Looking Away

Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve been reading with some combination of horror and lascivious fascination about the scandal surrounding the arrest last week of Pennsylvania State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. I do not wish to write about the specifics of the case against Sandusky, however. For one thing, I have nothing to add to what everybody already knows, which is what has been repeated endlessly in the newspapers and on television and the radio in the course of the last week. Nor, as you all know, do I ever have any interest in looking past the civic obligation we all share to grant the presumption of innocence to people who have not actually been found guilty in a court of law. What I do wish to write about, however, is a feature of the case against Sandusky that actually has nothing at all to do with him personally.

Unrelated to the question of the guilt of the accused is the question of the behavior of all those others who saw evidence that he was guilty, or who thought they did, and who either did nothing at all about it or else contented themselves with passing the buck along to someone else who ultimately did nothing about it. Sandusky was arrested and charged with forty counts involving the alleged molestation of eight boys over a fifteen-year period. Are there more children involved who simply have not yet come forward? There’s no way to know if there are, or if any of those theoretical other children will now come forward, but the more interesting question to ponder is how abuse on this scale could take place—none of it behind locked doors and most of it in public space in a facility open to staff, students, and visitors alike—without anyone acting decisively to put an end to it. (The investigation that led to the grand jury indictment was undertaken only after the mother of one of the boys came forward to report her son’s abuse after it had been going on for three years. But that boy’s experience was recent compared with what the police now believe happened to some of the other alleged victims.)

The grand jury testimony is beyond chilling not only in terms of the horribleness of what the children involved allegedly experienced, but also in terms of what the story implies about human nature itself. A janitor walks into the shower room at Penn State in 2000 and sees what he takes to be the sexual assault of a child in progress before his eyes. He reports the incident to his superior, as he was told he was supposed to do in such a situation, but the superior in question does nothing at all, failing both to inform the police and to bring the charge to the attention of other school officials. Two years later, a graduate assistant walks into the same shower facility and sees what he too takes to be the rape of a child of about ten years of age in progress. He duly reports the incident to the athletic director of the facility, as he had previously been instructed to do in such an event, but the incident is never reported to the police. Nor does the athletic director bother to inform his own higher-ups. Procedure is followed, at least to a certain extent. But nothing at all happens to safeguard the children who come to that facility to enjoy a day of sports and competition. The matter is eventually buried, forgotten. The world keeps spinning. No one knows. And no one seems to care either.

Let’s put ourselves in the picture. We see something that appears incredibly wrong. We could be wrong about what we think we’ve seen, but we have no more reason to think that any more than any of us ever doubts what we see with our own eyes and our brains experience no difficulty deciphering or interpreting. Nor are we expected to go to law school and only then decide how or whether to proceed. Indeed, the specific legal question of whether the person we believe that we saw behaving poorly is guilty of an actual crime is hardly our call anyway—in our great land, people are found guilty by juries of their peers or by judges trained in the law, not by bystanders even if they walk in on them in flagrante delicto—but we surely understand that something very wrong is going on. And yet we either do nothing at all or else feel done with the matter once we report it, even though we understand perfectly well that nothing has happened, that the person we saw with our own eyes behaving incredibly poorly and endangering the welfare of young children is still at it, still hanging around, still bringing boys into the facility where he is apparently free to behave as he wishes. But, having technically complied with the instructions in some rule book, we allow ourselves to overlook the fact that nothing has actually happened to prevent the perceived offender from re-offending.

To speak about the Sandusky case itself for a moment, I suppose it’s possible that all these eye witnesses were wrong, that they thought they saw something very wrong but were simply misinterpreting what was nothing more than good natured, if excruciatingly vulgar, horsing around. I’m sure Sandusky’s lawyers will attempt to depict the allegations in just that light, but that is precisely my point: it is the job of the police to investigate allegations of misconduct and then to decide if the allegations are credible or not. And it is the job of the district attorney to determine if the behavior in question constitutes a crime of which the accused can actually be indicted. And it is the job of the grand jury to weigh the evidence and then either to return an indictment against the accused or not to return one. But the original witnesses—the individuals who saw with their own eyes what they had no difficulty understanding or deciphering—cannot feel morally done with the matter once they see clearly that nothing has happened to halt the abuse. And what about the boys’ parents? Is it possible they were all completely unaware of what had befallen their sons? I suppose it is possible to look and not to see, but it still seems incredible that the boys’ doctors, their teachers in school, their parents, the parents of their friends, their friends themselves, their principals, their clergy people, their neighbors, their coaches, their guidance counselors—that no one at all noticed the pain, the fear, the emotional distress, or any sign at all that something horrible had happened. Yet no one at all spoke up for, so the indictment, fifteen long years.

The whole question of people—and apparently lots of them—being capable of looking past one of the most heinous of crimes and doing nothing at all about it is the aspect of the case that calls out to me. I was eleven when Kitty Genovese was murdered on Austin Street, just a few blocks from my parents’ apartment house in Forest Hills. I was only in fifth grade at the time, but I can easily recall the brouhaha that followed once it became clear—or at least once it was widely believed—that dozens of people would necessarily have heard that poor woman screaming and yet chose to do nothing to help her. There has been a lot of debate over the years about what actually happened—although it appears to be basically true that she screamed for help repeatedly and no one phoned the police or came out into the street to offer her any assistance—but the whole incident somehow became emblematic of the ability of people simply not to hear what they do not wish to hear, not to see what they will only complicate their own lives by seeing, and not to feel responsible for actions that no one could credibly describe as any of their business.

For Jews, of course, this is an old story. There is a beautiful, tree-lined avenue at Yad Vashem on which each tree honors one of the righteous non-Jews who put his or her life on the line to save Jewish lives during the Shoah. It is a stirring place to visit, but, like all trees, these too cast a shadow—in this case on the vast majority of Europeans living under Nazi rule who were capable of looking on from afar as their Jewish neighbors were degraded, deprived of even their most elemental civil rights, and then eventually either murdered or deported to their deaths, yet who had it in their hearts to do nothing at all to help. In the New York Times the other day, David Brooks took his readers to task for allowing themselves smugly to assume that they would have necessarily have behaved better if they were in Joe Paterno’s shoes or in assistant coach Mike McQueary’s, that they would never have had it in them to look away when children were being abused, that they would have done the right thing if they had been living on Austin Street the night Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered. Brooks’ point, well made and well argued, is that none of us can say with certainty how we would behave in such a situation, that there are people who step up and do indeed do the right thing and other people who simply do not…and that none of us can know with absolute certainty in advance to which group we will belong until the opportunity to speak out or not to speak out actually presents itself. (You can find David Brooks’ essay, called “Let’s All Feel Superior,” here. It’s a good read and I recommend it to you.)

But saying that none of us can say with certainty how we would behave in such a situation and then leaving it at that is hardly enough. As I said before, I have no way of knowing in advance what the outcome of Jerry Sandusky’s trial is going to be and I see no point in behaving as though I do. But I do think we could all profit by taking the backstory to heart and asking ourselves whether we have earned the right smugly to condemn all those who could have stepped forward over a decade and a half and yet who found it in their hearts to remain silent and to do nothing…and, since we’re asking unsettling, stress-inducing questions, also by asking ourselves how sure we are that we would have earned the right to be honored with a tree at Yad Vashem when exerting ourselves to save a Jewish child would have put our own children’s lives at risk. Those questions too, of course, have no answers. But asking them of ourselves can itself be a salutary exercise: to grow morally throughout the years of our lives, we need consistently and repeatedly to look out at the world and, instead of taking smug satisfaction in condemning those who appear to have behaved disgracefully, asking ourselves if we truly know our own mettle…and then, once we admit (as we all must) that we do not, by then asking what we are doing constantly to grow spiritually and ethically so as to guarantee that no one will ever say of any of us that we had the opportunity to do good in the world but simply looked away.

Throw-Away Children

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two different cases, both of which are predicated on the argument that sentencing minors—in both of the cases at hand, young teenagers—to lifetimes in prison without the possibility of parole constitutes precisely the kind of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

The background to the decision to hear these cases is instructive and has mostly to do with the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the case known as Graham vs. Florida, in which the justices concluded that the clause prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment “does not permit a juvenile offender to be sentenced to life in prison without parole for a non-homicide crime.” In other words, the court held that sentencing a juvenile to die in prison—which is the more stark way of saying that someone is sentenced to life without the possibility of parole—is unconstitutional if the crime of which the young person in question was convicted was not murder. The number of juveniles convicted of the kind of non-homicide crimes that resulted in that kind of sentence—rape, armed robbery, and kidnapping—is about 130. Those, however, are the small minority of prisoners in our country who were convicted as minors and sentenced to death in prison: if you include those found guilty of some form of homicide, the number rises to over 2,000 prisoners. Moving incrementally forward, the Court has now agreed to hear cases deemed representative of the about seventy people (out of that 2,000 figure) who were under the age of fourteen when they committed the crime that led to them being convicted of some version of homicide and then given sentences of life-long incarceration. And the Court has, I assume intentionally, chosen to begin with two cases that involve minors who themselves did not actually kill, but whose deeds were deemed participatory in murder. (I should make it clear that the Court’s earlier ruling does not imply that any young people currently serving life sentences without the possibility of parole is necessarily going to be retried or resentenced, let alone have his or her conviction overturned. All it means is that the young people in this category must at some point be given some chance to show that they have matured enough while in prison to warrant being permitted “to rejoin society” rather than staying in prison for the rest of their lives. What is on the table now is the question of whether the homicide exclusion is constitutional.)

In one of the cases the Court has agreed to hear, Jackson vs. Hobbs, the defendant, a fourteen-year-old named Kuntrell Jackson, participated in the robbery of a video store in Arkansas in 1999 during the course of which one of the other robbers shot and killed the clerk working in the store. In the other case, one called Miller vs. Alabama, a fourteen-year-old named Evan Miller and an older friend, both of them drunk and high on marijuana, administered a beating to a neighbor in 2003. They then set his house on fire, as a result of which the neighbor died of smoke inhalation. These are horrific crimes that resulted in the death of innocents. Surely, society cannot look the other way when citizens are murdered in the places of employment or in their homes merely because the persons responsible for their deaths did not specifically set out that day to kill anyone. I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with that thought, and yet I find myself strangely unsure about how I feel about the actual matter before the Court.

Just to provide a bit more background, the Supreme Court has already ruled that the death penalty may not be imposed on minors. (The original decision, making it illegal to sentence juveniles under sixteen years of age to death dates back to 1988. Then, in 2005, the Court determined that no one under eighteen may receive the death penalty.) But it is specifically not the death penalty that is under discussion here.

On the one hand, fourteen-year-olds are children. Our bar- and bat-mitzvah boys and girls are only slightly younger. Many need to stand on the box we keep on the bimah when they deliver their remarks so they can see over the lectern. They aren’t even in high school yet, and so it seems impossible to imagine them or other young people their age already beyond redemption, already so far beyond the pale of normal and rational behavior that the only reasonable way for society to deal with them is to lock them up forever and then to toss away the key. Would I feel differently if it was my brother who died in that house fire, or if it was my dad working in that video store? I’m sure I would, but that, of course, is precisely why we do not invite the brothers or sons of homicide victims to serve on the juries considering the fates of their relatives’ alleged murderers.

Where should Jewish people stand on an issue like this? On the one hand, our tradition is strongly in favor of using the justice system to make society safe. (And people—of any age—who participate in armed robbery or who set other people’s homes on fire are clearly dangerous and violent people who make society the precise opposite of safe.) On the other hand, our tradition is adamant that the gates of teshuvah, of repentance, are always open…and that there is no one at all who cannot turn around, who cannot renounce sin (and crime), and, through the sheer force of will and the power of faith, become a God-fearing person from whom society has nothing at all to fear. Of course, there is no way to know in advance who will choose that path and there are no guarantees, nor could there ever be, that even defendants who appear the most docile and chastened in the course of their trials will actually make the decision to abandon their evil ways and embrace goodness. If guarantees like that were possible, then that would make the administration of justice a whole lot simpler! Seen in that light, the question, really, before the court is not whether violent criminals are bad people, but whether we are prepared, as a society, to say that there simply are children—and fourteen-year-olds are children no matter how horrifically poorly they behave—of whom it can be reasonably said that there is no reasonable hope for them to grow past the badness of their earlier years and end up as law-abiding citizens from whom society needs to fear nothing at all. Isn’t that what we are saying to a fourteen-year-old to whom we deny even the possibility of parole: that there is no possibility of you ever growing past the out-of-controlledness of your youth and therefore no possibility of society ever no longer needing to incarcerate you. And, if that really is the case, then why shouldn’t we just say so out loud and save you from a lifetime of hoping in vain for mercy that will never come?

Our Torah, towards the end of Deuteronomy considers the case of the rebellious son. In my own translation, the passage reads as follows: “If someone should have a violent and rebellious son who does not listen to his father’s instructions or to his mother’s, then, assuming they have attempted to discipline him and he still refuses to obey, his father and mother should seize him and bring him…to the gates of their hometown. And there shall they say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is violent and rebellious, he does not listen to our instructions, and he is a glutton and a sot.’ All the inhabitants of his city shall then stone him with stones until he dies, and thus shall you eradicate evil from your midst so that all Israel hear and become chastened” (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). That sounds gruesome enough and, indeed, all those people who can’t find enough reason to hate religion and mock its teachings naturally can’t get enough of this passage. But for us, the question isn’t really what the Torah says, but what it means. And that requires considering the oral traditions that go along with a passage like this, traditions generally ignored entirely by people eager for any pretext to heap abuse on the Bible.

The most convenient place to find the laws relating to the rebellious son catalogued is in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. (The more precise place to find them in that encyclopedic work is in the seventh and final chapter of the section called Hilkhot Mamrim, the Laws Pertaining to the Rebellious.) And there we find the beginning of our answer regarding the proper Jewish response to the matter before the Supreme Court. For one thing, the laws pertaining to this rebellious son are so restrictive that it’s easy to understand where Rabbi Simeon was coming from when he declared that this law was never actually used to convict anyone at all and that it appears in Scripture merely to teach a profound lesson about the importance of obedience towards one’s parents. (His opinion is found in Tractate Sanhedrin on page 71a.) The son in question, for example, cannot be a minor—he must already have reached the age of commandments—but he also can’t be a full-fledged adult (because then why would the Torah reference him as a “son”?) So he must be thirteen, but not yet fully physically mature—and no boy exists in that state, so Rambam, for more than three months. On top of that, tradition declares that he must actually have stolen money from his parents and used the stolen funds to purchase meat and wine. (Not that many twelve year olds have a taste for wine, so that law represents a serious narrowing of the law’s applicability. But the Torah specifically requires that his parents condemn him as a glutton and a drunkard!) If such a precocious lad is located, then he must have eaten the meat and drunk the wine outside of his father’s house, but not by himself either. Instead, he has to have consumed the goods purchased with stolen funds in the company of hooligans and ruffians. The meat itself must be eaten raw, but not entirely raw—thus slightly cooked—and the wine must have been thinned with water before being drunk. If the meat wasn’t kosher, the law doesn’t apply. If he consumed the forbidden feast on a fast day, the law doesn’t apply. If he consumed the food at a feast connected somehow with the performance of the commandments, for example at the feast following a bris or at a wedding, the law doesn’t apply. If the value of the food is less than fifty dinarim, or if the meat alone was not worth that much, the law does not apply. If his parents forgive him, the law does not apply. Nor does the law apply in any way to daughters.

You get the picture. No wonder Rabbi Simeon wondered how anyone could ever be convicted! To be fair, a different rabbi, Rabbi Jonathan, is cited in that same passage as mentioning that he himself once visited the grave of such a boy. But, realistically speaking, how many such children could ever have been executed. My guess is none at all. Or the one whose grave Rabbi Jonathan came across and no more. The bottom line is that, despite the unimpeachable sanctity and authority of Scripture, the rabbis could not imagine that the simple meaning of the text—that inveterately rebellious children should be given up on and suitably and permanently punished—could be the whole story. They accepted the text as sacred. But, by focusing the law through the prism of their own moral consciousness, they found the courage to take the text as hyperbole intended solely to warn the faithful against taking a cavalier attitude towards the respect and obedience we owe our parents. In other words, they simply could not imagine that a boy of thirteen and a few months could possibly be so irretrievably bad that the only rational response to his poor behavior would be to end it violently and permanently by taking his life. And these were hardly people, our ancient sages, who treated the words of the Torah lightly!

I think the Supreme Court is on the right track. So were our ancient sages. Executing children is barbaric and wrong. But throwing them into prison and supposing that nothing—no amount of counseling, no amount of maturing, no amount of teaching, no amount of exposure to positive, moral role models, nothing at all—could ever help a troubled, violent boy or girl turn into the kind of adult who could live constructively and peacefully in the world, that seems to me to be as wrong an idea as anyone ever had. Would I feel differently if it was my dad who got shot in that video store? I’m sure I would. But I would be wrong. There are no children worth throwing away.

Mormons and Jews

A Public Religion Institute Poll released last Friday indicated that less than half of registered voters could identify Mitt Romney’s religion correctly. The number of Americans overall who could say that Romney is a Mormon was even lower. (The numbers were 49% and 42%, respectively.) That would seem to suggest that, should he get the nod, the governor’s religion will not be a major factor in the race. Nonetheless, I do not believe that will be the case.

That, of course, isn’t to say that most of us won’t wish it to be so. My sense is that an overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans would easily support the notion that a candidate’s personal religious beliefs should be as irrelevant as skin color or ethnic origin when it comes to deciding which candidate is the most worthy. That, however, is clearly not the view of a significant portion of non-Jewish Americans. A Gallup poll from a few weeks ago came up with the result that a full 20% of Republicans would not vote for a Mormon candidate no matter how otherwise qualified he or she might be. The Reverend Robert Jeffress, an evangelical pastor who leads a gigantic mega-church in Dallas, made a huge stir last month when he declared that in his opinion Mormonism was not even a real religion, just some sort of cult, and that its members were kidding themselves if they thought of themselves as Christians. Rick Perry, Romney’s chief contender and the candidate the reverend is backing, politely distanced himself from that statement. But there’s no question that lots of evangelicals agree with the pastor. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant church body in the United States and the second-largest Christian organization in the United States (only the Catholic Church is bigger), has officially labeled Mormonism a cult as well. And the reverend was probably quite right when he responded to his critics, and they were legion, by referencing the Southern Baptists’ stand and adding that, in his opinion, “there are a lot of people who will not publicly say that's an issue because they don't want to appear to be bigoted, but for a lot of evangelical Christians this is a huge issue, even if it's unspoken.” For better or worse, I think he’s probably got that exactly right. (If you’re not sure how far some anti-Mormons are prepared to take this, take a look at www.exposemittromney.com and you’ll see what I mean.)

If we exclude information gleaned from watching The Book of Mormon or Angels in America on Broadway, most Jewish Americans know almost nothing about Mormonism. And most Jewish Americans don’t live anywhere near Broadway anyway! What many of us have heard about, and find beyond perverse, is the Mormons’ creepy custom of posthumously baptizing Shoah victims, thus making them—in their own minds only, of course—into ex-post-facto members of the Mormon faith. Correctly called “vicarious baptism” or “proxy baptism,” the practice—condemned by every other major Christian denomination, including the Catholic Church—involves baptizing a living person on behalf of a deceased individual and the Mormons have been doing just that since 1840. The practice, however, is not limited to the martyrs of the Holocaust. Other prominent Jews—including Maimonides, Irving Berlin, and Albert Einstein—have apparently also been baptized posthumously. Nor is the practice limited to Jews: just last year it was revealed that, of all people, President Obama’s late mother was posthumously baptized by Mormons acting wholly on their own. She thus joins Heinrich Himmler, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus in club of unwitting and unwilling after-the-fact Mormons. The whole thing is so patently ridiculous that it is hard to know whether the more rational response should be anger or incredulity. To their credit (and in response in no small part to the Jewish community’s outrage), the Mormons claim to have stopped the practice in 1995. And just last September they agreed to remove the names of all previously posthumously baptized Jewish Shoah survivors from their rolls.

The opinion Jewish Americans have of Mitt Romney should, of course, be a function of his record in the world of business and as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. I wish today, however, not specifically to write about Mitt Romney at all, but about another Mormon, one who seems to have been long forgotten by everybody but who showed uncommon insight and bravery in standing up for Jewish interests when the rest of the world noted the devastation wrought by the Nazis on the Jews of Germany on Kristallnacht, which occurred seventy-three years ago next Wednesday, and then quickly looked away. The man’s name was William Henry King, and he represented Utah in the United States Senate from 1917 to 1941. He was also president pro tempore of the Senate in 1939-1941, which put him third in line to succeed to the presidency should the president have become incapacitated. (Amazingly enough, he was not the only William King ever to serve as president pro tempore. William R. King, our country’s shortest serving Vice President, was president pro tempore of the Senate from 1836 to 1841 and then again from 1850 to 1852.)

By all accounts, Kristallnacht was the end of the beginning of the Shoah, the event that, at least in retrospect, serves as the watershed moment after which nothing was ever again the same for the Jews of Germany. In the course of one evening of terror, over 1600 synagogues were ransacked. Hundreds more were burnt to the ground. Countless Jewish businesses and shops were destroyed. Ninety-one people were murdered in the course of one single evening and over 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and carted off to concentration camps. (Of them, more than two thousand died as a result of the brutal treatment to which they were subjected and the rest were forced as a condition of their release to agree to leave Germany.) For those of us looking back on the horror after all these years, it seems impossible to imagine the world not finally awakening to the demonism that had seized Germany and responding dramatically and forcefully.

Mostly, the world yawned. No economic sanctions were put into place against Nazi Germany. America recalled its ambassador to Germany briefly as a kind of formal protest against the ferocity of the pogrom, but diplomatic relations were not severed. Nor were immigration quotas in the free world relaxed to permit the Jews of Germany to escape to freedom. Even something as innocuous and deeply humanitarian as the Wagner-Rogers bill, which would have allowed 20,000 Jewish children to come to the United States outside the quota system, was opposed by FDR and eventually died in committee. As chronicled just this week by Rafael Medoff in an op-ed piece published on the website of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Christian America was equally unmoved. (You can find Medoff’s very interesting essay here.) And then there was William H. King. Arguably the most powerful Mormon in the United States at the time, King chastised FDR for recalling our ambassador “for consultations,” correctly understanding that the Germans would understand the move as little more than a slap on the wrist. And then, when President Roosevelt—as unmoved by the events of Kristallnacht as he was apparently uninterested in risking his own political capital by moving aggressively even to rescue children from the Nazis—coldly noted in public that a revision of American’s immigration quota system was “not in contemplation,” King responded by suggesting that Alaska be opened up entirely as a haven for Jewish refugees.

Why don’t I know about that? I read Michael Chabon’s novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union a few years ago and liked it less than I had hoped I was going to, yet I somehow missed the fact that it was rooted in history rather than solely in the author’s imagination. It turns out that there was indeed such a proposal. Called the Slattery Report, it was named for Undersecretary of the Interior Harry A. Slattery but produced at the behest of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. And it specifically proposed that Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, then the extent of the Reich, be permitted to settle in four specific locations in Alaska. (The concept was that the quota program could be legally sidestepped in this specific way because Alaska was a territory of the United States, not a state.) In retrospect, it seems like a zany sort of response to Kristallnacht, but perhaps that is only how it seems this long after the fact. At the time, it had the support of an interesting range of religious organizations, including the Labor Zionists of America, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Federal Council of Churches. It could surely have made a difference in the fate of countless European Jews. And it was none other than William King who introduced the bill into the Senate. (Representative Frank Havenner, a Democrat from California, introduced the bill into the House of Representatives.) But without Roosevelt’s support, this bill too was buried in committee and never again saw the light of day.

Still, as people line up to decide whether or not Mitt Romney’s religion should impact on voters’ decision whether or not to support his bid for the presidency, it might be worth considering that when the Jewish people was facing the darkest of hours in its history, a concrete, dramatic, and eminently doable plan to save countless European Jews was introduced into the Senate by a Mormon. When America’s leaders could not bring themselves to act decisively even to save children, King took the Slattery Report and put his considerable authority behind it, proposing it be enacted into law. It came to nothing at all. Obviously, it hardly make sense to support or not to support Mitt Romney because of something William King did more than seventy years ago. But when I think of Mormonism in general—and I haven’t seen the musical, although Joan and Max, my oldest, did—I find myself able to look past the nuttiness of posthumously baptizing Anne Frank—a practice I believe even the Mormons themselves must now regret—and remember instead the fine and noble example set for us all by William Henry King, a brave man for whom the notion that it was “not in contemplation” to act decisively to save the Jews of Europe was reason enough to act outside the boundaries of political loyalty and to go up against his president to do the right thing.

Advice for the 99%

Like many of you, I suspect, I’ve only been vaguely aware of the Occupy Wall Street people camped out in Zuccotti Park for the last six weeks or so. I don’t even think I knew where Zuccotti Park was until just recently. (It’s in Lower Manhattan between Broadway, Trinity Place, and Liberty and Cedar Streets. It was called Liberty Plaza Park until 2006, but I don’t believe I knew where that was either.) Maybe some of you know all about it, but I certainly cannot agree with Douglas Rushkoff, the CNN columnist who wrote the other week that, at least in his opinion, “anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful.” Yet, if there’s one thing Jewish history has taught me, it’s never to shrug off large numbers of unhappy people demonstrating in the street as irrelevant or unimportant merely because they don’t overtly appear to have anything to do with me personally. And so I set myself to attempting to figure out what this is all about. (And the numbers are not inconsequential. A few weeks ago there were, by police estimates, 15,000 people in the park. And they were joined by tens of thousands of others demonstrating across the globe in places as diverse as Auckland, Sydney, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, São Paulo, Paris, Madrid, Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Phoenix, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Were we to understand that these were all spontaneous demonstrations of support for the people in Zuccotti Park? That was how the media depicted the demonstrations…but that too caught my attention. What, I asked myself, could possibly have inspired all these people simultaneously to mount the barricades? Or is that just the kind of question someone would ask who neither has a Twitter account nor understands why anyone would want to have one? Maybe that is just how the world works now! But can someone really tweet and get tens of thousands across the world to respond? Apparently!)

As far as I can tell, the single theme that unifies all the protesters has to do with the unequal distribution of wealth in our country (and, for that matter, in every other country). The slogan “We are the 99%” references the claim, endlessly repeated in the media, that the wealthiest 1% of Americans earn 24% of our nation’s income. (I keep hearing the statistic quoted as 40%, but I believe that not to be correct.) It’s hard to know what to do with that number, however. By any measure, 24% of the earned income of Americans in any given year is a huge amount of money. But it’s not that dramatically different from how things have been historically in our country: in 1915, the year of my mother’s birth, the richest 1% of Americans earned 18% of the nation’s income. Still, it’s easy to amass statistics and difficult intelligently to analyze them. In 2010, for example, the wealthiest 20% of our nation’s citizens earned 49.4% of the nation’s income, while the poorest 15% of Americans earned 3.4%. (Those 15% of Americans are, not coincidentally, those who live beneath the poverty line.) Is that more or less significant than the 1% earning 24%? And yet another way to view the disparity between wealthy and poor is to observe that the mean after-tax income of the nation’s wealthiest 1% rose 176% between 1979 and 2005, compared to a growth over those same years of just 6% for the poorest 20% of Americans. Is that a sign of the degeneracy of American culture? Or is impressive that even the poorest are better off now than a quarter-century ago?

I am not an economist and I therefore find it difficult to find these statistics as arresting as the demonstrators clearly expect me to. Do the demonstrators have a point that things have changed in our country, and for the dramatically worse? Or is that just how things have always been, that rich people with plenty of money to invest have the means to make even more money while the poor—who spend their income on groceries and rent—do not. In a sense, the real question behind all of this is whether the disparity between rich and poor is itself a societal evil we should be working to eradicate or whether it is the specific width of the chasm that separates the wealthiest from the least wealthy Americans that we should be finding outrageous (i.e., and not the simple fact that such a chasm exists at all). Among Christians, Jesus’ comment that there will always be poor people in the world (found at Matthew 26:11, where Jesus justifies someone wasting a bottle of expensive perfume to anoint his head even though the perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor by observing that there will always be poor people no matter how much charity anyone gives away), has been used over and over—especially just lately, it seems to me—to justify the right of the wealthy to live lives of luxury when others have almost nothing. I suspect that’s a misreading of Christian tradition, but what do I know? It’s hardly my place to critique other people’s gospels…but instead I’d like to challenge myself here to say what our Torah actually does teach about the fact of income disparity. It’s not as simple a question as it sounds as though it should be!

On the one hand, our Torah seems clearly to suppose that poor people will permanently exist within Israelite society. Many laws, in fact, seem naturally to presuppose such a situation. A law in Exodus regarding the sabbatical year, for example, specifically discusses the land that must be left fallow every seventh year and, addressing the Israelites, says that they must “let it rest and lie still so that the poor of your people may eat…and so shall you deal also with your vineyard, and with your olive trees.” Another law, also in Exodus, cautions judges against favoring poor people when they appear in court as litigants going up against wealthy adversaries, the clear point being that the justice system derives its authority at least in part from its supreme impartiality and that this quality cannot be compromised merely because one litigant is less well-off than the other. Still a third law, this one from Deuteronomy, cautions against taking the tools of a poor person’s trade as collateral when lending him or her a sum of money. There the logic is obvious and impeccable: if you take away the tools of a debtor’s trade, how can that person be expected ever to earn the money to pay back the loan? And in a similar vein is the law, also in Deuteronomy, requiring employers to pay their poorest employees on a daily basis no matter how inconvenient that might be: if someone needs his or her daily wages to feed a family or to purchase basic necessities, then the inconvenience of the employer is not taken into account and the worker’s wages must be paid out daily.

All of the above-mentioned laws seems to suppose easily that the existence of poor people is a basic feature of society, and a permanent one. But there is one extended passage in the Torah that attempts to depict the process whereby people slip into poverty. The portrait is a moving one, beginning with someone short of funds who sells off some of his family’s land to raise some cash. He retains the right to redeem the land—that is, to buy it back—but even if he cannot afford to do so the land reverts to his possession in the jubilee year. That doesn’t sound so bad—he gets the land back and keeps the purchase price! (On the other hand, there are jubilee years only twice a century. So it’s not as good a deal in the third year of the cycle as it would be, say, in the forty-seventh.) But then the Torah moves forward and imagines a man with no more land to sell. This person has to borrow money, and then must pay it back. He does not have to pay interest—it is forbidden for one Israelite to charge interest when lending money to another—but neither is he working for himself any longer: whatever he earns must go not to raising his own standard of living but to paying back his debt. And then we imagine a third stage in the descent into poverty, the one in which a person can no longer borrow money in the normal way. Perhaps he lacks anything to use as collateral. Perhaps his debt load is already too high for anyone to risk lending him more money. Or perhaps he is deemed unlikely to pay back whatever money he borrows for some other reason. Once borrowing in the regular way is no longer an option, there is always another way however, one even less desirable than going into debt, to raise funds, and so this man sells himself into indentured servitude by agreeing to give up his freedom by being the unpaid employee of another Israelite to raise the money to pay back his previous debts. And finally, when there simply is no other way, the Torah imagines the worst of all fates for a faithful Israelite by imagining someone brought so low by circumstances to have to sell himself to a non-Jew who, not being bound by the laws of the Torah, will not scruple to treat him as an impoverished brother or as a landsman, but as a slave.

The passage is very moving, but I’d rather focus on its implications than its detail: here is the story of a man sliding into poverty, not born into it and certainly not condemned to it by mere circumstance. The assumption seems to be that, yes, there will always be poor people but that they do not function as a permanent caste within society that will always exist regardless of who its members might be in any given generation. Instead, the implication is that there will always be people who make poor investments, whose businesses close, whose crops fail, or who borrow unwisely. When poverty overtakes an individual, then, the Torah ordains practical ways for members of the House of Israel to relate to such a person not by regretting his or her misfortune but by lending that person money not on interest, by buying land even though it will revert to its original owner in the jubilee year, by taking someone in truly dire straits into one’s home as an unpaid employee (and thus providing such a person with a way out of debt that requires neither collateral nor property up front). In other words, the Torah views poverty as misfortune not as destiny, and ordains that the faithful strive to find ways to help not “the poor” as a class within society, but each individual who falls on hard times. And to do so kindly and respectfully as well, thereby transforming tzedakah from welfare into worship.

So where does that leave the people in the park? Since they are, as far as I can see, mostly referencing themselves as the have-nots in the equation they are putting forth (“We are the 99%”), their unhappiness has a certain self-serving ring to it that so far as failed to engage me. In an open society such as our own in which people with almost nothing can and do achieve great professional and financial success, it seems odd to argue that the chasm is unbridgeable. That only a fraction of the needy will manage to become truly wealthy is not really the point. What I think is probably the more reasonable attitude towards the disparity between rich and poor is not to whine or complain about it, but for each member of society—and certainly within our Jewish world this should be the norm, not the exception—for each individual Jewish citizen to feel personally responsible for those less well off than he or she, then to offer tzedakah within his or her means not merely by giving a few dollars to someone in need, but by creating opportunities for the needy to lift themselves out of poverty and to acquire marketable skills that will lead to gainful employment. To spend weeks camped out in a park chanting about how inherently unfair it is that society spans the gamut from poor to rich seems just a bit pointless to me. Better these people should spend a few weeks doing whatever it might take to reach out to someone even less well off than they themselves are and help that person achieve a level of prosperity in life that that person might otherwise never attain. That, it strikes me, would be a practical response to poverty in America…and in every other country as well.

Travels in Time

Our Shelter Rock computer guy, Ron Kliot, put an interesting question to me the other day, one that’s been with me ever since. How, he asked, would I respond if it were to be announced tomorrow that a time machine has been invented, patented and manufactured, and that I personally have been selected to test it out. There are, however, some serious flaws, in the machine’s operating system: time travelers will only be able to travel back in time twenty years exactly, the duration of the traveler’s visit to the past will be exactly five minutes, and the only person in the past who will be able to see or hear the time traveler during his or her visit from the future will be the twenty-year-younger version of him or herself. (Anticipating my next question, Ron also revealed one other flaw in the system: that the younger version of the traveler, the person being visited in earlier time, will somehow be able to remember whatever the later version of him or herself has to say, but not the experience itself. That’s why, supposing this were to be true, none of us remembers meeting three-year-older versions of our current selves seventeen years ago.) And so, cast in slightly weird, science-fiction-y terms was the challenge Ron laid down just before Yom Kippur for me to accept or not to accept as I saw fit: if I actually could travel back to 1991 and visit the thirty-eight year old me, and if I had exactly five minutes to say whatever I would like for that version of myself to know without having to find it out for himself the hard way over the ensuring twenty years and if the younger me would be able to recall, if not the experience itself, then at least the message I will have traveled back in time to transmit…so what exactly would I say to the younger me?

It’s a good question. My first attempts at answers—“Buy Apple!”, followed shortly by “Buy Google!”—were unimpressive and a bit childish: if I really could talk to the twenty-year-younger me, would stock tips be the best I could do? (I heard that! But surely you don’t really think that the only thing that would make your life (or my life) better or happier now would be having made more money or acquired a more cleverly-put-together portfolio back then! Yeah, yeah…me too! But, seriously, is that really what you’d use your five minutes to say? Mind you, I don’t think insider trading laws could be made to apply to advice you give yourself!) But seriously, and clever-investment-advice jokes aside, what actually would you tell yourself? Or, since Ron put this to me, let me phrase that in a more personal way: what would I tell myself if I only could? (Just for the record, Google only went public in 2004. But Apple was trading at $47 a share on my birthday in 1991 and for $345 on my birthday this year. And it closed at thirty dollars or so higher than that yesterday, even after the untimely death of Steve Jobs. Oh well!)

My father was still alive in 1992. Would now-me have warned then-me that I had less than seven years less to ask him all the things I never actually did get around to asking about? That sounds like more worthy counsel than stock tips, but traveling that particular route opens other doors I have always preferred to leave shut. Why is it exactly that I never asked my dad about his first marriage—including not even his first wife’s name or her eventual fate—or about his parents’ apparently extremely complicated relationship? Why do I know more or less nothing at all about my father’s mother’s family. And why have I never met anyone at all from my father’s father’s family other than my father and his siblings themselves? My father graduated from high school in 1934 and married my mom in 1951. Why is it I have no clear idea where he lived or what he was up to for the intervening seventeen years? There’s a photograph somewhere in one of our albums of him in Florida…but I don’t really know why he was there or how long he lived there, or even, to speak honestly, if he lived there or was just visiting. Even typing these questions out is extremely stress-inducing for me and, as I find myself formulating them I simultaneously also know that I would never have used my five minutes in the past to go there, that if I really wanted all those doors open I would have opened them on my own during the many years I could have. I was, after all, forty-six years old when my father died! And I certainly wouldn’t have needed a boost from future-me to formulate the questions that would possibly have pried them open, just the courage I lacked then and no longer need to lack now.

Twenty years ago, we lived in Richmond, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver situated on half-rural, half-suburban Lulu Island in the alluvial delta of the mighty Fraser, the province’s longest river. It was a kind of a paradise, British Columbia. Growing up in Queens, I hadn’t ever seen bald eagles nesting in the wild or flying around overhead. I certainly hadn’t ever walked along a riverbank and seen seals jumping in and out of the water just a few yards off the beach or owned a dog that felt entirely free to jump into the water to join them for a quick swim. I don’t believe I even knew there were such things as snowy owls, let alone that I would be able eventually to recognize their call (something like a hoarse gawwwwh) from a distance, and to distinguish it from their alarm bark (which is more like quacking than gawwwwh-ing). You get the picture. It was beyond gorgeous. We throve there for as long as we stayed, or we thought we did. But perhaps if I could have five minutes with the 1991-iteration of myself I would suggest focusing a little less on the owls and a little more on my children…and asking myself if all that natural splendor was worth the price we paid for living as far as we did from the kind of Jewish life that they only got to know once we finally landed in New York. (California, if anything, was a step down, not a step up, in that regard. I’ll write about that whole experience some other time.) I don’t regret our time in B.C., not even a little bit. But I do think that now-me would have used at least a minute or two of the five to tell then-me not to linger too long at the fair…and to make sure we were back on the East Coast before it was too late for my kids truly to profit from the move.

So that’s possibly how I would use three of my five minutes: buy Apple (did you really think I’d skip that part?) and move east. But what about the other two minutes…what would I use them to say? Supposing there will be some magic mechanism built into the system that prevents time-travelers from revealing future winning lottery numbers or Kentucky Derby winners to their younger selves, I think I’d spend my final two minutes telling myself to stick with my fiction, to keep writing novels no matter what, to understand that, in the end, what my children will treasure most of my legacy will be the books and stories I leave behind for them to contemplate—biz hundert-tzvantzik—one day in my absence.

As you all know, I write a lot. I’m in the middle of a huge book project right now which you will learn more about as soon as you have a chance to read our October Shelter Rock bulletin. And the project behind that one, my Chumash (that is to say, my personal, slightly idiosyncratic translation and commentary on the five books of the Torah) is coming up behind that once I finally get The Observant Life off my work desk.

As many of you know, I do most of my writing in the morning before minyan and in the evening, if I can stay awake, after minyan if I don’t have anything keeping me at shul after that. I spend a lot of my Wednesdays at my desk trying to write. And Joan and I generally take our vacations in the summertime somewhere that I will be able to spend at least a few hours a day at my desk. But, for all I try to devote myself to my writing, it’s also so easy not to find the time, not to have the energy to focus on something that requires the kind of concentration I try to bring to my writing when what I really feel like doing is watching a rerun of Law and Order on television and going to bed. I do it…but I could do it more assiduously. And maybe that is what I’d tell my 1991-self if I could: that most of everything eventually fades away, but that not everything does. And that I should feel privileged, not burdened, by whatever ability I possess to express myself in words that could possibly end up constituted my most previous legacy. I feel that way about our congregation as well, by the way: I serve Shelter Rock in many different ways, most of which I have in common with most other rabbis. But my personal gift to our shul is my writing. I’ve been gratified over the years by the reception you have all accorded to Siddur Tzur Yisrael, and to its companion volume for the house of mourning, Zot Nechamati. I have been pleased as well by the way Riding the River of Peace, the book for young people that we published in memory of the late Dr. Jeffrey Siegel, was received by many of you. Just this year, I felt proud and very pleased to be able to offer you the three stories we brought out for the High Holidays, “Teshuvah,” “Tefillah,” and “Tzedakah,” and I was very touched and pleased by the response they elicited from so many of you. So I think that’s what I’d use the last two of my five minutes to do: to remind myself not to give up, not to imagine that it’s all for naught, that reading is a lost art cultivated by almost no one at all in our digital age. And I hope I’d listen too!

Of course, since in this fantasy I’m spinning out for you one of the rules is that you get to remember the message but not the messenger, maybe I did learn these things from myself…not, obviously, in 1991, but perhaps in 1993 or 1995, twenty years before some point in the future at which time travel finally is possible. True, that would still leave open the question of why I didn’t buy Apple at least then. (On my birthday in 1995, Apple was trading at $42 a share, even less than a few years earlier!) But it would at least explain why we eventually knew we had to come back east, and why I have made the writing of stories and books the foundation stone upon which I have attempted to build my rabbinate.

And that is what I learned from our computer guy the other day when he stopped by to fix something in the office and, while waiting for the damned thing to boot up again, had a few minutes to shmooze with me before he had to get back to work and I had to rush off to choir rehearsal.

Elul 5771

Elul is our Janus, our god of looking forwards and backwards at the same time. Being monotheists, of course, we have no gods but God…but we still have Elul, this strange, holiday-less month that slithers through Jewish time at the end of the year as we prepare, yet again, to face the future by staring down the past, and then daring to advance the number of the calendar year by one and thus to wander forward bravely or timidly into whatever the new year brings.

It’s a strange month, suggestive in a dozen different ways of its (and our) native ambivalence about things in general. Is it the end of the year? Clearly, it is—by every reckoning Elul is the last month of the Jewish year—and yet it looks more to what lies ahead than to the past. Shul-Jews begin on the very first day of Elul to hear the shofar, the herald of the holiday season, being blown every morning in synagogue. The twenty-seventh psalm, the song singled out by our sages as the most supremely suggestive of the feel of the spiritual agenda of the yontif season soon upon us, begins to be read morning and evening. And, indeed, the faith-based bravery with which the poet recommends that his readers address the most daunting of life’s challenges—physical attack by vicious enemies, the death of our parents, the rage of people jealous of our successes in the world, denunciation at the hands of liars to whom the possible penalties for perjury mean nothing at all—is tempered by his wistful admission that only the fortunate few get only to see evidence of God’s justice and goodness in the land of the living, and by his dour understanding that one pays for the privilege to wait for God in this world with the years and decades of one’s life. It’s that kind of poem. It’s that kind of month.

So Elul becomes this strange mixture of things. Bounded on the one side by Tisha Be’av, the saddest (at least in the pre-Shoah world) of all Jewish days, the residue of Tisha Be’av in Elul is not melancholic at all but upbeat: all the haftarot that we read in synagogue during Elul during the weeks following Tisha Be’av are odes to faith, to hope, to confidence, and to the glorious destiny that awaits the Jewish people on the other side of the messianic moment. At the other edge of Elul, of course, is Rosh Hashanah, one of the happiest of holidays, an occasion for feasting, for family time, for apples and honey, But the run-up to the holiday is distinctly less merry that the festival itself: as we make our way through Elul we are all of us drawn to self-examine, to consider our flaws, our faults, our moral inadequacies, and our ethical shortcomings. So as we prepare to sit down to tables laden with the best foods and cakes, and with more wine than any of us should probably drink, we are also spending time on the dark side, visiting the chambers of our own hearts and either liking or, if we are being completely honest with ourselves, mostly disliking what we find there lurking. More ambivalence, more mixed messages, more crossed signals! That is what Elul is, I believe: a month-long festival of insecurity, uncertainty, and ambivalence out of which we come only slowly as the holiday approaches and we find it in us to place our faith in God, to resolve to grow into finer versions of ourselves, and, as ever, to hope for the best. Elul is my favorite month!

But this is not any Elul. Adding to our sense of ill ease in this specific year are a dozen outside factors, each of which all by itself would weigh heavily on all of our shoulders and all of which together feel beyond burdensome. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 last Sunday is in that category and has its own Janus-like quality: should we be more sad that so many innocents died on that horrific day or more happy that we have somehow managed to prevent any subsequent terrorist attacks of that magnitude on American soil for a full decade? The aftermath of the so-called Arab spring is in that category as well: as Americans we are obviously pleased by the fall of tyrants and the collapse of dictatorships. But as Jewish people whose hearts beat with Israel it is impossible not also to wonder what the future is going to bring. And if the recent events in Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey are harbingers of worse to come, then the future seems somewhere between troubled and truly bleak…and that makes it concomitantly more difficult simply to declare ourselves pleased with fall of a Mubarak or a Kaddafi and be done with it. They were, by all accounts, bad men who deserved to lose their power. But how can my pleasure at seeing despots deposed not be tempered by the realization that I have no idea what may yet come…and that the specter of all or most of these liberated (if that’s the right word) countries coming under the sway of violent, radical Islamism must be part of the picture for all thinking people?

Weighing the most heavily on me personally is the debacle about to be upon us at the United Nations. As all my readers know, I could not possibly have a lower opinion of the U.N., an organization that lost any pretense of moral credibility decades ago and which exists, as far as I can see, simply to further its own malign agenda. I didn’t used to think that! When I was a child, we celebrated United Nations Day in school every fall on October 24. We collected money for UNICEF. We had school trips to the U.N., where we were told excitedly by tour guides wearing pins bearing the names of their exotic homelands that we had left American soil and were in the only building in the entire world that was actually owned by the entire world—or at least jointly by all the member states of the U.N.—and which existed solely to further the cause of peace between nations. I do remember asking my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. D’Antona, why exactly it was that the Soviet Union got three votes in the General Assembly while the United States and every other member state only got one, but I do not recall being as put off by the answer—which can only have been because they demanded it and the rest of the world lacked the courage to say no—as it seems in retrospect that I should have been. Mind you, I was ten years old in fifth grade, so what did I know? But as the United Nations now prepares unilaterally to reward the Palestinians for decades of counterproductive terrorism and self-defeating intransigency with a cloak of unearned respectability—a step that will somehow end up making it seem that it is Israel that is being unreasonable by not cheerfully agreeing to its own demise unilaterally by withdrawing from territory it won in a war that was foisted upon it by others absent a real, enduring peace on which generations to come can rely—I find myself not especially surprised by the hostility of the world towards Israel (which I am nowhere near naïve enough not to understand in its larger context as merely the latest gilgul of the same Jew-hatred that has stalked the world for millennia), but flummoxed nevertheless by it.

In this month-long celebration of ambivalence, I find myself—what else?—ambivalent. Surely, I tell myself, the U.N. only means well. Surely, they feel that by bringing the Palestinians into the family of nations, even in a way that lacks any actual importance in terms of actual geo-politics on the actual ground of the Middle East, they will be encouraging them to accept the dignity of national identity, to renounce terror, to agree finally to live in peace with the Jews of Israel in a corner of the world clearly big enough to accommodate them both. Surely, I continue in my happy reverie, when Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon notes, as he did the other day, that he is “sympathetic” to the frustrations of the Palestinians,” he must imagine that he will make them less frustrated by encouraging them to refuse even more adamantly to negotiate in good faith with Israel. But why should they? (Why abandon a policy that has worked so well?) Has the Secretary-General noticed that Hamas continues openly to call for the destruction of Israel and continues to launch rockets against civilian targets? And that Hamas has explicitly distanced itself from the goings-on in Turtle Bay this week, the better later on to sound reasonable about continuing its terror war against the Jews of Israel? Perhaps the Secretary-General assumes that Hamas will just go away once the “good” Palestinians are rewarded for having been sufficiently impotent to prevent the bad ones from attempting to murder the children of Sderot in their beds in the first place. Sounds like a plan to me!

And so we attempt to gear up for the holidays. Elul is happy/sad and serious/joyous. What can I say? I’m a Jew—I like being off-balance! Even the weather is part of the larger picture, at least in the Northeast. Is this summer? Sort of, it is. (It was 87 degrees the other day.) But it’s also fall, also sort of. (There are leaves all over my backyard.) The ill ease I feel when I contemplate the murderous rage of the rioters in Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey this last week is tempered by my faith in justice, in human decency, and in God’s watchful guardianship of Israel. The ill ease I feel in the pit of my stomach as I contemplate the glee with which the United Nations will act this week in its ongoing effort to delegitimize Israel in the forum of nations makes me queasy, yet I also feel filled with hope as I contemplate our current woes against the larger pageant of Jewish history. In every generation, people rise up who would be only pleased to finish us off for good, yet the blessed Holy One somehow manages for the Jewish people somehow always to endure, always to survive, always to bear witness to God’s presence in history. Pesach is a long ways off, but perhaps that is the line for us to hold in our hearts as the world prepares to help us prepare for Rosh Hashanah by reminding us just how fragile this sukkah is in which we live and hope to thrive in the course the year soon to be upon us.

Goodnight, Irene!

By the time all of you finally read this—or at least by the time all my local readers at Shelter Rock eventually do—I hope that power will have been restored to all of our homes. We ourselves lost our power at about 7 AM on Sunday and only got it back Wednesday evening. In the history of the universe, it was a blip of not even four full days. Speaking more realistically, the universe having been around for a really long time, it wasn’t even a blip. But irritating, slightly upsetting days they were nonetheless. Washing up at the gym. Downloading my e-mail in other people’s backyards or at Starbuck’s. Charging my phone in the car (but never quite completely, which led to even more irritation and upset). Shlepping the laundry to friends’ houses. Wandering around after dark with flashlights and never quite being able to find what I was looking for. Reading by candlelight and trying not to get wax all over the page. You get the picture!

Of course, there were also good things that Irene brought in her wake. I saw many instances of people being truly kind, generous, and hospitable to each other. We ourselves were invited for dinner each night that we were without electricity at home, as I know were many of you also, by people who hadn’t lost their power or whose power had already been restored. On our street, we actually spoke to neighbors from down the block with whom we hadn’t ever exchanged a word. (Okay, okay, so that was Joan engaging the neighbors, not me. But I could too have!) I noticed a noticeable upsurge in children actually playing outside in the street and in the park, children whom I’m guessing I hadn’t ever seen before in the neighborhood because they have generally been too glued to large and small screens of various sorts ever to venture forth into the daylight.

So, on the whole, it was a kind of a wash—good things and bad things, inconveniences and kindnesses, more stress than usual but also way more sleep than I usually get. And, of course, we were the lucky ones. Not as lucky as some, but still far more fortunate than many New Yorkers who are still flooded and uncertain whether their homes will ever return to normal in the simple way ours did the other evening when someone somewhere threw some unseen switch and the lights went on just as suddenly as they had gone off in the first place. And the damage outside of New York, both to the north and the south, was truly devastating to entire communities. On the whole, we should be grateful we came through this relatively unscathed!

But, as you know happens regularly, this whole incident got me thinking about things. Do you know the expression “the new normal”? I can’t quite figure out who coined the expression, which I do not believe I had heard until just a few years ago, but what it means is clear enough: society moves along quickly enough for things that would once have seemed instances of peculiar, faddish, outlandish, or at least highly idiosyncratic behavior quickly to become the norm. It happens all the time. Nor is this a feature particularly of our age. Cole Porter’s song, “Anything Goes,” from the 1934 musical of the same name, is specifically about how quickly things change, how patterns of behavior that once would have seemed scandalous or unimaginably vulgar can suddenly become respectable and reasonable in the minds of most neutral onlookers. And how the nature of society is such that not only do these things happen regularly and frequently, but how they also remain for the most part unnoticed and uncommented upon, how they do not merely become acceptable but how they become the actual norm, the “new normal,” the standard that people are considered to be acting outside of societal standards if they deviate from rather than if they hew to.

Watching myself flounder around all week racing back and forth from Starbucks to get my mail made me realize that what is true about the way people behave with each other is also true of the way they interact with the machines in their lives. There was a time, after all, not that many years back when I got mail once a day. It came, for readers too young to remember, printed out on pieces of paper or even handwritten and you found it in the mailbox when you came home at the end of the day from work or school or wherever. You could get mail at work in the Stone Age too, of course, but it also came once a day and was also available only in hard copy. You then answered it—reminding the person to whom you were writing what the issue at hand was that you were writing about, since there was no way simply to write a paragraph or two over the original letter unless you actually, physically, mailed the piece of paper itself back to the person who sent it to you in the first place—and then a few days later, or a few weeks if you were writing to someone overseas, it arrived in that person’s hands. And then that person could respond and that too would take a few weeks. Asking a question of a friend in Tel Aviv and getting an answer by return mail could easily take a month. It didn’t seem all that burdensome to wait, however. It was just what it was, the norm, the normal.

From there we moved on to e-mail. The letters could be transmitted almost instantly, but you still had to be sitting at your computer to get the mail. So I got my mail a few times a day—but only when I was at work or at home. People understood that. If an e-mail didn’t elicit a response, it usually meant only that the person to whom it was sent hadn’t found a computer to read his or her mail on, not that he or she was ignoring you. And then from there we moved on to Blackberries and other kinds of smart phones, so that your e-mail could follow you around. You could conceivably not have your phone with you…but, unless you were undergoing surgery (and then really only if you were fully, not just locally, anesthetized), why wouldn’t you have your phone with you? How quickly this all too became normal! Nor does it seem odd any longer to receive text messages instead of actual e-letters from people who for some reason can’t find your e-mail address but have your phone number, or who feel that texting is closer to actual communication and therefore to be desired not solely for its speed (which is no faster, I don’t think, than e-mail most of the time), but for its intimacy and its (perceived) immediacy. All of these things felt like huge advances at the moment they were first introduced, but then became features of daily life so quickly that it seems almost impossible to imagine how quickly they have become almost unnoticeable features of daily life. When I tell my kids that we had exactly one telephone at home and that it was on the wall in my parents’ kitchen, thus making it possible to speak privately on the phone only when no one else was home, they both believe me (because why shouldn’t they?) and don’t believe me (because how could someone only my age have lived, let alone survived, under such primitive conditions?) When I tell them the internet also didn’t exist, they respond roughly the way I myself would if some new friends were to tell me that they grew up in some shtetl somewhere where they didn’t yet have gravity and dropped things just floated off into the stratosphere.

And then, suddenly, it all goes away. No power means no computers, no cell phones, e-mail, or text messaging (at least once the phones die until you find some place to recharge them, if you do), no cold Coke in the fridge, no personal laundromat in the basement waiting for the next load of dirty clothing, no electronic security system guarding things while you’re out and about, no air conditioning, no television, no telephone, no internet. At first it really does feel as though gravity had somehow stopped existing. You tell yourself that people read by candlelight for centuries before Edison invented the light bulb, that candles themselves must have been an innovation somewhere along the way when the switch was made from smelly, dirty oil lamps to efficient, clean-burning, and scent-free wax candles. But for all you know that to be true, you still can’t quite believe that you can’t turn on the TV. Obviously, you can brush your teeth in the dark. But who ever imagined we’d have to?

So the first response, I think, for most of us was incredulity. This is how people used to live? Where did they wash their clothing, in the river? (The answer is, actually, yes. But that was before my day, so even I don’t really believe it.) From there we move on to irritation, then to frustration, then (depending on our sense of social equanimity) either to resignation or to rage. I myself experienced all of the above emotions, other than rage, over the four days we had no power. But I ended up feeling most of all amazed at the wonders of our world now that I finally had the opportunity to conceptualize life without them: without computers (like the one I’m writing this letter on and which I used just before to find out in about three seconds what year Anything Goes opened on Broadway by googling Cole Porter), without telephones, without electric lights, etc.

Instead of being depressed because our service was out for a few days, I found myself marveling at the world in which we live. And feeling grateful to live in the kind of world in which even in the year of Irene we are still likely to end up at year’s end having had 361 days of only-once-interrupted electricity powering up our indispensible machinery.

As we make our way through the month of Elul leading to the High Holidays, it would behoove us all to consider how fortunate we are, and in so many ways, and to ask ourselves how we can allow ourselves to take it all for granted…and then to be outraged when we are deprived of some small part of it for a couple of days. The correct emotion to cultivate during Elul is gratitude and beholdenness to God for all that we have, not irritation with LIPA for not working fast enough. In its own way, Irene wasn’t such a bad way to get Elul off to the right start.