Profiles in Courage

 

In anticipation of the celebration this week of the 248^th anniversary our nation’s independence, I undertook to re-read President John Kennedy’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1956 bestseller, Profiles in Courage, a book I first encountered when it was assigned to me by Mrs. Gore in my eleventh-grade American history class. If I remember correctly, it impressed me then. But it astounded me now, and in several different ways. Of course, I am more than aware of the widespread belief that the book was substantially written by Theodore Sorensen, at the time a Kennedy speechwriter with a strong interest in American history, and that a good deal of the research that went into the book was undertaken by Jules Davids, a professor of diplomatic history at Georgetown, where he had among his students the young Jackie Kennedy, then still Jacqueline Bouvier. (Sorensen’s remark that he wasn’t the book’s author, merely the guy who wrote “the first draft of most of the book’s chapters” says more than enough.) Of course, I was unaware of any of this when I was in Mrs. Gore’s class and took the book to be the work of our martyred thirty-fifth president, whose memory we all revered and whom we all believed would have gone on to do truly great things if he had lived to the end of a second term in the White House. For better or worse, I will refer here to John Kennedy as the book’s author.

The book itself consists of a series of essays, eight in total, describing acts of moral heroism undertaken at various moment’s in our nation’s history by sitting senators. Most of the senators in question served in the Senate in the decades leading up to the Civil War or in the ones that followed; all are depicted as men who, rather than following the advice of their party or even the wishes of their constituents, chose instead to do what they perceived to be the right thing regardless of the consequences of their actions. These senators, in Kennedy’s opinion, were therefore heroes: men who chose to remain true to their own ideals and who were prepared to pay a big price for doing so.

That notion, of course, was and remains controversial: is the job of elected officials to do what they personally believe to be right or to represent their constituents vigorously and to vote in accordance with the wishes of the people who put them in office specifically to represent them in the Congress? It’s a good question! And it is telling, at least to me, that that specific issue is not debated or even raised really in the pages of the book: for the author, it goes without saying that the job of public officials is always to act in accordance with their own moral code and so to fulfill the “real” reasons anyone is elected to office in the first place: to do good, to promote virtue, to act in the best interests of the people, and to lead the nation forward to (or at least towards) the fulfillment of its national destiny. No more than that, but also no less!

What I liked so much about the book the first time ‘round (i.e., back in eleventh grade), I can’t quite recall. But what struck me this time was how complicated it is to say that politicians who act in accordance with their own values and ideals are always behaving in a praiseworthy manner—and that the corollary, that it is always base and unworthy for politicians to bow to public opinion, including the public opinion of their own constituents, is also true.

A good example would be the case of Senator Robert A. Taft, the son of the twenty-seventh president of the United States and the senator from Ohio from 1939 through 1953. What JFK particularly admired in Taft was his willingness to face nation-wide opprobrium for publicly opposing the Nuremberg Trials of some of the worst Nazi war criminals, to which Taft sneeringly referred as victor’s justice under ex post facto laws. This latter idea—that no one may be tried, let alone executed, for breaking laws that were only enacted after the deed under consideration was done—is a pillar of Western justice. But there was no one in the nation—except for Senator Taft, it seems—who was willing to apply that to the Nazis being tried in Nuremberg, whose crimes against humanity were—at least for most—so beyond the pale of “normal” criminality that the regular rules could not reasonably apply to them. Nor did Taft mince his words on the topic, repeatedly referencing the trials as being far more about vengeance than justice. This could not possibly have been a less popular opinion and he was publicly lambasted both by Republicans and Democrats for daring suggest that there was something intrinsically illegal afoot in Nuremberg and for going so far as to characterize Nuremberg as “a miscarriage of justice that the American people would long regret.” (To read the New York Times article of October 6, 1946 recording the senator’s words, click here.) It is widely believed that this principled opposition to the Nuremberg Trials is what cost Taft the Republican nomination for President in 1952.

JFK admires Taft immensely for knowing what he believed to be right and for repeatedly paying gigantic prices for being true to his own self. (His pre-Pearl-Harbor opposition to US involvement in World War II is widely thought to have cost him the Republican nomination in 1940, which he also didn’t get in 1948 because—or at least probably because—of his isolationist positioning.) I felt myself swept along by Kennedy’s rhetoric too: I couldn’t have agreed with Robert Taft less on most issues, including—possibly most of all—the legitimacy of Nuremberg. And yet I was struck by the portrait of a man with the courage of his convictions, of a man who would simply not lie about how he felt for his own gain.

The other portraits in the book are equally stirring, most of all the portraits of Edmund G. Ross, the senator from Kansas who broke with his party and the large majority of his constituency to vote to acquit at the impeachment trial in the Senate of President Andrew Johnson, and of Lucius Lamar, senator from Mississippi, who alienated huge numbers of his constituents by attempting to re-integrate the South into the Union and by supporting Black suffrage. At this juncture in history, it would probably be a good thing for all Americans to review Kennedy’s book—including those of us who last read it as teenagers. The chapters are a bit uneven (and some presume a familiarity with American history that will not correspond to what most readers will bring along to their encounter with the book), but the book’s basic argument—that our nation has been blessed over the centuries to have among its leaders people whose devotion to their own ideals and principles was ironclad and unshakeable—is something American would do well to consider and reconsider as we wrap up the first quarter of this century and move on into the second.

We have evolved a system in which we esteem above all else flexibility of opinion and elasticity of conviction. We hail as our greats individuals who get things done, who are effective and energetic, who know how to compromise. And we specifically do not admire people who refuse to go along with the majority, who insist on sticking to their opinions no matter what the consequences, who don’t mind being widely reviled if such is the price for being true their personal convictions. Indeed, the notion itself that the job of senators and members of the House is to embody their own virtues rather than invariably to act in accordance with the opinions of their constituents is probably the opposite of what most people think. And that is what makes President Kennedy’s book so challenging and so interesting—because, in the end, the book is a provocative argument that democracy needs leaders with vision and virtue, not ones who see their job as simply doing what they are told by the voters. In turn, this question leads to others. With whom should the ultimate power rest in a democracy—with the people (who are, after all, the demos in democracy) or with its leaders, chose precisely because of their vision and personal philosophy? How should history judge those who claim to believe in democracy but who—like JFK, apparently—ultimately hail as heroes elected officials who refuse to obey the wishes of the people who put them office? What does it even mean to lead a nation, for that matter: to do as the people demand or to inspire them to want what you feel is in their own best interests? Is that paternalism or leadership? Does hoi polloi get the final vote? Or is putting that kind of power in the hands of the masses precisely what leads to Nazism and Maoism? These are the questions that Profiles in Courage awakened in me as we approach the nation’s semiquincentennial in just two years. Are our leaders supposed to lead or be led? Do the people have the final word? Or is their job to put in place leaders whose sense of allegiance to their own virtues and values will lead the nation forward to its destiny? These are all excellent questions…and one more timely than the next!

Weakening Our Most Protective Wall

I haven’t much used this space to comment on news from other states, but I seem to be in that mode precisely now: last week I wrote about the new law in North Dakota restricting the rights of voters to elect federal officials who will turn 81 before the end of the year before their terms expires. And now I’m going to write about a different new law, the one passed in Louisiana earlier this month that is going to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom in the state. And not displayed casually either: the law requires that the text be presented on “a poster or a framed document that is at least 11 inches by 14 inches” in size. Furthermore, it must be “printed in a large, easily readable font.” Also, the act doesn’t leave anything to chance and actually enshrines in law the specific translation that must be used, one that is clearly derived from Protestant (as opposed to Catholic, let alone Jewish) tradition. To read the act itself, click here.

You might expect a rabbi-author such as myself to be delighted. The Torah teaches that the Ten Commandments were spoken aloud by God to the Israelites camped at the foot of Sinai, after all, and they are widely understood to constitute the core of the covenant that binds the God of Israel and the people Israel. So why should I object to such a text being disseminated widely, and perhaps especially to children? There are actually lots of reasons.

First and foremost, I am convinced that nothing good will come from degrading the barrier that our country used to pride itself on maintaining between church and state. I have made that argument many times in this space and it’s very much still what I think. The White House Christmas tree irritates me. The White House seder hosted by the Obamas from 2009 to 2016, times ten. (And the fact that it was unkosher is specifically not what I found so wrong with it. But that too.) And then there’s the White House Chanukah Party, initiated by President Bush in 2001 just a few months after 9/11, and carried forward by every President since. All those lighted menorahs look pretty enough on display in the West Wing, but the whole thing feels wrong to me, wrong and deeply counterproductive to our wish to maintain and, if possible, even to strengthen the wall between church and state in our country, that wall that permits all citizens to conduct their spiritual lives without interference from the government and without having to vet their religious practices with the government before engaging in them. I’m an equal-opportunity curmudgeon though, not solely a Jewish one: I find the plastic Christmas tree in the post office in December every bit as annoying as the plastic menorah on display annually in what should be a government facility free of all religious influence.

But this new law in Louisiana is bizarre for other reasons as well.

First of all, if the assumption is that being exposed as children to the Ten Commandments is going to achieve the kind of American society Justice Alito had in mind in his secretly recorded comment the other week to the effect that America should return “to a place of godliness,” then it’s hard to know how that is going to work since so much of the text of the Ten Commandments is out of sync with practices that are standard in our nation and our nation’s churches. Every serious biblical scholar knows, for example, that the Sabbath mentioned in the fourth commandment is Shabbat, i.e., Saturday, not Sunday. (For a simple explanation of why the Church moved its weekly day of worship to Sunday as opposed to holding it on Shabbat, click here.)  The Second Commandment forbids the use of plastic imagery in worship, but America’s churches are filled with artwork and statuary. Nor does this new law make sense on a partisan level, even: Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana, has formally endorsed Donald Trump’s candidacy for President, but the seventh commandment prohibits adulterous relationships as contrary to God’s law. I suppose there are ways to explain away all of these issues, but it still seems strange for Louisiana’s governor to wish that these laws be presented to school children as the essence of God’s revelation and then leave it to the children’s teachers to explain to the boys and girls why Michelangelo was not behaving wickedly in depicting God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, let alone who exactly Stormy Daniels is.

But the real reason I’m opposed to the Louisiana law has to do with the concept of textual integrity, which is to say, with the notion that you cannot read a text out of context and then insist that you understand it.

The story is beyond riveting. The Israelites cross the Sea of Reeds, then head south into the wilderness. They have no idea what they are going to eat or where they should camp. There is no obvious source of drinking water, at least not at first. They must know that Canaan, the Promised Land, lies to the north, not the south. And yet their leader, “that man Moses,” insists that they head in the opposite direction, but without saying clearly—or really even at all—why they should or what they can or should expect once they arrive wherever it is that they are going.  This goes on for seven weeks, the forty-nine days later enshrined in Jewish tradition as the s’firah, the “counting.” And then the Israelites arrive at Sinai. They have been told that they are coming “to God,” but without having had it explained to them even vaguely what that could possibly mean. They are told what to do: to wash their clothing and to refrain from intimate relations for a period of three days, but without being told precisely what is about to happen.

And then the scene commences that we all know. The mountain is covered by cloud and smoke. Deafening shofar blasts can be heard, but without it being clear where the shofars are or who is blowing air into them. Bolts of lightning illumine the sky. Claps of thunder are fully audible, combining with the shofar blasts  and the lightning to create an atmosphere that is both blinding and deafening. And then, all at once, a deep silence. The shofarot  fall silent. The lightning stops. And God speaks to the people.

What follows is the Ten Commandments, the text we all know by heart or almost by heart. But the story continues in a way that would probably surprise the Governor of Louisiana if he were to open up his Bible and continue reading. After just ten commandments, the people feel enervated to the point of exhaustion by the experience of audible, sensory communion with God. They break into what was presumably meant to be an ongoing revelation of divine law and beg Moses to go up personally to the top of the mountain “where God was” and himself to retrieve the rest of the rules and laws that are to serve as the meat of the covenant intended forever to bind Israel and God. What Moses thought is not recorded, but his actual response is: he kindly tells them that they’ve passed the test God has imposed upon them (but without saying what exactly was being tested or even what precisely the test was), then heads up the mountain. God, in our day so taciturn, is positively talkative: Moses has barely begun to ascend the mountain and God is already continuing the revelation. And then, presumably once Moses is settled in atop Sinai, God really gets going and continues to detail the rules and laws that will constitute the covenant.

All these Moses records in a document called “the Book of the Covenant,” sefer ha-b’rit. And then he returns to the people, reads the book aloud to them—since they cannot reasonably be expected to enter into the covenant blindly, i.e., without knowing what is to be expected of them as the human parties to it—and only then, after the people formally agrees to follow the rules of the covenant, is the weird and wonderful sacrificial ceremony described in detail in Exodus 24 undertaken. The people agree to stand still while the blood of a slaughtered bull is splattered all over them. And God, amazingly, deigns to be seen…but only by the elders of the nation and only from below so that all they really see are the soles of the divine feet.

And that is the real story of the Ten Commandments, that they are merely the first ten of the sixty-odd laws that constitute the terms of the covenant between the Jewish people and the God of Israel. Later on, God will issue many more laws and statutes that will henceforth govern Jewish life. But the terms of covenant itself—the terms included in the sefer ha-b’rit—are presented in Scripture in Exodus, chapters 20 through 23. So singling out the Ten Commandments and suggesting that they are somehow different in kind or nature from the rest of the commandments that constitute the covenant is either naively or willfully to misread the text of Scripture.

Yes, it is true that Moses later breaks the tablets of the law emblazoned with the first ten of the commandments, then refashions the tablets atop the mountain and redelivers them to the people. But there is no reasonable way to read the scriptural narrative to yield the conclusion that God’s covenant with Israel only “really” includes the first ten commandments, let alone that these are intended to serve all of humankind as the basis of decent and ethical behavior.

The new law requiring that schools display the Ten Commandment in every classroom in Louisiana is an egregious breach of the wall between church and state. And it imputes a meaning to the text that has no basis in the actual scriptural narrative. For both those reasons, I hope that the courts strike down this law and re-affirm the barrier between the government and the religious lives of the citizenry.