The Ruminative Rabbi

The Digital Shtetl of Rabbi Dr. Martin S. Cohen

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Profiles in Courage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Defending the Most Protective of Barriers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Old and Older

News from North Dakota rarely makes headlines in New York, but last week we had an exception to that general rule when a majority of voters there voted to make it illegal for individuals to run for congressional office in that state if they will turn 81 before the end of the year before their term ends.

Why such a measure should be legal in the first place eludes me: it seems to me that, in a true democracy, citizens should be permitted to cast their ballots for whomever they wish without any artificial barriers set in place to prevent them from doing so. Of course, that opinion puts me out of sync with lots of our nation’s laws, for example those that require members of the House to be over twenty-five, members of the Senate to be over thirty, and the President to be thirty-five years of age or older. Nor are these instances of latter-day legislation that would have been foreign to the nation’s Founders: all these requirements are enshrined in the Constitution (click here, here, and here to read the texts), and so constitute restrictions to free and unfettered voting that could not even imaginably be set aside at all, let alone dispensed with easily or casually. But there are no upper limits, not in the Constitution and not at all (except now in North Dakota), to the age of candidates. Similarly, all fifty states (including North Dakota) have at least some lower, but not upper, limits on individuals who wish to run for state-wide office. Some of these are a bit surprising—the citizens of California, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin, for example, can elect a teenager to be their governor as long as the candidate is at least eighteen years of age—but most are mostly what you’d expect. (To see a full table of minimum age limits for state-wide office in our country, click here.) Vermont is, and by far, the most liberal: there are no age limits on any state office other than the requirement that the governor be at least eighteen.

As far as I can tell, the basic principle seems to be that the Founders thought that it would be dangerous to elect someone to a federal or state-wide office who is too young successfully to bear the burden that comes with that position. On the other hand, the parallel thought—that a candidate could conceivably be too old successfully to serve—seems not to be part of our national culture. Until this week’s vote in North Dakota, that is. Of course, given the 1995 decision of the Supreme Court specifically denying states the right to set age restrictions for public office other than those mentioned in the Constitution, the new law in that state will certainly be tested in the courts. Still, it’s the idea itself I’d like to use this space this week to think through, the notion that individuals, regardless of their actual mental acuity, level of insight, or professional experience, can simply be too old to serve in the Congress. Or, by extension, in any elected position if a state passes legislation to that effect.

Given the fact that it is inconsonant with the Supreme Court decision mentioned above, this new law in North Dakota was destined to be contentious anyway. But how much the more so is it going to be a hot-button issue—in North Dakota and in the other forty-nine states as well—given the degree to which the age of the presumptive candidates for President is clearly going to be an issue in the months leading up to Election Day and is already such an issue. President Biden, as everybody who ever reads a newspaper knows, is eighty-one years old. At seventy-eight, Donald J. Trump is roughly the same age. There are surely lots of surprises still to come in the months leading up to the election, but it will come as a surprise to no one at all that the age of both candidates is going to be discussed endlessly. And all of that talk is going to be about the supposition that there is such a thing as being too old to serve effectively—and that that supposition is rooted specifically in the age of the candidates and not in their level of ability, skill, or talent. 

The whole concept of being too old to serve is—at least from a classical point of view—a strange one. Scripture—and particularly in the Book of Proverbs—could not be clearer that old age is not a curse that devolves upon the elderly as punishment for having lived too long, but rather a blessing and a reward. Nor is it difficult to justify that concept of old age as a blessing because the older people become, the more likely they are to have entire lifetimes of experience guiding them forward, as well as a lifetimes of learning, lifetimes of interacting with others, and lifetimes of making mistakes and learning from them. In other words, the idea that merely passing a certain age means ipso facto that one is no longer fit to lead could not possibly be less in sync with our classical sources. And yet that is the law in North Dakota as of last week!

Consider, for example, the famous verse in Proverbs (16:31) that remarks that silver hair, instead of being something to be feared or regretted as a sign of decline, is to be acclaimed as “a crown of glory.” The word for “silver hair” in that verse, seivah, should be familiar to students of Torah as well: in one of its most famous passages, Leviticus depicts God as commanding the faithful Israelite to rise before the silver-haired individual, the seivah, and then continues on to command as well that the faithful show the deepest respect to the elderly as an expression of their wish to be seen as God-fearing people.  Read in each other’s light, these two passages have a clear and specific lesson to teach: with age can come wisdom, insight, and an enhanced ability to lead well…and that turning away from such people merely because of their age is counterproductive, even self-destructive, behavior. Youth is impetuousness, whereas old age is deliberation and thoughtfulness . Youth is eagerness, whereas old age is reticence. Youth is self-absorbed, whereas old age is focused—if the individual in question has spent the years of a life acquiring wisdom—on the public weal, on the good of society, on the needs of others. Youth is worry rooted in anxiety, whereas old age is calm born of resignation and acceptance. Obviously, not every old person falls into that category. Neither does every young person. But the idea that some specific individual should be disqualified for public service solely because he or she has reached a certain age—that idea should be anathema for people who seek to be led by the wise rather the reckless.

In ancient times, great philosophers wrote whole books about the merits and virtues of old age. Of them all, the one that seems the most on point to read or reread during this presidential election would be Cicero’s short (but truly great) work, On Old Age. You can read the whole thing in a very readable English translation by clicking here,  or, for just a few dollars, you can buy the still-very-readable translation of Evelyn Shuckbergh, a scholar of classical literature who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. (An earlier translation by one James Logan was actually published by Benjamin Franklin, thus making it the first classical text to be published in translation in North America.) In his work, written just a year before his death, Cicero discusses the gifts and troubles that the aging process brings along in its inevitable wake to all who survive their own youths. His comments are trenchant and more than accessible. As a result, there are lots of passages to consider, but I’d like to offer here just one that is specifically concerned with the relationship between old age and the ability to lead well:

Those who allege that old age is devoid of useful activity are like those who would say that the pilot does nothing in the sailing of his ship, because, while others are climbing the masts, or running about the gangways, or working at the pumps, he sits quietly in the stern and simply holds the tiller. He may not be doing what younger members of the crew are doing, but what he does is better and much more important. It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not poorer, but is even richer.

Is Joe Biden too old to be our President? Is Donald Trump, only a few years his junior? In my opinion, the question itself should be shelved. Obviously, old age brings some early-onset senescence and its attendant incapacity. But there are others whose older years feature insights born of experience and wisdom rooted in a lifetime of learning from others. Supposing that Joseph Biden and Donald Trump are their respective parties’ nominees, the decision whom to choose should be rooted in their policies, their experience, and their character. The question of age, and specifically when considered independent of ability, should be deemed wholly irrelevant.

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The Southern Border

The current presidential campaign has already been characterized by an amazing amount of obfuscatory rhetoric, confusing policy zigzags, and inconsistent argumentation—and we are still almost five months away from the actual election and, other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there still aren’t any actual candidates out there, by which I mean candidates formally nominated by their parties to run for the office of President. Nonetheless, and barring the kind of catastrophe that in our gun-crazed society can never really be ruled out, we all know that the next president of the United States is going to be one of two individuals. And neither is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

For me and for many, the ultimate decision about how to cast my ballot will have to do with the candidates record on supporting Israel, and particularly during the war in Gaza that has lasted now for well over 200 days. I suppose that won’t surprise anyone at all among my readers, since I have basically been writing ever since October 7 solely about issues relating to Israel, and particularly to the events of that horrific day and their aftermath in Israel and around the world (and particularly on American college campuses). But there are other issues to consider. And today I’d like to write about one of them.

Americans like to reference their country—our country—as a nation of immigrants, a phrase made famous by then-Senator John F. Kennedy as the title of his 1958 book on the topic. And, for all it has gone out of fashion (to put it mildly) to celebrate our country as one founded and populated by colonialist settlers from other lands who—other than to massacre them or herd them onto reservations—mostly ignored the presence of native people in this place who surely thought of the land our nation occupies as their own, the reality remains in place that our nation’s Founders were either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, which could also be said of the vast majority of American citizens today. (To refer to the enslaved ancestors of today’s Black Americans as “immigrants” seems both offensive and ridiculous, even grotesque. But, horrific though their story may be, they too came here from somewhere else.) And that truth—that, for better or worse, we actually are a nation of immigrants, just as JFK put it in his book—is at the core of our current issues with immigration.

In other words, President Biden’s decision to issue an executive order earlier this month closing the southern border when our officials are literally overwhelmed by a surge of would-be immigrants seeking to cross the border illegally needs to be evaluated in its historical sense as well as its political one.

The order itself feels almost banal. Targeting only people attempting to cross the border illegally, the order decrees that the border be closed once the average of such people trying to cross into the United States in a seven-day period exceeds 2,500 a day, and only re-opened after that figure drops to 1,500 for seven consecutive days and stays at that number or less for a two-week period. But nothing about our immigration policy is ever that simple. But between the two obvious response-positions—the one wondering why any illegal immigration should be tolerated at all  and the other wondering how a “nation of immigrants” can deny safe haven in this place to any newcomers at all when almost all Americans are personally descended from people who sought safe haven in this place themselves—between those two extremist positions there should be a middle-ground approach that features both charity for the desperate and respect for the law. Complicating all of this, of course, is the nightmarish images that still haunt the American psyche of children being ripped from their parents’ arms just a few years ago, an unbelievable 1,200 of whom have still not been reunited with their families. (For the government’s own avowal of that figure, click here.) For Jewish Americans, of course, it is impossible to contemplate the image of children—any children at all—being dragged away from their families and then forced somehow to survive on their own, or at least without their parents, without evoking the most horrific Shoah memories. And I suppose that is also the case for a large number of non-Jewish Americans as well.

Another part of this, and surely not just for Jewish Americans, is the challenge of setting the whole concept of barring the desperate or the eager from entering our country in its historical context. And that is  a long, complicated story.

We can start with the Page Act of 1875, which had as its specific point, to quote its sponsor in the House, one Horace Page (R-California), “to end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women” by making it illegal for Chinese women to immigrate to the United States. And then, seven years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it illegal for any Chinese laborers, male orfemale, to enter the United States.

The Immigration Act of 1917 went a step further still, barring all immigration from Pacific Island nations and from the Far East, but also imposing literacy tests on would-be immigrants as well as creating for the first time categories of people to whom immigration was to be denied without respect to national origin. The sanitized expressions “mentally defective individuals” and  “persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority” were used to deny openly gay people the possibility of entry, along with undesirable “illiterates, imbeciles, insane persons, and paupers.” But it was the Immigration Act of 1924, framed in its day as a mere extension of the earlier act, that for the first time established immigration quotas. Formally, the idea was to restrict immigration to a number equivalent to 2% of the number of Americans who claimed that nation as their ancestral home in the 1890 census. Why it was deemed desirable at all, let alone crucial, for the ethnic balance of the populace to be maintained by law is a good question. But it’s not that relevant a one, because the real purpose of the Act was to keep out Italians, Greeks, Poles, and (I can’t help thinking especially) Eastern European Jews, all of which groups were coming here in numbers that far exceeded the percentage of the population that was already occupied by people of that heritage or national origin. I hardly have to pause to note what happened to those Jews who would have come here to start new lives, but who were instead condemned to be present when the Nazis occupied their homelands. Nor do I have to say out loud that this specifically is the baggage Jewish Americans bring to this debate, that sense that millions died because of an act of Congress inspired by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic desire to preserve the nation’s religious and ethnic mosaic in the future precisely as it had been in the past.

And then there is the counter-narrative, the one that finds it reasonable for the great statue of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor to have on its base engraved the words of Emma Lazarus’s “The Great Colossus,” which poem was actually written in the first place to raise the funds necessary to construct the pedestal atop which the statue would eventually be set. This is my personal way into the debate because I have truly loved that poem ever since I was obliged to learn it by heart as a student in Mrs. Gilbert’s sixth-grade class at P.S. 196. And it was the poet’s description of the statue as “a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and her name the Mother of Exiles” that was the most resonant with me because my people came here fleeing persecution from towns in Poland and Belarus in which, as far as I know, no Jews at all survived the Nazi occupation. And the rest of the poem spoke equally directly to the young me. When I read that “from her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome,” I imagined the three of my foreign-born grandparents passing through Ellis Island and wondering what fate awaited them here. And when the poet imagined Lady Liberty herself addressing the decaying lands of the Old World and imploring them to send to us “your tired, your poor,” your homeless and tempest-tost, and that they would be welcomed by Lady Liberty herself, on duty 24/7 holding aloft her “lamp beside the golden door,” I felt that the values embedded in those words were precisely what made America great.

So was President Biden protecting our nation with his executive order or betraying our core values of inclusivity, tolerance, hospitality, and empathy? I suppose we shall find out soon enough. If this really is just a way to keep the authorities from being overwhelmed with desperate people eager to find a safe, prosperous place in which to raise their children, then it’s hard to find a good reason to be opposed: surely, no good can come from the system in place breaking down and ceasing to function well or at all. But, in the end, if this is really a way to close the border precisely to the people Emma Lazarus had in mind when she composed her poem, then it’s hard to feel sanguine about the nation’s future. Consider the poet’s words, “From her beacon-hand / glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command / the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.” In Emma Lazarus’s day, the twin cities were New York and Brooklyn. But although Brooklyn has been part of New York City since 1898, the poet’s sentiments are no less relevant today than they were when she wrote the poem fifteen years before the expansion of New York City from just Manhattan to the city it is today and defined, at least for me, what the most basic of all American values was to her and should be for us all.  

[ruminativerabbi]

Dancing in the Moonlight

There are so many things in my heart following this crazy rollercoaster of a week that began with the death of my dear father-in-law last Wednesday and continued through his funeral on Thursday, my return to New York without Joan on Friday, our beautiful musical Shabbat on Friday evening, the remarkable Shabbat morning service featuring remarks by Rabbi Carl Perkins (my friend of many, many years), the Gold Plate Dinner itself on Sunday, Joan’s return to Long Island on Monday, and the next few days of shiva observance in our home. You could say it’s been a busy week!

Any one of the above could turn into a Friday letter in its own right. But I thought I’d write this week not about any of it but about all of all, about the experience of knitting so many discordant themes and diverse obligations and opportunities into a coherent whole. Because, in the end, isn’t that what life itself is like, only just not usually quite that concentrated? We dance through the years of our lives, after all, and, as the music changes to suit the occasion, we dance differently: slower or faster, in our partner’s arms or merely facing each other, in step with the other couples on the dance floor or fully on our own and without reference to anyone else. But, at least for as long as we can, we keep dancing. When the pace actually gets a bit dizzying, as happened to me this last week, we finally force ourselves to take note of what we’re doing. But most of the time, we’re too pre-occupied for that kind of focused introspection and we just keep on keepin’ on, twirlin’ and swirlin’ to the music, happy still to be standing, still to be moving, still to be dancing in the moonlight.  (Just for the record, “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest was my favorite record of 1972, the year I left for my junior year of university in France. I knew you’d all want to know that.) And the music is always there, always audible, always present—just usually in the background. And then something happens—sometimes a single event, but other times a strange concatenation of unrelated events—and suddenly, almost out of the blue, there we are in the moonlight as the world falls away and we are suddenly on the dance floor all by ourselves.

That’s what this last week was like.

Since I mentioned one of my favorite songs from my college years, I’ll also mention one of my favorite books, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Watts, now forgotten by most, was a remarkable and well-known figure in his day and a great author. The child of devout Anglican parents, he eventually forsook Christianity to become a Buddhist monk, then went on to write any number of books I treasured as a young person. Of them all, however, The Wisdom of Insecurity is the one that had the greatest effect on me. He begins by observing that, just like people, animals also age as they pass through the years. They get older, then sicker, then weaker. And eventually they die, just as do we all. But the difference between animals and people is that, whereas we are consumed with anxiety about all of it (by which I mean: the aging process, the possibility of illness, the fear of incapacity, the opacity of death itself and our inability to see past it other than in our mostly made-up fantasies, the whole concept of growing more frail and less hale as we age, etc.), animals don’t seem to worry at all about following the natural trajectory of their lives. In fact, they seem far better at facing it all than any of us is. And so, as they become less strong and less able, they just move through those stages of their lives the way they’ve already moved through the earlier ones, possibly even not noticing the diminution of ability as it devolves upon them, and simply growing into new version of themselves without seeming to find that concept upsetting or off-putting. Growth, they appear wordlessly to be saying, may not be always positive, but it is invariably normal.

And so is the anxiety growth naturally engenders. In his book, Watts teaches that the insecurity that the aging process engenders in all of us is not a bad thing and certainly not something to try to deny or avoid. There is, he wrote, great wisdom in insecurity, in accepting the fact that we have no idea what the next day will bring (which idea would presumably be totally foreign to animals), that we cannot control the universe as we decline any more than we could when we were young people growing more strong and more capable with each passing year of childhood and adolescence. And it is from that insecurity that wisdom comes. (Or can come.) And not just wisdom, Watts wrote, but wisdom born of acceptance, of acquiescence, of submission to the nature of things, to our place in the universe, to the Creator who created Creation according to a divine plan that seems to include inevitable decline as we age and grow less sturdy and increasingly rickety. Even after all these years, I can still recommend that book to you all. You’ll like it, I think. But it is troubling too—and precisely because we are so good at avoiding these truths for most of the time, even perhaps for most of our lives.

And then you have a week like I just had. Brought together in a handful of days were the following: anxiety in the face of impending death, death itself (weirdly captured on video, since my father-in-law was actually facetiming with Joan when he breathed his last), eulogy, burial, bereavement, terrible sadness…and then, as if I wasn’t feeling mortal enough, my return to New York and the ensuing worship services and speakers and dinners and dancing celebrating my impending retirement, which is to say the beginning of the next stage, the stage that contains—not plausibly or possibly, but inevitably—all the things that Alan Watts writes about in his book. So you can excuse me for feeling a bit fragile as I contemplate all of this. Fragile and brittle. And yet, also as per Watts, hopeful and eager to see what the next years bring.

Is that eagerness itself a kind of denial? You could make that point very cogently! Or was Watts right that the great reward for facing things as they are is the wisdom that insecurity engenders as we find the courage to acknowledge the flimsiness of it all, to face the impermanence of this world we inhabit and, specifically, of our place in it? I thought he was when I was in college and, now, a half-century later, I find that I still do.

Like everybody, I’d like to live forever. But I’m not indulging that fantasy these days and, instead, I’m embracing the insecurity and seeking comfort in the ephemeral. Nothing lasts forever. As the great philosopher said, panta rhei, it’s all in flux, all changing constantly, all morphing forward into its own next version, all a work in endless and permanent progress. You can like it or not, but that’s how things are in this world God made and set us all into. So I’m not going to retreat into morose acceptance of my fate or resignation to the inevitability of decline. Instead—and this is the last and best lesson Joan’s dad taught me—I’m going to dance in the moonlight for as long as I can. Like my father-in-law, I have a happy marriage to sustain me and three wonderful children. And another three wonderful children-in-law. I have grandchildren too, unberufen, and watching them grow is and always will be a source of huge pleasure for me. So what am I complaining about? That life is process? I’ve known that since I was in college!

[ruminativerabbi]

Contextualization Is the Opposite fo Surrender

As we make our way through the weeks between Pesach and Shavuot, we are bidden by Scripture to count each day separately. This mitzvah, called informally “counting the omer,” is not complicated or difficult: you simply say the blessing, then say out loud the day of the omer upon us, then wrap up with a brief prayer. In different years, of course, this custom has a different feel to it. But this year, as things have gone from bad to worse, as the situation on many college campuses has deteriorated to the point almost of no return, as the poisoned tree that is the international effort to delegitimize Israel has born more and more fruit on more and more different branches, as traditional allies have wavered or retreated entirely, and as many members of Congress (a minority, but a sizable one) hesitate to support the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act for a variety of reasons, some bizarrely exaggerated and others darkly ominous—in a year such as this, the practice of counting each day, of marking each day as it passes and turns into the next one, that practice feels ominous and darkly suggestive of worse things to come in a way that I cannot recall ever having felt in years gone by.

And then I came across a video by an Israeli sketch comedy time called Ha-y’hudim Ba’im, literally “The Jews are Coming.” Normally, it’s a very funny broadcast on Israeli television, something along the lines of Saturday Night Live in its heyday.  But this last video clip, released just a week or so ago, is not at all funny. But it is profound and it is, in its own dark way, encouraging.

The video presents a series of Jewish people from ancient to modern times. A woman speaks about her experiences in first-century C.E. Judea as the Romans razed Jerusalem and defeated the rebels who dared seek an independent Jewish state in Israel. A young man follows who speaks to us from eleventh century Cologne and describes his family’s experiences as the Crusaders invaded the city with the specific intent of murdering its Jewish population before setting off to “liberate” the Holy Land. We then shift forward a millennium and find ourselves in Kishenev in 1903 as a resident describes what he saw and what his family experienced during the pogrom I wrote about last fall (click here), an anti-Jewish riot that, in a world that had yet to experience the Shoah, was understood as an almost unimaginable act of violence directed against innocents, including children. And then we skip forward two decades and meet a young person speaking from Hebron in 1929, the year of the anti-Jewish riots there that took the lives of sixty-nine Jews, also including children.

From Hebron, we move back to Germany and meet an older man who lived through Kristallnacht in Berlin. He describes the riots, the destroyed Jewish shops and businesses, the arrests of innocent Jewish men, the intentional destruction of the local synagogues. And then we travel to the east and meet a younger man who speaks from Baghdad and describes the Farhud, the violent anti-Jewish riot that seized the city on the first two days of June in 1941, riots that included gang-rape, the destruction of synagogues and Jewish shops, the murder of more than 180 innocents, and the destruction of upwards of 900 Jewish homes.

And then we move forward to Gaza in 2023. A young woman from Kfar Aza who lived through October 7 faces the camera. Based on what we’ve already seen, we expect her to tell about her experiences, about what she saw, about whom she lost. But she skips that part. We know those stories, she seems to suppose. And instead she speaks about the future. About her intention to remain in place, to live in her home, to rebuild what the vandals destroyed. She speaks calmly, but with integrity and purpose. And then, almost as if to reward her for her courage, she is joined by the others, all of whom step out of history to join her on camera and to say, as one, that together they represent the worst of Jewish history, the low points, the disasters, the pogroms, the nightmares, the true horrors…but that they also represent the spirit of the Jewish people to face down its oppressors and enemies, and to refuse to do anything other than to resist the haters and the bigots and the barbarians, and to thrive.

There’s an interesting riddle embedded in the clip as well. The actors are all Israelis. The clip itself is in Hebrew with English subtitles. Except for the final woman who speaks from Kfar Aza, they are obviously depicting people who lived before the State of Israel existed, some of them long before. Even the woman who speaks first, the one who describes the Roman onslaught against Jerusalem in the first century, and the fellow who speaks from Hebron, even they didn’t live in an independent Jewish state! And the others obviously lived in different places, in Germany and Iraq and Moldova. So that’s fine: actors depict personalities from different centuries and different countries all the time. But then, at the end, when they all come together, they somehow turn into Israelis as they speak in fully unaccented Israeli Hebrew and pledge to rebuild, to thrive, to defend their country, and to prosper in their own land, in their homeland, in their native habitat.

And in that merging of past and present, of Jewish history and Israeli reality, of stories from distant centuries and contemporary reality, there is something truly uplifting and satisfying, even encouraging.

I’ve written almost weekly since last October about the situation in Israel. It has consumed us all, of course, and me no less than anyone else. As the situation in Gaza, on the diplomatic front, at the UN, in the halls of Congress, and on our nation’s college campuses has deteriorated, it’s been easy to lose hope and to feel dejected about the future. Yes, it could always be worse. But that’s the punchline to a famous joke, not a rational path into the future! And then I saw this clip and things fell back into place for me. Yes, we’ve dealt with terrible things in our past. Yes, October 7 was beyond horrific. Yes, it will take a long time for Israel to return to its pre-October 7 state, if it ever does. But contextualizing is neither denial nor retreat. And seeing these people on the clip I’ve been writing back stepping out of history to join that young woman from Kfar Aza to remind her that she is not alone, that the ghosts of the past are not only present but fully and really so as Israel—and Jewish people in all the lands of our dispersion—move forward into whatever comes next.

I intentionally didn’t give the link earlier on because I wanted to introduce it to you with my own words, but here’s it is: https://youtu.be/KjwrV0wG9E0?si=Zp2vl0HkWWQzNPCA. Take a look, let these people speak to you as they did to me, and together let us all find comfort in the thought that, since history is run-up and destiny is catch-up, it’s the present we need to negotiate together into the future. We have faced worse than Hamas and survived. And we will survive this as well.

[ruminativerabbi]

Who Is Opposing the AAA and Why

A few weeks ago, the House passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act by a vote of 320 to 91. Obviously, I’m pleased that 320 members of Congress take anti-Jewish prejudice seriously enough to want to specify in law what constitutes an anti-Semitic act so as to facilitate taking legal action against the perpetrators of such acts. But I’m much more involved emotionally with the fact that 91 members of the House voted against the measure. The naysayers were a bipartisan group too, albeit a lopsided one: 70 of those who voted against the bill are Democrats and the other 21 are Republicans. To condemn them all as haters opposed to opposing anti-Semitism would be wrong. Nor is it so that they came to their opposition from similar vantage points.

The basic concept of the AAA is that the bill requires the U.S. Department of Education to use the definition of anti-Semitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a group based in Sweden that works “to foster education, remembrance, and research about what happened in the past, to build a world without genocide in the future.” (That’s a direct quote from their website; to see more, click here.) To do their work, it became necessary at some point to define anti-Semitism precisely. And so they developed a precise definition, one as brief as it is almost banal: “Anti-Semitism,” they determined, “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It’s hard to know what anyone could possibly take issue with in that. But, of course, the devil is always in the details.

The definition comes with quite a big set of elucidatory details, each describing a specific manifestation of anti-Jewish prejudice. They are:

Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.

Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g., the gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II.

Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libels) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, and

Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.

So you can already see where this is going. The Democratic opponents of the bill, including several Jewish member of Congress, were afraid that adopting the IHRA definition would criminalize criticism of the State of Israel under points 7 and 8 above. To me, that seems almost bizarrely exaggerated: the points listed above do not seem even remotely to me to mean that criticizing this or that decision or policy of the State of Israel ipso facto makes someone an anti-Semite in the way that questioning the right of Israel to exist would. Our own Jerry Nadler (D-NY) voted against the bill. So did Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont). That hardly surprised me, but what did me was a comment by yet another Jewish member of Congress, Sara Jacobs (D-California), who observed that although she personally feels that Israel has a right to exist, she knows many people who don’t feel that way at all despite the fact, and I quote, that they are “deeply connected to their Judaism.” I’m sure there are people out there whose understanding of Judaism is so unconnected to classical Jewish thought that they really imagine it possible to be “deeply connected” to Judaism without feeling any emotional connection to the State of Israel. We see such people, thankfully in tiny numbers, when they show up annually at the Israel Day Parade. But was it those people that Representative Jacobs had in mind? I doubt it. Whom she really had in mind, I obviously have no way to know. But to speak of such a position as though it were a valid, reasonable approach for a Jewish person to take—is it even possible for someone educated enough to be elected to Congress to know so little about her own faith? Apparently, the answer is yes. But weirder and creepier still are the reason at least some of the 21 Republicans who voted against the measure chose to do so, of which the one that made the headlines was the one put forward by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) who opposed the bill not for any reason that had to do with Israel, but because she perceived the bill to threaten her right to hold Jewish people responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus in the 1st century C.E. Oy.

It would be easy—and more than easy—to write off a comment like that. This is, after all, the same woman who speculated, apparently seriously, that the 2018 wildfires in California may well have been ignited by secret lasers orbiting in space that were put in place by the Rothschilds as part of a larger plan to control the world by controlling the weather. But Greene was not without her own supporters. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, took things one step further by observing that, in his opinion, the adoption of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act would basically outlaw the entire New Testament, an opinion promulgated on X by Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). That sounds even loonier than the idea of Jewish space lasers, but students of Jewish history have long since learned not to wave away anti-Semitic tropes or remarks just because they sound crazy. And so should we not pass lightly by this kind of statement, especially when used to justify opposing a bill that would criminalize the use of extremist religious rhetoric to justify harming or killing Jewish people.

Unlike most rabbis, I know the New Testament well. (I spent years of Graduate School working on my knowledge of New Testament Greek, and took courses in New Testament theology at the Union Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary, both Christian institutions of higher learning in Manhattan.) So I feel entitled to an opinion. All four of the Gospels are set in first-century Israel. The Romans are in charge; Judea is a province (or, in the very beginning of the story, a client kingdom) of the Roman Empire. Other than the Roman overlords, pretty much every person in the story is Jewish: Jesus himself, all his disciples, all of his relatives, all (or almost all) of his followers, the Temple priests, the High Priest, the citizens of Jerusalem. It was a fully Jewish place, Roman Judea in the first century CE. And leaving that detail out of the mix more or less guarantees that the resultant sense of what life was life in that time and place will be basically false.

The authors of the Gospels wrote decades after Jesus’s death and for Gentile audiences. As a result, “the Jews” were depicted—I’m generalizing here, but not to the extent of giving a false impression—the “Jews” were depicted as the non-Christians and the followers of Jesus as the Christians, without it being over-emphasized (or emphasized at all) that those followers were themselves Jewish as well and that the sharp division between Jews and Christians that later became basic to the Christian self-conception did not apply really at all in the days that Jesus himself walked the earth. And so, somehow, starting with the earliest extant Christian literature, the followers of Jesus were de-Judaized and depicted as proto-Christians, while the Jews who chose not to follow Jesus ended up depicted as “the” Jews. As a result, a casual perusal of the Gospel literature suggests a struggle between proto-Christians and Jews, thereby missing the point that Christianity doesn’t exist in Jesus’s day and that all the players in the story other than the land’s Roman overlords were Jews.

The bottom line, though, is that many Christian denominations have moved past the anti-Jewish tropes of the Gentile authors of the Gospels. (To give just one example, the papal encyclical called “Nostra Aetate,” promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965, specifically renounces that belief, saying explicitly that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”) But for a member of Congress to oppose a bill criminalizing anti-Semitic behavior because she perceives it possibly to be denying her the right to hold Jews responsible for the execution of Jesus—that is precisely the kind of statement of extreme prejudice that Jews know far better than to wave away as “just” silliness. When I ask myself what the future could possibly hold for the Jews of the United States, I find it impossible to consider an answer without hearing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comment ringing in my ears. I suppose there are many people who feel the same way. I’m sure there are, actually. And that is precisely why the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act should become the law of the land.

And what actually are the bill’s chances in the Senate? We shall find out soon enough!

[ruminativerabbi]

The President's Warren-Harding-Moment

Warren G. Harding, the 29th president of the United States, came to the presidency on the heels of a landslide victory over his Democratic opponent, James M. Cox. (He was also the first of our three presidents to move director from the Senate to the White House, the other two being JFK and Barack Obama.) And there truly was a new age dawning as Harding took the oath of office on March 4, 1921. The Great War was over, the Treaty of Versailles in effect for more than a year, our troops all back home. It was the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, les années folles in our nation and across the Atlantic in Europe. The future felt bright, our national potential for growth almost limitless.

And then, just a couple of months after Harding came to office, America experienced a race-based pogrom on a scale that had never been seen before. Called the Tulsa Race Massacre (or, sometimes, the Black Wall Street Massacre), the event featured mobs of white citizens rampaging through the Greenwood district of Tulsa, a Black neighborhood, eventually destroying 35 square blocks of homes and businesses. The precise number of people killed during those days, May 31 and June 1 of 1921, is not known, but the estimates range from 75 to 300. About 10,000 people were left homeless. It was, even by the standards of the day, a shocking event that seized the attention of the nation. To learn more, I recommend Tim Madigan’s book, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, which I read a decade ago when it first came out.

The riot presented President Harding with a remarkable challenge because he was scheduled just two days later to deliver the commencement address at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, the nation’s first degree-granting Historically Black College. He could surely have given some sort of color-by-number speech about graduating college and moving into the future and been forgiven for his blandness. But he saw an opportunity, a great one, and he took it. He only spoke for ten minutes. But in those ten minutes, he identified himself with his Black listeners (a remarkable thing for a white man in his office to do, and especially for the President who followed Woodrow Wilson, a known racist and segregationist). He wondered aloud how government, lacking a magic wand that could somehow alter attitude and stance, could lead Black Americans forward to a position of equality by working to offer Black Americans a chance to go to school, to become educated, and to enter society on an equal footing with their white co-citizens. And he spoke about Tulsa, calling the riot “an unhappy and distressing spectacle” of the kind that the nation should not and cannot tolerate. And then, in a gesture that will seem ordinary to most today but which at the time was considered astonishing, the white President of the United States shook the hand of every single Black member of the graduating class, which was all of them.

That fall, Harding went south to Birmingham, Alabama, to speak at the celebration of the city’s semicentennial. The Black third of the audience was separated from the white two-thirds by a chain-link fence. The President began his remarks, as everybody expected, by praising the city and commenting on its beauty. But then he reverted to Tulsa and, without mentioning the massacre, addressed its aftermath clearly and precisely. Black Americans fought in the Great War just as patriotically as white citizens, he began by noting. And then he went on to say clearly that Black people should not only not be prevented from voting, but should be encouraged to vote. Educational opportunities should be extended equally to all, he said, and without reference to race. And white Americans should be encouraging their Black neighbors to find their own leaders and to participate in the effort to advance humanity morally and politically. For the time and place, it was a remarkable statement. The white listeners greeted his speech with stony silence. The Black listeners responded with “uproarious applause,” to quote a journalist who was present. There was no question where Harding stood. It was his moment and he neither flinched nor equivocated. He is remembered today as, at best, a mediocre president. But he was a brave man as well. And delivering that speech in the heart of segregationist Alabama was a message as loud and clear as any President could have delivered. In many ways, the Birmingham speech was Warren Harding’s finest hour.

I reminded myself all about these two speeches as a way of preparing to hear President Biden speak Tuesday morning about the surge of anti-Semitism in America. I was especially curious to see if he would offer concrete steps forward or merely condemn prejudice, if he would address the haters in the manner of Warren Harding standing in front of a segregated audience in the heart of the South and daring to insist on equality for Black Americans. Would Biden merely announce that he is opposed to anti-Semitism in the way that people are opposed to bad weather, i.e., without anyone supposing that he could actually do something about it? Or would we hear concrete proposals about how our nation should move forward? I was especially interested in hearing what he would say about our nation’s college campuses. Would he call for the expulsion of students who openly call for the murder of their Jewish classmates? Would he announce that guest-students in our nation who openly espouse genocide directed against Jews (or anyone) be deported? Would he say clearly that college professors, including tenured ones, who espouse hatred of Jews should, at the very least, be fired? That was what I was waiting to hear.

In the end, the President didn’t call for any of the measures mentioned just above in so many words, but, almost despite myself, I was impressed, even moved, by his words. The man is not a great orator, but his words were clearly heartfelt and personal. And what he had to say was beyond resonant with me because he artfully made the single point over and over that I personally find it the most exasperating when our elected officials seem not to understand.

To my relief and slight amazement, the President seemed fully aware that it is not possible for Jewish Americans with any sense of their own history to consider the events of October 7 other than in the context of the Shoah. Yes, I understand that Hamas-governed Gaza is not Nazi Germany. But I am incapable of hearing stories about children being murdered, women being sexually abused and then killed, elderly people dragged from their homes and shipped off to unknown destinations to meet whatever fate awaited them there—I am just not able to hear any of that without being transported back to the dark days of the 1940s. Nor, I think, should anyone be able to be. And then the President tied the two together unambiguously: “Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven-and-a-half months later and people are already forgetting, are already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror. That it was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten, nor have you, and we will not forget.”  That is the precise point for Jewish Americans: that to talk about Hamas without reference to murder, rape, and barbarism towards babies is exactly the same as discussing the Nazis without reference to Auschwitz.

And then the President made that point even more clear, stressing that he understood fully that the Israeli response to the Simchat Torah pogrom was rooted in the history of the Jewish people and that those memories are, for better or worse, ineradicable: Too many people [are] denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas' appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews. It's absolutely despicable and it must stop…Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous they cannot be…buried, no matter how hard people try.

I recommend reading the whole speech, which you can do by clicking here. And I recommend comparing it to a document published on the White House’s own website, a fact sheet detailing the Biden-Harris administration’s national strategy to combat anti-Semitism. It’s a remarkable document in its own right, something very worth your time to consider. (To see a copy, click here.) You will find there more than 100 specific steps the administration is taking or wishes to take to fight anti-Jewish prejudice in these United States. Some of them seem a bit odd (will things really change if enough NBA players visit Yad Vashem?), but other initiatives seem solid and potentially very effective. But what struck me, aside from the details, was the larger image here of the President offering not one or two, but dozens upon dozens of initiatives to make Jewish people in our nation feel and be safe and secure.

But that document was from last year, published in May 2023. It still reads well. But this is now, not then. In May of 2023, our nation’s college campuses hadn’t turned into battlegrounds onto which Jewish students barely dare to wander and our nation’s high schools hadn’t become breeding grounds for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred. We hadn’t yet had the surge in anti-Semitic incidents that the President himself characterized as “ferocious.” So the efforts outlined in last year’s policy paper, for all they were surely well-meaning and even potentially game-changing, need to be revised and revamped in light of the new normal. The President did address the situation on campus. And what he said was spot on (“In America we respect and protect the fundamental right to free speech, to debate and disagree, to protest peacefully and make our voices heard. But there is no place on any campus in America … for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.”) But I was disappointed that the President didn’t call for the three-pronged approach to the situation on our nation’s campuses I recommended above. And I do believe that things will not change until it becomes clear that calling for more October 7’s, the equivalent of calling for the murder of Jewish children and the rape of Jewish women and the wholesale slaughter of Jewish families, will result in expulsion for students, dismissal for faculty, and deportation for visitors from foreign lands who received visas to come to these shores to study and not to call for the murder of our citizens. That was what I wanted to hear and didn’t.

President Harding’s Birmingham speech was a grand moment for the man and for the nation. But that was in 1921 and it took more than forty years for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to become the law of the land. We can’t wait forty years for focused, effective action on anti-Semitism. Nor should we have to.

[ruminativerabbi]

The Anti-Semitism Report Card

I get a lot of mail, especially e-mail. Some of it, I always read. Some of it, I read sometimes or just partially. A fair amount, there just being so many hours in the day, I delete without reading. But I got, unsolicited, something in my inbox this week that was so eye-opening that I resolved not only to read it all (which I did, and without getting up from my chair even once), but also to share it with you all this week. It is the first annual ADL Campus Anti-Semitism Report Card, available to all by clicking here. It was not pleasant reading.

Like all eye-opening surveys built on careful research, it is filled with little details and tiny facts that, considered entirely on their own, would sound banal or even petty. You could say the same, I suppose, of a single brick from the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon: it’s only just a brick if you consider it entirely on its own, but nothing like that when considered in the larger context of the structure of which it has survived as a single, tiny part. Obviously, not every college and university in the nation was included in the study. (That would have been too gargantuan an undertaking even for an organization as well equipped to undertake such things as the ADL.) So, instead, a sampling of eight-five of the nation’s schools were chosen for study, some because they have an especially large number of Jews in their student body and others because they are widely considered—or at least up to now have traditionally  been considered—to be our nation’s finest, most desirable institutions of higher learning. When considered against the fact that there are just shy of 4000 degree-granting institutions of higher learning in the United States (click here for corroboration of that number), the number sounds low. But when the actual roster of schools included in the study is considered, that number sounds reasonable: if I had been challenged personally to make up a list of the schools that are the best-known and most popular in the Jewish community, more or less every single school that would have been on my list appears in the survey, as do also the college I myself attended and those from which two of my children got their degrees. So waving the survey away as not broad enough in scope would be, in my opinion, a huge error of judgment. As noted, you won’t enjoy your time spent reading. No normal person would. But this is something every American should read—and not just every Jewish American either. This is the social fabric of our country we’re analyzing here, the institutions that train our young people to take their place as productive citizens. To put it another way, what percentage of members of Congress in twenty-five years will be people who are in or who soon will be in college in the United States? Surely not 100%, but I’m guessing that a serious majority of our nation’s leaders in a quarter-century will be people enrolled as undergraduates in our nation’s colleges and universities in the 2020s. If they are poisoned as undergraduates with prejudice and bigotry, and if they are trained to see nothing abnormal in hating Jews or Judaism, then we are in, I fear, for a very rough ride. And be “we,” I don’t mean just we Jews. I mean we Americans, we who imagine ourselves to live in the world’s most enlightened democracy, in a nation where the civil rights of the citizenry are not only universally respected, but understood to serve, each in its own way, as the foundational principles upon which the republic rests.

Like all complex documents, this one gives up its secrets slowly. But there are also shortcuts to be taken: the ADL has actually awarded letter grades to the surveyed institutions based on their efforts to create a safe environment for Jewish students and to combat anti-Semitism on campus. A quick survey yields some surprising results and some expected ones. Some of our most prestigious institutions were awarded D’s: Cornell, Columbia, Barnard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Northwestern, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. So were many others. But the list of schools awarded F’s is also interesting: some obvious institutions (Harvard, Tufts, Stanford, Swarthmore, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Chicago) and some that came as a surprise to me (SUNY Purchase, for example, or the University of Virginia at Charlottesville).

Of course, these letters grades—both the high one and the failing ones—have to be approached with caution. The ADL site itself offers the following advice: “Just because a school has received a letter grade A or B…does not mean that the school does not have an antisemitism problem. It also does not mean that the school is in compliance with existing legal frameworks, including but not limited to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Similarly, just because a school has received a C or D does not mean that the school is failing to support its Jewish students. For example, some schools received lower grades relative to others due to the severity and prevalence of incidents on campus, administrative policies notwithstanding.) In other words, the grade is meant to address two simple questions that are merely two sides of the same coin: how safe would a young Jewish person be as an undergraduate or graduate student in the college in question and how rational a choice would that institution be for high school seniors having to decide now where to attend university.

Looking more carefully at the survey leads to some interesting results. Let’s consider Princeton, for example, which has always been considered one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning. When you consider Jewish life on campus, every box is checked off: active Hillel, active Chabad, kosher dining hall, Jewish studies courses, pro-Israel activities permitted, Jewish religious services held on campus, etc. Then, when you consider the school’s policies, it also sounds wonderful: Princeton publicly condemns anti-Semitic incidents when they occur, has a clear process for reporting anti-Semitic incidents, maintains an advisory council specifically charged with monitoring anti-Semitism on campus, etc. So that sounds ideal too. So how could such an ideal institution end up with a D? Well, that’s a different column, the one that takes note of the fact that the school has tolerated severe anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents, has permitted hostile anti-Israel student government activity, has not censured anti-Zionist student groups, and tolerates anti-Semitic guest speakers on campus. In other words, Princeton seems to have all the right councils and advisory boards in place, plus they seem not to tolerate but to foster Jewish student life. But when it comes to protecting those Jews from predatory groups whose rhetoric is clearly meant to intimidate Jewish students and to humiliate those who dare speak out as Jews or as pro-Israel advocates, the school seems to fall seriously short of its own theoretical agenda. Yet it also bears noting that things are improving: the school originally got an F, but was upgraded to a D just a few weeks ago.

The other schools I investigated were similar in many ways: all had formal policies in place decrying anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic bullying and all tolerated overt Jewish activity on campus under the aegis of the local Hillel or Chabad House. But again and again they fell down on the actual application of those policies when such decisions might anger the extreme leftist students bent on denouncing Israel and condemning any who disagree as murderers and torturers.  The University of Chicago, for example, earned its F not by not formally condemning anti-Semitism or by not permitting kosher dining or on-campus religious services, but by tolerating extreme anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric on campus—rhetoric that is threatening, intimidating, and insulting to Jewish students—and not feeling obligated to deal with the matter forcefully or conclusively. To make believe that Jewish students can walk past signs condemning IDF soldiers as terrorists or see “bring home the hostage” posters vandalized but left in place by the university without feeling—to say the very least—unwelcome is just the kind of fantastical thinking that seems to be the norm in the nation’s colleges. When the president of Harvard couldn’t quite bring herself to say that calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people (i.e., the murder of every single Jewish person alive, which was Hitler’s goal as well) was not quite severe enough to warrant intervention by the Harvard administration, that weakness of moral character cost her her job. That certainly worked for me. But applying that standard to tuition-paying undergraduates seems to be the problem here: we will not see real progress until the nation’s schools can bring themselves to understand that bullying and threatening the safety of Jewish students who are not willing to condemn Israel and, in effect, join their own enemies in calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, should result, if not in the offending student being arrested, then at least with that student’s expulsion from the school. That would certainly happen if violent rhetoric were to be levelled against Black students or Latino ones, or against gay students or against Asians. But somehow violent anti-Jewish rhetoric gets a pass in the groves of academe that no other kind of prejudicial language ever would.

I strongly recommend my readers to visit the ADL site and spend time with the Anti-Semitism Report Card. (The link is above in the first paragraph of my letter. If you are reading a print copy of this letter, the URL is https://www.adl.org/campus-antisemitism-report-card.) You won’t enjoy your time there, that I can promise you. But it will remind you, as it did me, that all is not lost, that we have allies and friends, that there remains the possibility of the nation’s schools taking strong, meaningful action on behalf of Jewish students. We’re nowhere near there now, regretfully. But we could get there—I truly do believe that. And perusing the ADL’s Report Card, in addition to horrifying me, also made me feel (even I can’t explain this) slightly hopeful. What has been ruined by inattention, moral laziness, and political ineptitude, is surely fixable if the will is there to do right and to do good. Why wouldn’t it be?

[ruminativerabbi]

An In or Out Moment Is Upon Us

There’s a line in the Haggadah that seems to me especially meaningful this year. And, although my letters to you all have been getting darker and darker as the year has progressed since last October, the line in question—when read in the correct light and with the correct background information—that line contains a message of hope that I think may be just the thing for all of us as we live through our annual festival of freedom and feel, it seems with each passing week, less certain where this will all lead.

The line opens the long Magid section in which seder-meal participants fulfill the mitzvah of telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The setting really could not be better known. The leader uncovers the matzot, lifts the plate, and recites words we’ve all heard a thousand times. “This is the bread of affliction. Let all who are hungry come and eat…and let us gather together next year in Jerusalem.” Most seder-regulars can easily recite the words from memory. At some tables, they are sung aloud, which only makes it easier to remember them from year to year. But hiding behind the words is a riddle that will feel particularly relevant to this nightmarish year through which we have all been living since last October.

The invitation to the hungry to come and join in the feast is suggestive of the natural sense of hospitality that Jewish people bring easily to the celebration of Jewish holidays. But there is a problem here, and it has to do with the second part of that invitation, the part represented above by the three dots that separate the invitation to the hungry and the prayer that we all have seder together next year in Jerusalem. The familiar words, kol di-tz’rikh yeitei v’yifsach, are often mistranslated as “Let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover with us.” That makes it sound like a mere restatement of the opening remark: “let those who are hungry come and eat / let those who have no seder to attend feel welcome at ours.”

So that’s a nice sentiment. But that’s not precisely what the words mean. The Torah enjoins upon the Israelites the eternal obligation to celebrate Passover by offering up the sacrifice called the paschal offering or, more commonly in Hebrew as the korban pesach or the zevach pesach and then by consuming its meat on Erev Pesach, on the Eve of Passover. That being the case, a more literal translation would be something like “Let all enter who need to share our korban pesach, our paschal offering.”

And that too, of course, is a noble thought. The Torah says unequivocally at Exodus 12:8 that “you shall eat the meat [of this sacrifice] on that night; broiled in fire and with matzah and bitter herbs shall you eat it.” So what could be more natural than helping others perform the very mitzvah your own family has already gathered to undertake?

But there’s a detail that needs to be considered: the Torah specifically requires that the Israelites consume the sacrifice in chavurot, which is to say: in pre-formed groups constituted of the specific sponsors of the specific offering they will then consume together. And, indeed, this is the law. Maimonides, for example, writes unequivocally that “the paschal offering may only be slaughtered as a specific offering for its specific sponsors,” who become the people thus entitled to consume it (Hilkhot Korban Pesah 2:1). So how can the seder leader blithely invite any in need to eat the korban with his or her own family? Such people specifically cannot accept the invitation without breaking the law.

So that’s the riddle. What the “real” answer is, who knows? But what the riddle means to me, and particularly in this year of pogrom and war and surging anti-Semitism, is that sometimes you need to step around your normal practice for the sake of a greater good. Yes, the invitee—the specific person the seder leader is addressing when inviting the hungry to come eat and the needy to share in his or her family’s paschal sacrifice—that person being invited in should have signed up for his own sacrifice, should have sponsored a korban pesach in the specific way required by law. But that’s not what happened! And who can say why not? Was the invitee too poor, too shy, or too unfamiliar with the law properly to have dealt with its requirements? Was the invitee held back by physical disabilities, or by mental or emotional ones? Was the specific person being invited in a traveler, a stranger, or perhaps an alienated local who up until that very moment was certain that the very last thing he or she wanted was to do the whole Pesach thing with someone else’s family? Whatever! This person has somehow appeared at the door. The time limit for slaughtering the pesach is long past. The kohanim, the Temple priests, are all off to attend to their own seder meals with their own families. The Temple itself is shut down for the night, its nighttime security detail in place but otherwise empty. The moment has clearly passed to do this the right way. And yet, as the burden shifts from obligation to generosity, from harshness to kindness, from halakhah to aggadah, the host, accepting the situation not as it ought to be or could be but as it actually is, turns to the person standing at the door and, preferencing the real over the ideal, invites that person in to join the family inside and to participate in celebrating Passover by consuming the flesh of the sacrificial offering with which the festival shares its name. The folk genius of the Jewish people allows for things like this, for people knowingly to step occasionally around the rules for the sake of a greater good.

And that is where we are today in the wake of the Simchat Torah pogrom. What is needed, more than anything really, is for the Jewish people to set aside the political or even religious debates that divide us and to face the future united as one people possessed of one Torah and devoted to the service of the one God. As everybody knows all too well, we are a fractious people. Arguing is what we do best. (The old joke about “two Jews, three opinions” is funny and not funny at the same time.) But the bottom line is that what we need to do now is to come together. We don’t all have to agree about everything. We certainly don’t all have to like Bibi or his politics, and neither do we all have to agree whether the IDF has done all it could to free the hostages held captive in Gaza. We certainly don’t have to agree with anything our own President or Vice President have said about Israel over the last half year, both speaking so regularly out of both sides of their own mouths that we barely even notice the disconnect between today’s comment and yesterday’s and the day before’s. But what the Haggadah is saying is that we have to open the door and invite all in who are somehow still on the outside wondering if they even would be welcome at a seder without having first signed up to sponsor a korban pesach in the Temple.

What that line in the Haggadah about the korban pesach and the unsigned-up stranger at the door is there to teach us is that the pursuit of the greater good will always be the wiser choice. That thought should be our watchword as we negotiate these stormy seas on which we are all afloat this year: the key is draw into our ranks all who would seated at our table and then, united and with one voice, to face the world and demand justice—justice for the captives in Gaza, justice for the people whose own lives were ruined on October 7 or whose loved ones were murdered, justice for Israel in the international halls of justice that so frequently, almost routinely, treat Israel unfairly and unreasonably harshly. If we can’t speak as one now, then when exactly will we? And if not now, then when?

If we can manage that, we’ll have done a lot. Yes, there will be those who cannot bring themselves to stand with Israel or with the Jewish people. I regret that, but I also accept it—but I am thinking about swelling our ranks, not thinning them. And so, even with the seder meals behind us now, I invite you all to join me in opening up the doors—of our homes, of our synagogues, of our communities—to all those Jewish people (and they are legion) on the outside and inviting them in to stand with Israel and to stand with all of us who stand with Israel. And allies in the non-Jewish world whose hearts beat with Israel are welcome in my house too. There are moments in history when you have to stand up or back off, to be in or out, to declare yourself part or apart. This, I think (and, yes, fear) is one of those moments.

[ruminativerabbi]

Pesach 2024 - Leil Shimmurim

History is filled with Rubicon moments, moments at which the course of history is altered by an event so widely understood to be of colossal importance that everything that follows feels related to that specific juncture in time, to that specific event. Pearl Harbor was that kind of moment in history. 9/11, too. So must have been also July 4, 1776. And the original Rubicon moment—when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River into Italy in January of 49 BCE and thus initiated the insurrection that led to the end of the Roman Republic and, eventually, to the reorganization of the nation as the Roman Empire with Caesar’s biological nephew and adopted son Augustus as its first emperor—that was (obviously) the first of them all. The famous words Caesar spoke aloud as he crossed the river into Italy, “the die is cast,” sums up the moment aptly: just as you can’t unroll dice, so did Caesar mean to say that his act of leading an army across the border into Italy could not be undone and would have to be allowed to lead wherever it went as the future unfolded in the wake of his decision. In the history of the Jewish people, Pesach itself is the original Rubicon moment. And it involved crossing a body of water as well!

Was October 7 such a moment for Israel? Was it one for Hamas? Or was it one for both, and also for diasporan Jews in all the various lands of our dispersion? I suppose those questions could conceivably all have different answers, but it doesn’t feel that way to me: as the months have passed since that horrific day last fall, things feel to me more and more as though the Simchat Torah pogrom permanently altered the course forward into the future for all directly and indirectly concerned parties. As Pesach approaches, this notion of a Rubicon moment has become the lens through which I feel myself called to think of the Simchat Torah pogrom.

The specific way in which the conflict in Gaza has poisoned the atmosphere not solely on our college campuses, but even in our nation’s high schools and elementary schools, is by now common knowledge, as is also the way that this conflict has opened the gates to the expression of overt anti-Semitism in the American work place and at other public events that feel totally unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict like the Christmas Tree lighting in Rockefeller Center last December. Nor are the halls of government immune: the fact, once unimaginable, that a member of Congress could formally decline to condemn people in her own district chanting “Death to America” at an anti-Israel rally and that that refusal be greeted by her colleagues with an almost universal shrug, is only this week’s example of how things have changed for Jewish Americans in the last half year. That people at the highest echelons of our American government could overtly—and without any sense of shame—suggest that American material support for Israel could, and possibly even should, be conditional on the elected leaders of Israel obeying the instructions of their American masters rather than those of their own constituents is just further proof that October 7 was a Rubicon movement for us all.

But history is not all Rubicon moments. Two weeks ago, I wrote to you about the slow deterioration of the Israelites’ status in ancient Egypt as year after year passed until their enslavement ensued almost naturally. Could slavery have been averted? Surely, it could have been: the Israelites had scores upon scores of years to pack up and go back to Canaan, but chose instead to remain permanently in Egypt on the assumption that their status would never change, that they would always be welcome, that no one would ever resent them as privileged foreigners living off the fat of somebody else’s land. I won’t repeat here what I wrote there, but the bottom line was (and is) that they could have saved themselves but, because there was no specific Rubicon moment, no pivot, no event that changed everything, they apparently chose to assume that nothing was changed at all. And then, just like that (or so it must have seemed), they were slaves possessed of no civil rights at all in a world in which midwives were charged not with assisting women in labor but with murdering the babies born to them.

I’ve written before about my relationship with Erna Neuhauser, my parents’ next-door neighbor. Born in 1898, Erna was in her 60s and early 70s when I was a teenager. But, long before that, she was a young married woman with a young daughter in Nazi Vienna, the city of her birth and the place in which she grew up. Some readers may recall that I’ve mentioned many times that Erna was a childhood friend of the woman later known as Miep Gies, the woman who risked her life years later to hide Anne Frank and her family in German-occupied Amsterdam. But the reason I mention her today is not related to Miep Gies’s story, but to her own. Erna was the first Shoah survivor I knew intimately. Of course, she never let anyone call her that because she was, she always insisted, not a survivor at all: she, her husband Ernst, and their daughter Liesel had been able to escape Vienna in 1938, first traveling to Sweden (where her brother had acquired residency earlier on and was able to sponsor them as refugees) and then to New York, where they settled and lived out their lives. But, also of course, she was a survivor—of the Nazification of Austria, of the intense anti-Semitism Anschluss brought in its terrible wake, of the degradation experienced daily, sometimes hourly, by the Jews of Vienna. And it was her story that framed my first effort to think seriously about the Shoah and to establish my own relationship to the events of those horrific years.

It was from Erna that I learned that the difference between Rubicon moments and non-Rubicon ones is not as clear as historians sometimes make it out to be. Yes, the moment Hitler annexed Austria—the event then as now known simply the Anschluss, the “Annexation”—was the Rubicon moment back across none could step. But it only seemed that way after the fact and what really happened was not one disastrous transformation from being welcome, respected citizens to despised Untermenschen, but the slow, step-by-step deprivation of the rights and privileges to which all had become accustomed. Jews couldn’t get their hair cut in non-Jewish barbershops. Jews could no longer ride the streetcars. Jewish children could no longer attend public schools. Some patriotic souls hung on, certain that things in their beloved homeland would soon improve. Others fled—some to America, others to the U.K. or to Sweden, still others to British Palestine. Many committed suicide in despair. I remember Erna saying that things somehow changed slowly and quickly at the same time. I’m feeling that right now in our nation, that sense that things are unfolding quickly and slowly somehow at the same time.

Wasn’t it just yesterday that Jewish parents would have been overjoyed to send a child to Harvard or to Stanford no matter what the cost? When did it feel reasonable not to wear a kippah on the subway or even on the LIRR? At what point did it feel wiser for Jewish teachers in New York City’s high schools not to mention their pro-Israeli sentiments for fear of being attacked by their own students? When did it start to feel normal for synagogues to hire armed guards to protect worshipers? When did I stop speaking in Hebrew on the phone in public places? I can’t even say that I don’t do that anymore—but I certainly don’t do it if I think someone might overhear me.

This isn’t the Weimar Republic we’re living in and it certainly isn’t Nazi Vienna. The center, at least so far, is definitely holding. Both presumed nominees in this fall’s presidential election self-present as allies of the Jewish community. The issue of anti-Semitism on campus is finally being addressed by people with the authority to effect real change. And, at least eventually, I still think reason will prevail, that people will come back to their senses and understand that Israel is not only our nation’s sole true friend in the Middle East, but also a fully reliable ally. But I am also sensitive to Pesach—now almost upon us—not solely being our annual celebration of freedom, but also our annual opportunity to obey the Haggadah’s famous injunction to think of ourselves not only as now-free people, but as once-enslaved ones…and to use that opportunity to consider how the Israelites ended up as slaves after having watched small micro-aggressive incidents become more and more overt, more difficult to endure, more suggestive of what was soon to come.

At Exodus 12:42, the Torah calls the eve of Pesach by the mysterious name leil shimmurim, a night of “keepings,” of “things kept or guarded.” What that means exactly has been a matter of debate for millennia. But for me it means: a night of holding on to history, of seeing time present through the lens of time past, of understanding our current situation as a function of what we’ve already experienced. Pesach is a hopeful holiday that celebrates the liberation of slaves from their bondage. But there is a monitory side to Pesach as well, one intended to make us think carefully about the present by focusing our gaze on stories from the past and in their light formulating our hopes for the future. Elijah comes to my seder table specifically with his intoxicating promise of redemption and survival. But Erna also comes, and her message is far more sobering than intoxicating…even after four cups of wine.

[ruminativerabbi]

Like a Letter Left Unread

The whole eclipse thing earlier this week made a big impression on me, but not (maybe) for the reason you’d think.

It all started when I mentioned to one of my grandchildren that I hope it will be a clear, non-cloudy day when the sun goes into eclipse. This was met with the kind of equanimity only a child can muster up effortlessly: “Me too, Saba. But if it’s so cloudy you can’t see anything, the next eclipse is in just twenty years and we can see it then.” Well, okay, I thought, and just how old will I be on August 23, 2044? You see where we’re going here: I surely do hope to be somewhere in the summer of 2044 looking up through safety sunglasses at a clear, cloudless sky as the moon passes before the sun and hides it totally from view for a few minutes. But suddenly the whole discussion made me feel mortal—not fragile especially, just more aware of where I am actuarially than I generally enjoy being. Of course, it could have been way worse: she could have reminded me that Halley’s comet is due back in the summer of 2061.

How to relate to a total eclipse of the sun is a different matter entirely, however. For most moderns, it’s just a thing—something that happens every so often and creates a dramatic effect for a few minutes, then stops happening. Not good or bad, not something overly to focus on and certainly nothing to fear. But our sages in ancient times were less certain: possessed of the conviction that the Creator at least occasionally speaks through the medium of Creation itself, they sought meaning in all sorts of natural phenomena that moderns tend to wave away. Nor is this solely a rabbinic thing—the biblical story of Noah ends with God’s observation that rainbows are not just natural phenomena that sometimes occur, but signs from God that there will never again be a flood that wipes out humanity as was the case in the days of Noah and his ark. And it’s for just that reason that tradition dictates that we recite a short prayer—just a few words acknowledging the rainbow as a symbol of optimism and hope—when we see a rainbow. How often does this happen? Often enough! Joan and I saw the most beautiful rainbow in Niagara Falls, New York, just last week on our drive to Toronto. And, yes, I said the blessing.

But the rabbis were less sure about eclipses. There’s a semi-famous passage in the Talmud (at Sukkah 29a) that declares that any solar eclipse should be taken as a bad sign for the world, for example. And the text then goes on to flesh that thought out with an elucidatory parable: a solar eclipse, they taught, is God behaving roughly in the manner of an earthly king who prepares a giant banquet for all of his servants, perhaps as a way of thanking them for their loyal service. But then, suddenly, the king becomes aware of some specific way in which his servants have conspired to do him ill. So what does he do? He can’t cancel the banquet entirely—that would be (I’m guessing) bad form—but what he can do is instruct his personal valet to remove the torches that had been illuminating the banquet hall. And that, according to the parable, is what a solar eclipse is like: suddenly aware of some way in which humanity has failed to behave honorably or decorously but not quite prepared to wipe clean the slate as in Noah’s day (and which God had promised never again to do anyway), God simply darkens the sun as a way of expression divine displeasure.

Other sages, however, took a more nuanced view. Rabbi Meir, for example, agreed that both solar and lunar eclipses are bad omens, but solely for the Jewish people not for the entire world. And he too had a parable to back up his lesson. The situation that pertains during an eclipse, he taught, bodes poorly for the Jewish people only because they are m’lummadin b’makkoteihem. That’s not that easy an expression to translate, which even Rabbi Meir apparently thought might be the case. And so he too offered up a parable to make his point a bit clearer. A solar or lunar eclipse, he taught, is like when a teacher comes into the classroom and he is already holding a giant razor strop, the kind that was apparently used in Rabbi Meir’s day to punish school children for their poor behavior. Who gets the most jumpy upon noticing the strop in the teacher’s hand, Rabbi Meir asked rhetorically. And he then answered his own question: the student who is beaten with it the most often gets the most nervous—because that student supposes that the teacher is intending to beat him again. And that is what it means to be m’lummadin b’makkoteihem, as above: Jewish people are so used to suffering and being again and again beaten down, must not it be they specifically who are being prompted to fear the worst when the sun disappears and the world is plunged into darkness? (The words literally mean “well-versed in their own beatings” or something like that.)

Still other rabbis took an even more nuanced approach. Solar eclipses, they opined, are bad news for everybody, whereas eclipses of the moon are meant specifically to augur bad times for the Jewish people. And the rationale behind this approach has its own logic to it: the Gentile nations, who use a solar calendar to count off their years of their lives, are addressed through the solar event, whereas Jews, who maintain a mostly lunar calendar, God admonishes by making the moon disappear briefly from the nighttime sky. And then they go on to discuss solar eclipses, discussing the specific significance of the location of the sun in the sky when the eclipse takes place and assigning specific meaning in terms of the disaster soon to ensue to the hue the sun in eclipse takes on.

And then, as if all this weren’t enough, the Talmud goes on to quote an ancient source that lists the specific sins for which a solar eclipse may reasonably be taken as the divine response. That thought—including the peculiarly modern-sounding horror of people in an urban setting simply ignoring a woman calling out for help in fending off a would-be rapist—founders, though, on the fact that it isn’t correct: people fail to show proper respect for deceased community leaders all the time (another sin on the list) and yet the sun does not go into instant eclipse as a response!

Is there anything to any of this? We moderns understand what eclipses are and why they occur, and we also understand that they are fully naturally phenomena that are not related to, much less triggered by, the behavior of Jewish or non-Jewish terrestrials. As a result, our natural response is to turn away from tradition and make a kind of smug virtue out of feeling grateful that we know better. The Talmud, after all, is filled with ancient ideas about all sorts of things that we moderns, who understand that epilepsy is a disease and not a function of the circumstances under which the epileptic individual was conceived, can only smile at. And, indeed, the Talmud is filled with all sorts of medical observations that no one today considers even remotely to be scientific truths. So it would be more than reasonable just to wave all this away. But I have a different idea I’d like to propose, one a bit less literalist and more fanciful, but also, I think, reasonable.

In a long, fascinating passage towards the end of the talmudic tractate Berakhot, the Talmud offers up a detailed lesson regarding the correct way to interpret dreams. It’s a long passage filled with lots of theories about the meaning of dreams, but the basic principle set forward is that the importance of dreams depends fully on their interpretation. In other words, nothing in a dream means anything at all until the dream is ably interpreted by the kind of oneirocritic trained to offer up that kind of interpretation. So the dream contains solely the meaning we find embedded in it, a principle later to serve as the foundation of Freudian dream analysis. When the Talmud says that a dream left uninterpreted is like a letter left unread, it means precisely that: leaving a dream uninterpreted deprives it of the chance of having any impact on the dreamer at all, just as an unread letter has no potential to affect the person to whom it was addressed at all.

Maybe we should apply that kind of thinking to eclipses. I was in Glen Cove last Monday at 3:18 PM and, looking up at the sky through the special glasses, I saw almost all of the sun disappear behind the moon. As the sky darkened and the temperature fell, I felt the trappings of civilization falling away as I stood there under the sky and watched the sun that defines our lives here in earth darken. I felt small and fully insignificant as the planet on which I was standing and the sun it orbits and the moon that orbits it began their brief cosmic dance. My interpretation of the whole event, therefore, had to do with humility. And with resolve: more than I do usually, I felt the presence of the Earth, alive and not alive at the same time, sturdy yet fragile, immeasurably big yet also cosmically insignificant. And I felt a renewed sense of responsibility for the planet, for its climate and its ozone layer, for its air and its water, for its wellbeing and security. My interpretation of the eclipse, therefore, is that the sun and the moon teamed up to remind us that we are, at best, stewards of this world we inhabit. And that the degree to which we shuck off that feeling of insignificance that the eclipse did its best to instill in us—that will also be the degree to which we have left this rare celestial phenomenon as a letter left unread, as a dream left uninterpreted.

[ruminativerabbi]

Israel in Egypt

Slow change is hard to notice. This, we all know from daily life: you hardly notice children growing taller if you see them every single day, whereas you are often amazed at how much those very same children have grown if you haven’t seen them in a few months. The same is true about gaining or losing weight: you can see changes easily in people you see once a year that you would hardly notice at all if you saw that same person daily. And the same is true about far more challenging aspects of life than height or weight: it’s always hard to notice incremental change.

With Pesach approaching, the story of Israel in Egypt is on my mind. There are a thousand different ways to think about that famous story, but the one that seems the most relevant—and chillingly so—to our current situation has to do with just that notion, with the concept of incremental change.

Sometimes, the Torah teaches its best lessons so subtly that it is entirely possible to miss them entirely. When Jacob comes to Egypt, he is awarded a private interview with Pharoah, something that must have been as rare and special in his day as it would be today. Their conversation is an interesting one in lots of different ways, but the most interesting part is when Jacob tells Pharaoh that he is 130 years old. It sounds a bit like a throwaway line to most: Pharaoh asks and he obviously has to answer, so he does. And yet there is a lot packed into that single number.

Jacob comes to Egypt in the second of the seven years of famine. That would make him 135 when the famine ended five years after his arrival and life in Egypt returned to normal. But the Torah makes the point later on that Jacob lived to be 147 years of age. So why, Scripture prompts us to wonder, didn’t Jacob and his clan return to Canaan once the famine ended and they needed no longer to fear starvation back at home? (Jacob would have had a full dozen years to get that all organized.) The question is unasked, so also unanswered. But then Scripture tosses some new numbers into the mix.

Joseph, who was sold into slavery at seventeen and who was thirty when he became the grand vizier of Pharaoh’s Egypt, presided over the seven years of plenty that preceded the seven years of famine. That would make him thirty-nine years of age when his father and his father’s family arrived in Egypt in the second year of famine, and forty-four years of age when, five years later, the famine ended. That being the case, he would have been fifty-six when, twelve years later, Jacob died. But the last lines of Genesis report that Joseph lived to be 110 years of age, which means that the Israelites would have been living in Egypt for something like fifty-four years when Joseph died.

Eventually, a Pharaoh came to the throne who, to quote Scripture, “knew not Joseph” and that was the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. Were there Pharaohs in between the one who welcomed Jacob’s family to Egypt and the one who knew not Joseph? The Bible doesn’t say. But what it does say—albeit subtly—is that the Israelites were in Egypt for more than half a century, and possibly a lot longer than that, when their situation had finally deteriorated to the point at which they could no longer just go home and, in fact, they had no choice but to endure the misery that slavery brought them in that land not their own.

They should obviously have left when the famine ended, but they didn’t. I suppose they eventually realized that. (After the fact, everybody’s a chokhom.) But my question has to do with the years between the end of the famine and the rise of the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.

Let’s imagine another half-century passed as things began to deteriorate for the Jews of Egypt. At first, it was small things, what moderns would call instances of extra-legal microaggression. Then as now, these kind of things were easy to shrug off: an overheard insult, a vulgar joke, an instance of being made to feel unwelcome in familiar places—in the locker room at the gym or at the pool or in the supermarket. But public opinion began slowly to shift as the Israelites were increasingly less welcome in their host country, increasingly resented, increasingly disliked. Could they have stemmed that tide by acting forcefully to make things right? There’s no answer to that question, but in my fantasy version of the long stretch of time I’m imagining between Jacob’s death and the Israelites’ eventually enslavement, things began slowly to snowball as the Israelites’ prosperity was resented, their clannish ways disliked, and their refusal to embrace the national religion of Egypt found more and more insulting.

But the Israelites failed to notice any of that. Or to take any of it too seriously. They withdrew into their communities, failing entirely to understand the depth of the antipathy they were dealing with as they circled their wagons and took pride in the degree to which they had managed to keep the world at bay while, at the same time, missing the point about the level of rage that was slowly reaching boiling point in the world in which they actually lived. In other words, they managed to make a virtue about looking inward when what they really should have been doing is looking out at the storm brewing on the horizon and working to fix things before they truly became unfixable.

Could they have returned to Israel? Was that door ever really shut? Or did the Israelites just like living in the world’s most sophisticated superpower, in a center of world culture, in one of the handful of nations never to have been conquered or subjugated by any hostile neighbor ever? Did they think of themselves as Egyptians? It’s a less silly question than it sounds at first. They must have spoken Egyptian. (How else could have communicated with the citizens of their host nation?) They surely must have had contact with Egyptian officials of various sorts. I imagine that, at least in the beginning, they did think of themselves as some version of Egyptians, perhaps some going so far as to think of themselves as Egyptians-of-Israelite-origin, something in the away the more assimilated Jews of Germany used to refer to themselves as deutsche Staatsbürger jüdischer Herkunft, as German citizens of Jewish origin. (This was only ironic after the fact, obviously.) But things got worse, not better. At first no one even noticed, not really. And by the time they all fully understood how things were, they were making bricks for Pharaoh and building his storage cities as his fully unwilling slaves.

We just came back from a few days in Canada visiting with Joan’s family. Everything seemed normal. But things have changed, almost without any of the locals noticing. The Canadian government, once a staunch defender of its citizens civil rights, has outlawed kosher slaughter. Of course, they didn’t put it that way and said instead that they were enacting a new law that would guarantee that animals be slaughtered in a way that they argued would be more humane than the way Jewish tradition requires and they simply didn’t care if that basically meant outlawing kosher slaughter. (This from a nation that sanctions as legal the clubbing of baby seals because outlawing such a barbaric practice would offend the basic right to cultural self-preservation of the Inuit nation that inhabit Canada’s Arctic. For more on that, click here.) Of course, Canada is not alone. Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Estonia, Slovenia, and Finland have also outlawed kosher slaughter, in effect saying that Jews are tolerated in those places as long as they don’t mind abandoning their own traditions and living as others would prefer them to live. But my point today is that none of this is evident—and not even slightly—on the streets of Toronto. Everything really did feel normal. When I asked some of the people we met about the kosher meat thing, they mostly shrugged. Yes, they agreed, it’s terrible. But what can you do? We’ll just import meat from the States. So it will be a bit more expensive—it already costs a fortune so it will cost slightly more of one. It’s just the government. It’s just the Liberal Party. It's just the New Democrats. It’s just the Greens. It’s just Justin Trudeau. It’s always just something! No one said any of this to me in Egyptian, but they might as well have! (To be fair, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, a kind of umbrella group representing Canada’s Jews, is suing the government to force them to amend the legislation. But I don’t think anyone is especially hopeful this effort will be successful.)

And that brought me to thinking about our nation in that same light. Things have changed quickly and slowly at the same time. Some of our most prestigious college campuses have become centers of intolerance, including of the violent kind, aimed directly at Jewish students. Some of our most revered public officials—including the President, the Vice President, and the Senate Majority Leader—have spoken hostilely, even crudely, about the duly elected Prime Minister of Israel. (The President’s endless critique of Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the settled results of a fairly-held election seems only to apply to our own country, not to our allies.) Suddenly, things feel different. The bond between Israel and our nation feels less strong, less sturdy, less un-unravelable. The degree to which the Trump campaign has begun openly to mix evangelical tropes into its campaign rhetoric feels ominous, not merely exclusionary and off-putting. The subtle sense that it might be wiser not to wear a kippah on the subway, a feeling I had previously only felt strongly on the Metro in Paris, suddenly feels fully reasonable.

Everybody knows that you can boil a frog alive in an open petri dish if you only heat the water slowly enough. Whether that’s actually true or not, I have no idea. (The blogosphere is equivocal.) But the Haggadah’s famous remark that Jews are required at Pesach to think of themselves as though they personally were slaves in Egypt and were personally liberated from their bondage by God’s might hand and outstretched arm—that remark seems to me to include the parallel obligation to think about all the years that led into slavery, decades of ever-increasing signs of degeneration blithely ignored by all until it really was too late.

[ruminativerabbi]

Purim 2024

Purim begins on Saturday night. Are we all ready? More or less, we’re ready. It feels like we’re ready.

And it also feels like we couldn’t be less ready. In normal times, Purim is fun, a riotous celebration of victory over Haman’s minions and of the truth behind Mordechai’s hopeful promise to Esther that, come what may, salvation eventually comes from somewhere. When I was much younger, I was more than slightly conflicted about Purim. That’s our plan, I thought to myself back then: to face impending genocide and to find comfort in the assumption that salvation will eventually come from somewhere? Great plan! Of course, in the Megillah, salvation actually does come from somewhere as the pieces of the intricate plot slowly fall into place. Haman’s preening megalomania makes it impossible for him not to appear at both of Esther’s banquets. Achashveirosh, confronted with the thought that Haman was personally attacking his queen in his own palace, somehow finds it in him—entirely uncharacteristically—to act forcefully and even to summon up a bit of sarcasm as he condemns Haman to death. And, of course, Esther has amazingly and completely unforeseeably ended up in precisely the right place to set the whole counterplot in motion, the one that features the Jews utterly defeating their would-be murderers instead of themselves being annihilated by those same thugs and haters.

But much-younger-me was unimpressed. The whole story in the Megillah hangs on so many unlikely details, of which the most shocking one has to be the decision of Mordechai in the first place to send Esther off for her overnight “interview” with the king to see if she can beat the gigantic odds against her and somehow become the queen of Persia. And there are lots more unlikely twists and turns in the story. That’s what makes it such a good story. But does that make it a cogent plan for the Jewish people? That was the question that younger-me pondered as, year after year, I showed up to hear the Megillah and to try to get in the mood to feel good about the one pogrom in these last 2.5 millennia that backfired and led to the bad people being defeated instead of the good people.

Eventually, much-younger-me grew up to be less-younger-me (and eventually much-less-younger-me), a working pulpit rabbi tasked with making sense of every Jewish holiday including, of course, Purim. Unexpectedly, I grew into it. Purim started to feel more reasonable to me as I read more and learned more about Jewish history. Yes, it was a mere fluke (and in twenty different ways) that it all ended up well. But the point both less-younger-me eventually grasped onto was that, in the end, it did end up well. The Jewish community survived and was able to contemplate an untroubled future. And then I began to wonder what could possibly have happened next. Did the Achashveiroshes have children? Wouldn’t those children have been Jews, the children of a Jewish mother. (And what a Jewish mother at that!) Was the next king of Persia then Jewish? Maybe salvation, less-younger-me eventually concluded, maybe salvation really does always come from somewhere.

So I was in. But not entirely. In 1943, the last Jews in the Krakow ghetto were sent to their deaths at Belzec and Auschwitz in the days leading up to Purim. That fact stayed with me for years after reading Schindler’s List (then still called Schinder’s Ark) back in the 1980s, even though I don’t think Thomas Keneally specifically made that point in the book. (I could be wrong—it was a long time ago.) And the weirdness of Purim for a post-Shoah Jew was always with me. I didn’t give into it often. Or really ever—I was a congregational rabbi and the last thing a congregation wants or needs is a rabbi displaying his own ambivalence about the traditions he is in place specifically to endorse personally and to promote. So I did Purim. As I still do. But the absurdity was always with me, always floating around like a distant cloud overhead, one that I could see but which I could also tell wasn’t likely to rain on my parade.

And that brings me to Purim 2024, the Purim that follows October 7. Something like 134 hostages are still being held in Gaza, including our own Omer Neutra, a graduate of the Schechter School of Long Island. There is no clear end to the fighting in sight. Whether the IDF enters Rafah this week or not, their eventually entry into the city seems a certainty. And where that will lead, who can say? If the strike is surgical, quick, and fully effective, it will lead to one place. But if it turns out to be long, drawn-out, and bloody, and if it ends up costing the lives of hundreds or thousands of civilians, it will be a debacle both for the Gazans and for Israel. Bibi, the elected leader, seems to have lost the confidence of a large percentage of the people who voted him into office. How the American government feels about the whole Gazan incursion seems to depend wholly on whom you ask and at what specific moment of the day. (I’ll write some other times about Senator Schumer’s unprecedented—and truly shocking—speech last week.) But while our leaders dither, we’re all feeling out of sorts, unsure, and ill at ease. And the situation on our American college campuses seems to go from bad to even worse on a weekly basis, as Jewish students face a level of anti-Semitism that would once—and by “once” I mean “last year”—been considered unimaginable.

Welcome to Purim 2024. Should we cancel the whole thing? If the Jewish world somehow observed Purim in 1944, we can surely observe it eighty years later too!  But there’s more than mere obstinacy in that thought. And with that I shuck off (finally!) all prior versions of myself to speak as current-me, as who I am today.

We live on the razor’s edge, all of us of the House of Israel. And Purim is our annual homage to that thought. As I wrote last week, the story both condemns and yet also celebrates the existence of a vibrant Jewish diaspora. As it begins, the Jews, a mere century after the Babylonians sent the Jews of Judah and Jerusalem into exile, have settled into every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. They appear to be thriving too, possessed of synagogues and businesses, of wealth and a sense of belonging that makes it reasonable for them, all of whom live in the same country as the Land of Israel and could presumably relocate to there if they wished—they all seem to be fine with living abroad and seeking their fortunes in those places. Yes, Haman does present a problem. But some combination of Providence and good fortune neutralize him and lead to the destruction not of his intended victims but of his own gang of would-be murderers. It could have ended up terribly, but it didn’t. It doesn’t always not, of course. (If there had been any survivors of those final deportations from the Krakow ghetto, you could ask them.) But it also does. And in the larger picture of things, it always does: the world has doled out its worst to the Jewish people and yet here we are, still thriving, still doing our best to pass our Jewishness along to the next generation, and still observing Purim and, yes, having great fun at the same time.

Living on a razor’s edge is uncomfortable, obviously. That’s the whole concept, after all! But we really have gotten good at it over all these years. And although the world really is full of the most horrible people who wish us ill, salvation—at least in the global sense—had always come, as Mordechai said it would, from somewhere. And so shall it again come—for the hostages, for the soldiers of the IDF serving in Gaza, for their families and friends across the globe, for us all. That is the message of Purim 2024 and it is one the me that all those previous versions finally grew into—it is the one I can embrace wholeheartedly. Yes, the forecast may occasionally be grim. But salvation really does comes, at least eventually, from somewhere.

[ruminativerabbi]

Ezra and Esther

Being an ancient book, the Bible makes many of its best points using all sorts of literary techniques that are unfamiliar to modern readers. Sometimes these are subtle flourishes that only someone reading truly carefully would ever notice. But other instances are totally overt, fully visible, and noticeable by even someone just casually perusing the text. The willingness of the narrative to depict the same individual as being two different ages at the same time is a good example: to most moderns, passages that do that have a clumsy feel to them and suggest that some ancient editor must have been asleep at the switch and simply failed to see a giant discrepancy that could easily have been fixed. (To see an essay I published years ago about that specific feature of the scriptural text, click here.) But discrepancy is more wisely taken as a literary feature of the text, as a kind of riddle fully intended to teach something to those who take the time to solve it.

Also in that category is the apparent willingness of Scripture to present two versions of the same story that are essentially incompatible with each other. The most famous example of that would be in the very beginning of the biblical text, where Genesis starts off with two wholly irreconcilable accounts of the creation of humankind. Many and clever have been the attempts of countless commentators to “fix” the problem by finding a way to fit the stories together into a single, cogent narrative. But the far more interesting way to approach the problem is to understand this opening riddle as one of many places in the text of Scripture in which the same story is told in two discordant versions not to confuse or to annoy, but to invite the reader to exploit the differences between the two conflicting texts to learn a lesson that Scripture prefers for some reason to teach subtly rather than fully openly.

As Purim approaches, I’ve been thinking how that approach to mismatched texts can be applied not solely to texts within a biblical book, but also to the larger biblical corpus itself. (I have an essay about that too: click here.) In other words, taking the Bible as a book (as opposed to a collection of books) allows the reader to approach the full text of Tanakh as a single literary unit to which the interpretive rules generally brought to bear in explicating passages within specific single books can be fruitfully applied.

In the second of my two essays mentioned above, I applied this principle to a huge difference between the biblical books of Jeremiah and Daniel, one that would be simple to wave away as a mere instance of misspelling on the part of one or both authors. Today, I would like to apply that same principle to the biblical books of Esther and Ezra. And then I would like to apply the lesson that comparison suggests to our present situation as Jewish Americans.

The Book of Ezra, one of Scripture’s most understudied books, begins where Chronicles leaves off: with the surprise announcement that, as one of his first royal edicts, Cyrus, king of Persia, formally ended the exile in Babylon and told the Jews living in modern-day Iraq and Iran that they could return to Israel and re-establish Jewish life in that place. It’s a complex story. The edict of Cyrus itself appears in Scripture in several different versions. The specific relationship between the work of the Chronicler (as the anonymous author of Chronicles is chummily called by scholars) and Ezra and its own sister work, the Book of Nehemiah,is a matter of endless scholarly debate. But, for all that, the storyline itself is clear as day. In the waning days of the Kingdom of Judah (the sole remaining Jewish state in its day, the northern Kingdom of Israel having been dismantled by its Assyrian overlords more than a century earlier), the Babylonian hordes arrived at the gates of Jerusalem. There was a brief window of opportunity during which the coming debacle could have been averted. (The prophet Jeremiah was at the peak of his powers in the months leading up to said debacle and promote surrender as a means of survival.) But the king of Judah wouldn’t hear of it. And what ensued was the razing of Jerusalem’s walls, the slaughter of countless citizens, the destruction of the Temple, and the annihilation of the nation’s hopes for some sort of continued existence as an autonomous state. What ensued is known as the Babylonian Exile. Some Jews—the poorest and least educated ones—were ignored. But the rest of the nation—the royal court, the scholars, the businesspeople, the upper and middle artisan classes—were taken off into exile and forced to attempt to survive while “weeping on the shores of Babylon.”

There is endless debate about the details: how many people went into exile, how many survived, how successful they were or weren’t in retaining their ties to their own Jewish culture while in a hostile environment. But none of that alters the basic the storyline: the Babylonians exiled some or many (but not all) the Jews and then, when they were defeated in turn by Cyrus of Persia, those Jews and their descendants were permitted to go home and it is their story that the Book of Ezra tells. Nor is the moral of the story hard to suss out: Jewish life in exile is possible, but the only real hope for continued Jewish existence lies in return to the land. Yes, Cyrus’s decree specifically permits any who wish to stay behind and support the returnees financially (“with gold, silver, goods, livestock, and valuables”). But the author’s point couldn’t be clearer: exile is barely bearable and only briefly. When the opportunity presents itself to return to Zion, the people who care about their own future get going—because that is where their future lies. From there, life progressed. In the chronology put forward in Ezra, Cyrus is replaced on the throne by Darius, who is followed by—surprise!—King Achashveirosh, known to all from the Esther story. (His “real” name was Xerxes, and he was followed by his son Artaxerxes, who was on the throne in Ezra’s own day.)

Let’s go back to Achashveirosh. I love that he has two names. (I do too, as do most diasporan Jewish types.) And I love that he’s mentioned not only in the book that is so much “about” him, but also in other books: here in Ezra and also once in the Book of Daniel (whose author thought he was Darius’s father, not his grandson. Whatever.) And thus does he serve as the link between Ezra and Esther by appearing in both, albeit briefly in Ezra and at length in Esther.

The storyline of Esther is known to all who have ever been in shul on Purim. But that story contains some riddles generally left unposed, thus also unsolved.

A terrible decree goes forth calling for true genocide, for the total eradication of the Jewish people. The edict is met with astonishment by the people, who are given a full eleven months to prepare for their execution. Eventually, things end up well. But I’m focused on what happens before that happens. The people is in a panic. They appear to inhabit every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. The portrait drawn by the Chronicler and by Ezra of a people temporarily banished from its homeland and more than eager finally to abandon exile and return to Israel seems oddly out of sync with the scene depicted in Esther. Cyrus reigned for about twenty years, from 550 BCE to 530. Darius reigned for about forty years after that. And then we have Achashveirosh/Xerxes, who came to the throne in about 465 BCE and who reigned for about forty years. In Cyrus’s day, the Book of Ezra has the Jewish people returning en masse to the Jewish homeland and leaving a few stragglers behind. But, a mere century later, the Book of Esther depicts a Persian empire with Jews living in all 127 of its provinces and apparently well settled in and, until Haman, secure.

And how do the Jews in the Megillah respond to impending genocide? (This is, of course, real genocide they were facing, not the phony kind modern-day anti-Semites see whenever Israel dares defend itself forcefully against its enemies.) They weep. They fast. They daub themselves with ashes, essentially pre-sitting shiva for themselves while they still can. But no one seems to remember that Israel—then called Yehud (the Persian version of Judah)—was one of those 127 provinces. And that there was no specific reason for the Jews, instead of cowering in terror, not to return to their own ancestral homeland and there to defend themselves against their enemies. This course of action—forceful, beyond justifiable, and possible even fully successful—this seems to have occurred to no one.

The Jews seem to prefer their misery. Mordechai forbids Esther to reveal her Jewishness to the king until precisely the right moment. But surely the Jews of Shushan knew that Esther was Jewish—how could they not have? They all seem to know who Mordechai is. And Esther was his ward, an uncle’s daughter whom he had adopted and promised to raise. Surely she too would have been known to all. And yet no one seems to light upon the idea of getting Esther to beg the king for permission to return to Zion  and there, in their own homeland, to resist the terror-onslaught planned by wicked Haman.

And so we have two worldviews in conflict: the one set forward in Ezra in which it goes without saying that the future of the Jewish people depends on their ability to flourish in Israel and the one in Esther that seems to think that the best hope for Jews in the diaspora is to hope that salvation from even the most extreme version of violent anti-Semitism (i.e., the kind that promotes genocide as its end goal) is to pray that salvation comes, to quote Mordechai himself, “from somewhere.”

Or do we? Could the point of Esther be to show the folly of charting a future for the Jewish people by hoping for salvation “from somewhere” or anywhere? The Jews of Persia were saved because of Esther’s daring and Mordechai’s cunning. But that their plan works at all is presented as something just short of miraculous. The Jews of Persia are depicted as powerless and foolish…and wholly unable to see that their only real hope rests in returning to Zion and there flourishing out in the open and fully in the light as proud members of the House of Israel. Ezra simply starts off by taking that for granted. Esther depicts a people gone astray a mere century later. Reading each in each other’s light is meant, I think, not to confuse, but to challenge those inclined to suppose that Jews can be safe by relying on others and hoping for the best and, to encourage them, ayin l’tziyyon tzofiah, to see where the ultimate destiny of Israel lies.

[ruminativerabbi]

Seeking Solace in Small Things

I’m feeling the weight of it all these days. I suppose most of you are too. Israel seems to have ended up in a Vietnam-style quagmire in Gaza, one that that feels increasingly insoluble with each passing day. All 136 hostages remain hidden away in Gaza, without it even being known with certainty which or how many are still alive. The weight of world opinion, briefly with Israel in the wake of the October 7 pogrom and its bestial brutality aimed at innocents, has long since turned away; each day seems to bring reports of more world leaders promoting the idea of another lopsided “prisoner exchange” to deal with the situation, but without noting that none of the captives in Gaza is being incarcerated after having been found guilty of a crime whereas all of the Palestinians who would be released in such a deal are precisely that: terrorists sentenced to prison for having committed crimes, including murder. Each day seems to bring another reason to be distressed. The debacle connected with the storming of that convey of aid trucks in Gaza City last week that led to the deaths of 112 Palestinians is a good example: regardless of how many precisely were killed by the stampeding crowd itself, how many were run over by the trucks carrying the aid (and driven by Palestinian drivers), and how many were shot by Israeli soldiers when some in the crowd foolishly attempted to storm IDF positions set in place precisely to watch over the aid distribution, the death of hungry people attempting to procure food for themselves and their families is tragic regardless of how precisely it may have come about.

Paired with the rising tide of anti-Semitic incidents, including ones featuring violence and death threats, directed against Jewish personalities, Jewish students, and individual Jews targeted solely because of their Jewishness, it’s no wonder my mood has been grim in the course of these last few weeks. How could it not have been? In that way (and also in so many others), we’re all in the same boat.

And so I’ve found myself seeking solace in small things, in the kind of thing I would normally look past quickly without dwelling on much or even at all. It doesn’t always work, this technique. But I thought I would offer my readers this week the comfort that can come from contemplating three tiny things, each in its own way a reminder of the unbreakable link that ties the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, thus—in that peculiar Jewish way I’ve written about many times—a symbol of hope in the future rooted wholly in the past. Each is a thing of beauty. And each is a reminder that Israel has faced far worse enemies than Hamas in the past and survived.

The first is, of all things, an earring. And a tiny one at that, albeit a tiny one made of solid gold. And its story, antique though it may be, is heartening, perhaps even a bit encouraging. There was a time when Israel and its neighbor to the north, then called Phoenicia, got along famously. King Hiram of Tyre, for example, was one of King David’s closest allies: when David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital, Hiram sent carpenters and stonemasons south to help build David’s new palace in the northern part of the city. Nor did the alliance end with David’s death: when Solomon, David’s son, built the Temple in Jerusalem, Hiram sent along cedar wood—a local specialty and still today the tree emblazoned on the Lebanese flag—to be used in the building effort and also workers (and probably thousands of them) to assist in the construction of Solomon’s new royal quarter in the Ophel, the part of the city south of the Temple Mount and north of the City of David area. Were some of those workers women? Or did the workers actually move to Israel and bring their families along with them? Or did Phoenician men wear earrings? Regardless, it’s a thing of true beauty and someone dropped it in the sand about three thousand years ago—or took it off and put it in a jewelry box that has long since disintegrated or put in the pocket of a robe when heading into the bath unaware that it would be part of the world long after the bathhouse itself would turn to dust. The world has change in countless ways since King Solomon’s time. Almost no artifacts from his day have survived. But ten years ago, an Israeli archeologist, the late Dr. Eilat Mazar, found the earring while sifting through what literally must have been tons of dust and mud in the Ophel. For a decade, the earring languished in the collection of things unearthed but not fully gone through. And then, just recently, the earring was discovered.

It's a tiny thing. It’s beautiful. Whoever lost it, assuming it was lost, must have had a fit! But this tiny golden thing survived—I speak here fancifully, but also hopefully—it survived for a reason: to remind us today, as all our spirits are flagging, that there was a time when Lebanon and Israel were close allies, friend, and trading partners. In the earliest days of the Jewish kingdom, Jerusalem was filled with workers building new things. (Some things don’t change.) And one of them, a man or a woman, a wealthy person who owned lots of golden things or someone of more modest means for whom a single pair of gold earrings (assuming the recovered one had an ancient mate) constituted a major percentage of that person’s wealth—someone lost an earring that survived to remind us that both the past (which is gone) and the future (which doesn’t exist) are mere reflections of the present. And that the troubles we experience in that present are not ours alone, but ones shared—magically but truly—with both our ancestors and our descendants. We are not in this alone, despite how we so often feel. And that is what this tiny golden thing from ancient times reminded me of, and in doing so brought me comfort and some level of relief from the ill ease I seem to be unable to shake off.

My second small thing is even tinier than the first. An off-duty IDF officer, one Erez Avrahamov, was hiking in the Lower Galilee a few weeks ago in the Nahal Tabor Nature Reserve, one of Israel’s most beautiful places. And there he stumbled across the coolest thing: a tiny scarab made of carnelian stone and probably about 2,800 years old. Where the thing came from, who can say? Probably it was made in ancient Iraq, either in Babylonia or Assyria. Featuring a beetle on one side and a winged horse on the other, the scarab was probably lost by someone in the 7th or 6th century BCE, when a visitor from the East—or possibly a citizen of Judah who had recently been in what is today called Iraq—inadvertently dropped it when preparing to enter the huge bathing facility that once stood on the spot, perhaps as a prelude to dining in one of the giant buildings than then also existed in that place.

Or perhaps it wasn’t lost at all and is simply all that is left of the person who wore it, perhaps as a pendant (the bezel is long gone, of course) or in a ring? In looking at this truly super-cool looking thing, I find comfort—in remembering that the history of Israel is charted not in centuries but in millennia, and that thousands of years ago, my 40x-great grandfather may well have been on his way home from a business trip to Assyria with a lovely present for my 40x-great grandmother when he stopped off for a much-needed bath before returning home and clumsily dropped the present on the floor of the locker room. Or in the woods. Or on the path itself that led from the east. The living of his day have long since turned to dust. But this beautiful thing, this tiny artifact, remains and has its own lesson to teach: mostly, the things of the world and its peoples are fragile, brittle things that don’t last all that long. But something always remains. All is never lost, or not fully lost. There’s always something left behind to remind future generations to look ahead by looking back. And by remembering.

And my third small thing is, of all things, a box. It’s made of limestone and isn’t itself all that tiny—but I include it today because it was made to hold small things. Found along the great commercial street leading up from the Siloam Pool to the Temple Mount directly through the City of David and the Ophel, the shop in which a shopkeeper displayed his or her wares in this specific box has been gone for millennia. So has the shopkeeper and all of his or her customers. But once that street was a major commercial thoroughfare along which pilgrims and tourists made their slow ascent to the Temple. Stopping off for refreshments or souvenirs to bring home must have been par for the course, just as it is today in the streets leading to the Kotel. And in one of those shops, this box was filled with…with what? Jewels or scarabs? Candies or nuts? “I ❤️ Jerusalem” pins? Who can say? But the thought of Jerusalem in ancient times filled with tourists, pilgrims, visitors, Jewish and non-Jewish people from all over the world, all intent on seeing for themselves the glories of the most glorious of all Jewish cities—that gives me comfort as well. I imagine myself among them too, one among many, a single man strolling along the wide avenue, wondering if Joan would like an Assyrian scarab or a Phoenician gold earring or an ““I ❤️ Jerusalem” pin, an ancient version of modern me feeling fully connected to the Land of Israel and to its eternal capital, to its citizens and to its soldiers, its kings and its priests and its prophets. When I contemplate little things like this, I remember that our present dilemmas and challenges are no different than the ones faced by our forebears or the ones our descendants too will have to face. It’s always something! And, that being the case, you can spend your days submerged beneath the weight of it all. Or you can seek comfort in small things. Will someone thousands of years from now somehow find the earring Joan lost at a wedding we attended ten years ago at the Westbury Jewish Center and find comfort in knowing we were here in this place and survived to bequeath our Jewishness to our descendants? None of us reading (or writing) this will know. But knowing that it could happen—that too brings me solace in troubled times.

[ruminativerabbi]

Heroes

I was troubled, but also very moved, by the death of Alexei Navalny, the personality at the core of the resistance movement in Russia struggling to oppose the dictatorial and oppressive policies of the Putin regime. What exactly happened is not at all clear. At the time of his death, Navalny was imprisoned in a penal colony in Western Siberia in a place called Yamalo-Nenets near the Arctic Circle. According to the warden, he was taking a walk just two weeks ago after telling some guards that he didn’t feel at all well. And then he collapsed. The prison authorities claim to have done all they could to resuscitate him, but were, they said, regretfully unsuccessful, as result of which regretted unsuccess he was dead by mid-afternoon. His body was then held for well over a week and then finally released to his family for burial. And so ended the life of one of the world’s true heroes, a man who not only put his life on the line to stand up for his beliefs, but who personally embodied the struggle for human rights in today’s Russia. Yehi zikhro varukh. May his memory be a blessing for his co-citizens in Russia and for us all.

There’s a lot to say about Navalny, but the detail—one among many—that is particularly resonant with me has to do with his return to Russia in 2021, an act that was as noble as it was death-defying. By 2021, of course, Navalny had a long history of being a thorn—and an especially sharp one at that—in the side of Vladimir Putin. He had led countless demonstrations against the Putin government. He repeatedly accused, certainly correctly, Putin of engineering his own victories whenever he stood for re-election as Russia’s president. And he openly opposed the war against Ukraine.

Navalny tried several times to gain a foothold in the bureaucracy he so mistrusted. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013. And then he ran for president of Russia in 2018, a move that was in and of itself daring given that he had previously been found guilty of embezzlement, which detail would normally have disqualified him from running for elected office despite the fact that there appears to be no reason to think that the verdict was just or reasonable. But the real reason Navalny was such a problem for Putin was that he appeared to be unfazed by the forces of government, including the Russian judiciary, that were openly and brazenly arrayed against him. And so the government eventually took matters to a new level.

In 2020, on a flight to Moscow, Navalny took ill and ended up on a ventilator in the Siberian city of Omsk, where his airplane had been obliged to make an emergency landing. It didn’t take doctors long to realize that he had been poisoned. (It later came out that his clothing, including his underwear, had somehow been suffused with the Novichok nerve agent, a poison known to have been used by Russia in the past to murder dissidents abroad.) Eventually, the German government, acting unilaterally, sent an airplane to Omsk to bring Navalny to Germany. Amazingly, this actually worked. And it was in Berlin that doctors at the famous Charité Hospital determined with certainty that Navalny had been the victim of an unsuccessful attempt on his life and that he had definitely been poisoned. Remarkably, his life was saved and he recovered. And then, in January of 2021, he returned to Russia.

Because Navalny had been convicted in a 2014 trial that was almost certainly politically motivated and unjust, he had theoretically been forbidden to leave Russia even for medical treatment. And so was he arrested at the Moscow airport upon his return to Russia and imprisoned to await a judge’s decision about his future. And it was just a month after that, in February of 2021, that a Moscow judge decreed that his suspended sentence, minus time served, would be replaced with an unsuspended one and that Navalny would have to serve two and a half years in a Russian prison. He was sent to one prison, then to another. Eventually, the government determined that it did not want to face a freed Navalny in less than three years and so began new proceedings against him again, this time charging him with fraud and contempt of court. In March of 2022, just two years ago, he was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to nine years in a maximum security prison. And then, because even nine years was apparently not long enough, Navalny was put on trial again last summer and sentenced to an addition nineteen years on extremism charges. And so he ended up in the Arctic Circle prison in which he died two weeks ago at the age of forty-seven.

Navalny’s is a long, complicated story. But the one detail that stands out to me, the single part of the story that is the most resonant with me—and with my lifelong interest in the concept of heroism—has to do with Navalny’s decision in January 2021 to leave safety in Berlin and return to Russia. He had every reason to expect that he would be arrested upon return. He had no reason to suppose that any future trials to which he would be subjected would be just. He surely knew not to expect clemency or mercy from Vladimir Putin, the man behind all the juridical procedures overtly and unabashedly designed to silence him. And yet he chose to return—not specifically, I’m sure, because he wanted to die or because he wanted to participate in yet another crooked trial, but because he saw himself as a moral human being who had been granted the opportunity to inspire his co-citizens to demand justice and freedom for themselves and for their nation.

 I’ve written in this space, although not too recently, about my boundless admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was safe and sound in New York when the Second World War broke out, but who made the noble (and eventually fatal) decision to return to Germany and there to try to inspire people to resist Nazism and to turn away from the path of ruinous and fascist barbarism down which the Nazi government was intent on leading the nation. (To revisit my comments about Bonhoeffer from 2011, click here.) Here was, in my eyes, a true hero: a man fully committed to his own ideals who made the conscious decision to leave the safe haven he had already found and to travel to a land that would probably, and which eventually did, kill him. To me, that decision to risk everything to attempt, even quixotically, to do good in the world represents the essence of heroism. It came to naught, of course. He did a lot of good for a lot of people, but, in the end, he paid the big price. On April 8, 1945, just a month before the end of the war, Bonhoeffer was tried on the single charge of treason in a court set up in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. There were no witnesses. No evidence against him was brought forward, nor was a transcript of the proceedings made. He was found guilty, apparently on Hitler’s personal order, and executed the next day in a way that was specifically intended to maximize his personal degradation and agony. (Eric Till’s 2000 movie, Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, is a worthy attempt to tell Bonhoeffer’s story even if the director couldn’t quite bring himself to depict the barbarism of Bonhoeffer’s final moments in any detail, let alone explicitly. For a more detailed account of his life, I recommend Eric Metaxas’s 2020 biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy, which I read a few years ago and enjoyed immensely.)

So, two men who lived scores of years apart, who spoke different languages, who came from different countries. One, a political man fully engaged by the political process. The other, a man of God fully in the thrall of his own calling to preach God’s word in the world and to inspire others to seek justice and to act righteously. But both heroes in my mind—both fully safe in a place their tormentors could not reach them and yet both of whom made the decision to return to their separate homelands to seek out in those places the destiny to which each felt called. Would I have left New York in 1939 or Berlin in 2021 to risk my own life to follow the destiny I perceived to be my own? I’d like to think I would have. Who wouldn’t? But we don’t all have it in us to act that boldly, to risk everything to be ourselves fully and in the most noble way possible. To be a man in full—or a woman in full—is never quite as easy in real life as it sounds as though it should be on paper. And that is why I admire those two men, Bonhoeffer in his day and Navalny in ours—and their willingness not merely to talk the talk, but truly—and at their own mortal peril—to walk the walk. May they both rest in peace!