Birds

The ancients understood the concept of evolution, but they took it as a political concept rather than as an ecological or geological one. The biblical Book of Daniel, for example, returns in three different chapters (twice explicitly and once allusively) to the notion that nations rise and fall, that the super-powers of any given generations are almost by definition the successor-states to earlier powers that ran their course and then, after a period of decline, either disappeared entirely or else turned back into being “just” one among the many other nations of the world. The version of that vision in the seventh chapter of the book is particularly stirring in that it depicts each successive nation as a fantastic beast emerging from the sea and taking its predecessor’s place on the shore. First, a lion with eagle’s wings steps onto the beach only to be forced to stand erect on its back legs while its wings are ripped off and its leonine heart replaced with a puny human one. And then it is replaced on that same beach by a man-eating bear that has also stepped out of the sea and which briefly takes its turn dominating the scene…until being itself replaced by a terrifying four-headed winged leopard that takes over when “dominion is given unto it.” But even that doesn’t last, because, soon enough, the winged leopard is replaced by a new beast, a true monster “dreadful and terrible and exceedingly strong” possessed of teeth made of iron and crowned with ten different horns sprouting from its giant head, which stomps whatever remains of its predecessors into dust.

It’s a long, weird vision and there’s been endless speculation among scholars regarding identities of the specific nations the author of Daniel had in mind. But the key point is that the concept that nation-states rise and fall—and that the world as we know it is specifically not as it was a century, or a dozen centuries, ago—was well known to the ancients. Nor was this all solely about the succession of super-powers: for the Greeks, the notion of successor states on earth nicely mirrored the history of the gods on high—Hesiod’s Theogony is all about how the Olympian deities eventually succeeded the different generations of gods that preceded them and came to rule the world. And there were similar ideas afoot across the ancient Near East as well.

But those were all political ideas and the notion that the physical world, the world we see all about us along with its fauna and its flora—the notion that what appears to be true of nation-states could also be true with respect to the environment, that appears not to have been known to the ancients. As a result, they imagined the world they saw all around them to be precisely as the world was when the Creator created it, both unchanged and—more to the point, unchangeable. Indeed, the story of creation in the first chapter of the Bible, less nuanced than the retelling in Genesis 2 but really just as stirring to consider, imagines God creating the physical world, then using the irresistible force of divine speech to fill the seas with fish and the skies with birds, and to create at once the animals of the world in all their diversity and also a world full of human beings, male and female, “to control the environment and to subdue it” when it for some reason seems unresponsive to human needs or wants.

All this by way of introducing my topic this week, one I first read about a few weeks ago but which has been weighing on me particularly just lately in the wake of all the Earth Day essays and articles I’ve been reading, and also in light of Steve Goldstein’s pre-Shabbat presentation last Friday about (among other things) the first Earth Day held back in 1970 when I was a senior in high school and could practically feel the earth moving under my feet as the age of Aquarius dawned and the new rushed in to sweep away the old. (That that perception was completely, or almost completely, false only became clear to me years later. But that’s not what I want to write about today.)

Here I want to write about birds and discuss one of the most shocking pieces of scientific writing I’ve seen in a long time, possibly ever. According to an essay published just before the pandemic in the journal Science, there has been an almost unfathomable decline of about 2.9 billion in the bird population of North America in the last fifty years—a decline that started precisely with the year in which the first Earth Day was observed. In other words, there are almost 30% fewer birds in North America today than there were when I was a senior in high school, an almost unimaginable decline.

What has caused this remains a matter of debate, but all the scientists whose works I’ve consulted seem to agree that the destruction of traditional bird habitats and the widespread use of toxic pesticides are major factors, as also is—albeit in a more subtle, less easy explainable way—climate change itself. Also of interest is the fact that, of the 2.9 billion birds that have vanished, about 90% belong to just about a dozen avian families, including finches, swallows, warblers, and sparrows. But there are losses across the board that affect every region of the continent and almost every species. (It is true that some species have come back almost from the brink of extinction, which list famously—or semi-famously—includes the American bald eagle, the Trumpeter Swan, and the Peregrine Falcon. But those success stories are all rooted in the massive efforts of scientists and environmentalists to pull a specific species back from the brink of extinction; as far as I know, no almost-extinct species has ever turned back from the precipice all on its own.) Forest birds alone account for almost one billion of the losses, but grassland birds have declined by about 700 million—which number leaves us now with about half the original population. No matter how you work the statistics, something terrible has happened to the world while more or less no one was looking…and those few who were looking were unable to fathom the scope of the debacle. Until now.

It’s easy not to care. So there are 862 million fewer sparrows in the world, so what? I mean…in the end, I didn’t know how many sparrows there were in the first place, they play no specific role in my life, I have been—at best—vaguely aware of their existence over the years of my own lifetime…so how does any of this affect me? That’s the question most will ask when confronting the number of missing sparrows…or the loss of 182 million larks or 618 million warblers. After all, the Passenger Pigeon went extinct and the world endured! (The Passenger Pigeon was once the most abundant bird in North America with a population before their decline set in of somewhere between 3 and 5 billion. And then, once deforestation destroyed most of its natural habitat, the decline began and ended only when the sole remaining Passenger Pigeon in the world died on September 1, 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. For a very interesting NPR podcast about the demise of the Passenger Pigeon, click here.) Like I said, it would be easy not to care. Or to care a little, but not quite enough to respond meaningfully to the news that so many of the most familiar birds are in danger of having no North American presence at all. But the reality is that this is one, large, interconnected biosystem we occupy…and we are not its sole residents. Birds, including the most common ones, control pests, pollinate flowers, spread seeds, regenerate forests, and are vital, productive members of the ecosystem in dozens of other ways as well. What will happen if they vanish in serious enough numbers to leave those vital tasks unaddressed, no one knows. But we’re about to find out. To read more, click here, here, here, here, or here. Pouring a whiskey before you start reading would probably be an excellent idea.

I admit that my first response, like most people’s I’m sure, was to turn the page and worry about something else. But then, when I returned to the topic over the last few weeks and started reading and rereading the many, many published essays responding to the original article in Science (the first of the “click here’s” at the end of the preceding paragraph), I began to understand how serious we all need to take this. We age mostly imperceptibly…and then, one day, the universe forces us to take stock of where we are and how we are or aren’t watching over our own best interests. This is more like that, I think: something that happens imperceptibly, but which has the capacity eventually to alter the course of human history. Yes, we will survive the decline of the Redwing Blackbird population (down from 270 million to a mere 160 million in just fifty years). But, taken all together, a picture begins to form…and it is not one we dare look away from. As we live our lives, and as society develops along its way, we are bringing about irreversible changes to the biosystem and, at least eventually, to the planet itself. What shape those changes will take, who can say? But to imagine that these issues are unimportant because they don’t all affect the way we live on a daily basis…that seems to me the definition of narrowminded folly. For better or for worse, we’re all in this together—us and the grackles and, yes, the sparrows.

 

Justice in Minnesota / Injustice in Paris

A native of Lod, Rabbi Joshua ben Levi was one of the greatest scholars in the Land of Israel in the first half of the third century BCE. Not too much is known of his family other than that he had a son named Joseph, who later grew up to become a rabbi like his father and to marry the daughter of Rabbi Judah, Patriarch of the Jewish community. But before Joseph grew to adulthood and achieved rabbinic ordination, it once happened that he fell terribly ill and sunk into a kind of coma during which he had vivid hallucinations. It lasted for days, but eventually he came out of it and, when he did, his father asked him what he had seen in the course of those hours spent in hallucinatory delirium. “I saw a topsy-turvy world,” Joseph reported, a crazy place in which things were the opposite of what they really are: “the things that belong on top were all on the bottom and vice versa—the things that belonged down below were all up on high.” Rabbi Joshua listened carefully to his son’s report about the olam hafukh, the topsy-turvy world that had been so prominently featured in his comatose dreamscape. And then he gave his considered, now famous, answer, “My son,” he said, that wasn’t hallucination, it was insight, because there, in your protracted dream, “you saw things as they truly are in this world.”

For twenty centuries, students of Talmud have been discussing what Rabbi Joshua could have meant. But now, just this very week, the secret has finally been revealed: Rabbi Joseph must have been dreaming about France, my new candidate for the most topsy-turvy nation in the world, a place where criminals bear no responsibility for their deeds, where murder is not an actionable crime, where voluntary drug use can relieve even the most vicious criminals of any responsibility for their crimes, and where the fully intentional murder of an elderly Jewish physician, a woman whose entire professional life was devoted to helping others, can be deemed an unfortunate mishap, an inconsequential accident unworthy of adjudication in the courts. These would have constituted a shocking turn of events to consider in the course of any week at all. But coming in the course of the same week in which the American justice system showed itself capable of convicting a veteran police officer who was deemed responsible for the death of a citizen in his custody, it was especially hard to swallow.

I am thinking, of course, of the decision this week by the Court de Cassation, France’s highest appeals court, to accept a lower court’s decision not to try Kobili Traoré, 31, for the 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi. Ordinarily, this would not be a subject for discussion at all. The crime was as horrific as it was brutal. The details themselves, including the identity of the perpetrator, are not in doubt: Traoré, a neighbor of Mme. Halimi, forced his way into her apartment and beat her so severely for a full thirty minutes before shoving her out a window of her third-story apartment that one of the few details that remain unresolved with respect to the crime is whether the victim was already dead when pitched out her own window to crash-land on the street or whether she died upon impact. Nor is the motive for the murder in any sort of doubt: Traoré, an immigrant to France from Mali in West Africa, was motivated, to quote his psychiatric evaluation, by a “frantic outburst of hate” directed towards his victim because of her Jewishness. As she shoved her out the window, he was heard to have called out the Arabic words Allahu akbar (“God is great”) and “I have killed the devil.” More specifically, it seems that Traoré was particularly enraged by the daily sight of the mezuzah affixed to the outer doorway of Mme. Halimi’s apartment, its mute presence reminding him daily that he was forced to live under the same roof as a Jewish woman.

So if neither the details of the crime nor the identity of its perpetrator are in doubt, why would the Court de Cassation have confirmed a lower court’s ruling forbidding the government from putting Kobili Traoré on trial? The answer, they said, is simple: according to French law, “a person is not criminally responsible [for his or her own deeds if those deeds were done while their doer was] suffering at the time of the event from [the kind of] psychic or neuropsychic disturbance that eliminate [the possibility of] discernment or control” and which that person might otherwise have brought to bear to rein in his or her behavior. For Americans, that too sounds like a familiar concept: we too do not put mentally ill people unable to distinguish right from wrong on trial. Indeed, the famous outcome of Durham v. United States in 1954 to the effect that a defendant can avoid conviction if it can be demonstrated convincingly that the “unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect” could hardly be more well known in our country.

But Kobili was not mentally ill in the way the term is normally used. Instead, his mental state—including his rage against his victim because of her ethnicity and faith and his willingness to express that rage brutally and sadistically—had been brought on by himself through his intense use of cannabis. And so the court concluded that Mme. Halimi’s murderer could not stand trial for his deeds because he had self-stupefied before entering his victim’s apartment. The moral of the story: if you are planning to travel to France to murder someone, be sure to pack your bong along with your gun and your ammo!

It has been a difficult decade for the Jews of France. Many will remember the 2012 murder by an Islamic fanatic of three children and a teacher in a Jewish school in Toulouse. And it was just three years later, in 2015, that Amedy Coulibaly entered a kosher supermarket in Paris with the specific intention of murdering the four Jews he killed there because of his hatred of Jewish people. And then, just a year after Mme. Halimi was murdered, a different elderly woman, Mireille Knoll, was also murdered—she was stabbed to death—by a madman who targeted her specifically because of her Jewishness. Those cases, it is true, were duly prosecuted and the defendants found guilty. But, even so, this week’s decision by the Court de Cassation, in effect excusing Mme. Halimi’s murderer from prosecution because of his voluntarily, intentional, and—it turns out—exceptionally well-timed drug use, was something that struck many onlookers as bizarre and more than slightly menacing.

The responses to the court’s decision have been angry. One of the public prosecutors on the case referred to the court’s decision as a gift of “complete impunity” to the murderer. Shimon Samuels, director for international affairs of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote that the court’s decision “potentially creates a precedent for all hate criminals to simply claim insanity or decide to smoke, snort, or inject drugs, or even [just] get drunk, before committing their crimes.” Even Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic, got into the act, calling for a swift change to the law to avoid the possibility of murderers going free after claiming that their own intentional drug use rendered them incapable of understanding the gravity or consequences of their own deeds. “Deciding to take narcotics and then going ‘like crazy’ should not in my eyes remove your criminal responsibility,” the President said clearly and unambiguously.

But future changes in the law will come too late to bring Sarah Halimi’s killer to justice. And that too seems to be universally understood by all concerned parties in France and abroad.

There is something logical and just about the basic notion that people unable to understand the consequences of their own actions should be treated kindly and mercifully by the criminal justice system. We treat children differently than adults in that regard, and for the same reason. As well we should, too—I don’t think anyone is arguing against that principle, which pertains not only in the U.S. and in France but in all enlightened countries of the world, nor would any normal person. But to extend that thought to include people who intentionally drug themselves to the point at which they can argue later on that they should not be held responsible for their own actions—that seems to me like the extension of a logical idea into the realm of true craziness. Kobili Traoré murdered Sarah Halimi because he found her existence as a Jewish woman offensive to the point of being unbearable. And, yes, he acted on his deeply anti-Semitic beliefs in a way that he might have not done had he not been high. But to conclude that the man should reasonably escape prosecution, conviction, and punishment because he willingly set himself outside the boundaries of culpability and responsibility through drug use—that seems to me to skate far too close to excusing the basic principle upon which all just criminal laws lies: that people who can tell right from wrong should be obliged to take responsibility for their own actions.

Sarah Halimi will rest in peace because she lived a decent, good life. She was the mother of four and a former physician, an older woman living a peaceful life in retirement. Why shouldn’t she rest in peace? But that her murderer will apparently legally avoid having to take any responsibility for her death—that seems to me to constitute an outcome wholly at variance with the facts of the case under consideration. I believe that justice was done for George Floyd this week in Minneapolis. I wasn’t sure how things would turn out, but the bottom line is that the basic principle that individuals, even police officers, must take responsibility for their own actions was upheld and affirmed. It’s too bad Paris isn’t in Hennepin County, Minnesota! 

Natanz

 Was Israel behind the attack on the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz? I suppose the honest answer is that I have no idea, that Israel’s long-standing policy not publicly to comment on incidents like this doesn’t mean that every last thing that happens in the world was the work of Israeli agents. Nor does Israel’s extremely impressive history of reaching into Iran to subvert its nuclear program mean that this incident must too have been the work of Israel. Any savvy journalist will tell you what a mistake it is to assume that all who benefit from a crime were necessarily its perpetrators. And surely the same is true of acts that make the world—even if just briefly and temporarily—safer, saner, and more secure. The United States certainly benefits from this week’s attack on Natanz. So do a significant number of Near Eastern countries aside from Israel. But that doesn’t mean it was the work of their agents or American ones any more than the fact that Israel too benefits from it makes it their work. Of course, there’s also the “who else could possibly have pulled this off?” argument to consider. Let’s leave it at that!

The point was clearly not to damage but to humiliate, a concept with which Americans are more than familiar. The point of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was not to damage some specific piece of the building or some office inside it, after all, but to demonstrate that the world’s most powerful nation was nonetheless not quite powerful enough to defend the epicenter of its military might from a group of suicidal nobodies who managed to take over a civilian airplane. Whether that is a fair conclusion to draw is a different question, of course—but if the fourth plane, the one that went down in Pennsylvania, had continued on to crash into the Capitol, as seems to have been the plan, the point of the operation would have been infinitely clearer. And, of course, the fact that the average American didn’t really think of the World Trade Center as a symbol of America before 9/11 didn’t mean that the terrorists who destroyed the towers didn’t think of them in precisely that way.

And so, similarly, have the Iranians been shown incapable of defending the single most tightly guarded site in the entire country, the nuclear research and development facility at Natanz. Nor does the Iranian leadership have the solace that could conceivably come from describing this attack as an eventuality they hadn’t imagined possible: in 2010, the Stuxnet virus—widely believed to have been jointly developed by the United States and Israel—was unleashed against the same facility in an attack that destroyed a thousand centrifuges. Nor was that the only incident: just last July the facility suffered a mysterious explosion that Iran later described as an act of sabotage. So they can’t have not known the facility was a target—which was completely obvious anyway—and the Iranians still couldn’t keep it secure from outside attack. Of course, these are the same people who could not keep the Israelis from removing 110,000 documents relating to their own nuclear program from a warehouse in Teheran in the course of a single night in 2018 and spiriting all of it off to Israel. (The haul, including videotapes, documents, and photographs, weighed half a ton. So it was hardly something a Mossad agent could carry under his or her jacket on the way out. For a very gripping account of that whole incident that appeared a few years ago in Business Insider, click here.) And it hasn’t been a particularly healthy time for Iranian nuclear scientists themselves either, who have been taken out at such a rate that there is actually a Wikipedia article entitled, “Assassination of Iranian Nuclear Scientists.”

The reviews of this week’s operation have been mixed. Certainly, anything at all that pushes the specter of a nuclear Iran even slightly further into the future makes world a safer place in the short run. But the real point of the operation was to deny Iran the leverage it might otherwise have had in Vienna as the U.S. enters into indirect talks with Iran regarding the possibility of reviving the 2015 Iran deal that President Obama considered one of the signature accomplishments of his presidency and which President Trump abandoned. That deal, about which I wrote many times in this space in 2015, was negotiated with an eye towards preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power, but succeeded only in delaying what John Kerry and President Obama apparently ended up accepting as an inevitable future development that could possibly be delayed but not actually prevented. And so it was: instead of preventing a future nuclear Iran, the 2015 deal was formulated to lead directly to that end as the sun would sadly set over sunshine clause after sunshine clause until, by 2030, there would finally be no meaningful impediments at all holding Iran back from joining the nuclear club. The hopeful assumption that that somehow won’t happen—because the Iranians will have demanded and achieved regime change by then and no longer be the belligerent nation it is today, or because the Iranians will for some reason agree to negotiate some sort of new agreement before the 2015 one expires, or because Iran will have abandoned its current predilection for sponsoring terrorist groups across the Middle East (and beyond) by 2030 and become a peaceful and peace-loving nation—that assumption seemed then and surely seems now to be rooted far more in wishful thinking than in any reasonable assessment of how things will probably be in nine years’ time.

And so we are, in a sense, back to the future. Our American administration still thinks that the Iranians can be bribed to abandon one of their signature programs with the promise of relaxed, or even totally abandoned, sanctions. (Then-Vice-President Biden was wholly supportive of the 2015 accord and seems now to feel honor-bound not to reject the set of premises upon which it was based.) The Iranians, shamed by their inability to defend their single best-guarded site from outside interference, feel concomitantly honor-bound to abandon neither their nuclear program nor their bellicose rhetoric. And Israel, as aware as ever that it can ultimately count only on itself for protection against a nation whose bloodthirsty leaders make no secret of their desire to eradicate the Jewish state by murdering its Jewish inhabitants, is somehow trying not to alienate the Biden administration at the same time it makes it clear that if the world proves unable or unwilling to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, then it will have to look after the matter on its own. This week’s incident at Natanz was meant to make that point crystal-clear. Which it surely did, and to all concerned too and not solely the Iranians.

Every nation as a mythic background rooted in the past against which it moves forward into the future. Sometimes these background images are rooted in hoary antiquity, but other times they are far more recent and well documented. Iran, one of the world’s two true super-powers when the Roman Empire was the other, recalls vividly its glory-years and today feels underrated and underestimated. And joining the nuclear club is thus perceived as one step towards righting that wrong. That is almost certainly will not work that way—Pakistan and North Korea are both members of the nuclear club and no one considers either a leader-state in the forum of nations—seems not to matter. Nor does it seem to matter that that being known as a sponsor of world-wide terror has made it infinitely less likely that Iran will ever take the place among the nations of the world its leaders feel so certain that their nation deserves.

Israel, for its part, has its own history guiding it forward. Americans tend to wave away as mere bluster Iranian statements about destroying Israel and murdering its inhabitants. Nor do most Americans seem at all impressed by military parades in Teheran featuring missiles bearing the names the Israeli cities they might someday help annihilate. When the Iranian Prime Minister opens insults and mocks the martyrs who died in the Shoah as part of his effort to denigrate the Jewish state—that too seems so far over the top to most Americans as to land somewhere between grotesque and laughable. But that is not even slightly how Israelis see any of the above. Nor is it how I myself see any of it.

For most Israelis—and for Jews like myself—every day is Yom Hashoah. When the leader of an oil-rich nation struggling to gain nuclear weaponry talks about annihilating the six million Jews of Israel, we listen carefully and the very last thing we do in response is wave away the remark as mere rhetoric. The world did just that in the 1930s, preferring to suppose that Hitler couldn’t possibly have really meant it about ridding the world of the Jewish problem by ridding the world of Jews. To label the 2015 Iran Accord as the 21^st century version of Munich Agreement of 1938 is exaggerated, but, like all exaggerations, it is only intelligible in the first place because it contains a kernel of truth. Nor is it reasonable to lay Treblinka at the feet of Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier—neither was thinking of genocide when they gave away somebody else’s country to a madman for the sake, they naively thought, of achieving peace in their time. But despite the noble intentions of its non-Nazi signers, the Munich Agreement did, in fact, lead directly to the outbreak of the Second World War not a year later. And not six full years after that, six million European Jews were dead, as also were almost 75 million other citizens of the world.

For Israelis, the fear of genocide is real and constant. This is hard for outsiders to grasp—in our nation, even groups that face daily prejudice and discrimination don’t fear actual genocide—but the reality of genocide is the beating heart of the consciousness of all Israelis, or at least the vast majority of them. As a result, when the mullahs talk about destroying Israel and murdering its people, Israelis take that seriously. And that is why Israel must and will do what it takes to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The world knows that, of course, which is what allows it to gather in such refined and dignified halls as the Grand Hotel Wien and over Viennese pastries politely to chat about ways to bring our nation back into the accord. I’m sure the coffee is excellent too! But, at the end of the day, none of it will matter: this week’s attack on Natanz makes it perfectly clear that when all the endless talking is over and even more pieces of paper are signed by whomever signs them, what will prevent Iran from using nuclear weapons to achieve its nefarious ends outside its own borders will primarily be a function of the Israelis’ refusal to allow that to happen.

The Southern Border

As the crisis on our southern border becomes more serious and the problem of how exactly to deal with unaccompanied children crossing, or attempting to cross, into the U.S. becomes more intractable with each passing day, we have begun to hear the same “but this is not who we are” argument so familiar to us all from the days following mass shootings or violent attacks on public buildings or seats of power. In the wake of the January riot at the Capitol, I wrote to you all suggesting that there is something self-serving and untrue in that argument when applied to insurrectionist violence directed against the Congress, an opinion I embraced after reading Joanne B. Freeman’s remarkable book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. (To review my comments from last January, click here.) Now, I would like to apply that line of thinking to the crisis at the border.

If there was one theme running faithfully through my own public school education, it was that America was a nation of immigrants, that we all came from somewhere, that even the native Indians, incorrectly taken as aborigines by the European settlers who came here in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were themselves descended from people who crossed the then-extant Bering Land Bridge that linked Siberia and Alaska during the Ice Age and so were also reasonably to be considered some version of immigrants to North America. (For more on the Bering Land Bridge, click here.) For most of us, that settled the matter: we were all either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Even the Indians! And the fact that a significant number of children in my elementary school had parents who had somehow survived the war in Europe and come here after the Second War only made that thought even more satisfying. I believe the first poem I was obliged to memorize during my days at P.S. 196 was Emma Lazarus’s “The Great Colossus,” written in the year of my grandmother’s birth specifically to raise money to construct the pedestal atop which the Status of Liberty stands to this day and eventually cast onto a bronze plaque attached to that same pedestal.

Boy-me was beyond impressed. The poet’s description of the statue as “a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and whose name the Mother of Exiles” was more than resonant with me. My people, after all, too came here fleeing persecution in Belarus and Poland—a fact my father mentioned regularly throughout my childhood—and that was without knowing the fate that would have awaited them had they failed to get out when they could and did. The rest of the poem spoke equally directly to the young me. When I read that “from her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome,” I imagined my grandparents passing through Ellis Island and wondering what fate awaited them here. And when the poet imagined Lady Liberty herself addressing the decaying lands of the Old World and imploring them to send to us “your tired, your poor,” your homeless and tempest-tost, and that they would be welcomed by Lady Liberty herself, on duty 24/7 holding aloft her “lamp beside the golden door” to welcome them, I knew what made America great—inclusivity, tolerance, hospitality, empathy, and kindness.

It was a very moving set of ideas to boy-me. It still is. But how true is it exactly? That I only found out later when I began to read on my own.

The United States was founded exclusively by immigrants from Europe or by the native-born descendants of earlier immigrants, but their sense of what they wanted future immigration to yield was not quite as expansive as Emma Lazarus’s poem suggests it ought to have been: the Naturalization Act of 1790, for example, dealt with the way individuals coming to the independent United States could become citizens and was quite specific: the ability to become an American citizen was formally to be limited to “free white persons…of good character.”  There was, therefore, no path to citizenship at all for slaves, free black people, Asians, or, most bizarrely of all, actual native Americans. And that was how things were for quite some time. (It is true that some few states before the Civil War allowed Black people to be considered citizens, but only of that specific state and not of the country. Today, of course, there is no such thing as being a citizen of one of the states but not of the nation.) Indeed, the first instance in which a serious number of residents without the priorly requisite European pedigree became entitled to American citizenship was the passing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1831, which created a path to citizenship specifically (and only) for Choctaw Indians who agreed to remain in Mississippi. (In exchange, the Choctaws agreed to abandon their claim to about 15 million acres of land in what is now Oklahoma.) I am quite certain that the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was not part of our curriculum in eleventh grade.

Things moved ahead, but only very slowly. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution offered citizenship to all people born within the boundaries of the United States, including Black people, but specifically excluding Indians residing on reservations. Two years later, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1870 that created, and for the first time, a possibility for Black people to immigrate to the United States and become citizens…but that same law not only denied the possibility of immigrants coming here from China but actually revoked the citizenship of Americans of Chinese descent who were already here.

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

And then we get to the twentieth century. The Immigration Act of 1917 went a step further still, barring all immigration from Pacific Island nations and from the Far East, but also imposing for the first time literacy tests on would-be immigrants as well as creating for the first time categories of people to whom immigration was to be denied unrelated to national origin. The sanitized expressions “mentally defective individuals” and  “persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority” were used to deny openly gay people the possibility of entry, along with undesirable “illiterates, imbeciles, insane persons, and paupers.” But it was the Immigration Act of 1924, framed in its day as a mere extension of the earlier act, that for the first time established immigration quotas. Formally, the idea was to restrict immigration to a number equivalent to 2% of the number of Americans who claimed that nation as their ancestral home in the 1890 census. But the real purpose was to keep out Italians, Greeks, Poles, and (I can’t help thinking especially) Eastern European Jews. (I hardly have to pause to note what happened to those Jews who would have come here to start new lives but who were instead condemned to be present when the Nazis occupied their homelands.)

And that is how things stood for a very long time. Of course, no one in those days would have dreamt of using President Trump’s vulgar expression to describe the countries from which the President was keen to see no immigration at all. Or at least not in public. But the sentiment behind the Immigration Act of 1924 was exactly the same, only the identity of the specific nations so qualified was different.

The situation at the southern border is dire. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, himself a Cuban refugee, is doing his best to deal with an impossible situation. And, indeed, it turns out that expressing horror at the policies of the previous administration with respect to the separation of families and the caging of children is distinctly easier than figuring out what exactly to do with large number of unaccompanied children arriving at the border possessed solely of whatever they are carrying with them. There are a thousand good reasons to shove them back over the border and let them fend for themselves. They aren’t playing by the rules. We have no idea who their parents are. They mostly don’t speak English at all, let alone well. Like children everywhere, they have no way to sustain themselves by going to work and legally earning a living. All the above are excellent and fully cogent reasons for giving these kids a hot meal and shipping them back where they came from.

But what of the lady in the harbor and her torch, still burning in the night, still calling out to the tempest-tost, to the homeless, to the destitute, to the exhausted? The question isn’t really what President Trump would have done or what President Biden can or will do. The question is what the Mother of Exiles would say if she could turn to the south and consider the border with Mexico. Would she set down her lamp, shut the golden door, and tell these freeloaders to go to hell? Or would she come down from her pedestal, tie up her skirts, and make her way south to use her “imprisoned lightning” to illuminate the nighttime sky while she gathers the children in unto her and offers them shelter in this, the greatest and most powerful of all nations? It strikes me that it is to Lady Liberty that we should be looking for counsel in the matter of the current crisis, not to even the most well-meaning of politicians.

Game-Changers

 Everybody knows the old French saw about how the more things appear to change, the more they actually stay the same. And mostly it’s true—we can surely all think of a dozen innovations touted in their day as societal game-changers that turned out merely to be variations on the theme they were supposed not merely to revise slightly but totally to uproot and replace. You can make scrambled eggs in your microwave slightly more quicky than in a frying pan, but you still end up with a plate of scrambled eggs. And your wireless printer does exactly the same thing as your non-wireless printer did, just without the wire. It’s nice to have fewer wires under your desk, of course. But was the world—or even just your world—really changed by the advent of wireless printers?

But then, every so often, something comes along that actually does change everything. It generally takes a while for people to understand the implications of that innovation, however. Gutenberg’s printing press is a good example: it’s hard to think of a day that more totally changed the world—and for the better—than that fateful day in 1452 on which Gutenberg produced his first printed Bible, thus opening the path for printed books to supplant hand-written manuscripts by making it possible to create hundreds, or even thousands, of  copies of a book in the time a scribe would have earlier on needed to create a single volume. And, yes, things got off to a strong start: by 1500, there were a cool 30,000 books in print across Europe. But even so it took almost a century and a half before it dawned on someone that Gutenberg’s invention could be used to publish a daily printed newspaper. (That first effort was the rather infelicitously named Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, a German-language newspaper that Johann Carolus began publishing in Strasbourg in 1605.)

Some of these game-changing moments seem less momentous as time passes: I can remember the teenaged me thinking that nothing would ever be the same again after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, only later on to realize that it was a come-and-go moment that, practically speaking, changed nothing at all in terms of the way we live our lives down here on earth. Others seem only in retrospect to have been crucial turning points, but went totally unnoticed at the time: surely the invention of email counts as an innovation that permanently altered the way society functions, but I myself can’t say with certainly who invented it or when exactly. (I can now—I just looked it up and so can you: click here. But why V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is basically unknown, while Neil Armstrong’s name is known even to young children—that would be an interesting issue to think through. Perhaps I’ll return to that one of these days and see what I can come up with.)

But I write about all this today because I noted in the paper something a few weeks ago that feels to me as though it might well be—at least in retrospect—a true game-changer moment. It surely went unnoticed by most. In the end, it may end up to have been a fancy parlor-trick that only felt momentous at the moment. Or it may be an innovation that possesses the potential to address the scourge of homelessness.

As recently as ten years ago, it was estimated that there were as many as 100 million people in the world living without roofs over their heads. Nor is this a Third World problem per se: in 2018 it was estimated by the government that there were about 553,000 homeless individuals in the United States, 65% of whom were temporarily being housed in shelters and 35% of whom were fending for themselves on our nations’ streets. Just this spring, the New York Times reported that there were about 114,000 school-age children who were or will be either permanently or temporarily homeless during the current school year. (To read more about that almost unbelievable statistic, click here.)

The roots of homelessness are complicated and vary from context to context, but the cost of owning a home is surely part of the problem. Maybe it’s the advent of Pesach that has made me especially sensitive to the whole issue: the holiday is formally about freedom from slavery, but the famous image of the Israelites yearning for home while spending forty years living in flimsy, roofless sukkot that provided no real protection from the elements, no meaningful security, and hardly any privacy at all—all those themes came together to draw my attention to an article in the New York Post last week that announced something that struck me as the kind of innovation that could conceivably take its place next to Gutenberg’s press one of these days. And it too had something to do with printing.

Or at least with a printer.

The article, by Mary K. Jacob, reported that 70-year-old Tim Shea, formerly a homeless soul living on the streets in Austin, Texas, now resides in a 400-square-foot home that was created with a 3-D printer and which is part of a community of such structures created especially to house 180 people like himself in homes they rent for $300 a month. (The community also provides work opportunities for the residents, so all who live there can earn their rent and remain permanently in place. To read the New York Post article, click here.) The cost of creating such a home, using machines called “large concrete 3-D printers” is about $10,000. But the price is expected to drop as the technology becomes more advanced and one essay I found projected the eventual cost of using such a machine to create an inhabitable home to be about $3500. Also relevant is that such a building can be constructed by four workers in less than twenty-four hours. (For a more detailed account by Adele Peters of how this unbelievable technology works, click here.) Each printer—obviously something akin to the printer on your desk but also quite different from it—costs about $100,000 and is expected to be able to produce about 1,000 homes. So that would add about $100 to the cost of each home, a more than bearable addition. The homes are made of concrete and mortar, both substances readily available in most Third World countries. The roofs are not 3-D printed.

As noted above, lots of innovations present themselves to the world as game-changers but only very few actually do alter the course of human society. The invention of the printing press certainly deserves its place on the list. So do the introduction of the personal computer and the invention of the Internet. But the thought that society could address the problems of homelessness and the extreme poverty and lack of resources that brings people to live on the street by constructing homes so inexpensively that even people with the most modest incomes could afford the rent…and then by constructing communities for such people that also provide the employment opportunities necessary to earn that rent and to survive with dignity in a secure and safe environment—that seems to me a development truly with the potential to change the world.

One of the Torah’s most chilling lines is in the fifteenth chapter of Deuteronomy. The text enjoins the Israelite to be generous and kind when it comes to charitable giving, and never to begrudge the poor their alms, “for it was precisely to grant you the ability to show such solicitude to the poor that God blessed you with whatever wealth you possess in the first place.” And then Scripture goes on to note wistfully that this shall be a permanent obligation, “for surely the poor will never vanish entirely from the land.” Ramban says to take this more as a dour observation than as an actual prophetic oracle—and thus specifically not to conclude that the eradication of poverty is something that could never actually be achieved—and I’d like to think that that is exactly correct. (Ramban, also called Nachmanides, died in 1270 and is still considered one of the greatest Torah commentators.) And that is why I responded so emotionally to that story in the paper the other day: the thought that it could be possible to address the world-wide problem of homelessness by building habitable homes for less than the cost of a car and then by constructing communities that present future residents with the kind of work-opportunities that will make residence in such homes affordable for all—that really does seem to me like a game-changer. If I had to bequeath to my lovely granddaughters a world in which no human being had ever walked on the moon, I could live with that. But to think that the possibility exists to offer them a world in which all human beings can live in dignified, secure housing—that seems to me like the kind of innovative change that really would be a game-changer in terms of the way we live in the world.