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!