chose to remain true to their own ideals and who were prepared to pay a big price for doing so.

That notion, of course, was and remains controversial: is the job of elected officials to do what they personally believe to be right or to represent their constituents vigorously and to vote in accordance with the wishes of the people who put them in office specifically to represent them in the Congress? It’s a good question! And it is telling, at least to me, that that specific issue is not debated or even raised really in the pages of the book: for the author, it goes without saying that the job of public officials is always to act in accordance with their own moral code and so to fulfill the “real” reasons anyone is elected to office in the first place: to do good, to promote virtue, to act in the best interests of the people, and to lead the nation forward to (or at least towards) the fulfillment of its national destiny. No more than that, but also no less!

What I liked so much about the book the first time ‘round (i.e., back in eleventh grade), I can’t quite recall. But what struck me this time was how complicated it is to say that politicians who act in accordance with their own values and ideals are always behaving in a praiseworthy manner—and that the corollary, that it is always base and unworthy for politicians to bow to public opinion, including the public opinion of their own constituents, is also true.

A good example would be the case of Senator Robert A. Taft, the son of the twenty-seventh president of the United States and the senator from Ohio from 1939 through 1953. What JFK particularly admired in Taft was his willingness to face nation-wide opprobrium for publicly opposing the Nuremberg Trials of some of the worst Nazi war criminals, to which Taft sneeringly referred as victor’s justice under ex post facto laws. This latter idea—that no one may be tried, let alone executed, for breaking laws that were only enacted after the deed under consideration was done—is a pillar of Western justice. But there was no one in the nation—except for Senator Taft, it seems—who was willing to apply that to the Nazis being tried in Nuremberg, whose crimes against humanity were—at least for most—so beyond the pale of “normal” criminality that the regular rules could not reasonably apply to them. Nor did Taft mince his words on the topic, repeatedly referencing the trials as being far more about vengeance than justice. This could not possibly have been a less popular opinion and he was publicly lambasted both by Republicans and Democrats for daring suggest that there was something intrinsically illegal afoot in Nuremberg and for going so far as to characterize Nuremberg as “a miscarriage of justice that the American people would long regret.” (To read the New York Times article of October 6, 1946 recording the senator’s words, click here.) It is widely believed that this principled opposition to the Nuremberg Trials is what cost Taft the Republican nomination for President in 1952.

JFK admires Taft immensely for knowing what he believed to be right and for repeatedly paying gigantic prices for being true to his own self. (His pre-Pearl-Harbor opposition to US involvement in World War II is widely thought to have cost him the Republican nomination in 1940, which he also didn’t get in 1948 because—or at least probably because—of his isolationist positioning.) I felt myself swept along by Kennedy’s rhetoric too: I couldn’t have agreed with Robert Taft less on most issues, including—possibly most of all—the legitimacy of Nuremberg. And yet I was struck by the portrait of a man with the courage of his convictions, of a man who would simply not lie about how he felt for his own gain.

The other portraits in the book are equally stirring, most of all the portraits of Edmund G. Ross, the senator from Kansas who broke with his party and the large majority of his constituency to vote to acquit at the impeachment trial in the Senate of President Andrew Johnson, and of Lucius Lamar, senator from Mississippi, who alienated huge numbers of his constituents by attempting to re-integrate the South into the Union and by supporting Black suffrage. At this juncture in history, it would probably be a good thing for all Americans to review Kennedy’s book—including those of us who last read it as teenagers. The chapters are a bit uneven (and some presume a familiarity with American history that will not correspond to what most readers will bring along to their encounter with the book), but the book’s basic argument—that our nation has been blessed over the centuries to have among its leaders people whose devotion to their own ideals and principles was ironclad and unshakeable—is something American would do well to consider and reconsider as we wrap up the first quarter of this century and move on into the second.

We have evolved a system in which we esteem above all else flexibility of opinion and elasticity of conviction. We hail as our greats individuals who get things done, who are effective and energetic, who know how to compromise. And we specifically do not admire people who refuse to go along with the majority, who insist on sticking to their opinions no matter what the consequences, who don’t mind being widely reviled if such is the price for being true their personal convictions. Indeed, the notion itself that the job of senators and members of the House is to embody their own virtues rather than invariably to act in accordance with the opinions of their constituents is probably the opposite of what most people think. And that is what makes President Kennedy’s book so challenging and so interesting—because, in the end, the book is a provocative argument that democracy needs leaders with vision and virtue, not ones who see their job as simply doing what they are told by the voters. In turn, this question leads to others. With whom should the ultimate power rest in a democracy—with the people (who are, after all, the demos in democracy) or with its leaders, chose precisely because of their vision and personal philosophy? How should history judge those who claim to believe in democracy but who—like JFK, apparently—ultimately hail as heroes elected officials who refuse to obey the wishes of the people who put them office? What does it even mean to lead a nation, for that matter: to do as the people demand or to inspire them to want what you feel is in their own best interests? Is that paternalism or leadership? Does hoi polloi get the final vote? Or is putting that kind of power in the hands of the masses precisely what leads to Nazism and Maoism? These are the questions that Profiles in Courage awakened in me as we approach the nation’s semiquincentennial in just two years. Are our leaders supposed to lead or be led? Do the people have the final word? Or is their job to put in place leaders whose sense of allegiance to their own virtues and values will lead the nation forward to its destiny? These are all excellent questions…and one more timely than the next!

Weakening Our Most Protective Wall

I haven’t much used this space to comment on news from other states, but I seem to be in that mode precisely now: last week I wrote about the new law in North Dakota restricting the rights of voters to elect federal officials who will turn 81 before the end of the year before their terms expires. And now I’m going to write about a different new law, the one passed in Louisiana earlier this month that is going to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom in the state. And not displayed casually either: the law requires that the text be presented on “a poster or a framed document that is at least 11 inches by 14 inches” in size. Furthermore, it must be “printed in a large, easily readable font.” Also, the act doesn’t leave anything to chance and actually enshrines in law the specific translation that must be used, one that is clearly derived from Protestant (as opposed to Catholic, let alone Jewish) tradition. To read the act itself, click here.

You might expect a rabbi-author such as myself to be delighted. The Torah teaches that the Ten Commandments were spoken aloud by God to the Israelites camped at the foot of Sinai, after all, and they are widely understood to constitute the core of the covenant that binds the God of Israel and the people Israel. So why should I object to such a text being disseminated widely, and perhaps especially to children? There are actually lots of reasons.

First and foremost, I am convinced that nothing good will come from degrading the barrier that our country used to pride itself on maintaining between church and state. I have made that argument many times in this space and it’s very much still what I think. The White House Christmas tree irritates me. The White House seder hosted by the Obamas from 2009 to 2016, times ten. (And the fact that it was unkosher is specifically not what I found so wrong with it. But that too.) And then there’s the White House Chanukah Party, initiated by President Bush in 2001 just a few months after 9/11, and carried forward by every President since. All those lighted menorahs look pretty enough on display in the West Wing, but the whole thing feels wrong to me, wrong and deeply counterproductive to our wish to maintain and, if possible, even to strengthen the wall between church and state in our country, that wall that permits all citizens to conduct their spiritual lives without interference from the government and without having to vet their religious practices with the government before engaging in them. I’m an equal-opportunity curmudgeon though, not solely a Jewish one: I find the plastic Christmas tree in the post office in December every bit as annoying as the plastic menorah on display annually in what should be a government facility free of all religious influence.

But this new law in Louisiana is bizarre for other reasons as well.

First of all, if the assumption is that being exposed as children to the Ten Commandments is going to achieve the kind of American society Justice Alito had in mind in his secretly recorded comment the other week to the effect that America should return “to a place of godliness,” then it’s hard to know how that is going to work since so much of the text of the Ten Commandments is out of sync with practices that are standard in our nation and our nation’s churches. Every serious biblical scholar knows, for example, that the Sabbath mentioned in the fourth commandment is Shabbat, i.e., Saturday, not Sunday. (For a simple explanation of why the Church moved its weekly day of worship to Sunday as opposed to holding it on Shabbat, click here.)  The Second Commandment forbids the use of plastic imagery in worship, but America’s churches are filled with artwork and statuary. Nor does this new law make sense on a partisan level, even: Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana, has formally endorsed Donald Trump’s candidacy for President, but the seventh commandment prohibits adulterous relationships as contrary to God’s law. I suppose there are ways to explain away all of these issues, but it still seems strange for Louisiana’s governor to wish that these laws be presented to school children as the essence of God’s revelation and then leave it to the children’s teachers to explain to the boys and girls why Michelangelo was not behaving wickedly in depicting God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, let alone who exactly Stormy Daniels is.

But the real reason I’m opposed to the Louisiana law has to do with the concept of textual integrity, which is to say, with the notion that you cannot read a text out of context and then insist that you understand it.

The story is beyond riveting. The Israelites cross the Sea of Reeds, then head south into the wilderness. They have no idea what they are going to eat or where they should camp. There is no obvious source of drinking water, at least not at first. They must know that Canaan, the Promised Land, lies to the north, not the south. And yet their leader, “that man Moses,” insists that they head in the opposite direction, but without saying clearly—or really even at all—why they should or what they can or should expect once they arrive wherever it is that they are going.  This goes on for seven weeks, the forty-nine days later enshrined in Jewish tradition as the s’firah, the “counting.” And then the Israelites arrive at Sinai. They have been told that they are coming “to God,” but without having had it explained to them even vaguely what that could possibly mean. They are told what to do: to wash their clothing and to refrain from intimate relations for a period of three days, but without being told precisely what is about to happen.

And then the scene commences that we all know. The mountain is covered by cloud and smoke. Deafening shofar blasts can be heard, but without it being clear where the shofars are or who is blowing air into them. Bolts of lightning illumine the sky. Claps of thunder are fully audible, combining with the shofar blasts  and the lightning to create an atmosphere that is both blinding and deafening. And then, all at once, a deep silence. The shofarot  fall silent. The lightning stops. And God speaks to the people.

What follows is the Ten Commandments, the text we all know by heart or almost by heart. But the story continues in a way that would probably surprise the Governor of Louisiana if he were to open up his Bible and continue reading. After just ten commandments, the people feel enervated to the point of exhaustion by the experience of audible, sensory communion with God. They break into what was presumably meant to be an ongoing revelation of divine law and beg Moses to go up personally to the top of the mountain “where God was” and himself to retrieve the rest of the rules and laws that are to serve as the meat of the covenant intended forever to bind Israel and God. What Moses thought is not recorded, but his actual response is: he kindly tells them that they’ve passed the test God has imposed upon them (but without saying what exactly was being tested or even what precisely the test was), then heads up the mountain. God, in our day so taciturn, is positively talkative: Moses has barely begun to ascend the mountain and God is already continuing the revelation. And then, presumably once Moses is settled in atop Sinai, God really gets going and continues to detail the rules and laws that will constitute the covenant.

All these Moses records in a document called “the Book of the Covenant,” sefer ha-b’rit. And then he returns to the people, reads the book aloud to them—since they cannot reasonably be expected to enter into the covenant blindly, i.e., without knowing what is to be expected of them as the human parties to it—and only then, after the people formally agrees to follow the rules of the covenant, is the weird and wonderful sacrificial ceremony described in detail in Exodus 24 undertaken. The people agree to stand still while the blood of a slaughtered bull is splattered all over them. And God, amazingly, deigns to be seen…but only by the elders of the nation and only from below so that all they really see are the soles of the divine feet.

And that is the real story of the Ten Commandments, that they are merely the first ten of the sixty-odd laws that constitute the terms of the covenant between the Jewish people and the God of Israel. Later on, God will issue many more laws and statutes that will henceforth govern Jewish life. But the terms of covenant itself—the terms included in the sefer ha-b’rit—are presented in Scripture in Exodus, chapters 20 through 23. So singling out the Ten Commandments and suggesting that they are somehow different in kind or nature from the rest of the commandments that constitute the covenant is either naively or willfully to misread the text of Scripture.

Yes, it is true that Moses later breaks the tablets of the law emblazoned with the first ten of the commandments, then refashions the tablets atop the mountain and redelivers them to the people. But there is no reasonable way to read the scriptural narrative to yield the conclusion that God’s covenant with Israel only “really” includes the first ten commandments, let alone that these are intended to serve all of humankind as the basis of decent and ethical behavior.

The new law requiring that schools display the Ten Commandment in every classroom in Louisiana is an egregious breach of the wall between church and state. And it imputes a meaning to the text that has no basis in the actual scriptural narrative. For both those reasons, I hope that the courts strike down this law and re-affirm the barrier between the government and the religious lives of the citizenry.

Old and Older

News from North Dakota rarely makes headlines in New York, but last week we had an exception to that general rule when a majority of voters there voted to make it illegal for individuals to run for congressional office in that state if they will turn 81 before the end of the year before their term ends.

Why such a measure should be legal in the first place eludes me: it seems to me that, in a true democracy, citizens should be permitted to cast their ballots for whomever they wish without any artificial barriers set in place to prevent them from doing so. Of course, that opinion puts me out of sync with lots of our nation’s laws, for example those that require members of the House to be over twenty-five, members of the Senate to be over thirty, and the President to be thirty-five years of age or older. Nor are these instances of latter-day legislation that would have been foreign to the nation’s Founders: all these requirements are enshrined in the Constitution (click here, here, and here to read the texts), and so constitute restrictions to free and unfettered voting that could not even imaginably be set aside at all, let alone dispensed with easily or casually. But there are no upper limits, not in the Constitution and not at all (except now in North Dakota), to the age of candidates. Similarly, all fifty states (including North Dakota) have at least some lower, but not upper, limits on individuals who wish to run for state-wide office. Some of these are a bit surprising—the citizens of California, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin, for example, can elect a teenager to be their governor as long as the candidate is at least eighteen years of age—but most are mostly what you’d expect. (To see a full table of minimum age limits for state-wide office in our country, click here.) Vermont is, and by far, the most liberal: there are no age limits on any state office other than the requirement that the governor be at least eighteen.

As far as I can tell, the basic principle seems to be that the Founders thought that it would be dangerous to elect someone to a federal or state-wide office who is too young successfully to bear the burden that comes with that position. On the other hand, the parallel thought—that a candidate could conceivably be too old successfully to serve—seems not to be part of our national culture. Until this week’s vote in North Dakota, that is. Of course, given the 1995 decision of the Supreme Court specifically denying states the right to set age restrictions for public office other than those mentioned in the Constitution, the new law in that state will certainly be tested in the courts. Still, it’s the idea itself I’d like to use this space this week to think through, the notion that individuals, regardless of their actual mental acuity, level of insight, or professional experience, can simply be too old to serve in the Congress. Or, by extension, in any elected position if a state passes legislation to that effect.

Given the fact that it is inconsonant with the Supreme Court decision mentioned above, this new law in North Dakota was destined to be contentious anyway. But how much the more so is it going to be a hot-button issue—in North Dakota and in the other forty-nine states as well—given the degree to which the age of the presumptive candidates for President is clearly going to be an issue in the months leading up to Election Day and is already such an issue. President Biden, as everybody who ever reads a newspaper knows, is eighty-one years old. At seventy-eight, Donald J. Trump is roughly the same age. There are surely lots of surprises still to come in the months leading up to the election, but it will come as a surprise to no one at all that the age of both candidates is going to be discussed endlessly. And all of that talk is going to be about the supposition that there is such a thing as being too old to serve effectively—and that that supposition is rooted specifically in the age of the candidates and not in their level of ability, skill, or talent. 

The whole concept of being too old to serve is—at least from a classical point of view—a strange one. Scripture—and particularly in the Book of Proverbs—could not be clearer that old age is not a curse that devolves upon the elderly as punishment for having lived too long, but rather a blessing and a reward. Nor is it difficult to justify that concept of old age as a blessing because the older people become, the more likely they are to have entire lifetimes of experience guiding them forward, as well as a lifetimes of learning, lifetimes of interacting with others, and lifetimes of making mistakes and learning from them. In other words, the idea that merely passing a certain age means ipso facto that one is no longer fit to lead could not possibly be less in sync with our classical sources. And yet that is the law in North Dakota as of last week!

Consider, for example, the famous verse in Proverbs (16:31) that remarks that silver hair, instead of being something to be feared or regretted as a sign of decline, is to be acclaimed as “a crown of glory.” The word for “silver hair” in that verse, seivah, should be familiar to students of Torah as well: in one of its most famous passages, Leviticus depicts God as commanding the faithful Israelite to rise before the silver-haired individual, the seivah, and then continues on to command as well that the faithful show the deepest respect to the elderly as an expression of their wish to be seen as God-fearing people.  Read in each other’s light, these two passages have a clear and specific lesson to teach: with age can come wisdom, insight, and an enhanced ability to lead well…and that turning away from such people merely because of their age is counterproductive, even self-destructive, behavior. Youth is impetuousness, whereas old age is deliberation and thoughtfulness . Youth is eagerness, whereas old age is reticence. Youth is self-absorbed, whereas old age is focused—if the individual in question has spent the years of a life acquiring wisdom—on the public weal, on the good of society, on the needs of others. Youth is worry rooted in anxiety, whereas old age is calm born of resignation and acceptance. Obviously, not every old person falls into that category. Neither does every young person. But the idea that some specific individual should be disqualified for public service solely because he or she has reached a certain age—that idea should be anathema for people who seek to be led by the wise rather the reckless.

In ancient times, great philosophers wrote whole books about the merits and virtues of old age. Of them all, the one that seems the most on point to read or reread during this presidential election would be Cicero’s short (but truly great) work, On Old Age. You can read the whole thing in a very readable English translation by clicking here,  or, for just a few dollars, you can buy the still-very-readable translation of Evelyn Shuckbergh, a scholar of classical literature who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. (An earlier translation by one James Logan was actually published by Benjamin Franklin, thus making it the first classical text to be published in translation in North America.) In his work, written just a year before his death, Cicero discusses the gifts and troubles that the aging process brings along in its inevitable wake to all who survive their own youths. His comments are trenchant and more than accessible. As a result, there are lots of passages to consider, but I’d like to offer here just one that is specifically concerned with the relationship between old age and the ability to lead well:

Those who allege that old age is devoid of useful activity are like those who would say that the pilot does nothing in the sailing of his ship, because, while others are climbing the masts, or running about the gangways, or working at the pumps, he sits quietly in the stern and simply holds the tiller. He may not be doing what younger members of the crew are doing, but what he does is better and much more important. It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not poorer, but is even richer.

Is Joe Biden too old to be our President? Is Donald Trump, only a few years his junior? In my opinion, the question itself should be shelved. Obviously, old age brings some early-onset senescence and its attendant incapacity. But there are others whose older years feature insights born of experience and wisdom rooted in a lifetime of learning from others. Supposing that Joseph Biden and Donald Trump are their respective parties’ nominees, the decision whom to choose should be rooted in their policies, their experience, and their character. The question of age, and specifically when considered independent of ability, should be deemed wholly irrelevant.

The Southern Border

The current presidential campaign has already been characterized by an amazing amount of obfuscatory rhetoric, confusing policy zigzags, and inconsistent argumentation—and we are still almost five months away from the actual election and, other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there still aren’t any actual candidates out there, by which I mean candidates formally nominated by their parties to run for the office of President. Nonetheless, and barring the kind of catastrophe that in our gun-crazed society can never really be ruled out, we all know that the next president of the United States is going to be one of two individuals. And neither is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

For me and for many, the ultimate decision about how to cast my ballot will have to do with the candidates record on supporting Israel, and particularly during the war in Gaza that has lasted now for well over 200 days. I suppose that won’t surprise anyone at all among my readers, since I have basically been writing ever since October 7 solely about issues relating to Israel, and particularly to the events of that horrific day and their aftermath in Israel and around the world (and particularly on American college campuses). But there are other issues to consider. And today I’d like to write about one of them.

Americans like to reference their country—our country—as a nation of immigrants, a phrase made famous by then-Senator John F. Kennedy as the title of his 1958 book on the topic. And, for all it has gone out of fashion (to put it mildly) to celebrate our country as one founded and populated by colonialist settlers from other lands who—other than to massacre them or herd them onto reservations—mostly ignored the presence of native people in this place who surely thought of the land our nation occupies as their own, the reality remains in place that our nation’s Founders were either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, which could also be said of the vast majority of American citizens today. (To refer to the enslaved ancestors of today’s Black Americans as “immigrants” seems both offensive and ridiculous, even grotesque. But, horrific though their story may be, they too came here from somewhere else.) And that truth—that, for better or worse, we actually are a nation of immigrants, just as JFK put it in his book—is at the core of our current issues with immigration.

In other words, President Biden’s decision to issue an executive order earlier this month closing the southern border when our officials are literally overwhelmed by a surge of would-be immigrants seeking to cross the border illegally needs to be evaluated in its historical sense as well as its political one.

The order itself feels almost banal. Targeting only people attempting to cross the border illegally, the order decrees that the border be closed once the average of such people trying to cross into the United States in a seven-day period exceeds 2,500 a day, and only re-opened after that figure drops to 1,500 for seven consecutive days and stays at that number or less for a two-week period. But nothing about our immigration policy is ever that simple. But between the two obvious response-positions—the one wondering why any illegal immigration should be tolerated at all  and the other wondering how a “nation of immigrants” can deny safe haven in this place to any newcomers at all when almost all Americans are personally descended from people who sought safe haven in this place themselves—between those two extremist positions there should be a middle-ground approach that features both charity for the desperate and respect for the law. Complicating all of this, of course, is the nightmarish images that still haunt the American psyche of children being ripped from their parents’ arms just a few years ago, an unbelievable 1,200 of whom have still not been reunited with their families. (For the government’s own avowal of that figure, click here.) For Jewish Americans, of course, it is impossible to contemplate the image of children—any children at all—being dragged away from their families and then forced somehow to survive on their own, or at least without their parents, without evoking the most horrific Shoah memories. And I suppose that is also the case for a large number of non-Jewish Americans as well.

Another part of this, and surely not just for Jewish Americans, is the challenge of setting the whole concept of barring the desperate or the eager from entering our country in its historical context. And that is  a long, complicated story.

We can start with the Page Act of 1875, which had as its specific point, to quote its sponsor in the House, one Horace Page (R-California), “to end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women” by making it illegal for Chinese women to immigrate to the United States. And then, seven years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it illegal for any Chinese laborers, male or female, to enter the United States.

The Immigration Act of 1917 went a step further still, barring all immigration from Pacific Island nations and from the Far East, but also imposing literacy tests on would-be immigrants as well as creating for the first time categories of people to whom immigration was to be denied without respect to national origin. The sanitized expressions “mentally defective individuals” and  “persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority” were used to deny openly gay people the possibility of entry, along with undesirable “illiterates, imbeciles, insane persons, and paupers.” But it was the Immigration Act of 1924, framed in its day as a mere extension of the earlier act, that for the first time established immigration quotas. Formally, the idea was to restrict immigration to a number equivalent to 2% of the number of Americans who claimed that nation as their ancestral home in the 1890 census. Why it was deemed desirable at all, let alone crucial, for the ethnic balance of the populace to be maintained by law is a good question. But it’s not that relevant a one, because the real purpose of the Act was to keep out Italians, Greeks, Poles, and (I can’t help thinking especially) Eastern European Jews, all of which groups were coming here in numbers that far exceeded the percentage of the population that was already occupied by people of that heritage or national origin. I hardly have to pause to note what happened to those Jews who would have come here to start new lives, but who were instead condemned to be present when the Nazis occupied their homelands. Nor do I have to say out loud that this specifically is the baggage Jewish Americans bring to this debate, that sense that millions died because of an act of Congress inspired by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic desire to preserve the nation’s religious and ethnic mosaic in the future precisely as it had been in the past.

And then there is the counter-narrative, the one that finds it reasonable for the great statue of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor to have on its base engraved the words of Emma Lazarus’s “The Great Colossus,” which poem was actually written in the first place to raise the funds necessary to construct the pedestal atop which the statue would eventually be set. This is my personal way into the debate because I have truly loved that poem ever since I was obliged to learn it by heart as a student in Mrs. Gilbert’s sixth-grade class at P.S. 196. And it was the poet’s description of the statue as “a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and her name the Mother of Exiles” that was the most resonant with me because my people came here fleeing persecution from towns in Poland and Belarus in which, as far as I know, no Jews at all survived the Nazi occupation. And the rest of the poem spoke equally directly to the young me. When I read that “from her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome,” I imagined the three of my foreign-born grandparents passing through Ellis Island and wondering what fate awaited them here. And when the poet imagined Lady Liberty herself addressing the decaying lands of the Old World and imploring them to send to us “your tired, your poor,” your homeless and tempest-tost, and that they would be welcomed by Lady Liberty herself, on duty 24/7 holding aloft her “lamp beside the golden door,” I felt that the values embedded in those words were precisely what made America great.

So was President Biden protecting our nation with his executive order or betraying our core values of inclusivity, tolerance, hospitality, and empathy? I suppose we shall find out soon enough. If this really is just a way to keep the authorities from being overwhelmed with desperate people eager to find a safe, prosperous place in which to raise their children, then it’s hard to find a good reason to be opposed: surely, no good can come from the system in place breaking down and ceasing to function well or at all. But, in the end, if this is really a way to close the border precisely to the people Emma Lazarus had in mind when she composed her poem, then it’s hard to feel sanguine about the nation’s future. Consider the poet’s words, “From her beacon-hand / glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command / the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.” In Emma Lazarus’s day, the twin cities were New York and Brooklyn. But although Brooklyn has been part of New York City since 1898, the poet’s sentiments are no less relevant today than they were when she wrote the poem fifteen years before the expansion of New York City from just Manhattan to the city it is today and defined, at least for me, what the most basic of all American values was to her and should be for us all.  

Dancing in the Moonlight

There are so many things in my heart following this crazy rollercoaster of a week that began with the death of my dear father-in-law last Wednesday and continued through his funeral on Thursday, my return to New York without Joan on Friday, our beautiful musical Shabbat on Friday evening, the remarkable Shabbat morning service featuring remarks by Rabbi Carl Perkins (my friend of many, many years), the Gold Plate Dinner itself on Sunday, Joan’s return to Long Island on Monday, and the next few days of shiva observance in our home. You could say it’s been a busy week!

Any one of the above could turn into a blog post in its own right. But I thought I’d write this week not about any of it but about all of all, about the experience of knitting so many discordant themes and diverse obligations and opportunities into a coherent whole. Because, in the end, isn’t that what life itself is like, only just not usually quite that concentrated? We dance through the years of our lives, after all, and, as the music changes to suit the occasion, we dance differently: slower or faster, in our partner’s arms or merely facing each other, in step with the other couples on the dance floor or fully on our own and without reference to anyone else. But, at least for as long as we can, we keep dancing. When the pace actually gets a bit dizzying, as happened to me this last week, we finally force ourselves to take note of what we’re doing. But most of the time, we’re too pre-occupied for that kind of focused introspection and we just keep on keepin’ on, twirlin’ and swirlin’ to the music, happy still to be standing, still to be moving, still to be dancing in the moonlight.  (Just for the record, “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest was my favorite record of 1972, the year I left for my junior year of university in France. I knew you’d all want to know that.) And the music is always there, always audible, always present—just usually in the background. And then something happens—sometimes a single event, but other times a strange concatenation of unrelated events—and suddenly, almost out of the blue, there we are in the moonlight as the world falls away and we are suddenly on the dance floor all by ourselves.

That’s what this last week was like.

Since I mentioned one of my favorite songs from my college years, I’ll also mention one of my favorite books, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Watts, now forgotten by most, was a remarkable and well-known figure in his day and a great author. The child of devout Anglican parents, he eventually forsook Christianity to become a Buddhist monk, then went on to write any number of books I treasured as a young person. Of them all, however, The Wisdom of Insecurity is the one that had the greatest effect on me. He begins by observing that, just like people, animals also age as they pass through the years. They get older, then sicker, then weaker. And eventually they die, just as do we all. But the difference between animals and people is that, whereas we are consumed with anxiety about all of it (by which I mean: the aging process, the possibility of illness, the fear of incapacity, the opacity of death itself and our inability to see past it other than in our mostly made-up fantasies, the whole concept of growing more frail and less hale as we age, etc.), animals don’t seem to worry at all about following the natural trajectory of their lives. In fact, they seem far better at facing it all than any of us is. And so, as they become less strong and less able, they just move through those stages of their lives the way they’ve already moved through the earlier ones, possibly even not noticing the diminution of ability as it devolves upon them, and simply growing into new version of themselves without seeming to find that concept upsetting or off-putting. Growth, they appear wordlessly to be saying, may not be always positive, but it is invariably normal.

And so is the anxiety growth naturally engenders. In his book, Watts teaches that the insecurity that the aging process engenders in all of us is not a bad thing and certainly not something to try to deny or avoid. There is, he wrote, great wisdom in insecurity, in accepting the fact that we have no idea what the next day will bring (which idea would presumably be totally foreign to animals), that we cannot control the universe as we decline any more than we could when we were young people growing more strong and more capable with each passing year of childhood and adolescence. And it is from that insecurity that wisdom comes. (Or can come.) And not just wisdom, Watts wrote, but wisdom born of acceptance, of acquiescence, of submission to the nature of things, to our place in the universe, to the Creator who created Creation according to a divine plan that seems to include inevitable decline as we age and grow less sturdy and increasingly rickety. Even after all these years, I can still recommend that book to you all. You’ll like it, I think. But it is troubling too—and precisely because we are so good at avoiding these truths for most of the time, even perhaps for most of our lives.

And then you have a week like I just had. Brought together in a handful of days were the following: anxiety in the face of impending death, death itself (weirdly captured on video, since my father-in-law was actually facetiming with Joan when he breathed his last), eulogy, burial, bereavement, terrible sadness…and then, as if I wasn’t feeling mortal enough, my return to New York and the ensuing worship services and speakers and dinners and dancing celebrating my impending retirement, which is to say the beginning of the next stage, the stage that contains—not plausibly or possibly, but inevitably—all the things that Alan Watts writes about in his book. So you can excuse me for feeling a bit fragile as I contemplate all of this. Fragile and brittle. And yet, also as per Watts, hopeful and eager to see what the next years bring.

Is that eagerness itself a kind of denial? You could make that point very cogently! Or was Watts right that the great reward for facing things as they are is the wisdom that insecurity engenders as we find the courage to acknowledge the flimsiness of it all, to face the impermanence of this world we inhabit and, specifically, of our place in it? I thought he was when I was in college and, now, a half-century later, I find that I still do.

Like everybody, I’d like to live forever. But I’m not indulging that fantasy these days and, instead, I’m embracing the insecurity and seeking comfort in the ephemeral. Nothing lasts forever. As the great philosopher said, panta rhei, it’s all in flux, all changing constantly, all morphing forward into its own next version, all a work in endless and permanent progress. You can like it or not, but that’s how things are in this world God made and set us all into. So I’m not going to retreat into morose acceptance of my fate or resignation to the inevitability of decline. Instead—and this is the last and best lesson Joan’s dad taught me—I’m going to dance in the moonlight for as long as I can. Like my father-in-law, I have a happy marriage to sustain me and three wonderful children. And another three wonderful children-in-law. I have grandchildren too, unberufen, and watching them grow is and always will be a source of huge pleasure for me. So what am I complaining about? That life is process? I’ve known that since I was in college! 

Contextualization Is the Opposite of Surrender

As we make our way through the weeks between Pesach and Shavuot, we are bidden by Scripture to count each day separately. This mitzvah, called informally “counting the omer,” is not complicated or difficult: you simply say the blessing, then say out loud the day of the omer upon us, then wrap up with a brief prayer. In different years, of course, this custom has a different feel to it. But this year, as things have gone from bad to worse, as the situation on many college campuses has deteriorated to the point almost of no return, as the poisoned tree that is the international effort to delegitimize Israel has born more and more fruit on more and more different branches, as traditional allies have wavered or retreated entirely, and as many members of Congress (a minority, but a sizable one) hesitate to support the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act for a variety of reasons, some bizarrely exaggerated and others darkly ominous—in a year such as this, the practice of counting each day, of marking each day as it passes and turns into the next one, that practice feels ominous and darkly suggestive of worse things to come in a way that I cannot recall ever having felt in years gone by.

And then I came across a video by an Israeli sketch comedy time called Ha-y’hudim Ba’im, literally “The Jews are Coming.” Normally, it’s a very funny broadcast on Israeli television, something along the lines of Saturday Night Live in its heyday.  But this last video clip, released just a week or so ago, is not at all funny. But it is profound and it is, in its own dark way, encouraging.

The video presents a series of Jewish people from ancient to modern times. A woman speaks about her experiences in first-century C.E. Judea as the Romans razed Jerusalem and defeated the rebels who dared seek an independent Jewish state in Israel. A young man follows who speaks to us from eleventh century Cologne and describes his family’s experiences as the Crusaders invaded the city with the specific intent of murdering its Jewish population before setting off to “liberate” the Holy Land. We then shift forward a millennium and find ourselves in Kishenev in 1903 as a resident describes what he saw and what his family experienced during the pogrom I wrote about last fall (click here), an anti-Jewish riot that, in a world that had yet to experience the Shoah, was understood as an almost unimaginable act of violence directed against innocents, including children. And then we skip forward two decades and meet a young person speaking from Hebron in 1929, the year of the anti-Jewish riots there that took the lives of sixty-nine Jews, also including children.

From Hebron, we move back to Germany and meet an older man who lived through Kristallnacht in Berlin. He describes the riots, the destroyed Jewish shops and businesses, the arrests of innocent Jewish men, the intentional destruction of the local synagogues. And then we travel to the east and meet a younger man who speaks from Baghdad and describes the Farhud, the violent anti-Jewish riot that seized the city on the first two days of June in 1941, riots that included gang-rape, the destruction of synagogues and Jewish shops, the murder of more than 180 innocents, and the destruction of upwards of 900 Jewish homes.

And then we move forward to Gaza in 2023. A young woman from Kfar Aza who lived through October 7 faces the camera. Based on what we’ve already seen, we expect her to tell about her experiences, about what she saw, about whom she lost. But she skips that part. We know those stories, she seems to suppose. And instead she speaks about the future. About her intention to remain in place, to live in her home, to rebuild what the vandals destroyed. She speaks calmly, but with integrity and purpose. And then, almost as if to reward her for her courage, she is joined by the others, all of whom step out of history to join her on camera and to say, as one, that together they represent the worst of Jewish history, the low points, the disasters, the pogroms, the nightmares, the true horrors…but that they also represent the spirit of the Jewish people to face down its oppressors and enemies, and to refuse to do anything other than to resist the haters and the bigots and the barbarians, and to thrive.

There’s an interesting riddle embedded in the clip as well. The actors are all Israelis. The clip itself is in Hebrew with English subtitles. Except for the final woman who speaks from Kfar Aza, they are obviously depicting people who lived before the State of Israel existed, some of them long before. Even the woman who speaks first, the one who describes the Roman onslaught against Jerusalem in the first century, and the fellow who speaks from Hebron, even they didn’t live in an independent Jewish state! And the others obviously lived in different places, in Germany and Iraq and Moldova. So that’s fine: actors depict personalities from different centuries and different countries all the time. But then, at the end, when they all come together, they somehow turn into Israelis as they speak in fully unaccented Israeli Hebrew and pledge to rebuild, to thrive, to defend their country, and to prosper in their own land, in their homeland, in their native habitat.

And in that merging of past and present, of Jewish history and Israeli reality, of stories from distant centuries and contemporary reality, there is something truly uplifting and satisfying, even encouraging.

I’ve written almost weekly since last October about the situation in Israel. It has consumed us all, of course, and me no less than anyone else. As the situation in Gaza, on the diplomatic front, at the UN, in the halls of Congress, and on our nation’s college campuses has deteriorated, it’s been easy to lose hope and to feel dejected about the future. Yes, it could always be worse. But that’s the punchline to a famous joke, not a rational path into the future! And then I saw this clip and things fell back into place for me. Yes, we’ve dealt with terrible things in our past. Yes, October 7 was beyond horrific. Yes, it will take a long time for Israel to return to its pre-October 7 state, if it ever does. But contextualizing is neither denial nor retreat. And seeing these people on the clip I’ve been writing back stepping out of history to join that young woman from Kfar Aza to remind her that she is not alone, that the ghosts of the past are not only present but fully and really so as Israel—and Jewish people in all the lands of our dispersion—move forward into whatever comes next.

I intentionally didn’t give the link earlier on because I wanted to introduce it to you with my own words, but here’s it is: https://youtu.be/KjwrV0wG9E0?si=Zp2vl0HkWWQzNPCA. Take a look, let these people speak to you as they did to me, and together let us all find comfort in the thought that, since history is run-up and destiny is catch-up, it’s the present we need to negotiate together into the future. We have faced worse than Hamas and survived. And we will survive this as well. 

Who is Opposing the AAA and Why

A few weeks ago, the House passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act by a vote of 320 to 91. Obviously, I’m pleased that 320 members of Congress take anti-Jewish prejudice seriously enough to want to specify in law what constitutes an anti-Semitic act so as to facilitate taking legal action against the perpetrators of such acts. But I’m much more involved emotionally with the fact that 91 members of the House voted against the measure. The naysayers were a bipartisan group too, albeit a lopsided one: 70 of those who voted against the bill are Democrats and the other 21 are Republicans. To condemn them all as haters opposed to opposing anti-Semitism would be wrong. Nor is it so that they came to their opposition from similar vantage points.

The basic concept of the AAA is that the bill requires the U.S. Department of Education to use the definition of anti-Semitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a group based in Sweden that works “to foster education, remembrance, and research about what happened in the past, to build a world without genocide in the future.” (That’s a direct quote from their website; to see more, click here.) To do their work, it became necessary at some point to define anti-Semitism precisely. And so they developed a precise definition, one as brief as it is almost banal: “Anti-Semitism,” they determined, “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It’s hard to know what anyone could possibly take issue with in that. But, of course, the devil is always in the details.

The definition comes with quite a big set of elucidatory details, each describing a specific manifestation of anti-Jewish prejudice. They are:

1.       Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

2. Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
3. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
4. Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g., the gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II.
5. Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
6. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
7. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
8. Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
9. Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libels) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
10. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, and
11. Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.

So you can already see where this is going. The Democratic opponents of the bill, including several Jewish member of Congress, were afraid that adopting the IHRA definition would criminalize criticism of the State of Israel under points 7 and 8 above. To me, that seems almost bizarrely exaggerated: the points listed above do not seem even remotely to me to mean that criticizing this or that decision or policy of the State of Israel ipso facto makes someone an anti-Semite in the way that questioning the right of Israel to exist would. Our own Jerry Nadler (D-NY) voted against the bill. So did Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont). That hardly surprised me, but what did me was a comment by yet another Jewish member of Congress, Sara Jacobs (D-California), who observed that although she personally feels that Israel has a right to exist, she knows many people who don’t feel that way at all despite the fact, and I quote, that they are “deeply connected to their Judaism.” I’m sure there are people out there whose understanding of Judaism is so unconnected to classical Jewish thought that they really imagine it possible to be “deeply connected” to Judaism without feeling any emotional connection to the State of Israel. We see such people, thankfully in tiny numbers, when they show up annually at the Israel Day Parade. But was it those people that Representative Jacobs had in mind? I doubt it. Whom she really had in mind, I obviously have no way to know. But to speak of such a position as though it were a valid, reasonable approach for a Jewish person to take—is it even possible for someone educated enough to be elected to Congress to know so little about her own faith? Apparently, the answer is yes. But weirder and creepier still are the reason at least some of the 21 Republicans who voted against the measure chose to do so, of which the one that made the headlines was the one put forward by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) who opposed the bill not for any reason that had to do with Israel, but because she perceived the bill to threaten her right to hold Jewish people responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus in the 1^st century C.E. Oy.

It would be easy—and more than easy—to write off a comment like that. This is, after all, the same woman who speculated, apparently seriously, that the 2018 wildfires in California may well have been ignited by secret lasers orbiting in space that were put in place by the Rothschilds as part of a larger plan to control the world by controlling the weather. But Greene was not without her own supporters. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, took things one step further by observing that, in his opinion, the adoption of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act would basically outlaw the entire New Testament, an opinion promulgated on X by Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). That sounds even loonier than the idea of Jewish space lasers, but students of Jewish history have long since learned not to wave away anti-Semitic tropes or remarks just because they sound crazy. And so should we not pass lightly by this kind of statement, especially when used to justify opposing a bill that would criminalize the use of extremist religious rhetoric to justify harming or killing Jewish people.

Unlike most rabbis, I know the New Testament well. (I spent years of Graduate School working on my knowledge of New Testament Greek, and took courses in New Testament theology at the Union Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary, both Christian institutions of higher learning in Manhattan.) So I feel entitled to an opinion. All four of the Gospels are set in first-century Israel. The Romans are in charge; Judea is a province (or, in the very beginning of the story, a client kingdom) of the Roman Empire. Other than the Roman overlords, pretty much every person in the story is Jewish: Jesus himself, all his disciples, all of his relatives, all (or almost all) of his followers, the Temple priests, the High Priest, the citizens of Jerusalem. It was a fully Jewish place, Roman Judea in the first century CE. And leaving that detail out of the mix more or less guarantees that the resultant sense of what life was life in that time and place will be basically false.

The authors of the Gospels wrote decades after Jesus’s death and for Gentile audiences. As a result, “the Jews” were depicted—I’m generalizing here, but not to the extent of giving a false impression—the “Jews” were depicted as the non-Christians and the followers of Jesus as the Christians, without it being over-emphasized (or emphasized at all) that those followers were themselves Jewish as well and that the sharp division between Jews and Christians that later became basic to the Christian self-conception did not apply really at all in the days that Jesus himself walked the earth. And so, somehow, starting with the earliest extant Christian literature, the followers of Jesus were de-Judaized and depicted as proto-Christians, while the Jews who chose not to follow Jesus ended up depicted as “the” Jews. As a result, a casual perusal of the Gospel literature suggests a struggle between proto-Christians and Jews, thereby missing the point that Christianity doesn’t exist in Jesus’s day and that all the players in the story other than the land’s Roman overlords were Jews.

The bottom line, though, is that many Christian denominations have moved past the anti-Jewish tropes of the Gentile authors of the Gospels. (To give just one example, the papal encyclical called “Nostra Aetate,” promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965, specifically renounces that belief, saying explicitly that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”) But for a member of Congress to oppose a bill criminalizing anti-Semitic behavior because she perceives it possibly to be denying her the right to hold Jews responsible for the execution of Jesus—that is precisely the kind of statement of extreme prejudice that Jews know far better than to wave away as “just” silliness. When I ask myself what the future could possibly hold for the Jews of the United States, I find it impossible to consider an answer without hearing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comment ringing in my ears. I suppose there are many people who feel the same way. I’m sure there are, actually. And that is precisely why the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act should become the law of the land.

And what actually are the bill’s chances in the Senate? We shall find out soon enough!