Elul Conventions

Like most of you, I suspect, I’ve spent last week and this week floating in and out of the nightly Democratic and Republican convention coverage on television. I suppose political conventions are always three- or four-day-long infomercials pitched primarily at undecided voters, but somehow seeing it all (or mostly all) unfold on Zoom has made that feel even more acutely to be the case. Still, what was I expecting? Conventions are hardly the context in which politicians candidly and openly discuss their shortcomings, weaknesses, failures, or moral flaws. (That never actually happens, of course, at least not in public, let alone on television—only it somehow doesn’t happen even more acutely in the context of these massive quadrennial conventions.)

Just as I suppose also does every other American, I really do understand that it’s all about selling the product. It’s just hard for me to watch night after night without feeling just a bit like Diogenes the Cynic. One of the greatest Greek philosophers, he was as peculiar a man as they come. He declined a salary for his teaching and preferred instead to beg for coins in the marketplace. He chose not to live in a normal home, but preferred to sleep at night in a broken human-sized ceramic jug owned by the local Temple of the goddess Cybele and provided to him as the most basic lodging imaginable. He owned one single item, a clay bowl…until he realized he could scoop his food up with his hand and eat it that way, whereupon he smashed his bowl as a way of divesting himself of what he now saw as a superfluous possession. His most famous stunt—one among many—was wandering around Athens in full daylight with a lit torch in his hands. People would see him behaving so oddly and ask what he was doing, which was the whole point: he would then look at them and explain that he was out searching for an honest man. After two weeks of watching convention television, I know exactly how he felt!

Maybe it’s Elul. Of all the months of the Jewish year, none is as special—to me personally, at least—as Elul. Admittedly, it’s not an obvious choice. Elul has no holidays, no special days at all. For rabbis of all stripes, myself absolutely included, it is a time of frenzied writing and rewriting as the horrible prospect of having to stand up on Rosh Hashanah and not have the most compelling, interesting, and uplifting sermon possible ready to go looms large on the terror-horizon. On top of all that, I’ve almost always lived in places where it is beastly hot and humid towards the end of August, thereby making even something as normally refreshing as going for a walk to clear your mind and re-organize your thoughts a minor misery. And yet, despite it all, Elul is still my absolute favorite month, the month I look forward to all year. And that is for one reason only, really: because Elul is our national month of introspection, of self-scrutiny, of the kind of soul-searching that comes naturally to almost none and yet which is at the heart of the way in which traditional Jews prepare for the holiday season.

It is not a particularly pleasant undertaking, this effort to look deep within. And yet it can also be satisfying and inspiring, even encouraging. Indeed, the very thought that we are not prisoners held in place by the various negative character traits we’ve developed over the decades is the single most invigorating idea I grapple with each year.

Like most people, I claim to hate that feeling of being mired in a slough of my own making. But that’s only what I say to the world—that I hate feeling trapped in my own life—but the truth is that, like most people, I actually revel in that sense of being trapped, of living in a maze I’m not quite bright enough to exit, of having no real choice left in life but to accept who I am and to be the man I’ve become. After all, if I have no choice but to play with the cards that I’ve somehow dealt myself over the years, then why not just accept myself as I am and be done with it? Nothing is more satisfying, after all, than feeling optionless, therefore noble and rational in accepting how things are without whining or wasting endless amounts of time trying to alter immutable reality.

And then Elul comes along and says—wordlessly, in that weird out-of-language way that time speaks to its prisoners, which is everybody—Elul comes and informs us without saying a word that that isn’t really how things are, that we actually aren’t slaves at all. And that Elul-based realization is the lens through which I’ve been watching these last weeks’ political conventions.

The point of the conventions is to make you want to vote for a specific party’s candidate this November. That’s why they promote their nominees so aggressively: to inspire the undecided to decide for their ticket by depicting its occupants as all the things they party-czars have concluded undecided voters want the most to see in their leaders. Interestingly for parties so completely different in terms of their approaches to most things, these qualities are not all that different. And so are both candidates for president depicted by their promoters as having basically the same set of virtues: courage, compassion, insight, unbounded patriotism, and integrity. But, for all I also esteem all those things, what Elul makes me want to see in a candidate more than any of the above is a deep, abiding sense of humility.

I want a candidate to speak about the COVID-pandemic and say, look, I’m not a physician, let alone a trained epidemiologist. I’m not a scientist or a researcher. I’m a politician. And therefore I admit openly that I don’t really have any idea how to deal with this nightmare that has come upon us. But I will find people who actually are experts, who actually are trained professionals, who actually do have some ideas about how best to tackle the challenges that the pandemic has thrust upon us…and I will follow their advice. I will listen carefully. I’ll ask all the questions I can think of, but when a consensus emerges among our nation’s brightest and most qualified scientists about how to deal with this national catastrophe that has already taken so many from us, that consensus will be the basis for national policy.

My mother used to tell me that the sign of being a truly smart person is knowing what you don’t know. I doubt the teenaged-me knew what she was talking about. Or maybe I did on some level, but I doubt I understood just how profound a point my Mom was actually making. In the fifth act of As You Like It, when Duke Frederick’s court jester, a man named Touchstone, recalls the old saying according to which “the fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool,” he is saying more or less the same truth that my mother wanted me to embrace: that the key to wisdom is understanding how little, not how much, you know of the world and then acting accordingly.

Politicians are neither economists nor historians, neither scientists nor anthropologists. And that is precisely why the key quality necessary to negotiate the various straits in which the nation finds itself is humility. To understand the racial politics of our day requires a profound understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history…with a good background in the culture of race as it evolved even earlier on as the nation’s founders were creating the Constitution.  To understand the Middle East in all of its complexity requires not merely understanding the byzantine process that eventually led to the imperialist nations of Europe—and foremost among them France and the U.K.—carving up the Levant and creating make-believe nations that suited no one’s interest but their own, but a serious grounding in ancient history as well and, at that, in the various events of late antiquity of which the ethnic reality of today’s Middle East is reflection and development. To understand the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming—on the weather, on the sea level, on the quality of air and water, and on the potential for world-wide cataclysm within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren—to understand anything at all about the environment requires not only a background in geology, climatology, and physics, but—even more importantly—an overall understanding of how the various branches of scientific inquiry come together to create a cogent picture of what the next century might bring to our beleaguered planet.

No one—with no exceptions at all—is a master of all those domains, let alone of all those I’ve just mentioned and all the others I haven’t. Politicians, as noted, are neither scientists nor scholars. Perhaps that’s how things have to be. (That the German chancellor actually does have a doctorate in chemistry merely makes her the exception that proves the rule. But even Mrs. Merkel doesn’t have training in any of the other disciplines mentioned above.) Nothing feels easier than “just” saying that and moving on to moan about something else. But Elul teaches us differently. Knowing what you don’t know is real knowledge. Wisdom always rests on a foundation of profound humility. Promoting yourself as possessed of a meaningful plan for the future at the same time you seem unable honestly to evaluate your own lack of training in more or less every single one of the disciplines necessary to develop a game plan rooted in reason—that is just bluster and self-promotion. Elul doesn’t teach us to evaluate people who function without any awareness of their own limitations unkindly. But to lead the nation, the would-be leader needs to face the future with self-effacing humility and with a commitment to seek counsel from people who actually are entitled to their opinions. Nothing more! But, if a candidate wants my personal vote in November, also nothing less!

 

Israelis and Emiratis

This week’s surprise announcement that the United Arab Emirates and Israel have decided to establish full diplomatic relations, including the cultural and commercial ties that such relations traditionally bring in their wake, caught me completely off guard—and everybody else in the world too apparently except for the players directly involved. Who saw that coming? And yet, now that I’ve had time to think about it a bit, I see this not only as something that was probably inevitable, at least eventually, but as a move that has the potential to alter the political reality in the Middle East in a way that could possibly actually lead to a peaceful resolution of one of the most traditionally intractable face-offs on the planet, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

It’s hard even to know where to start in assessing the potential impact of the agreement, but probably most important of all is that it makes it crystal clear that the Sunni Arab world is not going to refuse to make common cause with the one country in the region, Israel, that can and does stand up to Iran in its relentless effort to extend its malign, imperialist influence into Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen merely because the Palestinians don’t wish them to. The Gulf States feel vulnerable because that’s precisely what they are—and the UAE decision to recognize Israel is simply their way to make themselves feel less vulnerable and more in control of their own destiny. Nor is it at all likely that this is the sole deal of its kind in the offing: most of the experts I’ve read this last week seem to agree that it is now only a matter of time before Oman, Bahrein, Kuwait, and even Saudi Arabia follow suit and establish formal relationship with Israel. (Morocco and Sudan won’t be far behind.) It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic shift than the one constituted by this week’s agreement. It really is a whole new world out there.

The message the UAE-Israel deal sends out directly to the Palestinians is key. For decades, the Palestinian leadership has presumed the right to turn down whatever is offered to them—and there have been so many offers over the years that it’s hard even for experts to keep them all straight—not because of any specific detail included or not included, but merely because entering into a peace arrangement with Israel would obviously require the Palestinians to agree to live in peace with their neighbors, something they have never been able to bring themselves to do.

I have returned to this theme many times in this space. Well over 100 nations have already recognized the non-existent nation of Palestine, so it’s not like the Palestinians have to worry if their state will be internationally recognized. Indeed, the Palestinians could easily proclaim their independence tomorrow, like the Israelis did in 1948, and then get on with the business of nation-building. Yes, they’d have to work through various issues with the Israelis, including some thorny ones regarding a future Jewish presence in the new Palestinian state, but once all that was successfully done the Palestinians would still have to bring themselves to live in peace with the Israelis next door. And that is what they appear unwilling or unable to bring themselves to do.

The UAE-Israel speaks directly to that set of issues.

First, it makes it clear that the Palestinians do not have a veto over other nations’ decisions to act in their own best interests. They had an inkling of that sentiment in 1979 when Sadat came to Jerusalem and Egypt established diplomatic relations with Israel, and then again in 1994 when Jordan followed suit. But 1994 was quite some time ago and things have changed considerably in the Near East since then. The Palestinians are eager to describe the UAE decision as a stab in their collective back. But a more realistic appraisal would be that the decision simply constitutes an instance of a nation declining to pass up a chance to prosper through a judicious alliance merely because of a different people’s intransigency.

Second, it makes it clear that the threat posed by the Iranians to the neighboring states of the Middle East is serious and real…and not only in Western eyes but in the eyes of the players on the ground in the region. In other words, this week’s agreement signals that the nations who see themselves as future victims of Iranian expansionism are not going to sacrifice their nations on the altar of somebody else’s national aspirations…and particularly not when those aspirations could be brought to fruition easily and effectively in a matter of days or weeks if there were any real desire to live in peace and to prosper not as a nation of perennial victims, but as a free, independent, autonomous player in the forum of nations.

Third, the Palestinians have always acted as though time were on their side, as though all they had to do was wait long enough and Israel would just go away and their problems would be solved. The UAE deal signals that the opposite is actually the case, that time is specifically not on their side, and that the time has clearly come to act if they want to resolve their conflict with Israel effectively and fairly. The Palestinian story is a tragic one that began with their leaders’ failure to seize the moment in 1948 and establish the “other” state that the Partition Plan for British Palestine was supposed to create. That was already seventy-two years ago, however, and yet they remain mired in tactical decisions that failed them in the 1940s and are still failing them. Clearly, at least some of the Arab world is tired of waiting for the Palestinians to act in their own best interests.

And, finally, the UAE-Israel agreement makes it clear that the oft-insisted-upon fantasy that Israeli cannot live in peace with any Arab nation until it caves into the demands of the Palestinians, no matter how radical or unimaginable, is simply not true. It probably wasn’t ever really true. But now it’s clearer than ever that the moment for the Palestinians to move forward as an independent state is upon them…if they have the courage to seize the day and make the requisite compromises any deal will inevitably entail.

What the Palestinians have to learn, the Europeans also need to take to heart. The endless EU-based rhetoric based on the assumption that the key to Israeli-Arab relations is resolving the Palestinian conflict needs to be set aside and replaced with words reflective of a new reality. If the member states of the EU want to contribute to peace in the Middle East, in fact, they need to press the Palestinians to realize that their problems are being dwarfed in the region by the hegemonic aggression of the world’s two largest non-Arab Muslim states, Iran and Turkey. And that the smaller states in the region see that aggression not only as irritating or destabilizing, but as an existential threat. Since peoples who are facing existential threats generally do what it take to address those threats regardless of what bystanders think appropriate or reasonable, the time has clearly come to press the Palestinians to negotiate a just peace and then to move ahead from there into the future.

Suddenly, all sorts of dreams I’ve had for years are becoming slightly more possible. Could Lebanon ever live in peace with Israel? Not with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah pulling the strings, but what if Lebanon suddenly found the wherewithal to become free of foreign influence? What then? Would a seriously isolated Iran be willing to renegotiate the so-called Iran Deal of 2015 and agree actually to turn away from the possibility of becoming a nuclear power? Could the people of Syria ever seize the real reigns of power in their country, get rid of the Iranians camped out on their territory, and establish the kind of close ties with Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel that should have long ago made that specific part of the Near East into the economic powerhouse it could and should be? The irony, of course, is that these developments—pie-in-the-sky though they may sound now—these developments would only bring prosperity and autonomy to the Palestinians too, who would then be part of a thriving economic region.

In the meantime, exciting things are happening. The Israeli and UAE foreign ministers have had their first phone call and are apparently going to meet in person soon. Embassies are going to be opened, ambassadors appointed. Omer Adam, the Israeli singer, was invited personally by the royal family of the UAE to perform in Abu Dhabi. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin formally invited the Emirati crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to visit Israel. It is expected that it is only a matter of time, possibly only weeks, before direct flights begin between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi.

Americans should be proud of the role our government played in this enormous break-through. But the lion’s share of the credit goes to the Emiratis themselves who found the courage to act in their own best interests. That their move could conceivably lead the Palestinians to abandon their traditional intransigency and negotiate a just and real peace deal with Israel—that really would be the icing on the cake. Whether that will happen, none can say. But it was a pretty good week for the Middle East, and particularly for Israel and for the UAE, and for that we should all be grateful.

John Lewis

 So much has happened since I stopped writing in July that it’s going to take a few weeks to work through the backlog of things regarding which I’d like to express myself. Still, I have to start somewhere. And where I’d like to start this fourteenth year of weekly e-letters and blog posts is with the death of John Lewis, someone for whom I’ve always had the greatest respect. And I’d like particularly to take note of the most remarkable, piece of writing he left behind when he left the world behind for the World of Truth—a letter he wished to be read in the wake of his death.

Much has been written since his passing of his life, and particularly his status as one of the thirteen original “Freedom Riders” in the early 1960s, so I won’t write in that direction here. Nor do I specifically wish to review his lifetime of work for the civil rights of black, and all, Americans—in the course of the years leading up to his election to Congress in 1986 and of his almost thirty-five years as a member of the Georgia congressional delegation. (For readers interested in his early years, I can still recommend his autobiography, Walking with the Wind, which I read when it came out in 1998 and found very interesting and moving. In later years, he wrote three graphic novels collectively entitled March, which books resume his earlier story and bring it up to 2016, and which I am hoping to read this year.)  Instead, I’d like to focus on the remarkable 750 words he left behind as a letter from the grave.

The notion of speaking to the people who survive you on this earth and offering them some final wisdom, some final instructions, or some final words of comfort is not a new idea. The Bible itself presents three specific instances of people transcending their own lifetimes to address a future from which they themselves will be absent. Those three instances are quite different, but each is telling in their own right.

A very moving speech preserved at 2 Samuel 23, for example, contains such a deathbed letter from King David to his own descendants and is basically a sermon about how the future kings of Israel will need to devote themselves to the pursuit of justice and fidelity to God if they are to succeed at governing the nation. (It also bears saying that an entirely different set of deathbed instructions from David appears just a few chapters later, at 1 Kings 2, one in which he basically provides his son and successor Solomon with a hit list of people David himself didn’t get around to making pay for their various acts of perfidy and whom he specifically did not wish to imagine dying peacefully of old age. I suppose you could argue that one is his deathbed letter for the nation and the other, some final specifics for his successor. But I prefer to imagine these two texts as representative of the tension we all feel when we contemplate our legacy, wanting to rise above the details—and the pettiness those details tend to bring in their wake—but also being eager not to leave unaddressed issues we have somehow failed effectively to deal with in the course of our years on earth.)

The second example is Jacob’s deathbed speech, the one in which he promises to reveal what will happen in the end of days, then proceeds one by one to discuss his sons’ best and worst character traits. The clear message—that the future of anyone at all will be a function far more meaningfully of who that person is than of what other people have done to or for that individual—is a profound lesson and one we would still do well to take to heart, even today.

And the third is Moses’s own speech to the nation from the edge of his life, one in which he addresses the tribes of Israel (or at least most of them) serially and makes more or less the same point each time, that the future will never be a function of their will to succeed, nor will it rest with their military power or with their wealth, but will instead be a function of the degree to which they submit to the rule of Heaven and live lives of fidelity to God.

Each is about the future. Each denies the fantasy that we are somehow pawns in a game none of us understands and cannot therefore really affect the future. And each, offering an alternative point of view, can be summarized in one sentence: the future will be a function of our success in the pursuit of justice (David), the future will be a function of our success in living lives of virtue and decency (Jacob), and the future will be a function our success in remaining faithful to God.  And it was those texts in the back of my mind that I sat own to read the letter that John Lewis wrote to the American people from the other side of his personal abyss, from Sheol.

It’s a short letter, complete in 747 words. Framed as his personal call for a national recommitment to the basic tenets of the civil rights in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it is also a kind of interesting philosophical statement about the nature of nations and the relationship of citizens to the larger polities to which they belong. We are citizens of a participatory democracy, he notes, one in which we are all called upon to vote for the people who will represent us in Congress and in the White House. But the real role, Lewis then goes on to say, is not merely to vote—although voting should surely be seen as an almost sacred obligation and not “just” a right or an option—but to find a way to stake out your place on the national agenda of ideas so that you personally become part of the specific agenda that you wish to see addressed by the nation and by its elected leaders. Democracy, he writes, is an act, not a state…”and every generation must do its part of help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world at peace with itself.”

And then he goes to draw a remarkable picture. He talks vertically and horizontally at once, imagining the citizenry as an aggregate of individuals linked intellectually and even morally to the past through the process of internalizing the lessons of history. (The idea is to make the link between generations past and present sufficiently real and meaningful to permit our ancestors speak through us to our descendants—who will obviously also be their own descendants—and thus to grant them standing in the world by allowing ourselves to see the world through their eyes.) But he also talks about reaching out horizontally and feeling a kinship with the other nations of the world, feeling tied to them through a sense of common humanity and shared destiny, and through the sense that, in the end, what binds the peoples of the world together will always be more profound than what separates us. From that sense of being part of the larger world and being part of the ongoing history of a people and a place will come the freedom to speak out, to act boldly, to play a personal role in the redemption of the nation’s soul.

From there, he moves on to call to address those reading his words directly. “I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart,” he wrote, “and stand up for what you truly believe.” In other words, he says that the problem facing the nation is not people being unfaithful to the political programs of others, but being unresponsive to their own finer angels, to the promptings of their own moral hearts, to the agenda of ideas that constitutes their personal contribution to the nation’s internal debate regarding its future. And he reminds his readers that although his was always the way of peace, love, and nonviolence, a commitment to nonviolence doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding what he calls “good trouble, necessary trouble” at all costs: sometimes people who insist on speaking out end up irritating people who don’t wish to hear what they have to say and there are consequences, including unpleasant ones, to be borne.

I was very moved by that idea. Our nation is in a state, it seems, of ongoing, endless turmoil. We move from one crisis to another, barely having the time to catch our collective breath between one event and the next. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed—and particularly as the presidential campaign hits up and the rhetoric becomes even more inflammatory. So to receive this letter from a true civil rights icon—and, at that, one that came from the grave—reminding us to take a deep breath, calling upon us to seek strength in history and comfort in the knowledge that in addition to being citizens of our own country we are also part of the family of humankind, encouraging us to admire people who speak out forcefully and clearly regarding the things they believe, and urging us to feel challenged by such people to join their ranks and to speak out for the things we believe no less forcefully and clearly—that was a remarkable experience. Generally speaking, the dead don’t come to their own shivas to comfort the bereaved they personally have left behind. But this thing, John Lewis too managed to accomplish.

I felt energized and comforted by his word and I encourage you to read them too. Click here and you’ll see what I mean. When people ask what makes America different, part of the answer lies in its cultivation of leaders like John Lewis, citizens who freely put their money where their mouth is, who don’t mind paying with a bit of “good trouble” for the right to speak out, and who manage to remain faithful to a personal agenda—in this case, one related to the search for justice for all—in the course of an entire lifetime. Yehi zikhro varukh—may his memory be a blessing for us all.