Betrayed Again

Like most readers, I suspect, I was upset—but not that shocked—by the decision of the Naftali Bennett government to go back on the P.M.’s unambiguous pre-election promise to implement the 2016 agreement to create a space for non-Orthodox (i.e., non-gender-segregated) prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That agreement, which took years to hammer out, was suspended first by the Netanyahu government in 2017. But many of us, apparently naively, expected P.M. Bennett to be a man of his word and to unfreeze—and actually implement—the agreement when he came to power. And, indeed, after the initial announcement was made, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid did issue a statement in which he vaguely promised—without using anything remotely like the language of real commitment or intention—to implement the agreement sometime within the next four years. We’ll see. I certainly wouldn’t bet on it. In fact, I’ll be amazed if the current government follows through on its own commitment.

The responses were entirely as any savvy observer would have expected. Yes, it was almost amusing to watch members of the government scrambling for cover by blaming their own lack of moral backbone and commitment to their own commitment on anyone other than themselves. (For a survey of those efforts, I recommend David Horovitz’s Times of Israel article on the topic, which you can access by clicking here.) From the leadership of the Conservative/Masorti and Reform movements in Israel came the expected statements of outrage, some more angry and others more wearily depressed. From the leaders of those same movements outside of Israel, some statements issued were more disappointed and others more self-righteous (i.e., in the you-expect-our-unwavering-support-yet-you-feel-free-to-stab-us-in-the-back mode). But the common theme that surfaced in them all were intense irritation at being confronted with yet another broken government promise and, yes, a sense of true betrayal.

I personally feel trapped by decisions like this one: eager to be as supportive of Israel as ever and yet, at the same time, unable to explain to myself how the leaders of Israel’s government can betray their commitments so callously. And this from a government that spends a fortune to maintain an actual Diaspora Affairs Ministry headed by an actual cabinet official, M.K. Omer Yankelevich. At the very least, she should have resigned in protest. But I could not find a single statement from her office responding directly to the Bennett government’s decision to abandon the Kotel agreement.

To explain how the Bennett government can behave so callously towards the very people on whose unwavering support it also wishes to count, I would like to draw my readers’ attention to a historical personality only rarely considered a player in modern Israeli politics: Napoleon Bonaparte, whose two-hundredth yahrtzeit fell just this last May.

There’s a lot to say about Napoleon’s 1797 series of battles in today’s Israel. To understand what the man was doing in the Middle East in the first place, however, it is necessary to step back far enough to take in the larger picture of world politics at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1796, Napolean became the leader of France after undertaking successful campaigns against the Austrians and their Italian allies. But the real objective of French expansionism was neither Austria nor Italy, but England. Nor was the French government unclear about its ultimate objective, talking openly about the idea of a march on London. But invading the British Isles was something that was beyond the capacity of the French forces of the day and they knew it. And so Napolean, then not even thirty years old, was dispatched to fight the British elsewhere than on home soil by making the Mediterranean into a “French lake” that would not tolerate incursions by British ships, thus ruining Britain’s capacity to trade freely in southern Europe and northern Africa. And so ensued a three-year campaign to wrest control of Egypt, and today’s Israel, Lebanon and Syria from the Ottoman Empire.

There were pitched battles in Egypt itself, but also at Jaffa, Akko, Gaza, El Arish, Haifa, and in the Galilee. The whole campaign was a disaster for the French—1,200 killed in action, 1,800 wounded, and another six hundred dead from disease (click here for some fascinating details about that last number). Napolean returned to Egypt and was victorious in some sea-based battles there, but he was ultimately unable to dislodge the Ottomans or the British from the Eastern Mediterranean and finally returned to France in defeat.

There are bits and pieces of Napolean’s legacy scattered around Israel, particularly in Akko. But the key to understanding the larger story—which is far more complicated than the scaled-down version offered above (click here for more details)—is that none of this had anything to do with the Jews of France…or of Israel. This was where Napoleon tried—unsuccessfully—to annihilate the forces arrayed against him. But to try to explain the whole episode as something of tactical or even spiritual importance for the Jews of the Land of Israel, or for the history of the Land itself, is to miss the point entirely: it happened there, but it wasn’t about the place in which it happened. This was about France and England mostly, and a little bit about France and the Ottoman Empire. It just happened in Israel, that’s all.

And the same could be said of the campaign of the British and Australian troops in today’s Israel during the First World War. The Battle of Beersheva is mostly forgotten today—but anyone who visits the Australian War Cemetery in Beersheva and sees the graves of more than 1100 young men, all of whom died on the same day in October 1917, will never forget the experience. Joan and I were there a few years ago and it was beyond chilling and, in its own way, just as suggestive to me of the horrors of war as were my visits to Gettysburg or Antietam. But the Battle of Beersheva, fought on Halloween in 1917, was just one of many battles fought by the British against the Ottomans and their German allies during the course of the First World War. Mostly forgotten or ignored today—when was the last time you read anything about the Battle of Raffa (January 1917) or the First or Second Battles of Gaza (March and April 1917, respectively) or the Battle of Mughar Ridge (November 1917) or even, most amazing of all, the Battle of Jerusalem, fought in the final two months of that same year, 1917?—these were the battles that changed the face of the Middle East permanently and irrevocably. (The best book on the topic I can recommend is David R. Woodward’s Hell in the Holy Land, World War I in the Middle East, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2006.) But the point is that this had nothing to do with the Jews of Israel or of anywhere, and even less to do with the Holy Land itself: this was just where the Brits encountered the Turks and fought to the finish, not unlike the way that same place served as the setting for Napoleon’s war against the Ottoman Empire.

So that’s how I’m feeling about this week’s betrayal by the Bennett government of the Kotel Agreement: it’s a huge slap in the face of all non-Orthodox Jews and yet it’s not really about us at all and has to do far more meaningfully with the nature of the coalition that brought Bennett to power, a coalition that cannot survive if it alienates the dark forces of ḥareidi fanaticism too seriously…but which sees only benefit to appearing to side with them on an issue that matters to them far more than it does to most secular Israelis. Like Israel itself in Napoleon’s day, we Masorti Jews are just the backdrop to the real drama playing itself out—not the actors with speaking parts and certainly not the playwright. Nonetheless, explaining the repudiation of the Kotel agreement as a function of the Prime Minister’s need to grovel before the ḥareidim doesn’t make it sting less or hurt less. Nor does understanding that the government’s actions were far more cynical than hostile make their betrayal of their own promise any more palatable.

My deep attachment to the State of Israel is not based on any specific personality, political or otherwise. It is a function of my faith in God and my Jewishness on its most basic level. I find it perfectly possible to be disgusted with the government and, at the same time, to feel as allied as ever with the nation it purports to govern and with its people. That, of course, is what the Bennett government is counting on. But how else can I feel? 

They Paved Paradise

 All readers my age and older (and many younger too, I’m sure) know Joni Mitchell’s terrific song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” and its most famous quatrain: “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot / with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin’ hot spot / Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” (For Joni’s own comments on her 1970 song, click here.) And she’s surely right that the sites of most parking lots would be more beautiful if they were verdant squares of natural growth filled with wildflowers, leafy trees, and babbling brooks. But sometimes the asphalt of parking lots is actually more like the top of a treasure box that has the most interesting things hiding just beneath its spongy surface. It was, for example, just a decade ago that the remains of King Richard III were discovered beneath the Leicester City Council parking lot in Leicester, England, which at the time of his 1485 death in the Battle of Bosworth Field was the site of a church’s burial ground. (The king was later reburied in the Leicester Cathedral.) For more about this whole fascinating episode, I recommend Morris Mathew and Richard Buckley’s Richard III: The King Under the Car Park. Riveting!

But I have my mind on a different parking lot today, one connected to Jewish rather than English history. And also to the Fast of the Tenth of Tevet, a minor fast day ignored by most that fell just this last Tuesday. And the story of that parking lot, the Givati Parking Lot near the City of David excavations just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, is also fascinating, its surface too more like the top of a treasure chest than its status as a municipal parking lot would suggest.

 What we know about the siege of Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE comes mostly, but not entirely, from the Bible. (The siege is one of the few events in biblical history with corroborative sources from the other side, in this case the Babylonians.) And we know a lot, actually. We know that Babylonia—more specifically, the Neo-Babylonian Empire over which Nebuchadnezzar II (c. 642 BCE–562 BCE) ruled—became the most powerful nation in the world after soundly defeating the Egyptians at the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE. But we also know that that was only the beginning—and that in the years that followed Carchemish, the Babylonians were able decisively to extend their empire either by overrunning smaller nations and making them provinces of the Babylonian empire or, as in the case of Judah, by making less powerful nations into vassal states headed by servile kings set in place by their Babylonian masters. And, indeed, the last king of Judah, a man named Mataniah who took the name Tzidkiyahu when he was put on the throne by the Babylonians, was a mere twenty-one years when his nephew Yehoyachin (who was even younger—just eighteen—when he came to the throne and reigned for all of three months) was deposed and exiled to the east.

For a while, things were calm. But then Zedekiah was somehow convinced to rebel against his Babylonian masters. This is a terrible idea, not merely a quixotic one. He was warned by none other than the prophet Jeremiah that this course of action was sheer folly, that there simply was no way to win. And yet he persevered, entering into an alliance with Pharaoh Hophra of Egypt and choosing to ignore the prophet’s warnings and hope instead for some sort of military miracle. And it was this foolhardy act of national suicide dressed up as patriotic bravado that led to the Babylonians’ decision no longer to tolerate Judah as a vassal state but instead to make it a mere province of their empire. The siege began in the winter of 589 BCE and lasted almost thirty months. And the end, the city was overrun, its king and surviving citizens (or at least thousands of them) taken off into exile in Babylon, and the Temple razed. And the day that siege began was precisely the Tenth of Tevet, the day we to this day commemorate as a fast in memory of the disaster that befell Judah when its kind decided that putting his trust in the king of Egypt would be a better plan than heading the word of God as conveyed to him over and over by God’s prophet in that place.

So that’s the background. And now we get to the part about the Givati Parking Lot. Or rather to the part about the parking lot as described in a remarkable scientific paper published by a team of six Israeli archeologists headed by Yoav Vaknin that came out in the online scientific journal PLOS One. It turns out that beneath the parking lot are the remains—not of a medieval English king—but of a large, two-story building that dates back to the siege of Jerusalem and which was apparently destroyed as part of the Babylonian campaign to bring Judah to its knees. Vaknin and his team found fifty-four fragments of stone flooring and were able to analyze them with respect to the coded information about the magnetic field of the earth in their day that they somehow preserved.

This is the part you need to be more of a scientist than myself (which is really not saying much) to understand. But the basic principle seems to be that when these buildings were burnt to the ground, the fantastic heat that consumed them—more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit—somehow locked into them data concerning the magnetic field of the world in their day—some 2600 years in the past. Maybe I should let Vaknin himself explain: “The floor of the structure,” he is quoted as saying in a Times of Israel article about his discovery, “is filled with magnetized minerals that absorbed the [magnetic] field that was on Earth at the time. Since the magnetic field changes all the time we’re trying to reconstruct it. Here, we have a little peephole, accurate to the day, of the ancient magnetic field from 2,600 years ago.”

This is important for several different reasons. First, it will allow archeologists to date artifacts from antiquity by measuring their magnetic field—a method that is far more accurate than carbon dating, but which until now lacked a secure baseline against which to measure new finds. But far more important are the implications here for future study with respect to climate change because the earth’s magnetic field serves as a kind of a shield that protects us from radiation and charged particles from the sun. The problem is that this magnetic field is in a state of constant flux, endlessly strengthening and weakening. Modern studies began only in the 1830s, when the initial research into the topic was undertaken by Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German mathematician and physicist, and lots remains to be understood. But the basic principle is clear and the NASA website says there are known to have been 170 of these reversals over the last seventy-six million years. (Click here for more details.) As a result, understanding the specific measure of the magnetic shield before detailed calculations began in 1830 has always been a wished-for but unattainable goal. And now these six Israeli archeologists have made a great stride forward towards saying what the shield was like in the sixth century BCE…which detail will provide scientists with the framework for trying to chart the vagaries of the earth’s magnetic shield into the future.

The upshot is that the next time someone speaks dismissively about the Tenth of Tevet as a fast commemorating something obscure that once happened two dozen and a half centuries ago, you can tell them that not only was the destruction of Jerusalem a seminal event in Jewish history the reverberations of which continue to influence the Jewish worldview heavily and meaningfully, but that the surviving remnants of that siege are providing scientists with the kind of data that could conceivably lead to understanding how the magnetic field that protects all life on earth functions.

The reasons I fast every year on the Tenth of Tevet are not specifically related to the earth’s magnetic field. But the thought that data from the siege that fast day commemorates could be crucial to the survival of human life on earth—that certainly makes me feel more, not less, committed to sticking with it, and with the other fasts that go with it: the Seventeenth of Tammuz (the day the walls of the city were finally breached), the Ninth of Av (the day the Temple was razed), and the Fast of Gedaliah on the third of Tishrei (the day the last flickering ember of Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel when Gedaliah ben Ahikam, the governor of destroyed Judah set in place by the Babylonians, was assassinated by vigilantes convinced that his death would serve the future of the Jewish people more ably than his efforts to hold onto something where there would otherwise have been nothing at all).

Pearl Harbor, Eighty Years On

For some reason, this last Tuesday—the eightieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Naval Station Pearl Harbor—was skipped quickly by on most of the media platforms I frequent. But it’s hard to say why, since this was a truly pivotal day in the history both of our country and of the world. More than 2400 Americans died in Hawaii that day. Another 1,178 were wounded. Four U.S. Navy battleships were sunk. Four others were damaged, as were seven other ships. 188 airplanes were destroyed and another 159 damaged. It was, by any rational yardstick, one of the worst days in American history, a day that, as FDR famously said of it, “will live in infamy.” Our nation responded by declaring war on Japan the very next day. (Canada, we should also remember with gratitude, declared war on Japan even before we did, acting quickly on the actual day of the attack.) But others followed quickly: by nightfall on December 8, no fewer than eleven nations also declared war on Japan, including Australia, New Zealand, and China. And so was the battle joined: later that same day the Japanese attacked Shanghai and invaded the Philippines.

For Jews, the day has its own set of memories to offer the remembering public: December 8, 1941, was also the day that the concentration camp at Chełmno opened, a nightmare site at which more than 153,000 Jewish souls, starting with deportees from the Lodz ghetto, were eventually murdered. And it was also the day on which Hitler issued his infamous Nacht-und-Nebel (“Night-and-Fog”) decree, removing all arrested resistance fighters and political opponents of Nazism from the “normal” judicial process, where they might have had some sort of minimal opportunity to defend themselves, and handing the apprehended over to the Gestapo instead, where their fate was a foregone conclusion.

I was raised to think of Pearl Harbor as a day of singular terribleness, as a day of national disaster pretty much without parallel. And, indeed, my father, who was twenty-five years old in 1941, carried the memory of that day to the grave. He never owned a Japanese car, never wore a Seiko wristwatch, never owned a Sony television or radio. Even he thought he was behaving just a bit peculiarly still to be holding onto that grudge all those many years later! But I can also remember clearly him saying to me that whenever he did occasionally think of buying something made in Japan, there immediately barged into his mind images of those poor American sailors—more than a thousand of them—buried forever beneath the wreckage of the U.S.S. Arizona on the floor of the ocean, whereupon he just found something manufactured in the United States (or anywhere but Japan or Germany) to purchase instead. And while I think this policy of my dad’s will probably sound to most today somewhere between quaint and obstinate, I understand where he was coming from and I respected him—and still do respect him—for his allegiance to the memory of our nation’s war dead. Nor, as far as I know, did he ever eat in a Japanese restaurant.

But there is another side to Pearl Harbor, one most of us—and myself most definitely included—prefer to look past or, if possible, to ignore entirely.

By December of 1941, Germany had already occupied most of Europe—including Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Holland, Yugoslavia, and Greece—and either set up puppet regimes in those places to serve their German masters or else seized the reins of governance themselves. The battle for Great Britain was well underway. The United States, strongly allied emotionally with Britain and with most of the nations of occupied Europe, was still grappling with the strong isolationist tendencies at home that had kept American out of the war until the Japanese left even those the most committed to American neutrality with basically no choice but to support the idea of entering the fray. Forgotten by most today are the series of “Neutrality Acts” passed repeatedly by Congress—in 1935, 1936, 1937, and, after the invasion of Poland, 1939—with the express intention of making it illegal for America to become “entangled” in foreign conflicts. Yes, it’s true that these acts were largely repealed after Pearl Harbor, but that is precisely my point: the United States entered the war only after thousands of Americans were killed in the surprise attack in Hawaii and there really was no possibility to respond other than vigorously militarily. Nor, to cite another unpalatable fact, did declaring war on Japan lead directly to our nation declaring war on Germany: it was only after Germany first declared war on us on December 11, 1941, that Congress responded in kind and declared war on Germany as well.

If the Japanese hadn’t drawn the United States into the war and made neutrality impossible, would the U.S. eventually have gone to war anyway? Or would isolationism—and the fear of “entanglement” in foreign wars—have retained its power over the American people and kept us out possibly even after Britain collapsed and became yet another state occupied by Germany? No one can say, of course. But, frankly speaking, if neither the occupation of France nor of Holland moved us to intervene, why would the occupation of Britain necessarily have done so? Are our ties to Britain that much stronger than our ties to France? Or to Poland? Do the Jews who survived the Shoah owe their lives to whoever made the decision to bomb Pearl Harbor and made it impossible for American to stay out of the fighting? You could make just that argument…and cogently too. Needless to say (since we’re dispensing unpalatable facts anyway), there is no evidence at all—and, if anything, evidence to the contrary—that FDR would ever have proposed military intervention to save the Jews of Europe.

It’s also worth remembering that our nation entered the First World War on April 6, 1917, almost three years after the fighting broke out…and that it was only the specter of a German-supported Mexican invasion of American territory with the express aim of restoring Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico to Mexican sovereignty and the reality of an ongoing German submarine offensive aimed at sinking ships headed for East Coast ports—that finally gave President Wilson the political juice necessary to bring America into the conflict. So it would be fair to say we only entered the Great War once we began to fear for ourselves, not to support our allies.

The endless struggle between isolationism and engagement-ism continues to play itself out in the hearts of Americans. If China finally invades Taiwan, claiming that it is merely restoring a renegade island to its traditional place as part of China, will American go to war to preserve the independence of a long-standing ally? If Russia invades Ukraine, which possibility was a front-page story in the New York Times just this last week, will the U.S. go to war (with or without the support of other nations) on behalf of Ukraine? Israel is a tried-and-true ally of the United States. But if war breaks out again in the Middle East and a nuclear Iran threatens to intervene on the side of radical Islamicists seeking to destroy the Jewish State, how will our nation respond?

Although mostly Pearl Harbor Day stirs of feelings of deep sadness in me as I contemplate our losses on that awful day, it also reminds me that our great victories across the world in both the Pacific and European theaters of war were triggered by Pearl Harbor and our subsequent entry into the Second World War. I’d like to think we would eventually have recognized Nazism for the evil that it was and gone to war to eradicate it. But that too is just so much conjecturing…and the reality is that, there too, none can say what might have happened. All we can do is hope! And that too is part of the legacy of Pearl Harbor.

 

The Miracle of Chanukah

At the heart of Chanukah is the concept of pirsuma d’nisa, the “publicizing of the miracle” that lies at the heart of the Chanukah story. The lighting of the menorah itself is explained with reference to that concept: we light our Chanukah lamps and then display them in a public place specifically to remind passers-by about the Chanukah miracle and presumably, in so doing, to make them sensitive to God’s role in the world as the Author of history. Nor should the way this works be obscure, for what are miracles really other than instances of direct divine intervention in the unfolding of human history to push the story along in a different direction than the one in which it might otherwise have gone off?

But what precisely was the miracle we exert ourselves so intensely to publicize? That sounds like a ridiculous question even to bother asking out loud—if there is one thing everybody knows about Chanukah it’s the story of the miracle that rests at the center of its best-known ritual. Even children in kindergarten know that story! Or do they?

Weirdly few and many at the same time are the historical sources from antiquity that relate the story of the Chanukah miracle. Few, because we are talking at most about five or six reliable contemporary (or nearly contemporary) texts written by authors who knew the events under consideration firsthand or almost firsthand. But also many, because none of the afore-referenced sources seem to agree—really not even slightly—about what the miracle actually was. And therein, as I hope to show, lies a very interesting tale indeed.

The story we all know has to do with the tiny cruse of oil that had somehow survived the Hellenists’ occupation of the Temple with its tiny seal—the seal of the High Priest of Israel—intact. When the Maccabees liberated the Temple Mount and began the process of restoring the Temple to its pristine state, they wished first of all to kindle the olive-oil lamps that sat at the top of each branch of the great golden candelabrum that stood—along with the golden incense altar and the golden table on which were displayed the weekly showbread—in the anteroom just outside the Holy of Holies. The jug of oil should have contained enough for just one day’s use, but—miraculously—there continued to be oil in the jug day after day no matter how much they poured out of it until, eventually, new oil could be prepared for daily use. It’s a good story, a famous one. But it only appears for the first time in the Talmud, a work finally published about seven centuries after the events under discussion. It is true that the Talmud presents the story as one deriving from the period of the Mishnah, so only two or three centuries after the Maccabean revolt. But it’s still a bit fishy, the whole idea: a remarkable story about a miraculous event that somehow avoided being mentioned by anyone in any surviving literary work for centuries upon centuries after it allegedly occurred.

And then there is Jason of Cyrene. Cyrene is on the Mediterranean coast of eastern Libya and there lived a man named Jason, known to us solely as the author of a five-part work that has not survived and the title of which also is unknown. In point of fact, we know nothing at all about Jason other than his name and his place. But the same cannot be said for his lost work because someone—whose name is also unknown—took on the job of creating a summary volume that would reduce the five tomes of the original to one, much shorter work. And that work, the summary volume, did survive and is known, confusingly, as Second Maccabees. (To make the matter even more confusing, Second Maccabees has no relationship at all to the book known as First Maccabees, an entirely different work.) 

And this Jason—who lived decades, not centuries, after the Maccabees seized control of the Temple—he also had a miracle in his story, just not the one we’ve all heard of.

In Jason’s book, the miracle has to do with one Nehemiah—not the Nehemiah who later became a book of the Bible, but rather the man, otherwise unknown to history, charged with restoring the Temple when the Jews returned from exile in Babylon.

He starts by recalling that “the pious priests of that time took some of the fire of the altar and secretly hid it in the hollow of a dry cistern, where they took such precautions that the place was unknown to anyone.” That seemed unlikely to work—how could the fire have possibly burned for the half century the Jews were away? But, hoping for a miracle, this Nehemiah then sent the descendants of those original priests who hid the first to retrieve it. But when they went to that secret place, they found not fire but some sort of “thick liquid” instead. Not sure what to do, but somehow inspired to take a huge chance, Nehemiah then ordered the priests to pour out liquid on the carcass of a sacrificial animal that had been set atop the wood set atop the newly re-inaugurated altar. And, indeed, a great miracle did occur: as soon as the sun shone on the liquid, it burst into flames and consumed the sacrifice that had been set atop the wood. And so the miracle was that this thick liquid—which Jason tells us the locals called naphtha—somehow allowed the sanctity of the fire that had burned permanently atop the altar in the First Temple to be transferred to the Second, thereby creating an unbroken link of sacrificial offering interrupted only temporally, but not really physically. Later on, Jason tells about the restoration of the Temple in the days of the Maccabees, but he mentions the menorah only in passing, saying merely that they “purified the sanctuary, built a new altar and then, “striking fire from flint, they offered sacrifices for the first time after a lapse of two years, burning incense as well and lighting [the] lamps [of the great candelabrum] and setting out the showbread.”

So Jason has the Maccabees restoring the golden Menorah, but his miracle is the one that connects the First Temple with the Second. And that actually does make sense: the appurtenances in the Second Temple were all new, whereas the sacred appurtenances present when the Maccabees restored the Temple were the same ones present a few years earlier when the traditionalists lost control of the Temple. So for Jason the miracle is that the fire that illuminated the Sanctum of the Temple in his day went back—physically and not just theoretically—to the days of David and Solomon. Same concept, same elements (oil, fire, menorah)—just a different story entirely.

And then there is the anonymous author of a different book, the one known to us as First Maccabees. He almost definitely wrote in Hebrew, although his book survives only in Greek. He was a near contemporary of Jason of Cyrene, perhaps a bit older but still a contemporary. And he was closest of all to the events at hand: a Hebrew-speaking Jew living in the Land of Israel relating the story of the Maccabees as he knew it.

But he has no miracle at all in his account. Just to the contrary, for this author the victory of the Maccabees was itself a miracle…and, at that, one that did not need to be enhanced with other, lesser wonders. He writes that they weren’t sure what to do with the altar now that it had been defiled with impure worship (he almost certainly means now that pigs had been sacrificed upon it), but that they eventually decided to tear it down and replace it with a new one. And so “they rebuilt the sanctuary and the interior of the Temple, then consecrated its courtyards. Then they made new vessels, bringing [a new] Menorah, a new incense alter, and a new table [for the showbread] into the sanctum. They then burnt incense on the altar and lighted the lamps of the Menorah so that these  could light up the Temple.” And the first day they initiated the renewed service of sacrificial worship was, indeed, the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the day we celebrate as the first day of Chanukah.

So those are our choices. The story we all know is also the most distant from the events and in every way the least likely. (Of course, aren’t all miracles highly unlikely? Otherwise, in what sense would they be miracles?)  Jason’s story is charming in its own way, but is set a few centuries too early to be the point of Chanukah observance. And First Maccabees omits the oil/Menorah theme entirely and sees instead in the great victory of the Maccabees a true miracle. As, indeed, it truly was.

And then we the evidence of our prayerbook. Who wrote the Al Ha-nissim paragraph added to the Amidah during Chanukah, no one knows. But that liturgist sided with the author of First Maccabees, ignoring the Talmud’s story and speaking instead of the Maccabees merely “lighting lamps in the Temple courtyards” (which is specifically not where the great Menorah stood—which was inside the sanctum and not outdoors in one of the courtyards) and instead finding the miraculous in the woof and warp of Jewish history itself, in the story of how God “stood by the Jews in their time of distress, waged their battles, defended their rights, and avenged the wrong done to them.” That is the miracle we mention in our prayers daily. And it’s also the one on which to focus: the role of God in history—and specifically in Jewish history—is the miracle…and a far more impressive one than keeping the oil pouring out of a magic pot that just couldn’t run dry.

The Jewish Home Beautiful

Among the many ways I serve Shelter Rock is as the official sorter of dropped-off boxes of books their owners don’t want to hold onto but can’t quite bring themselves to throw out. The books in such boxes divide down easy into two categories: non-sacred books that we send to a thrift shop, and prayerbooks that we box up and store to hand off to the genizah guy who comes periodically to Shelter Rock to retrieve our stash of unwanted or damaged holy books and respectfully to bury them in the earth. There are the occasional exceptions to the rule. Sometimes, for example, I find book that would actually be a reasonable addition to our library. But it is extremely unusual for me to find a book in such a box that I don’t know of or that I haven’t ever seen before. (It does happen…but only very rarely.) If any reader would like one of those Israeli prayerbooks with faux silver covers tastefully adorned with greenish-blue Eilat stones, just let me know: I have a stack in my office just waiting for anyone who likes his or her prayerbook to have some serious heft and/or to be bound in shiny metal.

And now I get to the meat of my story: a few months ago, someone left off one of those boxes…and it actually had a book in it with which I wasn’t at all familiar. At first, I didn’t understand what a treasure it actually was. In fact, it was, as books go, quite ordinary-looking. Bound in blue cloth, its title, The Jewish Home Beautiful (emblazoned in golden letters across the top of the front cover), suggested, or at least suggesting to me, that it was a cookbook or some sort of Emily-Post-ish guide to Jewish dinner parties. I set the book aside, dealt with the rest of the box’s contents, then forgot about it. But then I found it under a pile of papers just a few weeks ago and this time I did open it and read it…and decided on the spot that it would be the subject of my Thanksgiving-weekend letter to you all this year.

The book, written by Betty D. Greenberg and Althea O. Silverman, was published by the Women’s League of the United Synagogue of America (as it was then called) in 1941, then reprinted in 1942, 1945, 1947, 1948, and 1950. Its authors were, in their day, well known: Betty Greenberg was the wife of Rabbi Simon Greenberg, one of the vice chancellors of the Jewish Theological Seminary for all the years of my residence there and a major figure in American Jewish life for scores of years. Althea Silverman was the wife of Rabbi Morris Silverman, the very long-time rabbi of The Emanuel Synagogue of West Hartford, Connecticut, and in his day the foremost translator and editor of prayer books in use in Conservative synagogues. The book itself is out of print, and has been for decades. But, this being the 21^st century, that is no real issue: you can see the whole book for yourself just by clicking here. (What a world!)  Also, you can read about both women in detail in JTS Chancellor Shuly Schwartz’s extremely interesting book, The Rabbi’s Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life, published by NYU Press in 2006.

But I want to focus on the book itself today, not its authors. Unexpectedly, The Jewish Home Beautiful comes in two iterations. One, the narrative version written by Betty Greenberg, was clearly intended to be read as an extended essay on the Jewish home. But the other, a dramatized version by Althea Silverman, was actually produced at the Joint Sisterhood Assembly in the Temple of Religion at the New York World’s Fair in September of 1940. But the year of publication is key here too: knowing what was happening to European Jewry as this book was printed and reprinted lends the experience of encountering it a certain eeriness. Yet the introduction to the third edition, published just two months before V-E Day and thus after the liberation of Treblinka and Auschwitz, too makes no reference to the Shoah and only nods in passing to the World War itself by expressing satisfaction that the book by then had been read and enjoyed by “hundreds of men and women” in the Armed Forces of our nation.

It would be easy to write off the Women’s League’s willingness to publish and republish a book about the Jewish home while unimaginable catastrophe was striking the Jews of Europe as a way of staving off a reality too horrible actually to contemplate and thus best dealt with by looking as far away as possible. Or perhaps there is a different way to explain its existence.

The world was still burning in March 1945 as The Jewish Home Beautiful went into its third printing. The war raged on. The fiend was still alive, still at the helm of his sinking ship, still bringing death and misery to countless millions caught in the crossfire…and that is specifically not to mention the war against the Jews that continued to be fought by the foe’s minions until the final capitulation. But our authors were possessed of a different vision, I think, one that seems almost impossible to fathom given how far down the pike we have come from where they were when they wrote their book. For these women, the great bulwark against barbarism and savagery was the intact home and, for them personally, the intact Jewish home. The stronger the home, the more safe the world. The more beautiful the Shabbat table, the more secure the universe. The more satisfying the Purim feast, the more strong the community. And so indeed are the women instructed to sing aloud in the dramatic version: “The Jewish Home Beautiful may be mansion or hovel, / On Boulevard, Avenue, or slum-crowded street. / With woman as priestess to tend to its altars, / Each home is a Temple, each hearth is a shrine. / While men build our houses and men fill our houses, / Women make these houses—homes.”

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since those words were sung aloud in the Temple of Religion in Flushing Meadows. The notion that the greatest thing any of us could ever to combat the forces of darkness in the world is to marry, to become parents…and to create homes that will then serve collectively as the sea wall that holds back the swirling, devastating waters of intolerance, indecency, injustice, and inequality—that is an idea that will strike most today as, at best, quaint. But what if Betty Greenberg and Althea Silverman were right? What if the dike that holds back the darkness best is not an army or an inventory of nuclear warheads but the family itself…and the home that family inhabits? For outsiders looking in, I suppose that the notion that the way to combat evil is to set a gorgeous Shabbat table will seem, to say the very least, naïve. It will seem that way to many Jewish people as well. But for those of us who know the Jewish home from the inside—not the bastardized, mostly unfunny parody-version promulgated by comedians, including particularly Jewish comedians, who themselves have no interest in living in such families or such homes—for those of us who know Jewish home life at its very finest and whose courage to face the world derives directly from the strength that inheres in such homes, that notion will seem almost obvious.

For me personally, Thanksgiving is the American version of the ideas set forward in The Jewish Home Beautiful, a book published when the world couldn’t have been darker that simply recommends that Jewish people respond to the horror by making stronger, richer, and more beautiful their homes, by transforming those homes into their personal bulwarks against whatever the world can serve up. In the end, the walls of Jericho didn’t protect the people of Jericho any more than the walls of Rome protected the Romans. But I believe, as did Betty and Althea in their day, that the walls of the Jewish home can indeed protect us and make us safe. And that is the gift from the past that I offer up as my Thanksgiving gift to you all. I hope you all had satisfying, happy Thanksgivings. And I hope that the strength of the home that we all feel at peak moments like Thanksgiving inspires us to create that kind of experience not annually on other people’s holidays, or not solely on other people’s holidays, but on our own as well…and particularly on Shabbat. 

Thanksgiving 2021

As I’m sure many of my readers also were, I was captivated by the story in the paper last week about Dr. M. J. Eberhart, age 83, the retired eye doctor from Alabama also known as Nimblewill Nomad who hiked both into Dalton, Massachusetts, and into the record books last week by becoming the oldest person known to have hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. It’s not a trifling accomplishment; the trail is about 2,200 miles long, stretching out between Mount Katahdin in Maine and Springer Mountain in Georgia. It’s a long walk. If you read Bill Bryson’s terrific account of his effort to hike the trail, A Walk in the Woods, published by Broadway Books back in 1998, you’ll understand something of Dr. Eberhart’s accomplishment. (The movie version starring Robert Redford as Bryson was good enough, but I found the book far more entertaining and way funnier.) The reason he ended up in Massachusetts rather than Maine or Georgia is because he walked the trail in stages and ended up at one point traveling north in a car to Maine and then walking south from Ketahdin to the precise spot at which he could legitimately say that he had completed the whole thing. That, of course, hardly diminishes his accomplishment. To say the least, I am impressed.

His story is interesting in its own right and his accomplishment, impressive and laudable. But the reason I thought of writing about Dr. Eberhart in my pre-Thanksgiving letter this year is because of an off-hand comment I heard on the radio a few days ago that struck me as worth pondering as we approach our best American holiday. The host was discussing the story of the doctor’s accomplishment and wondering aloud what could possibly have prompted a man his age to undertake that kind of test of his own stamina. The host, who was maybe a third Nimblewill’s age (if not younger), suggested that the reason must have had to do with the need we sometimes feel to demonstrate to the world something we know about ourselves but have no way of proving other than by doing it out loud and in public “He must have known he could do it,” the nice young man opined, “and that’s why he did it—to show to the world something he already knew.”

I don’t know the man. I have no idea why he took this on or what he hoped ultimately to accomplish. But I’d like to think the real story is the precise opposite of what the young radio guy thought: that the man didn’t undertake the hike to show the world something he already knew about himself, but to discover something about himself that he himself didn’t know. In other words, I’d like to think that this was not about a senior citizen showing the world how healthy and remarkably fit he was so everybody could then shower him with praise, but rather about a man finding the courage to test himself, to put his hand to the fire, to learn something about himself that could only be found out conclusively through the doing of the deed under consideration. In other words, what impresses me about Dr. Eberhart’s is the degree to which it is interpretable as an expression of one of the best parts of our American ethos and, as such, something more than worthy to contemplate as Thanksgiving approaches.

As I understand it, this willingness to grow, to test ourselves, to see if we can successfully summon up the inner strength necessary to reach for something that lies just beyond our grasp—this refusal ever to accept that we have already done all we can in life and have no specific reason to try to do even more is the most American of all virtues.

The story of Thanksgiving is usually reduced to the great feast of 1621 at which the fifty-odd surviving Mayflower passengers joined together with about ninety Wampanoag under the leadership of famed King Massasoit to share in a late-autumn meal. (There had been one hundred one board when the Mayflower landed a year earlier, but about half died in the course of their first year in North America.) That feast—described by William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation and by Edward Winslow in his Mourt’s Relation—has its own complicated background and legacy: to read it as a celebration of the degree to which tolerance and mutual respect were the foundation stones upon which the Europeans who eventually came to occupy all of North American built their new country rings especially hollow in the wake of the truth about the horrific deaths of more than a hundred native American children in a federally-operated boarding school in Nebraska between 1884 and 1934 coming to light. (For more details, click here. To set this in context by comparing the fate of these poor children to the more than four thousand Indian children who died in the residential school system in Canada under the joint auspices of the Catholic Church and the Canadian government, click here. To add Australia and the more than 100,000 aborigine children forcibly removed from their families and mostly never heard from again to the story, click here.)

But to abandon Thanksgiving because of the horrific fate of the native people who possibly thought the future would bring peaceful co-existence when they sat down to their meal of venison and wild turkey is at least a little to miss the point. That part of our nation’s past, so long ignored by adults and left untaught to our children in school, needs to be brought to the fore if the kind of national contemplative consideration that could possibly lead to atonement and reconciliation is ever to take place. But the notion of a nation coming into being to see if the lofty republican ideals the Founders embraced could actually serve as the foundation upon which a democratic nation could come to exist—something that had occasionally been attempted, but never actually accomplished  before their time—that notion is what animates Thanksgiving for me.

Dr. Eberhart could not possibly have known if he could complete the Appalachian Trail when he set out. I suppose he thought he might be able to, but he can’t have known for sure. How could he have? But what he did surely know was that the only one way to find out was actually to go into the woods and start walking. And so was it with our nation at its inception: none could have known if the lofty ideals our Founders learned and embraced could actually be brought to bear in the formation of a modern nation-state. I suppose they must surely have hoped that would be the case. But they can’t have known it with any certainty until they set forth, one step forward at a time, towards independence.

When Thoreau withdrew to Walden Pond in 1845, he had the same notion in mind: to see if he could do something he had no idea whether he could accomplish:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms....

I don’t know if high school students still read Walden these days, but they should. The spirit that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth and Thoreau to Walden is the same spirit that brought Dr. Eberhart to the Appalachian Trail. I like to think that I can add my name to that list, at least a little: I didn’t know if I could spend a lifetime preaching and teaching without succumbing to despair or uncertainty about my vocation until I set to it and found out. That notion of not knowing if you can do something and then plunging forward into life precisely to find out—that is the idea that strikes me as the most quintessentially American of virtues. Nimblewill Nomad is just our latest, and very impressive, example! And with that thought in mind, I wish you all a very happy and self-challenging Thanksgiving. 

Pigs

Sometimes two articles that pop up in the press the same week that, despite the fact that they have nothing to do with each other really, practically beg to read in each other’s light. There was an excellent example of this just last week. Was it synchronicity or mere serendipity? Or am I making something out of nothing? Read on to find out!

Like many of my readers, I’m sure, I was amazed—and thrilled—to read a few weeks ago about the successful transplant at NYU Langone in Manhattan of a kidney grown in a genetically-altered pig into a human being. Everything about the experiment was remarkable. The patient was, other than legally, dead—in other words, possessed of no brain function but still being made to breathe in and out by a ventilator. Normally, the time would have come for the family to make that most awful of decisions: whether to accept that the patient is gone and allow the machine to be turned off, or whether to hold back just a bit longer and hope for a miracle. In this case, though, a third option presented itself when the family was asked if they would agree to allow the doctors to see if a kidney grown in a genetically-altered pig could function well, or at all, in a human being. The patient clearly had nothing to lose. The family agreed. And so, while the ventilator kept the patient breathing, the doctors hooked up the kidney and stepped back to see what would happen.

What happened is as strange as it is miraculous. According to Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, it began to function normally “almost immediately.” And so we had, and for the first time ever, a patient with a functioning kidney that originated in a pig that the scientists had altered genetically to make its organs more compatible with the human body and thus less likely to be rejected. The experiment only went on for 50-odd hours, after which time the ventilator was disconnected and the patient died. But for as long as the patient was alive, the kidney functioned well.

This was a huge breakthrough. (Dr. Dorry Segev, a professor of transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins, was quoted in the paper as using that exact expression to describe the success of the operation, adding that this breakthrough was a “big, big deal.” Click here.) I’m hardly a professor of surgery, but even I can see why he would have said that: more than 90,000 Americans are waiting in line for a donor kidney, but there were only 23,401 kidney transplants in 2020. About a dozen people waiting for transplants die daily. But up until now there appeared to be no way around the basic problem that the only source for kidneys was from living or not living human donors…and that there are way too few of such people to provide enough kidneys to go around.

So to centerstage now steps the team from NYU Langone headed by Robert Montgomery to make the remarkable announcement that it could be possible genetically to alter not one or two, but thousands upon thousands of pigs to make their organs more suitable for transplant into human beings. (These pigs could and would be raised for this specific purpose.) Nor are we talking solely about kidneys. Dr. Amy Friedman, chief medical officer of LiveOnNY, an organ procurement organization, was quoted in that same article mentioned above as saying that she could easily imagine using this new procedure to procure new hearts and livers, as well as other organs, for sick people who might not survive without them. We have clearly come a long way from that day in 1984 when Dr. Leonard Baily transplanted the heart of a non-genetically-altered baboon into the chest of the child then known as Baby Fae (her real name was Stephanie Fae Beauclair), who then lived for three weeks—two full weeks longer than any previous recipient of an animal’s heart.

The question of the ethical reasonableness of “using” animals for their functioning organs is a complex one. On the one hand, there is something peculiar about feeling reasonable about raising animals for the slaughter and then eating them, but not about using them to grow organs that can save people’s lives. Nor does it seem all that ethically important that Americans do eat pork but don’t eat baboons or chimpanzees: raising animals at all to serve some human need is the basic question here, but it’s one for which Western culture has a very clear answer. Still, the idea of thinking of animals as boxes of organs instead of as living creatures endowed with their specific version of the dignity that inheres in all life—that doesn’t sit well with me either. And I speak as someone who was the recipient just this last May of a new aortal valve that was once part of an ox. I don’t feel a deep sense of kinship with that ox, although I suppose I harbor a vague sense of gratitude towards that anonymous beast. But the bottom line is still that I cannot see any moral obligation to equate animal life with human life. Killing animals for a legitimate purpose is not murder. Eating meat is not sinful. Using the carcasses of slaughtered animals purposefully is wise, not sinful. Yes, of course, the Torah requires that we only eat certain animals as a way of demonstrating our understanding that the fauna of the world were created by the Creator, who thus had the right to permit us to eat some of them and not others. And it is also true that the ones we do eat have to be slaughtered, because the Torah requires kindness even towards animals, in as painless a way as possible. But the bottom line is that the only way to get that meat is to raise animals for the slaughter and then to kill them, and that is fully countenance by Scripture. For a very interesting essay by my friend, Rabbi Dr. Martin Lockshin, about whether God originally intended for humankind to be vegetarians, click here. But no traditional rabbi, including Rabbi Lockshin, argues seriously that killing animals and eating their meat is a sign of moral depravity. And while the thought that there could some day be no one at all who dies in this country (or anywhere) while waiting for an organ transplant still sounds like an amazingly optimistic fantasy, wouldn’t we have once said the same thing about a dozen other medical advances that we’ve all come to think of as commonplace?

So the other article in the paper that struck me as worth reading against the one about the pig kidney transplant had to do with, of all things, kosher pork. Impossible Foods, the nation’s largest purveyor of plant-based meat substitutes, has perfected and is already marketing a kind of pork substitute that, being made solely of plants, is entirely kosher. Yet the Orthodox Union, the world’s largest kosher certification agency, has declined to grant the product its much-coveted OU certification. The rabbi in charge was quoted in the paper the other day as saying that the product is completely kosher, but that they will nevertheless not certify it as such because they are afraid people will be offended by the idea of kosher pork.

To such people, I reference the story about the kidney transplant. If you were dying of kidney failure and the possibility existed of saving your life with a transplant derived from a genetically-altered pig, my guess is that you’d agree to the operation pretty quickly. And that being the case, there’s probably something morally amiss in being so revolted by pigs that the thought of kosher pork is repellant or disgusting. That regular pork (i.e., the kind not made of plants) isn’t kosher doesn’t mean that pigs aren’t God’s creatures. And that being the case, allowing yourself to be so repulsed by any animal that the thought of a plant-based substitute for its meat being certified as kosher is repugnant—that is a repudiation of the faith in the goodness of Creation that Scripture wishes us all to adopt as a foundation stone of our approach to the world and its things. If the product is made of plants and is kosher, then the OU is behaving—to say the least—mercurially by declining to certify it as kosher. And for all those kosher Jews of whose negative response the OU is so worried, people who presumably can’t imagine why God made pigs in the first place, the team at NYU Langone has produced a pretty satisfying answer.

Remembering Martin Davidowicz

I was extremely moved by the description in the press last week of the burial of Martin Davidowicz in the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery, located on the northern slope of Mount Herzl just outside Jerusalem. The cemetery was originally established in 1949 specifically as a final resting place for soldiers who died defending Jerusalem during the Israeli War of Independence, but has since become the main cemetery for members of the Israel Defense Forces who have fallen in the line of duty. For Israelis, there is no more sacred ground, no place in the nation more suffused with the national will to survive and to thrive as focused through the effort specifically to honor those who have given their lives over the years to protect the State and its people.

What is interesting—and, to me, beyond moving—is that Martin Davidowicz never actually lived in Israel. In fact, he died before the State of Israel came into existence and never even set foot on the soil of what in his lifetime was still the British Mandate of Palestine. Yet he was nonetheless buried last week on Mount Herzl with full military honors and recognized as the first paratrooper to die in the service of the country he hoped to help create. He was twenty-one years old at the time of his death in 1948.

Davidowicz was born in 1927 in what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1943, when he was only sixteen years old, he and his family were deported to Auschwitz, where all but Martin were killed. He somehow survived as a slave laborer and was eventually liberated in the spring of 1945—at which time he was still only eighteen years old. He returned home, served in the Czech Army, and then, upon discharge, signed on to a course the Czech Army was offering to young Jewish men who wished to participate as paratroopers in the struggle to bring a Jewish state into existence in the Land of Israel. And it was in the course of that training course—and, at that, only three weeks into it—that a Czech Army officer accidentally shot and killed this poor lad who had survived Auschwitz, the annihilation of his family, and a stint in the Czech Army. Since the whole paratrooper training program was being conducted secretly, he was buried surreptitiously the next day in a nearby Jewish cemetery that the Nazis had somehow neglected to destroy. He was therefore neither a citizen of Israel nor an IDF combatant when he died. But Davidowicz was nonetheless formally recognized as the nation’s first fallen IDF paratrooper in 2001— and a full fifty-three years after his death.

For twenty years, nothing happened. And then, just this year, the Israeli government, realizing its oversight, began what became a successful effort to exhume Davidowicz’s remains and rebury him, this time with full military honors, on Mount Herzl among so many others of Israel’s war dead.

At Shelter Rock, when we recite Yizkor we always include a prayer for the fallen of the IDF, both those who gave their lives to bring the State of Israel into existence and those who fell in service to their nation since the day statehood was proclaimed in 1948. And my custom is almost always to introduce that prayer by reminding the congregation that the War of Independence was fought—not entirely but to a serious extent—by young people whose families had been murdered by Nazis and who were thus those families’ sole living survivors when they died. Since such young people by definition had no one to say any Yizkor prayers for them, I always invite the congregation to join me in taking on the role of surrogate family members and praying that they rest in peace and that their memory be a source of blessing for us all.

I’ve introduced that prayer with words along those lines for decades. But I’ve never mentioned the name of any specific person in that category for fear of making the memorial about that person and not all the others as well. But now that Martin Davidowicz has stepped out of time to take his place, at least briefly, on the front page, I thought it would be worthwhile to tell his story. May he rest in peace. And may his memory be a source of blessing for us all.

In the Matter of John Ramirez

I find myself unexpectedly engaged by the decision of the Supreme Court to stay the execution of John Ramirez, a convicted murderer who had been scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas last September 8.

First, the story itself is interesting. Ramirez was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death for having brutally murdered Pablo Castro, an employee in a convenience store, in the course of an armed robbery in which Ramirez managed to steal a mere $1.25 after stabbing Castro twenty-nine times in the alley behind his store. This was all some time ago—the murder took place in 2004—and in the meantime Ramirez has been on death row awaiting his execution. Suggestive, more than of anything else, of our national ambivalence towards the death penalty, we have created a strange world in which people sentenced to death are obliged to wait for years and years before they are actually executed as the inevitable appeals wind their almost interminable way through the courts and then, finally, the condemned person either is or isn’t granted his or her life through an act of clemency by a state’s governor personally or by a board empowered to make such a decision, or in federal cases by the President of the United States. Clemency doesn’t happen too often, however: other than in the case of blanket clemency offered by a state’s governor as an expression of distaste for the death penalty itself, there have been fewer than two prisoners a year spared execution since 1976. In contrast, more than 1,500 prisoners have been executed at the state or national level during those same years.

But the stay granted in the Ramirez case caught my interest because of the reason it was granted: the State of Texas had made it clear that Ramirez’ pastor was not going to be permitted to lay his hands on Ramirez’ head as part of the latter’s final prayer before being put to death and his lawyers argued, apparently convincingly enough for the Supreme Court to feel called to rule on the matter, that that refusal constituted an infringement of Ramirez’ civil rights. As a result, the issue before the Court transcends the details of Ramirez’ personal story and becomes one far more broad in its implications by raising the question of what precisely constitutes freedom of religion. And, even more to the point, it will require the Supreme Court to specify whether a state has the right unilaterally to decide what does and doesn’t constitute legitimate religious behavior on the part of a specific citizen or group of citizens, behavior that specifically cannot be curtailed by legislation or edict precisely because the exercise of the religion of one’s choice is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution as one of our most basic civil rights.

The question of whether the laying on of the pastor’s hands is or isn’t a legitimate Christian ritual is not for me to decide. But it seems even less reasonable than asking a rabbi to make such a decision would be asking a secular court or—even more absurdly—a state’s Department of Corrections—to do so. And yet that is precisely where things stand. The Texas Department of Corrections turned down the request because of what they referenced vaguely as “security issues,” but without explaining how the security of the execution chamber, let alone of the entire prison complex, could or would be endangered by a pastor placing his hands on someone’s head? More to the point, the Department’s argument was seriously undercut by a different minister, the Reverend Carroll Pickett, who served as a death row chaplain in Texas for fifteen years and who wrote in his book, Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain, that both he and his successor both routinely had physical contact with condemned individuals in the last minutes of their lives and that there was never any sort of obvious risk to anyone at all in that gesture of spiritual kindness to a prisoner about to die. (Reverend Pickett’s book was quoted verbatim in the document submitted to the Supreme Court called “Brief of Former Prison Officials as Amici Curiae in Support of the Prisoner.” To read those remarks, click here and search for Pickett.)

But the legal wrangling began almost immediately nonetheless.

A judge of the Federal District Court in Houston rejected Ramirez’ argument that the decision to bar his pastor from placing his hands on his head violated his civil rights, accepting the argument that prison officials should be free to decide what does or doesn’t constitute a breach of prison security. Then a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld the District Court’s decision. And now the matter has come to the Supreme Court.

In my opinion, it would be a great error of judgment to wave all this away as just so much legal folderol because it seems beyond crazy to worry about—or to care about—the civil rights of someone whom the state is about to kill anyway. I see why someone might think that. But there’s a lot more here than the specific question of Inmate Ramirez’ right to engage in the rituals of his faith without needing to get anyone’s permission to do so.

Other cases like this have come up just recently. And the verdicts have been strangely inconsistent. In 2019, for example, the Supreme Court declined to stay the execution of a prisoner in Alabama who claimed that his civil rights had been violated when he was denied the right to have his own clergyperson, a Muslim imam, attend his execution, which right was routinely granted to Christians executed in Alabama. But then, just a few weeks later, the Court forbade the execution of a prisoner in Texas who wished his own spiritual advisor, a Buddhist priest, to be present at his execution, which right Texas at the time granted solely to Christians and Muslims. After winning in court, however, the State of Alabama decided to head off future legal troubles simply by excluding all spiritual advisors or clergypeople from the execution chamber. But then, earlier this year, the Supreme Court forbade Alabama from executing someone who had been denied the presence of a Christian minister in the execution chamber.

In the end, what is really under discussion here is the right of the federal government—or any government—to determine what constitutes a bona fide religious ritual. The security argument seems, at least to me, wholly bogus. (Are they really afraid that the pastor might strangle the prisoner if physical contact between them were to be permitted? That sounds even crazier than the idea that a phalanx of armed Corrections officers couldn’t overcome a single unarmed pastor no matter what he attempted to do during the few minutes before an execution.) Nor are we seriously discussing the question of whether prisoners should or shouldn’t be allowed to practice the religion of their choice, a basic civil right specifically not extinguished with incarceration. Instead, we are seeing a state government choosing, in my opinion arbitrarily, to determine that the laying on of the hands is not enough of a Christian ritual for the prisoner’s right to engage in it to be guaranteed by law. And that is why it is so important for the Supreme Court to strike down the rule that forbids contact between minister and prisoner. Not because John Ramirez does or doesn’t deserve the solace he expects to receive from the physical touch of his pastor’s hands—but because the government must never be permitted to arrogate to itself the right of deciding which religious rituals are included in the general freedom we all enjoy to practice our religions without the government mixing in negatively or positively.

Freedom of religion, like freedom of speech or the freedom to assemble, is one of the  foundation stones upon which our American republic rests. To allow that freedom to be eroded is never going to be a good thing for those who cherish the civil rights enshrined in the Constitution. Reverend Dana Moore, pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, is John Ramirez’ minister. If he feels that his faith calls him to lay his hands on John Ramirez as the latter is being executed to offer him the kind of spiritual strength necessary to die with dignity, then that decision should be entirely his to make. 

Texas House Bill 3979

At the heart of the democratic enterprise is the notion of tolerance. And this is so for one single reason: because embedded in the concept of majority rule (which is, obviously, the core principle of any democratic state) is the parallel obligation to guarantee that even people who espouse unpopular points of view have an opportunity to speak out on matters that matter to them. It’s hard to imagine anyone seriously taking issue with that: the whole point of enshrining freedom of speech and a free press in the Bill of Rights—and, at that, in the First Amendment—is to guarantee that, for all the majority may rule, the minority may never be silenced. And that certainly applies—perhaps even specifically applies—when the view not being silenced is unpopular or out of favor.

All that being the case, there was—at least at first blush—nothing controversial in Texas House Bill 3979, a new law just recently passed by the State Legislature, requiring teachers in the state’s public schools to be evenhanded when presenting “widely debated and currently controversial” ideas to pupils in the state’s public schools. Why would anyone oppose teachers taking an evenhanded approach when instructing children regarding contentious matters? There are, after all, two sides to every story.

The decision earlier this week to remove the statue of Thomas Jefferson from the New York City Hall Council Chamber is a good example of those two sides: you can damn Jefferson as a slaveowner and a racist rapist (and allow those details to overwhelm the role he played in the founding of the nation) or you can honor his crucial role in declaring our nation’s independence from Britain—he was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, after all—and allow that to make less important the fact that he openly spoke of Black people as inferior beings, fathered children with teenaged female slaves, and supported the idea of “removing” native Americans from their own land and resettling them west of the Mississippi. There are rational, reasonable arguments on both sides, and for one simple reason: because all of the above details are true. So the debate is by its nature destined to be complex and complicated because Jefferson himself, a man who behaved in many ways that were totally at odds with his own philosophy and politics, was a complex and complicated creature. Both sides have lots of good points to make. The decision to remove the statue and send it to the New York Historical Society, where it will presumably be presented to the public in a way that sets the man in his historical perspective, only pleased some of the people engaged in the debate. But there’s no real question—not in my mind, at any rate—that there were valid, cogent arguments to be made on both sides of the issue. And that’s how democracy is supposed to work: everybody speaks freely, no one is silenced in advance, and then the majority rules.

And that brings me back to Texas. The bill, now a law, mentioned above requires that teachers present both sides to a debate when presenting that debate to impressionable children. But a path paved with virtuous paving stones can still lead to hell. And so, just this last week, we heard Gina Peddy, the executive director of curriculum and instruction in the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, a suburb of Dallas/Forth Worth, comment in a training session for teachers that if they were going to have a few books in their classroom libraries about the Shoah, then they should be sure also to offer students books written from an “opposing perspective.” Nor was this notion implied or merely suggested: “Make sure if you have a book on the Holocaust,” Executive Director Peddy said unequivocally, “that you [also] have one that has an opposing [viewpoint], that has other perspectives.” Nor can we imagine that the Executive Director unintentionally misspoke herself. “How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one flabbergasted teacher asked in response. “Believe me,” Peddy said slightly mysteriously, “that’s come up.”

Another teacher asked how precisely this was supposed to work. Imagine, this teacher proposed, that a classroom library contains the famous book by Lois Lowry, “Number the Stars,” detailing the escape of a girl from a Copenhagen Jewish family from the Nazis. Was Executive Director Peddy suggesting that the classroom should also feature pro-Nazi books promoting the notion that the Germans absolutely had the right to exterminate the Jews of Denmark if they wished? It wasn’t clear if Peddy heard the question. But what is clear is that she failed to answer it.

The reaction to Peddy’s remarks was ferocious and immediate. A spokesperson for the Texas State Teachers Association, Clay Robison, said unequivocally that his organization considers it “reprehensible for an educator to require a Holocaust denier to get equal treatment with the facts of history. That’s absurd. It’s worse than absurd. And this law does not require it.” Those are stirring words. But is Spokesperson Robison right about the law? That’s the real question here!

The author of the law, State Senator Brian Hughes, was clear enough, saying unambiguously that the law does not require teachers to present opposing viewpoints in matters of “good and evil” or to present pro-Nazi books if they also present books about the Shoah. Nor would the law require teachers who teach about slavery in Texas or anywhere to include reading assignments that would expose children to authors who promoted slavery as an acceptable institution or who attempted to justify ante-bellum slavery in the United States with reference to the natural inferiority of Black people. Of course, no one in his or her right mind would propose an even-handed approach to slavery. Or do I just want to think that that is the case?

What it comes down to—for Texas and for all of us—is understanding the difference between legitimate debate about complex, nuanced issues and the ridiculousness of debating historical or scientific reality. Debating whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned would be a reasonable exercise for high school students. And, in such a case, why shouldn’t they be presented with thoughtful arguments on both sides of the abortion issue? That’s precisely how education in a free society is supposed to work, after all—by exposing young people to both sides in a principled debate and then allowing them to formulate their own opinions based on what they’ve learned. But to extend that notion to people who promote ideas that are rooted solely in bigotry and racial or ethnic hatred and to feel some sort of obligation to let children be exposed to their ideas as well—that is just lunacy.

If we as a nation cannot say—unequivocally and unambiguously—that Nazism was an evil and not an “alternate viewpoint” that deserves its day in court, then we have truly descended into true craziness. The kerfuffle in Texas seems to have died down. No one is actually insisting that teachers expose children to pro-Nazi or pro-slavery books if they teach materials about the Nazi war against the Jews or about the misery and degradation slaves were obliged to endure in the Old South. But the very fact that this matter came up for debate at all is worrisome. Are there actually people out there—including the curriculum directors of school districts—who think of the Shoah as a theory to be accepted or rejected and not at all as a historical fact? Apparently, there are. And that distressing and disturbing detail far outweighs in importance the happy ending of this single incident in Texas.