The Rising Sea

I am old enough, but just barely, to remember Robert Frost reading his poem, “The Gift Outright,” from memory at President Kennedy’s inauguration on January 20, 1961. (I was just in second grade, but our teacher, Mrs. Slass, made sure—apparently successfully—that we would remember both that day and that poem for the rest of our lives.) But far more important to me in Frost’s magnificent body of work, at least later on, was his poem “Fire and Ice,” which I memorized in high school and still know by heart. True, it’s only five lines long. But even at that length, it is still very satisfying to read along as the poet famously wonders whether the world will one day end in a fiery conflagration that consumes all that humankind shall by then have built or in a new Ice Age that will simply overwhelm the peoples of the earth with a lifeless blanket of frozen water. I hadn’t thought about “Fire and Ice” for a while, though, until it suddenly resurfaced in my consciousness the other day as I was reading—coincidentally just days before hearing the story of Noah read aloud in synagogue—an article in the New York Times reporting on a new scientific study published just last week in the journal Nature Communications. (To read the study in Nature Communications, click here. To read the summary report in the New York Times by Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle, click here.)

The Nature Communications study, by Scott A. Kulp and Benjamin H. Strauss, determined that previous methods of calculating the effects of rising sea levels were seriously inaccurate, and that the correct figures are infinitely more devastating than the ones formerly proffered: the study concluded that 150 million people are currently living on land that will be submerged beneath the rising sea by 2050, a mere thirty-one years from now. They are not necessarily doomed, of course. There are, for example, about 110 million people already living on land below sea-level but whose dry-land habitat has been secured through artificially constructed sea walls and barriers of various sorts. The same could theoretically be done in the course of the next three decades for a significant portion of the 150 million people whose land will be flooded by mid-century. The questions, therefore, are as few as they are sharp. Do we have the knowledge to prepare in advance for this almost unimaginable catastrophe hovering over the horizon? Do we have the skill to translate theory into practice and to pre-rescue the land on which so many millions live while we still can? And, most unsettling of all to ask out loud and seriously and honestly to attempt to answer: do we have the collective will to address this issue on a global scale and in a way that sets aside the petty concerns of individuals and single nations in order to respond to a humanity-wide crisis in a way that encompasses the collective will of all humankind to act forcefully, thoughtfully, and successfully on its own behalf?

Looking further into the future only yields an even more unimaginable prognosis: Kulp and Strauss predict that a plausible, albeit worst-case, scenario puts 630 million people living today on land that will be submerged by 2100, a year that only sounds distant until you begin to figure how old your grandchildren’s grandchildren will be around the turn of the next century. To describe the situation even more starkly (and without relying on projections or estimations at all), a full billion people live right now on land less than ten meters above sea level, of whom a full quarter (i.e., 250 million people) occupy land currently less than one single meter above sea level.

And so we finally have an answer to Frost’s question. Yes, the world will be toast (in both senses of the expression) in five billion years when the sun turns into what astronomers call a “red giant” that, as it expands into its next stage of being, will engulf first Mercury and Venus, and then Earth in a thermal cocoon of almost unimaginable heat. Perhaps we will by then have long since decamped to some alternate planet with a better prognosis for long-term survival. But long before that (and in our own lifetimes), human life as we know it will be disrupted by water as the seas rise and we either do or don’t find the wherewithal to stem off at least the most potentially devastating of the effects that the rising sea will bring in its wake. So what if Frost and Dante were wrong in supposing the devastating water would come all froze up? They had the right basic idea! So at least that’s settled.

Poets vied with themselves in ancient times—or at least in Israelite ancient times—to find an appropriate metaphoric range along which to describe the great goal of all mystic endeavor, the attainment of a state of ongoing communion with God. It sounds almost simple when written out so plainly, but the journey to God was (and is) truly daunting—and for one single reason: since God by definition exists outside human experience and since all human language is rooted precisely in the warp and woof of human experience, any effort to speak honestly and clearly in any human language about God should be impossible. And, ultimately speaking, it probably is impossible…but only for writers of prose. Poets are used to using language somehow to describe the essentially indescribable and so, at least in theory, the task should not be beyond the best of them. Nor was it beyond the poets of ancient Israel, as the various efforts in the Book of Psalms to describe what it would be like experientially and sensually to know God—or at least to know of God—seem unequivocally to prove.

Different ancient poets choose different metaphoric ranges along which to express themselves and more than a few described the experience as one of drowning and then, at the very last moment, feeling oneself miraculously saved from certain death. The poet whose ode to God encountered is our eighteenth psalm, for example, writes movingly about the sense of being lifted up by divine hands from a sea in which he was at that very moment about to perish. The author of the sixty-ninth psalm writes about waiting for God to speak as he sensed himself sinking slowly into the seabed and the water rising all around him. The authors of the 88^th and 124^th psalms wander the same metaphoric path, as does the author of the psalm that appears as the second chapter of the Book of Jonah. These odes to God’s palpable presence are different in lots of ways, but they all have in common this single feature of likening the experience of God to the sensation of being almost drowned and then being miraculously being saved. And, of course, this was the Israelites’ story as well: they too almost drowned in the Sea of Reeds on their way to their experience of intimate communion with God at Sinai. (One of my earlier essays in the journal Conservative Judaism was about this notion of drowning in God; click here to read what I wrote back in 1999.)

Along with Frost’s, these poems too came to me after I read that piece in the paper about the Nature Communications study. At first, they seemed antithetical: the biblical poets were using the notion of being almost drowned and then at the very last moment rescued to describe how it felt to them to be elevated out of mundane reality and—even if just for a long moment—ushered into the reality of the divine, whereas the authors of the Nature Communications study were talking about the possibility of countless numbers of people drowning—or almost drowning—as they flee their homes for higher ground that they either will or will not actually reach in time. But then I changed my mind and in an uncharacteristically hopeful way: perhaps, it struck me, the ancient poets were actually offering us the wherewithal to deal with this new study productively and meaningfully.

The waters are rising, that much seems certain. Nor is there any question that the seas are rising because of human intervention in the natural eco-system of our planet. (Click here to visit the website of the National Ocean Service of the U.S. Department of Commerce if you still need convincing on either of those assertions.) And so the only real question is whether humankind can respond meaningfully to the implications of a changing climate and a changing environment without becoming mired in a swamp of indulgent self-interest from which ultimately none will get out alive. If we just apply to everybody’s better angels to get on board, I suppose we will end up with nothing at all. But if the faithful of the world—and particularly those whose Bibles feature the full text of the Book of Psalms—were to understand that the rising sea actually is God speaking to us, warning us, remonstrating with us, reminding us of our responsibilities to all who bear the divine image (which is every living soul on earth) and to the planet on which all those people bearing God’s image live—then perhaps we can still act meaningfully, and as one, to save ourselves before it really is too late. As all my readers know, the Book of Psalms is primarily a prophetic work. But even the most authentic prophetic prediction can be averted through concerted human action. The Book of Jonah teaches that clearly enough. So the question is only really whether we are prepared to act on that lesson or not.

I close with another favorite poem. In the fifth book of his “The Prelude,” William Wordsworth describes a strange encounter he had in a dream with a mysterious stranger. In the dream, his gaze is drawn in the direction of the stranger’s. “And looking backwards when he look’d, I saw / A glittering light, and ask’d him whence it came. / ‘It is,’ said he, ‘the waters of the deep / Gathering upon us,’ quickening his pace / He left me: I call’d after him aloud; / He heeded me not; but with his twofold charge / Beneath his arm, before me in full view / I saw him riding o’er the Desart Sands / With the fleet waters of the drowning  world / In chase of him, whereat I waked in terror, / And saw the Sea before me; and the Book, / In which I had been reading, at my side.’  I first encountered those lines in W. H Auden’s remarkable book, The Enchafèd Sea, then sought them out in their original context. I offer them to you all today, however, not as poetry but—in the style of the ancient bards who created the Psalter—as prophecy. And so are we just where the poet himself also was: between the word (in our case, as published last week in Nature Communications) and the sea itself. Shall we just read? Or shall we act? That wasn’t precisely the poet’s question to his readers back in 1805, but it is mine to all of you this week.

So what else happened this week? Oh yes, the United States began the procedure intended formally to withdraw our nation from the Paris Climate Accord.

Occupiers

For most Americans, ancient history is, well, ancient history. I say that in a jokey way, but the truth is that the history of ancient and medieval times is covered—to the extent it is covered at all—in our American high schools in a cursory way that by its nature cannot possibly lead students to a clear understanding of the specific way in which the roots of the modern world in all its political, inter-ethnic, and polarized complexity are to be found in much older times. Yet an argument could be made—and a cogent, compelling one at that—that there is no real way to understand the present other than as a function of the past, including the distant past. And this is particularly true, I think, of today’s Middle East: to understand the place of Israel in the world without any knowledge of the specific way modern Middle Eastern reality is rooted in antiquity is basically impossible. And yet I see, day after day, people writing about Israel on various web sites and in newspaper articles who seem to have no firm grounding in the study of ancient or medieval history at all.

The period I’d like to write about this week has the distinction of being (and by far) both the most obscure and the most crucial for any who wish to understand today’s Middle East. I’ll begin with the events of 614 C.E.

There are some years that themselves are famous. 70 C.E. is sort of in that category. 1492 definitely is. So is 1776. But who has ever heard of 614? And yet a convincing and fully cogent argument could easily be made that modern Jewish history began in 614 and that the events set in motion that year reverberate to this day in the region. Let me explain in more detail.

That Rome once ruled the world is the rare fact about ancient times that actually is known to almost all. The fact that the Roman Empire eventually split in two and that its two halves met their respective ends almost a full millennium apart, not so much. But that single detail is at least subtly crucial to understanding today’s Middle East. The Western part collapsed in 476 C.E. when the last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustus—a hapless weakling with an unfortunate overbite—was obliged to hand over his throne to a man named Odoacer, the leader of the Germanic tribes who had successfully invaded the Italian peninsula and established themselves as the new overlords of Rome and its provinces. So that was the end of Rome in Italy. But the Eastern part of the empire, eventually called Byzantium after the original name of its capital city, continued to exist for many centuries and only met its end when the capital, by then called Constantinople, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 precisely five hundred years and two days before my birth. And that detail continues to echo throughout the Middle East today.

Ancient Israel was part of the Roman Empire. That too is relatively well known. Christians know it because the gospel narrative is set in Roman Judaea. And Jews—or at least traditionally observant ones—know it because we are still fasting on the Ninth of Av each summer to commemorate, among other catastrophes, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century when the Jews revolted against their unwanted Roman masters. But what happened after that? That’s where the thinking of even relatively sophisticated students of today’s Middle East gets seriously fuzzy.

To get a running jump at 614, let’s start three years earlier when, in 611 C.E., Iran (then called Persia) went to war with Byzantium and invaded from the east. Things went back and forth for a while, but then, in 613, the Jews of Byzantine Israel joined with the Persians to revolt against the Byzantines. And it worked too: in 614, the Persians, fighting alongside about 20,000 Jewish supporters—including men famous in their day but long since forgotten by all like Nehemiah ben Hushiel or Benjamin of Tiberias—captured Jerusalem. It was a bloody war. According to some ancient historians, the siege of Jerusalem resulted in the deaths of about 17,000 civilians. Another 4500 or so, taken first as prisoners of war, were eventually murdered by the Persians at the Mamilla Pool, then a man-made lake just outside Jerusalem and today the site of a very popular upscale shopping mall. Another 35,000 or so were exiled to Persia. But, as it always seems to, the tide eventually turned. By 617, the Persians determined that their best interests lay in making peace with the Byzantines even if it meant betraying their Jewish allies. And that is just what they did. In 628, the shah of Iran, King Kavad II, made peace with his Byzantine counterpart, a man named Heraclius. The Jews surrendered and asked for the emperor’s protection, which was granted. That lasted about twelve minutes, however: before the ink on the treaty was dry, a massacre of the Jews ensued throughout the land and Jewish residency in Jerusalem was formally forbidden. 

And now we get to the good part. Or at least to the relevant part for the situation as it has devolved down into our day. Just ten years later, in 648, the Byzantine Empire was invaded again, this time by the Islamic State that had grown up after Mohammed’s death in 632. (This is the empire ISIS today would like to restore.)  The Byzantines retreated, the Muslims took over, and Israel was then ruled by Muslim Arabs until the Crusaders arrived a cool four and a half centuries later in 1099.

It was a tumultuous time. The Islamic State was called a caliphate. (Is this starting to sound familiar?) There were several. The first, named the Rashidun caliphate, ruled Israel from Medina in what is today Saudi Arabia. Then power passed to the so-called Umayyad caliphate that ruled from Damascus. And then, eventually, power passed from the Umayyads to the third caliphate, called the Abbasid Caliphate that ruled from Baghdad.

At first, life under Arab occupation wasn’t that bad. Historians estimate that there were between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish residents in Israel in those days. Umar, the second caliph of the Rashidun caliphate, eventually permitted Jews to return to Jerusalem. The famous Pact of Umar promised Jewish families security and safety, but also classified Jews as dhimmis, i.e., as non-Muslims whose presence in Islamic lands was begrudgingly to be tolerated as long as they accepted their second-class status and agreed to pay a special tax, called the jizya, that was levied against non-Muslims. Things were dismal, but tolerable. But tolerable didn’t last, particularly after the Arabs built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in 691 and the Al-Aksa Mosque in 705. By 720, Jews were banned from the mount, the holiest site in all of Judaism.

And so did the Arabs come to Byzantine Palestine, a land that had been the Jewish homeland even then for one and a half millennia. The progression of foreign overlords feels almost endless, particularly if we count off the years since biblical times. The Babylonians ruled Israel for a mere 48 years before the first Persian occupation of the land, the one featuring such famous personalities as King Cyrus and King Darius, began and lasted for 206 years. The Romans ruled for 388 years, then were succeeded by the Byzantines. They ruled for 297 years until, as noted above, the Persians returned in the 7^th century for a paltry seventeen years. Then the Byzantines returned for a decade and were followed by the Arabs, who ruled the land for 461, until they themselves were cleared out by the Crusaders starting in 1099, who ruled for 192 years.

Working all that data yields the semi-astounding result that, in the almost two thousand years from the time the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem in biblical times until the Crusaders were finally defeated once and for all by the Mamluks (yet a different version of Arab invader), the Jews were able to restore Jewish sovereignty to the Land of Israel and rule over themselves for precisely one single century, the one stretched out between the Maccabean victory over King Antiochus in 164 B.C.E. and Romans’ successful invasion of the land a century and a year later in 63 B.C.E.  That’s a lot of years of occupation by a wide range of occupiers.

When I read modern columnists who seem to know nothing of Jewish history talking about the “occupation” and meaning the presence of Israelis in the parts of the Land of Israel that were lost to Jordan in 1948 and recovered more than half a century ago in 1967, I see red. I am fully sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, who have been pawns in a game not of their own devising for more than seventy years and who truly do deserve to be treated justly, fairly, and decently. But when I notice people stigmatizing Israelis as occupiers of their own homeland without reference to the fact that Arabs first came to Israel when their armies invaded in the seventh century and occupied the land for centuries until they were finally defeated by invading armies from the West—that seems, to say the very least, to martial half-truths in the defense of an already-adopted argument.

To understand where things in Israel are now, it’s necessary to take the long view. I understand that not everybody can take the time to earn a Ph.D. in ancient history. But to write authoritatively about the Middle East without appearing to have any knowledge of history, to reference Israelis as occupiers of Arab land without appearing to know that the Arabs themselves came to Israel as an army of occupation—that could be, I suppose, a mere oversight prompted by an abysmal ignorance of history. But why is it that I don’t think that? Not even a little bit!

Bahya Steps Forward

Last week, I invited readers to join me in peering through the mist to catch a glimpse of King Kohelet stepping up to take his place on the debaters’ stage amidst the top dozen people vying for the Democratic nomination and then to join me in imagining what he might have had to say if he had been there in person and not merely as a figment of our collective imagination. I tried to come up with several distinct lessons he might well have wished to teach, but all turned out to be variations on the same theme: that humility is the surest sign of wisdom and that, therefore, the least qualified leader or would-be leader will almost always be the individual the most of sure of him or herself, the proudest of his or her accomplishments, and the most certain that no one could possibly know more or do better than him- or herself. And then, life occasionally actually imitating art, I opened the newspaper the other day and found myself reading about a scientific study published just last summer in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Research that detailed the latest thinking on degree to which humility is not merely a virtue (like patience or generosity) but rather a critical personality trait that truly mentally healthy people cannot do without. (The original journal article has to be purchased—and for an exorbitant $35—to be read on- or off-line, but to see the New York Times article by Benedict Carey about the journal piece, click here.)

It makes sense too: in a world of highly polarized attitudes towards everything, people possessed of the kind of humility highlighted in the study turned out to be less dogmatic, less judgmental, less aggressive, and less likely to fall prey to what the author calls ideological or political polarization. They’re also less likely to fail in their committed relationships—which only makes sense given the need for compromise in such relationships. Perhaps even more to the point, the study found that the humble among us are more likely to have the psychological resources “to shake off grudges, suffer fools patiently, and forgive” themselves for inadvertent missteps or errors of judgment. In that regard, I can also recommend a very interesting essay by Peter Wehner that came out in 2017 (click here) about the worth of humility from a spiritual point of view. (Wehner writes specifically in Christian terms, but Jewish readers will find his views very resonant and highly applicable to themselves.)

I have my own odd relationship with the concept. One of my own culture heroes, although not one I’ve written much about in this space, lived in Spain a cool thousand years ago in the first half of the eleventh century. And, as the author of the first Jewish book devoted solely to ethics and ethical issues, he deserves to be far more famous than he actually is. There are a few reasons for this. First, my guy, Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda, is regularly confused—including by people who should certainly know better—with Bahya ben Asher ibn Halawa, who lived about two and a half centuries later, and who became known as one of the greatest biblical commentators of his day. So maybe it was inevitable that the two Bahya’s would get confused with each other, but it’s a shame that that happens: Bahya ben Asher was insightful, creative, and intelligent, but Bahya ibn Pakuda was one of the handful of true greats: a giant in terms of his incisive intellect, his ability to synthesize diverse material, his literary ability…and the humility he brought to his writing desk even when working on a book that he could not possibly have imagined readers a millennium later still considering novel, interesting, and not even slightly stale. And then there’s the matter of language: Bahya wrote not even in regular Arabic or in Hebrew, but in Judeo-Arabic, the specific dialect of Arabic spoken by the Jews of Spain during what we in our day have taken to reference as the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry. So that means his book is read today in its original language by more or less no one at all.

When I first began to read Jewish classics, I was still in college. And in my junior year, which I slightly unexpectedly spent in France studying Hebrew, I found myself in a class devoted to reading the 1950 French-language translation by André Chouraqui. After a few weeks, I was completely in his thrall. To say that Bahya became my only friend that year is to exaggerate. (I wasn’t that lonely.) But he was a real (if spectral) presence in my life that year…and a very supportive one at that. I don’t know where other people read Bahya, but I read him each night before bed. And I carried his book around with me too, pausing to read a few paragraphs whenever the opportunity presented itself. What can I say? Friends hang out together! (Maybe I really was that lonely.)

It was from Bahya that I learned about humility as something to be cultivated and sought after. In the sixth chapter of his book, which is wholly concerned with the topic, he writes that “one should always show humility toward others and divest oneself of all pride for the sake of showing honor to God, casting off all sense of loftiness, all arrogance and self-importance…both in private and in the midst of a crowd.” And then he goes on to explain how Scripture makes a point of requiring this particularly of people in leadership positions. And now we get to my point for the week.

Aaron, for example, was the High Priest of all Israel—but he was not above cleaning the ashes off the altar each morning and delivering them to the dump personally as a way of reminding himself to avoid haughtiness and arrogance. Similarly, the Bible reports that when the Holy Ark was finally brought into the City of David, King David himself offered up the burnt-offerings and danced in the street to remind himself that, when all was said and done, he was just as unworthy to sit on the throne of Israel as any other mortal would also have been.

And then Bahya goes on to describe the true leader specifically in terms of the degree to which such a person successfully cultivates a sense of natural humility, speaking as little as possible, declining ever to pontificate in public, always avoiding vulgar language, never behaving in a tawdry, tasteless, or crude way in front of others, and instantly intervening when someone is being treated unjustly. True leaders, he goes on, always seek to avoid public praise and never pass up an opportunity to own up to their own moral or ethical errors. “Such people,” Bahya writes, “never blame the ones who blame them (for having done things that they did in fact do), nor would they ever be angry with whomever uncovered the misdeed in question. On the contrary, the true leaders will always say to an accuser, ‘O my friend, what is this evil act of mine that you know of in comparison to those of which you are ignorant and which have been concealed by God for my sake for such a long time? Were my deeds and sins known to you, you would run away….” That, Bahya says, is what it means to embrace humility as a personal virtue...and to qualify as a national leader.

What would our American landscape be like if the people vying for political office were to take these words to heart—actively seeking forgiveness for past missteps, owning up to an inability to know with certainty where any chosen path will eventually lead, openly admitting ignorance and shortsightedness, and actively—and vigorously—seeking the counsel of the wise when decisions have to be made instead of relying solely on an inflated sense of their own ability magically to know the unknowable? I can answer that question myself: a lot more appealing and a lot healthier than the endless contest we now endure to see which candidate or would-be candidate can speak with more brazen certainty about the future, can be more disdainful of his or her rivals’ points of view and opinions, and who can be as little self-effacing as possible in an attempt to convince the undecided voter to choose him or her as our nation’s next leader.

Bahya’s book is almost a full thousand years old. Its author has been gone from the world for almost that long. His precise dates are unknown, as is the site of his grave and the details of his personal life—whom he married, how many children he had, what became of them, etc. He is hardly known to the non-Jewish world at all, but even within the world of Jewish letters there are only very few who can say that they have read his book from beginning to end even once, let alone many times. If only our would-be leaders were among them!

Kohelet Joins the Debate

Last week, I wrote to you about my idea of expanding the idea of inviting various ushpizin to dine with us in the sukkah to include all sorts of non-traditional invitees. I’ve been thinking about that idea all week—wondering whom I should or could invite aside from Lady Oumuamua and Prince Borisov (neither of whom would actually be that much fun to host, given that they are both basically rocks whose sole claim to fame is their origin in deep outer space). Lots of potential ideas came to mind in that regard, some whimsical, some semi-serious, some almost reasonable. (And, yes, the whole concept of “reasonable” does need to be stretched just a bit if we’re going to talk seriously about inviting the spectral presences of the long-since-dead to dinner in the first place.) Perhaps I’ll propose the idea earlier on next year and invite suggestions about whom exactly to include on the invitation list.

And then I watched the debate on Wednesday evening between the top dozen individuals vying for the chance to run for President as the Democratic candidate in 2020. I realize that it would have been impractical to hold the debate in a sukkah, but that’s really a shame: seeing them all gathered in a rickety hut with canvas walls and a roof made of grass might just have moved things along a bit faster. (Was it only me who thought so, or did at least some of those people appear to be injecting themselves into the mix just to make the same point over and over?) And then, just when I thought I had had enough and would just read about the last hour in the paper on Wednesday morning, I was taken entirely off-guard by the sight of King Kohelet—ghostly, but otherwise in full royal regalia—striding confidently up to the invisible thirteenth podium and taking his spectral place among the others.

No one else seemed to notice him there. Even I had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t having some sort of tele-hallucination, but there he was for all (or at least for me) to see, his famous book tucked securely under his arm and his ability to take in what was unfolding around him more than obvious. (How an ancient king of Israel could speak English, I didn’t pause to ask myself; he was, after all, the wisest of men—as Scripture says specifically and unambiguously. Maybe he took English in high school!) Mostly, of course, he’s known as Solomon. He reigned as Solomon. He published his other works—and foremost among them the Song of Songs and the Book of Proverbs—under that name too, but this work—the product of his old age, when his wisdom was at its fullest flower—he brought out as King Kohelet, a mysterious name cited several times in the book itself but always left unexplained. Perhaps he used a pseudonym to suggest the universal nature of the lessons he wished to teach. Or perhaps Kohelet really was an actual nickname of some sort, perhaps a name one of his seven hundred wives made up as a term of endearment. But our custom of reading Kohelet’s book—called by the ten-dollar name Ecclesiastes in most Western circles but almost always by its author’s name in Jewish ones—our custom of reading Kohelet during Sukkot made his presence almost logical: having come up from Sheol on his annual author’s tour of the world as his book is read and debated in countless thousands of sukkot in the course of the festival, why not stop by an actual debate and see what he could add to the discussion? So what if they weren’t actually holding it in a sukkah? Surely, he must have thought, that really is just a detail! And, as we would naturally expect from the wisest of all men, it turned out that he had a lot to say.

The basic givens on Wednesday night were obvious. Everyone present on that stage wishes to be elected President. All have plans! Senator Warren has become known for saying that almost as a personal mantra, but they all have strategies for fixing what ails our land (or at least for what they perceive to be ailing our nation) and none showed any reticence about touting his or her proposals as the very best. And, although each would-be nominee has shortcomings of various sorts (including, at least for two, a complete lack of experience in government) and none has yet emerged as the ideal candidate that the others will eventually have no choice but to support, the setting seemed to require that each candidate vaunt him or herself maximally, responding to whatever question was formally asked with some version of that candidate’s standard stump speech. As a result, what was supposed to be a thoughtful debate about principles, policies, and platforms turned into a long infomercial that differed from “real” infomercials merely with respect to the time spent tearing down other candidates either overtly or by clever (or not so clever) innuendo.

The king listened carefully, as did I. And then, when the din subsided somewhat, he offered the would-be nominees some thoughtful advice that, if you ask me, they could all do well to take to heart. Kohelet wasn’t the wisest of men for nothing!

First, he noted clearly there is no virtue more becoming to a true leader than humility. The clearest way to establish your right to lead, therefore, is to stop bragging about your accomplishments…both because there will always be someone whose accomplishments are even more impressive than yours and also because nothing is less suggestive of the ability to govern than arrogance. As a result, the more you beat your own drum, the more it feels as though your real interest is in denying your listeners the possibility of appraising your worth frankly and honestly. True leaders, says the king, always seek to self-improve…and self-improvement must unavoidably be born of frank self-analysis. And that was the king’s first point.

Secondly, he went on to note that the sign of a true leader is the willingness to work far more intently on the actual work of governance than on the portrait of oneself destined for the history books. Knowing everything would be a useful skill to bring to the office of President. But since no one actually knows everything, those who would lead should instead demonstrate their commitment to the pursuit of wisdom itself—through study with learned teachers, through the contemplation of the works of intelligent authors, through the taking of counsel with people more experienced and more knowledgeable than themselves are, and through the repudiation of negative character traits they have somehow inadvertently (or not so inadvertently) acquired. Those who would lead should therefore present themselves as students of the wise, as people who desire to listen far more intensely than to lecture others. Accepting that others could do as good as job as they themselves is key, as is then trying to transcend that thought by seeking to attain a heart of wisdom that truly does set them apart from the rest. Self-knowledge is key; the nation, says Kohelet, led by a king who only knows of himself what the sycophants and yes-men who surround him tell him is hardly being led at all.

Thirdly, the king noted that true leaders blame no one for their own errors of judgment. If they admit to having occasionally acted poorly in a given situation, they never blame the situation as though it, rather than they themselves, was at fault. In fact, true leaders always accept responsibility for their own mistakes and move forward humbled and chastened by them: what the people need in their leaders is specifically not braggarts who can’t imagine ever having done anything wrong, but rather the kind of people who learn from their errors and consistently strive to become better and more virtuous as they move forward through life.

Fourthly, the king noted—and clearly—that people worthy to lead invariably listen very carefully to others…including to their opponents in debate and dialogue. King Kohelet said this repeatedly too, noting that it is always better to hear a wise person chastise you than to listen to a fool singing your praises…and that instead of responding instantly to any hint of criticism with a thousand different explanations intended to defang the critique, it shows greater leadership potential gratefully to embrace the criticism and to be willing to learn from it. No one enjoys being critiqued, he admitted freely, much less harshly. But whereas fools run from criticism, the wise run toward the thoughtful individual prepared to evaluate their work honestly and thoughtfully. Those worthy of the charism of leadership are therefore those who are constantly striving to improve, to become more virtuous, to become wiser and more insightful. The king couldn’t have been more clear that no one who wants to become a national leader should be unable to imagine learning something from the thoughtful comments of others…even when those others are one’s direct competitors.

Finally, the king noted that those who would lead their nation forward need to demonstrate an ability to take the long view. Eventually, he correctly noted, every single voter alive today will pass from the scene. The would-be candidates themselves will pass from the scene. But instead of taking that as license to ignore the consequences of their actions now (or their inaction), they need to consider future generations as pre-constituents, as people whose interests they must have at heart now even if they are unable to vote in our national elections right now. And this point too the King stressed repeatedly: the mantle of leadership can only be legitimately worn by someone willing to respond to the interconnectedness of the generations personally and viscerally, and who is willing to accept the responsibility for the kind of earth we bequeath to our grandchildren’s grandchildren. And to their grandchildren as well because, in the end, a willingness to look deeply into the future is a prerequisite for leading in the present.

Seeing with Your Ears

One of the great challenges of the High Holiday season has to do with the undertaking to transform thoughts into deeds, plans into actions, and resolve into actual behavior. It sounds like a no-brainer: what could be simpler than deciding to do something and then doing it? But, as anyone who has ever tried already knows, it’s actually a lot harder than it sounds.

The set-up is known to all, or at least to anyone who has ever spent time in a traditional synagogue service on the High Holidays. The liturgy, both by virtue of the actual text—the specific words of our prayers—and the feeling the various melodies used only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur elicit almost automatically from worshipers who have been hearing them since childhood, the liturgy itself  is meant to prompt worshipers to revisit the past year, to rethink its decisions, to regret its errors of judgment and its instances of flawed ethical reasoning…and, at least ideally, to respond by resolving to live differently and better in the course of the year now beginning. The key concept—that introspective rumination with respect to the past can lead to renewed moral resolve with respect to the future—is simple enough to summarize in just a few words. But the actual act of translating resolve into deed—of thinking about the past and then charting a new path into the future—is distinctly more difficult for most of us that it sounds as though it should be.

There are many reasons that this is so, but—at least for me personally—the major part of the challenge derives from the simple fact that we are asking ourselves to look at one thing and to see something else. Even in less fraught contexts, this is not that easy. Sometimes, true, it really is just a matter of training. A talented cook, for example, can look at a recipe in a cookbook that consists merely of words on a page and somehow “see” the finished dish as it will look set out on the dinner table. A talented musician can browse through a book of musical notation and “hear” what the piece will sound like when played on an actual piano or on a flute or an oboe. A talented architect can look at a blueprint rolled out on a draftsperson’s table and somehow know what it will be like—what it will actually feel like—to step inside the structure once it is eventually built. All these abilities are functions of mere training that some people have and others don’t…but which, given the opportunity to train properly, all can at least theoretically acquire.

One step further along the path we seek to travel during the holiday season is the skill to imagine the cooked dish, the played sonata, or the built palace without having anything in front of our eyes to “tell” us what they will taste like or sound like or look like, but solely to imagine the finished product by constructing it within the matrices of our own imaginative consciousness and then, if we are able, to translate the resultant image into something that actually exists in real space. In other words, the holidays challenge us to be composer and musician, architect and resident, recipe writer and cook—in other words, specifically not to read someone else’s work and then imagine what it would feel like in real life to do that thing or to be that person, but to start from ground zero, from nothing at all…and then, somehow, to imagine a world in which we ourselves play a different role than the one we have played up to this point in our lives and then, if we have the courage and the stamina, to find a way to make that vision part of our ongoing reality.

I never tire of telling our Nursery School parents how important it is to read to their children at bedtime, but I don’t always explain why that is so: because it is precisely when children are listening in the dark and cannot see anything at all that they have no choice but to imagine an entire world. And it is that specific ability to construct a world through the sheer imaginative force of a focused mind that has the ability to make children grow up to be the kind of creative individuals who can invent things that don’t exist, write music that only they can hear before they find a way to write it out in musical notation, and produce all sorts of new things merely by imagining them first and then finding a way to make real the image they “see” before their eyes.

The work of the High Holidays, at least in a certain sense, is merely the grown-up version of that challenge. Is it possible to sit in synagogue, to hear the words of the prayers sung out, and to see them transformed from poetry into a real version of the world? Since people do it, it must be doable…but the real question isn’t whether it can done at all, but the whether it can be done by regular people possessed of no more powerful tools than the moral force of their own will to improve the world through the agency of their own will.

I was encouraged to think hopefully about the whole concept by a piece of fascinating research I read last summer about, of all things, fruit bats.

I’m not usually a huge fan of bats, but I almost changed my mind this last summer after reading an article in the Times of Israel about scientists at Tel Aviv University who have convincingly demonstrated that bats, or at least Egyptian fruit bats, have the strange ability to see things merely by hearing them. (To read the whole article, click here.)

The basic principle has to do with the concept of echolocation, the specific method bats use to navigate the world in the dark—which, since they are nocturnal animals, is the world in which all bats live. The process is simple enough: bats emit high-pitched squeals and squeaks that then hit objects in the vicinity and produce an echo which comes back to the bat’s ears and make it possible for the bat to map out the local landscape and thus to fly around safely without crashing into things. That much is basic science, but the researchers on whose work the article reported took the whole concept one step further. First, they allowed some fruit bats to fly around in absolute darkness using echolocation to keep themselves from crashing into some large objects in their immediate vicinity. Then, after having enclosed the objects in plastic containers specifically designed to make it impossible for echolocation to work, they flooded the area with light. To their amazement, the bats uniformly seemed able to recognize the objects even though they could now specifically not use echolocation and appeared to be recognizing them by somehow “seeing” what they had previously only heard.

And that was the detail that fascinated me, this ability to see something merely by hearing it. It sounds like it should be impossible. But the researchers felt confident that they had demonstrated conclusively that bats can indeed hear something and then translate the sound heard into a kind of image seen…and then recognize that thing when all they can do is see. How cool would it be to see with your ears? Perhaps not cool enough for me to want to be a fruit bat. But even so, pretty cool indeed!

And that is the experience I’m going to try to emulate on Yom Kippur: hearing the words sung aloud, both by the cantor and by us all, and then seeing with my ears to view—at least in my mind’s eye—a world made better and finer through my personal effort to improve morally and ethically in the course of the year now almost suddenly upon us. If bats can do it, perhaps I can too!

Or perhaps we could approach the challenge on a simpler level simply asking yourself this one question: when you hear the cantor sing out that some heady combination of prayer, charitable acts, and sincere resolve to live better lives can materially alter the course of human history…what exactly do you see before your eyes? If it’s primarily the back of the head of the person sitting in front of you, perhaps you should consider taking a cue from the Egyptian fruit bats of Tel Aviv and attempting to see what you hear!

As a New Year Dawns

As a long year draws to a close and a new one begins, it strikes me that we do not allot our attention to both those facts with the same level of enthusiasm or interest. This Sunday, for example, is the last day of a year that brought us an exceptionally wide variety of things, some expected and others wholly unanticipated, some encouraging and others beyond calamitous. Then, the very next day, a new year will begin in which nothing at all has yet happened. It would be reasonable, therefore, to focus on the year we can discuss in detail and to wave away the year still to come as a blank slate, as a bag of possibilities, as a story as yet fully unwritten. Our tradition, in fact, encourages just that kind of ruminative introspection focused on our deeds and misdeeds in the past year. And yet, tradition or not, we mostly (at least in public) do precisely the opposite, preferring almost always to focus on wishing each other a happy new year replete with all God’s best blessings and taking some sort of strange pride in the degree to which we feel ready to move on from last year’s foibles, missteps, errors of judgment, ethical shortcomings, and instances of moral failure without suffering over them all unduly. In fact, now that I think of it, I don’t believe I have ever heard anyone greet another on Rosh Hashanah by congratulating him or her on having survived the year now concluded and leaving it at that!

A while ago, I noticed a similar phenomenon on the train. As riders of the Long Island Railroad will all know, the train’s cars usually feature seats facing forward (i.e., in the direction the train is moving) and seats facing backwards from which you can only see where the train has recently been. I myself always try to find a seat facing forward. Judging from what I see all around me, I think that that is what most people do: it somehow feels natural to face forward and see where the train is going. (That’s how the world looks when you’re out for a walk too, of course: you see where you’re going, not where you’ve been.) But life is just the opposite because, on the train of life, we can only clearly see where we’ve been and what we’ve done. What the future will yet bring us is at best a hope or a dream that none can see clearly. There can’t ever be any certainty about our vision of what yet may be: even prophets cannot know that God will not relent and specifically not make even a divinely-inspired prediction come to pass. (Jonah is surely the best known prophet to have had that specific rug pulled out from under him. But there were others too.) All that is true. But it still feels strange to sit in the backwards-facing seat, and that is so even despite the fact that where we’ve been is all we can see as we journey ahead on the aforementioned train of life.

Therefore, in addition to wishing you all a very good, happy, and healthy year to come, I would like to congratulate you all on surviving the year that now concludes. It has been, to say the very least, a roller coaster ride for Jewish Americans. This was the year of Pittsburgh and Poway. This was the year in which the House of Representatives proved unable, or at least unwilling, unequivocally to condemn anti-Semitism other than in the context of every conceivable other kind of prejudice or bigotry (including, as I’ve said several times from the bimah now, some so obscure that I hadn’t ever heard of them before). And this was the year in which we have had to deal not once or twice, but repeatedly, with elected members of the House of Representatives using well-worn anti-Semitic tropes to castigate American Jews for being firm supporters of the State of Israel who believe wholeheartedly and unambivalently in the democratic right of Israel’s people to elect their own leaders and then to be governed by them. And we have had also to endure members of the Congress openly questioning the loyalty or patriotism of Jewish Americans, a canard most of us felt certain had been laid to rest decades ago.

These are all events that I am happy to contemplate in the rear-view mirror even if I really do always prefer the forward-facing seats on the train. It has been a wild ride, this last year. But I face 5780 with courage born of confidence in our nation, in its national values, and in the innate fairness and reasonableness of its citizenry. As a new year dawns, I pray—and without the slightest trace of irony, cynicism, or ambivalence—that God bless America. And I pray also that God grant us all a happy, healthy, productive, and prosperous year. May it bring us all only good things! And may it be a year of peace for us all, both here, in all the lands of our dispersion, and in Israel itself.

Elections in Israel: The View from Athens

Although my Greek never really got good enough to read the great tragedians in the original without a dictionary by my side, I nevertheless grew through my studies to love their work and to understand why Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, all of whom lived and worked in the fifth century BCE, eventually became pillars of Western culture. Even today I retain a real fondness for their work and an appreciation of its value and its artistry. But the part I always liked the best was their common use of an on-stage chorus—known to history because of them as a “Greek” chorus—to act sometimes as a kind of intermediary between the playwright and the audience, but other times as a kind of fictive corporate personality in its own right that interacts not with the audience but with the various characters in the play. In either case, however, the idea is almost always the same—to remind viewers that things are never as they seem, that behind even the most banal off-hand remark can hide a universe of emotion and meaning, and that we are, all of us, bit players in a huge drama that none of us has read and that no one therefore fully understands. It is that specific concept of an all-knowing Greek chorus that I would like to bring to bear in my attempt to analyze the results of last Tuesday’s elections in Israel.

As has so often been the case in these last years, the results at best equivocal—somehow both clear and unclear with respect to their potential impact on the future. As I write these words on Wednesday afternoon, it feels as though Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party will probably end up with a slight edge—something like 32 or 33 seats to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party’s possible 31 or 32. With 95% of the votes tallied, it feels likely that those numbers will hold, but even if the numbers were reversed the outcome will be exactly the same because no one party will have won enough seats—sixty-one— in the Knesset to govern all by itself without the need to form any sort of coalition. (Indeed, no party in the history of the state has ever won a majority of seats, the closest being the 56 seats that the Alignment coalition won in 1969.) And with that thought in place, let’s bring the chorus out onto the stage.

In classic Greek plays, the chorus is often depicted as a chorus of elderly persons possessed specifically of the kind of wisdom that, if it comes at all, comes to most in old age and it is precisely that kind of chorus of wise oldsters that in my mind’s eye I see stepping onto the stage. In my mind’s eye, I see them dressed in shapeless robes, their demeanor suggestive not of creeping senescence but of burgeoning insight as they turn first to face the audience and then, one by one, to the players in the drama unfolding on stage to offer them the benefit of their perceptive acumen, of their deep awareness of how things really are. The strange masks they are wearing are part of this as well: by denying them specific in-play identities, the members of the chorus appear instead as symbols of wisdom itself. And, indeed, the characters in the play are generally depicted either as being entirely deaf to the insight being offered them by the chorus or, in some ways even more tragically, as being vaguely aware that it is being offered but, at the same time, being far too distracted or otherwise occupied by their own egos to take the information being offered to them to heart.

The whole parliamentary system of government is theoretically designed to make elections more about ideas and policies than specific individuals. And that is how things are, at least theoretically, in Israel: voters don’t actually vote for anyone at all, just for the party they wish to see form the next government. Of course, the personalities involved are well known to all: as part of its campaign, each party publishes a list of the specific individuals who will serve in the Knesset if the party gets enough votes to seat people that far down the list. So everybody knows who will be Prime Minister if any specific party gets enough votes to form the next government because that individual appears as number 1 on that party’s list. The only problem is that the system doesn’t work quite as well as intended and, even though Israelis technically aren’t voting for any individuals at all, it somehow feels entirely as though people are voting for the person who will serve as Prime Minister if his party gets to form the government.

And now the curtain goes up to reveal our opening tableau. At the back of the stage on a kind of platform is the chorus, their wise presence as reassuring as their masks are unsettling. Upstage in the center is Reuven Rivlin, the President of Israel, wearing a dark suit and looking as though he knows his lines well enough but can’t quite remember to whom he is supposed to deliver them. To his right is a nattily-dressed but still clearly dejected Bibi Netanyahu. To the left, looking slightly surprised to be on stage at all and not at all ready to be off-book, is a rumpled-looking Benny Gantz, leader of the Blue and White Party. And hovering overhead, held in place by a hoist similar to the one that holds the Angel aloft in Angels in America, is Avigdor Lieberman, outfitted with a set of outsized white wings like Emma Thompson’s in the mini-series.

The audience quiets down and waits for the play to begin. All eyes, naturally, are on Rivlin, whose job it is to invite someone to attempt to hobble together a coalition large enough to govern effectively…or at all. Clearly, the opening soliloquy, ideally in the form of an invitation to get to work forming a government, is his to deliver. But as he produces some sort of computer print-out from his inside jacket pocket and begins to scan the numbers yet again, the chorus quickly intercedes and sternly instructs him to remember that he is above the system and not bound to the tyranny of its numbers, that he can—that he must—guide the nation forward by selecting the individual whom he deems the most likely to be able to govern wisely and well, not slavishly to turn to the guy whose party got the most votes. That makes his job both simpler and infinitely harder: simpler, because he can act as he wishes; but far more daunting because his decision will almost undoubtedly affect the nation’s future in a profound, perhaps even irreversible way…and he is far too savvy to pretend that he doesn’t understand that fully. As the chorus sings out their warning, his face grows pale, almost ashen. He seems weighed down with responsibility. He himself belongs to Netanyahu’s party. But he knows that his job is not to support Bibi, but to keep the Angel overhead aloft and the ensemble below from being crushed if he descends too quickly or too roughly.

And now Bibi steps forward and delivers his own opening soliloquy. Yes, he admits, his party got fewer votes than Benny Gantz’s. But why should that matter? Is Mrs. Clinton President of the United States? What should matter, he declaims in his weirdly American English, is that he can form a coalition, that he can govern, that he can and will lead the nation forward. He clearly has more to say, but again the Chorus intercedes. Looking not at Bibi but at Benny, they sing out a warning. “Remind him that he won’t be able to lead the nation that effectively from a prison cell…and that even you have lost track of the numerous indictments pending against him.” Then they look to Lieberman, still hanging there in mid-air and looking as smug as ever. “And you there,” they continue, looking up at the kingmaker, “remind him, again, that the way to bring you into the government is to form a grand coalition with Benny and yourself…and specifically to leave the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, out of the mix. Tell him, again, that it’s you or the black-hats…but not both. Not until they agree to serve in the IDF like every other Israeli citizen. He knows all that, to be sure. (You have told him that a few dozen times in the last few days alone.) But can you be sure Bibi always knows where his own best interests lie? Why not tell him again anyway? What can it hurt?”

And then, clearly on a roll, the Chorus of the Elderly, turns to Benny Gantz. He is a tall man, and wearing his newly pressed IDF uniform—he was, after all, the Chief of the General Staff, the Ramatkal, from 2011 to 2015—he looks even taller. He somehow seems sure and unsure of himself at the same time, confident and ill at ease. He wanted this, obviously. He personally founded the Hosen L’yisrael (“Israel Resilience”) party just last year and guided it into the coalition first with Telem, the party of Moshe Yaalon (also a former Chief of Staff of the IDF) and then with Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”), Yair Lapid’s centrist party. The resulting Blue and White party is therefore his baby, something he himself created, something in the remarkable victory of which he can take personal pride. And yet he looks uncertain. He looks at Bibi and feels untried and inexperienced in the ways of government. He looks up at Lieberman, still menacingly hovering overhead, and wonders what price he will have to pay to bring Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel Our Home”), Lieberman’s party, into a coalition. And then he looks at Rivlin and wonders what it’s going to take to get him to stop staring at Bibi with that unsettling mixture of awe and frustration.

I would tell you more, but the play is still in rehearsal and only opens in a few weeks when President Rivlin formally asks someone to form a coalition that could conceivably govern effectively. As also on Broadway, things in Israel can (and probably will) change dramatically before opening night. But the Chorus is already in place, already positioning itself to remind the players that what they see is not all there is, that acquiring power and exercising it wisely are not at all the same thing, and that the fate of the nation—and, by extension, the course of Jewish history—depends not slightly or tangentially, but fully and really on what the show actually looks like when the curtain goes up and the show actually opens.