Pittsburgh

Like most of my readers, I suppose, I have been watching the trial of Robert Bowers, the perpetrator of the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, with a strange brew of emotion concocted principally of fascination, horror, pride in our American justice system, and intense personal engagement—the latter despite the fact that I’ve never actually been to Pittsburgh, thus also obviously not to that synagogue, and that I did not know any of the victims personally.

The charges alone were hair-raising enough to consider during the trial, but the verdict feels even worse: guilty of 22 crimes, eleven capital counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death and eleven capital counts of using a firearm to commit murder during and as part of a crime of violence. Of course, none of the above was at all unexpected: even Bowers’ own lawyers did not waste the court’s time by arguing that their client was not the shooter, choosing instead to argue that he was not primarily motivated by hatred of Jewish people in general, but specifically by his hatred of the HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and his understanding that at least one of the congregations housed in the building he attacked worked with the HIAS to assist immigrants in need.

There’s a lot here to unpack. The HIAS has been around for a long time, having first been founded in 1881 to assist Jewish persons newly arrived on these shores in finding lodging and employment, and in developing a sense of belonging in a new place so unlike their countries of origin. That remained its primary focus for a long time too—which is why supporting the HIAS was, in my childhood, as uncontroversial a thought as supporting the March of Dimes or the JNF. And it did its work famously well, establishing an office on Ellis Island itself in 1904 and assisting hundreds of thousands of those who arrived there. They provided translation services for would-be immigrants who didn’t speak English well or at all. They lent the truly indigent the $25 “landing” fee that all who passed by those portals were obliged to pay one way or the other. They provided lawyers to argue before the so-called “Boards of Special Inquiry” the cases of individuals who might otherwise have been sent back to Europe. On top of all that, they found the funds to launch nation-wide searches for relatives of the newly arrived so that the former could provide affidavits of support for the latter to guarantee that they—the new immigrants—would not end up as indigents living off public money. They opened a kosher restaurant on Ellis Island that eventually served more than half a million meals. And they created a kind of charity travel bureau to assist new immigrants in covering the cost of train tickets to wherever it was they were going to settle. Perhaps most useful of all, they opened an employment bureau to help newcomers find work.

All that being the case, what’s not to like? My parents were big supporters, never setting aside an envelope from the HIAS without putting a check or at least a few dollar bills inside before mailing it back. As well they should have: three of my four grandparents came to this country through Ellis Island and all benefited from the presence of the HIAS officials waiting for them to disembark and helping them through what could easily have been a harrowing experience in a foreign language they could barely speak. And that, of course, was without knowing that being sent back to Europe would almost definitely have meant eventually being killed along with two-thirds of European Jewry during the Second World War.

Later, the HIAS was instrumental in saving as many European Jews as possible, famously saving 1400 children the Nazis had incarcerated in French concentration camps and bringing them to America. (Nearly all their parents were subsequently murdered by the Germans.) All in all, about 45,000 Jews were saved by the HIAS during the war, none of whom would otherwise have survived. And then, when the war was over, the HIAS assisted in finding homes for more than 300,000 Jewish souls left in D.P. camps with no place to go. Eventually, the HIAS would also play a major role in helping Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union in finding new homes in Israel, Western Europe, or the U.S.

It's hard to imagine why Robert Bowers would have cared about any of this. Nor, apparently, did he. But the HIAS also took on another role in the latter part of the twentieth century. In 1975, the State Department asked the organization to assist in the settling of 3,600 Vietnamese refugees here in the U.S. And that constituted a sea change for the organization, which now turned from its original raison d’être of helping Jewish immigrants to helping refugees of all nationalities in need, extending its mission to address the needs of all displaced persons in need of assistance in finding or settling into new homes. And that was the part that Robert Bowers apparently couldn’t stand. “HIAS,” Bowers posted online, “likes to bring invaders in who kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch our people get slaughtered.” And then he famously concluded that post with words that were subsequently repeated a thousand times: “Screw your optics! I’m going in.”

And in he went—to a synagogue housing three different congregations, one of which had indeed participated just a week earlier in HIAS’s annual National Refugee Shabbat. Shouting, by police accounts, “All Jews must die,” he set to his deadly work. It didn’t take that long: Barrows entered the building at 9:50 AM and by 11:08 he had surrendered to police. And so, in just a little over an hour, eleven died. Two were a married couple. Two others were brothers. Six others were injured, which figure includes four police officers. The dead, in alphabetic order, were Joyce Flenberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger. They ranged in age from 54 to 97. None was guilty of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At first, it might almost sound as though Bowers’ lawyers were right, that this was “about” HIAS and its mission to assist refugees of all kinds and points of origin and not “just” about killing Jews. But Bowers didn’t shoot up a HIAS office and neither did he take aim at any of their refugee clients. Instead, correctly understanding that part of the Jewish worldview includes a deep and ineradicable sense of identity with the refugees and displaced persons in this cold, uncaring world we inhabit (a point presented in Scripture not as a good idea or even as a noble one, but as a divine commandment), he took aim at Jews because they had embraced their Judaism and the worldview that their faith calls upon them to adopt. And it was that specific part of Jewishness that Bowers couldn’t tolerate, the sense that it is requisite that all who would call themselves godly or decent feel a deep sense of kinship, not with the masters and rulers of the world, but with the powerless, with those seeing refuge from tyranny or poverty, with the defenseless and the desperate. And it was expressly to express his loathing of that kind of worldview—one so identified with Judaism that it would be impossible to imagine Judaism without it—that Bowers chose to act. He chose innocent victims because they were Jewish, because they were in synagogue on Shabbat morning to affirm their Jewishness, because they were associated—both in Bowers’ mind and probably correctly—with the mission of the HIAS not to turn away from those seeking refuge in the world but to turn towards them and to embrace them as fellow children of God.

And now, the verdict having been handed down, we turn to the next part: the sentencing phase of the trial scheduled to begin on Monday, at which time the jury will have to decide whether to sentence Bowers to life imprisonment without parole or to death.

As always, I find myself unsure where I stand on death penalty issues. On the one hand, who could possibly qualify for execution if not a man like Bowers, a violent extremist who mercilessly executed eleven innocents to make some sort of demented political statement about an issue to which none of his victims had any direct connection? He falls in the same category, then, with Dylann Roof, the young man who murdered nine innocents in 2015 after spending an hour studying Bible with them at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and who was subsequently found guilty and then sentenced in state court to nine consecutive sentences of life without parole and in federal court to death. Both men acted willfully and intentionally. Neither had any particular personal animus against any of his victims. Both were angry souls fueled by violent hatred. If the death penalty is the ultimate punishment our justice system metes out, then to whom should it be meted out if not to people who fully intentionally kill innocents specifically because of their faith or the color of their skin?

On the other hand, I see the arguments against the death penalty too. The victims don’t come back to life when their executioner is executed; the death penalty speaks to a need to punish felt by the living but yields exactly nothing at all to the dead. Should it matter if the deceased individuals were on record as being opposed to or in favor of the death penalty? And how should faith itself impact on the way we feel about the death penalty? Do we argue that the Bible itself, which clearly has no problem at all with the notion of execution as the proper response to violent crime, should be our guide? What about the strictures that Jewish tradition places around the death penalty, strictures so tight that it would be more or less impossible for a traditional rabbinic court to sentence anyone to death even if such a court were to have the authority to hand down such a sentence? In the end, do we support the concept of the death penalty in theory because it is, after all, the ultimate in punitive acts at the same time we oppose it in reality because of the possibility of error? Is it relevant in this regard to mention the over 300 convictions that have been overturned based on DNA evidence since the Innocence Project began its work in 1992? Surely that should be irrelevant here—neither Bowers’ own lawyers nor even the defendant himself tried to deny that he was the Pittsburgh shooter. Or is it irrelevant, given that, by supporting the idea of sentencing the man to death, we are saying clearly that we support the death penalty while knowing that that the work of the Innocence Project makes it more or less certain that innocent individuals have been executed in our nation’s history?

All these are the thoughts I bring to the conviction and eventual sentencing of Robert Bowers, the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh massacre. What happens to Bowers will happen without any input from myself. But what I can do, and invite all my readers to join me in doing, is to pray that his victims rest in peace and that their deaths collectively serve as a mass sanctification of God’s name in this violent, crazy world we inhabit.

Contextualizing Trump

There are lots of different ways to approach the indictment of former President Trump on thirty-seven felony counts, but presuming the man’s guilt in advance should not be one of them: like anyone at all charged with a crime in our nation, the ex-President enjoys the presumption of innocence until such time as he is actually convicted of a crime. With that, none (I hope) can argue. Nor should anyone question his right to defend himself vigorously in court and to be aided in that defense by able counsel: all these are basic rights accorded to all accused individuals without exception and really should not be questioned at all, let alone challenged. The man has no more rights than anyone, but also no fewer!

But the larger question facing the American people as we wait to see what happens next is how to contextualize the whole affair. Surely, the principle that none is above the law is basic to any democracy. I lost track early on of how many times I heard those words cited in this specific context in the last week, which is as it should be: the notion that the sign of a truly healthy democracy is precisely that neither wealth nor status can protect someone from facing the legal consequences of his or her actions in a court of law is really unarguable. But that’s not quite the tack I wish to take in analyzing this last week’s events, which is to wonder aloud how to set last week’s indictment in its larger context. Of interest too is that President Trump’s former valet (now his aide), Walt Nauta, was also named in the indictment as a co-conspirator. That surprised me, but whether he is destined to turn into Gary from Veep or to morph into this year’s Michael Cohen remains to been. (Both went to jail, but one remained faithful to his boss and the other turned on him.) But the concept itself that the big man’s little man is going to have to answer for his own misdeeds is also a healthy sign that the law applies to the mighty and the lowly alike, just as it should and must.

One way to contextualize the indictment would be to do so horizontally by scanning the globe for similar stories. Of these, there is no lack. In 2021, the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, was sentenced to a year in prison for corruption and influence peddling. The former president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, has been charged with racketeering and money laundering, and will face trial. Ehud Olmert, the twelfth Prime Minister of Israel, was convicted of taking bribes and obstructing justice, then sentenced to six years in prison. And, of course, the Prime Minister of Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu, is also on trial for bribery and fraud. And that’s only to mention the most recent world leaders to face trial in their own countries. Nor was Israel the only country to put two of its political leaders on trial this century: Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was found guilty of paying bribes and accepting kickbacks in 2011 and handed a two-year suspended prison sentence.  If this were a contest, though, South Korea would probably win: in the last three decades, five different former South Korean presidents have been tried and convicted of various offences. For a useful and very interesting summary published on the PBS website of world leaders who have been arrested, tried, and convicted (or not convicted), click here.

It's actually a very satisfying list to contemplate, one populated by politically powerful and mostly very wealthy individuals who were specifically not deemed to be above the law and who were therefore obliged to defend themselves in courts of law against the charges brought against them. But I’d like to propose an alternate way of contextualizing the Trump indictment, one rooted in American history rather than in the stories of other nations.

In the course of the last century, four presidents have had their reputations seriously tarnished by charges of criminal wrongdoing leveled against themselves or others close to them. Of them, however, Donald Trump is the first actually to face federal criminal charges. But considering no. 45 in the light specifically of three of his predecessors—nos. 29, 37, and 42—is an interesting exercise nonetheless.

Sometimes, it’s enough merely to be associated with bad people.

Warren Gamaliel Harding, no. 29, was in office for less than two and a half years, wrapping up his service to the nation in the summer of 1923 by suffering what was probably a serious heart attack while visiting Washington State and then dying a few days later in San Francisco. That he seems to have had a series of extra-marital affairs, including one that probably resulted in an illegitimate child and another that memorably featured a White House tryst in a closet off the Oval Office with Secret Service agents posted in the hallway to keep the couple safe from intruders, hasn’t helped his reputation. But it was not his infidelity that damaged his reputation—the nation had learned not to care much about that back in the days of Grover Cleveland—as much as it was his association with people later accused of serious crimes, including his Secretary of the Interior Albert Fell (who was later convicted of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in what came to be called the Teapot Dome Scandal) and his Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, who was tried on charges of corruption but in the end not convicted. Key is to realize that Harding himself was dead when all this came out and that he himself was never accused of actual wrongdoing while still alive and serving as President. And yet his name was so posthumously tarnished that he is regularly rated as among the very worst of our American presidents. So we begin with the story of a man who was tarnished by association, whose willingness to consort with men later openly labelled—in the court of public opinion as well as in actual courtrooms—as criminals ruined his reputation. This we could reasonably call guilt by posthumous association.

Moving along, we could consider the fate of William Jefferson Clinton, no. 42. Bill Clinton was accused over the years by at least four different women of sexual assault, but not by Monica Lewinsky, who never described herself as an assault victim. Nonetheless, it was lying about that specific relationship that led independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr to charge Clinton with perjury and obstruction of justice. This led directly to the December 1998 vote in the House of Representatives to impeach Clinton, which led to his five-week trial in the Senate. (That Kenneth Starr was supposed to be investigating the Clintons’ role in the Whitewater Real Estate scandal and not the president’s sex life may well have contributed to the sense among many that the president was being tried in the Senate unfairly.)  Clinton was acquitted, but his reputation was severely tarnished by the whole affair, which would put him in a slightly different category than Warren Harding: both are remembered as philanderers, but Clinton’s famous “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” combined with his impeachment, his trial in the Senate, the suspension of his license to practice law in Arkansas, his disbarment from presenting cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, his being held in contempt of civil court, and the $90,000 fine he was obliged to pay for giving misleading testimony in court—all these together ruined Clinton’s reputation in the eyes of many. He is, of course, still alive and well, which puts him in a different category than Warren Harding, who at least had the good fortune to have his reputation ruined posthumously. And he has clearly bounced back to being a respected past-president whose company is sought out and whose counsel if valued.

And that brings me to no. 37, the president of my college years, Richard M. Nixon. In February of 1974, a federal grand jury was prepared to indict the by-then-former president by charging him with a variety of crimes connected with his association with the Watergate break-in: bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and obstruction of a criminal investigation. What would have happened if they had actually indicted him is hard to say—but it never happened because Congress was busy drawing up the articles of impeachment that led directly to Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. The next day, Gerald Ford took the oath of office and became president. And a month after that, President Ford pardoned his predecessor, thus protecting him from criminal prosecution. (The question of whether Nixon effectively made Ford president in exchange for the promise of a pardon has never been settled. Ford was obliged to deny formally that such a deal existed when he was called to the House Judiciary Committee in the fall of 1974. But deal or no deal, that pardon cost him mightily: his approval rating dropped from 71% to 50% after he pardoned Nixon and that single act probably cost him the 1976 election.)  It would be fair to say Nixon’s legacy was permanently tarnished by his decision to resign, which was understood at the time as a kind of unspoken yet somehow fully audible admission of guilt. And his reputation too was left in tatters by the whole sorry affair. So Nixon’s story presents yet a third version of doing what it takes to avoid paying the piper: Harding skipped the whole thing by dying before the corruption in his own cabinet became known, Clinton swallowed one bitter pill after the next but eventually walked away intact from the whole nightmarish series of disasters he basically brought down upon himself, and Nixon accepted the humiliation of resignation and then flew off into the sunset to live out his life in California.

And now, Trump. Could he end up in prison? It feels impossible to imagine that actually happening, and yet the crimes with which he has been charged could easily and would probably lead to incarceration for a non-ex-president who wasn’t actually the front runner for his party’s nomination to run for president next year. Eugene Debs famously ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell. (He lost, slightly amusingly, to the above-mentioned Warren G. Harding.) And, if he had won, Debs would theoretically have not been barred by his own incarceration from serving. (He had promised to pardon himself if elected, however, which action with respect to himself would certainly be on the agenda for the first day of Prisoner Trump’s new term of office.) Still, the basic principle upon which any true democracy rests—the Torah’s own principle of one single set of laws governing all, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, well-connected and poorly connected and totally disconnected—that specific principle is alive and well in our American republic. And regardless of the outcome of the Trump trial in Florida, that is something for all to celebrate.

 

 

 

Martian Powers

When I was a boy, one of my favorite television shows was My Favorite Martian, which ran for just three years (from 1963 to 1966) and which starred Ray Walston as the Martian who crash-lands on Earth and Bill Bixby as the L.A.-based reporter who takes him in and who then becomes the sole earthling to whom the Martian reveals his astounding powers. (Did I like the show especially because the Martian took the earth-name Martin? Maybe!) And those powers were truly astounding. Uncle Martin could make himself fully invisible merely by raising two antennae otherwise hidden deep inside his skull and willing himself to disappear. That power, I particularly envied. But there was lots more. He could speak in English to animals and successfully will them to understand him perfectly. (I never thought to wonder why he didn’t address them in Martian.) He could will his body to function in a superhuman high-speed mode that made him able to accomplish work in minutes that would otherwise have taken hours. And he could will other people’s minds to open up before him so he could successfully read their thoughts and know what they were thinking. But of all his super-powers and abilities, the coolest was Uncle Martin’s ability to will inanimate objects to float in the air simply by pointing his index finger at them and then lifting his finger slightly. (He was also an amateur inventor of super-cool inventions, of which my favorite was definitely the “molecular separator,” a remarkable machine able to turn anything into anything else merely by “re-arranging” its molecules.)

Uncle Martin’s powers were basically discrete abilities, but the feature they all shared was the ability to alter the physical world in ways that earthlings possessed of human brains could only dream of. And that was the part that intrigued boy-me and made me wish I could have even some, let alone all, of Martian Martin’s powers, and thus be possessed of the ability telepathically to interact with the whole world in the way we humans can, generally speaking, communicate solely with our bodies.

The way the brain interacts with the body is one of the great mysteries of life, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand well enough to help those for whom the kind of interaction we all take so for granted is not working properly. So used to the whole thing are we, in fact, that it actually takes some discipline to think of brain-body interconnectivity as a thing at all. But it is a thing. And it is truly amazing too. Joan tells me (yet again) to put my dirty coffee cup in the dishwasher by coordinating her lungs, larynx, tongue, lips, and brain to produce sounds that she invests fully with meaning. This message is directly directed at me and I hear it—but, of course, I don’t hear the meaning, just the sound, which my ears somehow turn into the sort of electronic impulses that travel up my auditory nerve into my brain, and which my brain somehow manages to interpret not only as sound but as actual speech, which is to say: as sound suffused with meaning. And then, having successfully deciphered the message, that same brain of mine conceives of the correct response and somehow first wills my right arm to extend out in the direction of my empty coffee cup and then wills the fingers of my right hand successfully to grasp the handle of the cup and lift it up off the counter. And then that same brain, crackling with meaningful intensivity, somehow instructs my body to assume the standing position and to walk towards the dish washer, then to use my left hand to open the door and pull out the rack while my right hand manages to turn the cup upside down without dropping it (most of the time) and set it on the upper rack of the dishwasher. And this all happens so quickly that I fail even to perceive it as a process at all, let alone a complex one: Joan said to do something and I, ever eager not to irritate, do it. I hardly give the matter any thought at all! (Why she needs to ask this of me daily is a different question entirely.) And yet my point is not how fabulous a husband I am, but how quickly that whole procedure unfolds: the whole procedure from Joan conceiving of her wish that I put my cup in the dishwasher to me actually putting that cup in that machine takes, maybe, ten seconds. Or less.

So Uncle Martin could levitate ashtrays and bicycles, but I can will my body to behave in accordance with messages my brain sends out without me understanding even vaguely how any of the above works. I want to take my cup to the dishwasher, so I do it without even noticing the amazing mental and neurological processes that lead from the inception of the desire in the world of ideas to its fulfillment in the physical world of coffee cups and dishwashers.

These were the thoughts that I brought to reading about the truly remarkable announcement the other day that doctors in Switzerland have developed a kind of implant that, when properly set into the brain of paralyzed persons (that is, people whose brains’ instructions to their limbs are not getting through because of damage or deterioration of some sort), can provide a kind of “digital bridge” across which commands that originate in the brain can “find” (if that’s the right word) the correct part of the body’s musculature and then instruct, say, arms to rise or legs to walk.  If this sounds like science fiction to you, you’re not alone. Dr. Jocelyne Boch, the neuroscientist in Lausanne who successfully set just such an implant in the brain of the paralyzed man described in the article, said exactly that: “It was quite science fiction in the beginning for me, but it became true today.” (To read the whole article in the New York Times, click here.)

The article is about a man named Gert-Jan Oskam, a healthy looking fellow who was left paralyzed from the waist down by a motorcycle accident in 2011. Now possessed of this “digital” implant, his brain can skip past the damaged parts of his spinal cord and communicate his desire, say, to take a step forward to his legs, which can then obey. The result, that the man takes a step forward, is something all of us take for granted: what could possibly be less interesting to discuss than someone taking a step forward? That’s probably how we all feel…until we are confronted with devastating disability that makes it impossible for our brains to will our bodies to respond in certain specific ways. Another scientist in Lausanne explained the breakthrough in Oskam’s treatment like this: “We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement.”

We happily non-neurologically-impaired persons can probably not even begin to imagine what it would be like to will oneself to take a step forward and have one’s body not “hear” that command. Nor was this just about getting Oskam’s legs to move: previous efforts to re-connect his brain to his body, he said, left him with a sense of an “alien distance” between his mind and his body, whereas this new breakthrough so closely mimics “regular” thinking that he felt, he said, like a regular person willing himself to raise his arm or willing his leg to take a step forward.

The actual way this works is not for non-scientists like myself even to pretend to understand. (Even the Times’ article was, at least in part, beyond me.) But the notion that science has created a kind of bridge across which neurologically handicapped persons can send signals from their brain to their limbs even if part of the neural highway has collapsed and is non-functional—if that doesn’t qualify as a miracle of modern science, I don’t know what would.

I’m often asked if I find my faith in God as the source of all healing weakened by discoveries like these. The answer, as anyone who hears me preach regularly will already know, is that I don’t at all think that. The human body is a remarkable machine in almost every way. That it occasionally breaks down because a part wears out or is damaged and has to be repaired doesn’t strike me as theologically problematic. Normally, this is an uninteresting procedure: you break a tooth and the dentist fixes it. But advances like the one described above stir up in me only wonder. That human beings are fragile, brittle things that break easily is not the point. That we creatures of God are able somehow to teach ourselves how to fix our broken bits and pieces and parts in ways that even a generation earlier would have sounded like science fiction is, on the other hand, precisely the point. Creativity, intelligence, and inventiveness are the greatest of God’s gifts.