The Ruminative Rabbi

Shavuot begins Saturday evening. Our least famous “big” holiday, Shavuot lacks even a reasonable English name: Passover is pretty much exactly Pesach and Tabernacles is at least a bad translation of Sukkot (although, not knowing any nineteenth century preachers, I have never actually heard anyone call it that), but Shavuot doesn’t even have a bizarre English name for people not to call it by. The word shavuot means “weeks,” in biblical context a reference to the fact that the festival falls exactly seven weeks after Passover-Pesach, but who ever called the holiday Weeks? It was once customary in Christian circles to refer to Shavuot in English as Pentecost because that name, derived from the Greek word for “fifty,” seemed reasonably to refer to the fact that, there being forty-nine days in seven weeks, Shavuot indeed does fall on the fiftieth day after the first day of Passover. But the name Pentecost not only never caught on in this context but actually did catch on in an entirely different context to denote a Christian festival totally unrelated to Shavuot, one which falls on the day that a text in the New Testament Book of Acts marks as the day, exactly fifty days after the crucifixion, on which the spirit of prophecy descended on the disciples of Jesus. (To be more precise, “totally unrelated” is not entirely correct since, at least according to the simplest reading of the synoptic Gospels, the crucifixion took place on Passover. So the first Pentecost did indeed coincide with Shavuot. And the whole concept is clearly a reflex of an early impulse within the primitive church to make parallel the stories of the ancient Israelites and the new Christians, thus subtly to discover in Christendom the “true” Israel. Later, this denigratory impulse, existing on the boundary line between insulting and pernicious, became distinctly less subtle. But the festivals are otherwise totally unrelated. And since the church formally denounced and renounced the custom of fixing the date of Easter with reference to Passover at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE, Shavuot and Pentecost never coincide other than by rare coincidence.) 

It’s a shame that we don’t focus more intently on Shavuot, because embedded in its story are worthy principles for Jewish people even today to embrace. The story, of course, is the Torah’s account of Israel at Sinai and the festival is traditionally understood to celebrate the day on which God spoke the words of the Ten Commandments aloud from atop the mountain. It’s a hard story to embrace unequivocally. Moderns tend to respond to it by asking if it is true. It’s a good question, but, regretfully, one that cannot be answered with anything like the kind of certainty modern historians attempt to bring to bear in their discussions of other legendary events and their evaluation of those events’ actual historicity. Of course, being unable scientifically to demonstrate that something happened does not necessarily imply that it didn’t happen, merely that it cannot be proven. And to suppose that events rooted in national memory are by definition exercises in wishful national thinking is not that defensible a line of thinking with respect to events so far back in time that their historicity is as really far more unprovable than merely unproven.

So we are left wondering…but perhaps that is the point: that the holiday is meant to engender wonder rather than frustration, engagement with the tale itself absent the natural skepticism moderns tend to bring to unverifiable stories. (Just to remain with this point for a moment, we grant events in our personal histories the weight of historicity without provability all the time almost without thinking about it at all. I have no way, nor is there any way nor could there be this far after the fact, to prove that my parents bought me a red Schwinn bicycle for my ninth birthday. No receipts were preserved. I have no idea where exactly my dad went to buy it. I have no parents to present as witnesses to the event. There is, I feel certain, no possibility of any of my friends who were present possibly remembering all these years later what my parents bought me for my birthday, nor could any of them prove it even if they did recall me getting that specific bicycle on that specific day. My parents, always for some reason averse to recording things for posterity, took no home movies. There are no still photographs either. But I feel absolutely certain the event occurred. I just can’t prove it. I remember the day clearly, possibly because it was also the day Adolf Eichmann was hanged. But for the nine-year-old me the bicycle was the thing, not the day’s news from Israel. I suppose historians could prove what happened in the Ramla prison that day. But my party exists, to the extent that it exists at all, within the confines of my own recollective consciousness and nowhere else.)

And so we are left not with home movies of the Israelites at Sinai, but with a single national memory preserved in Scripture and venerated for generations as something that truly happened. The details we all know. The Israelites, safe on the far side of the Sea of Reeds, travelled further into the desert until arrived at the mysterious mountain alternately referenced in Scripture as the Mountain of God, Mount Choreiv, and Mount Sinai. Here, they set up camp, then—after being instructed by Moses how exactly to prepare themselves—washed their clothes, kept apart from their spouses, and waited for God. And then, on the third day, God finally spoke. What he said we also all know. To believe in God. Not to worship idols. Not to take false oaths in God’s name. To keep shabbos. To be respectful towards our parents. Not to murder. Not to betray our spouses’ trust. Not to steal. Not to lie in court. Not to give ourselves over to obsessive acquisitiveness. Judging from the larger narrative, God intended to keep going through the rest of the commandments, but the people, overwhelmed and not sure how much more they could take, begged Moses to intercede, to receive the rest of the revelation personally and then to reveal it to them in a less emotionally super-charged moment. Moses agreed. God stopped talking. The Torah moves on to some other material, then opens its account of the Book of the Covenant that God then proceeded to reveal to Moses atop the mountain. And so we moderns are left with the story as told…and challenged to do with it what we will.

Forty years later, Moses was still talking about it. Speaking from the edge of his own life and looking back to Sinai, he is recorded as speaking directly to the Israelites of the new generation as though they themselves had been at the foot of the mountain on “the great day on which you…approached the foot of the mountain and stood there as the mountain was ablaze with fire that rose to the heart of heaven…but also with darkness, cloud, and fog. And then did the Eternal, your God, speak to you from the midst of the fire—permitting that you hear a voice speaking words but not that you see any image at all, only that you experience the Voice—telling you of [first] ten codicils of the divine covenant that God was present to bequeath directly to you, deigning even to write them down on two stone tablets. And it was at that time as well that the Eternal commanded me to teach you the statutes and laws and to inveigh upon you actually to obey them all in the land into which you are now crossing so as soon to acquire it as your own.”

There’s something hiding behind those words, something that can provide a gateway into our own observance of Shavuot. Moses was speaking to the new generation of Israelites gathered on the plains of Moab as they prepared to enter the Promised Land. Indeed, the whole point of the decades of wandering in the desert was precisely so that the original generation of Israelites, the ones who crossed the sea and actually stood at Sinai, would die out and be replaced by their own children. So the people to whom Moses was speaking as he prepared to die were specifically not the people who approached the foot of the mountain and stood there as the mountain was ablaze with fire rising to the heart of heaven. Yet Moses speaks to them as though they had been standing there all along. Later, even further along in his final remarks, Moses will make the idea explicit by noting that there stood at Sinai both those physically present and those physically absent. Who he meant to include in the latter group is a bit obscure in that passage, but the larger context makes the meaning clear: there were those who were physically present, but the subsequent generations of as-yet-unborn Israelites were present as well…not as actual men and women, but as the disembodied souls of a nation bundled up in the bond of life everlasting outside of time past, present, and future. And it was thus to those psychically present Israel as well that Moses addressed himself, including those who would only be born in the distant future. Perhaps that was just Moses’s ancient way of nodding to the reasonableness of events existing in the recollective consciousness of a nation long millennia after they retain any trace of historical verifiability: the events in his nation’s past, he seems to be saying, will also ever exist outside of the flow of moments, similar in that to the people whose history they will eventually constitute.

So the bottom line is to stop worrying and embrace the festival as it is. Our Torah exists. Our people exists. Our recollective consciousness certainly exists. (Along with arguing, the Jewish people has elevated the maintenance of ongoing national memory to an art form.) And Shavuot also exists, returning each year in the late spring to remind us to remember that if we were not among those physically standing at the foot of Sinai, then we were surely among those psychically present…at the mountain, in the moment, embedded in the events that more than slightly paradoxically would soon become the defining experience within history of an eternal people that exists outside of time.

The other day, Aharon Appelfeld, the 80-year-old Israeli author about whom I’ve written in this space several times now, became the oldest author ever to win the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. (The prize has that name because it was originally administered by The Independent, a British newspaper, and still called by that name even though it is now run by Booktrust, an independent British charity dedicated to promoting great books and encouraging reading in general.) He’s in very good company—a list of past nominees for the prize reads like a roster of some of my all-time favorite non-English-writing authors: Haruki Murakami, Alaa Al-Aswany, David Grossman, Amos Oz, Orhan Pamuk, even the late José Saramago (whose books I really did enjoy thoroughly until his extreme, one-sided anti-Israelism made it impossible for me to read his books neutrally or calmly).

The specific book for which Appelfeld  won the prize was Blooms of Darkness, a novel I wrote to you at length about in October, 2010,  comparing it there to Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants. (If you are reading this electronically, you can find my comments here.) But today I’d like to write about the man’s larger body of work, and recommend his books to all of you more generally. Any who have yet to read one of his books are in for a rare treat.  But those of you who have only read a few of his books should consider undertaking a read-through of the whole corpus (or rather, please God, the whole corpus to date).  Appelfeld’s books are all short. His prose is spare, even in places austere. He has the uncanny ability, so rare in novelists (and yes, yes, even rarer in rabbis), to say more by saying less, always to remember that the deepest emotions can be stirred far more effectively with a feather than with a literary sledgehammer.

Appelfeld’s entire body of work is about the Shoah in one way or the other. He himself was a child survivor, having been born in Czernowitz, today part of Ukraine. When the Romanian army invaded in 1941, his mother was murdered. He and his father were deported to a concentration camp, but he somehow managed to escape almost immediately after arriving and, despite the fact that he was all of eight years old in 1941, managed somehow to survive in hiding for three years. Then, at age eleven, he somehow ended up working for the Red Army as a child cook. When the war finally ended, he was still not bar-mitzvah age. But he was old enough to be interned in a displaced persons camp in Italy, where he had a series of formative experiences about which he has written repeatedly and rivetingly. In 1946, he immigrated to Palestine, only then to learn that his father too had somehow survived.  One of the holes in the story as related through his thirty-seven novels—as justifiable as it is lamentable—has to do with their eventual reunion in British Palestine: even after all these years, Appelfeld—whose 2003 autobiography, The Story of a Life, detailed his experiences during and after the war—has never written about their reunion. Nor, I suspect, will he ever. Some things, apparently, are beyond the written word. Perhaps it takes a writer of Aharon Appelfeld’s enormous talent to know where the edge of literary expressibility truly lies. 

One of the features of Appelfeld’s writing that has spoken the most deeply to me personally over the years has been his repeated efforts to describe the Shoah through the eyes of children.  As noted above, he himself was a child when he lived through his own wartime experiences.  In a sense, his body of literary work could be characterized as an extended midrash on that detail, on what it could possibly mean for a child to witness what adults themselves found and find unfathomable. It is that specific aspect of his writing that I’d like to write about today.

Blooms of Darkness is about a child, probably not unlike the author, whose middle class existence within the Jewish community of a large European city abruptly ends with the onset of the war. His father disappears, but just as any eleven-year-old would, Hugo lacks the insight into the larger picture to understand the true scope of the disaster that has befallen his people and his city and his family. His mother, frantic with worry, embarks on a complicated crusade to find a Gentile—any Gentile at all—who will risk his or her life to hide her little boy from his would-be murderers.  One plan after another falls through, but then she somehow comes into contact with a childhood friend, a Ukrainian woman named Mariana, who agrees to harbor the boy. What Hugo’s mother appears not fully to understand—although we never find out if that really is the case or if she just wills herself not to know, or perhaps not to care—is that Mariana is not only a prostitute, but one who lives (and not merely works) in a brothel, the exclusive clients of which are now German soldiers. Hugo can pass, however. He speaks Ukrainian.  He looks enough like he could possibly be Mariana’s nephew for the subterfuge plausibly to work. In any event, he never leaves her bedroom, never steps outside, remains as still as possible for most of the day. He doesn’t move around. He barely breathes.  As the months pass, and then the years, Mariana becomes all of Hugo’s world. But his presence becomes an important factor in her life as well, and she too grows dramatically because of their relationship. As Hugo approaches puberty, his feelings undergo just the kind of complicated metamorphosis that you would expect would characterize a boy growing to maturity with no friends around with whom to compare notes (and, indeed, with no male companions of any sort), no parents, and only a single woman as his friend and mentor. And then the war ends, the Germans flee, the Red Army occupies the town…and begins its concerted effort to root out collaborators, specifically including all women who granted comfort to the enemy during the occupation.

At the end of the book, Hugo is all alone in the world. His friends are all gone. His parents are gone. Marina herself too is gone, never to return. Somehow, Hugo comes to realize that the prison by the front gate of which he has been waiting for Marina to emerge is not actually that far from his parents’ old apartment. And so he embarks on a walk to his old home, the description of which has to be one of the finest, most moving pieces of writing about the Shoah I’ve ever read, one as overwhelming as it is understated.

Appelfeld could not have deserved his prize more. But there are others of his books to recommend to you as well.  All Whom I Have Loved, published in 1999 in Hebrew and then in 2007 in English translation, is the story of a nine-year-old boy, Paul Rosenfeld.  The book is set in 1938.  Little Paul’s parents are divorced and, soon enough, they are both dead: his mother of typhus (after being abandoned by her second husband, a Gentile who seems to represent the false promise of security vaguely offered to the Jews of Europe by modernity itself) and his father shot down while trying to prevent the robbery of a Jewish shop. And then, like Hugo, little Paul is alone in the world, facing unimaginable events without anything even remotely like the perspective necessary to interpret them.  Appelfeld’s description, then, of an orphaned child facing a cataclysm the dimensions of which he cannot even begin to fathom becomes the author’s model for conceptualizing the situation of European Jewry in 1938.  These books are painful to read, obviously. But they are also endlessly illuminating, thus also deeply satisfying. In an interview in the Israeli newspaper Globus in 2007, Appelfeld said “I have written forty books and every single one is part of the story of my own life. All my books are linked to each other and differ only in that they explore different corners of my own history.” The little boys in all these books, then, are the author.  And, of course, they are also all of us….grown-up children, trying to fathom the unfathomable and nevertheless to find a place in the world in which to flourish. 

Not all of Appelfeld’s “children” are boys. A third book worth mentioning is Tzili, the story of a young girl in war-torn Europe. When the front approaches her home, her parents run off and leave her to guard the house. When she herself flees, there begins a serious of adventures that form the core of the narrative: her stay with an aging prostitute named Katerina who is capable of kindness but also of great cruelty to her basically unwanted visitor, her subsequent stay with a family of peasants who see nothing wrong with beating her for the slightly infraction of their family’s rule, her encounter with a Jewish man named Mark who has escaped from one of the camps and with whom Tzili finally finds love (and pregnancy, which ends in miscarriage) but who eventually leaves her, and finally her aliyah to British Palestine on a ship packed full of rootless, identiless people like herself who can only hope that they will find in each other’s company the companionship, understanding, and security the world has never really offered any of them.  It’s the rare male author who can write of a woman’s journey to adulthood like this. Men and women are similar, obviously, in many ways. But it is precisely the ways in which they differ that constitute the greatest challenge for any author attempting to write someone else’s story when that someone is of the opposite gender. Appelfeld, I think, gets Tzili Kraus down perfectly, though, writing about her coming of age—and specifically the onset of menstruation and her first attempts to understand physical love—in a way that stays with me still, even though I read the book fifteen years ago. The sign of a truly great author, after all, lies precisely in the ability to make of every character in every book some sort of literary midrash of his or her own psyche and nevertheless for the description of them as men and women in their own right to ring perfectly true. And it is that specific talent that, in my opinion, constitutes Appelfeld’s greatest gift.

One final book I’d like to write about, also about a young person, is Laish. Set outside of time, this peculiar—but ultimately very satisfying—novel reads like an extended fable. Laish is a boy of fifteen, an orphan who has somehow ended up as part of a caravan of Jews shlepping through Eastern Europe on their way to Jerusalem, where they are convinced they will find the solutions to all of their problems and the cures of all of their physical and psychological illnesses. On the way, they are beset by endless woes. Some are pious students of Torah whose lives, even under the worst circumstances, are bounded by prayer and ritual. Some of them are scurrilous criminals whose daily lives are given over to violence, extortion, and theft. Some are their resigned victims. And still others are idiots who cannot really fathom the point of the journey, yet who seem unable simply to give up and settle where they are. No towns are given names; we never really know where these people are or what year this is. All we learn is that they are following a river, the Prut, because they believe it will take them to Palestine, to Jerusalem. (The Prut is a real river that, beginning in the Carpathian Mountains, traveling along the border between Romania and Moldova, and eventually emptying into the Danube, most certainly does not lead to the Middle East.) Laish speaks for himself, but he also narrates for the others; this is a first-person narrative about a young man telling his own story by telling other people’s stories. Alternately violent and soothing, the point of the book is to describe the journey of the Jewish people itself towards salvation, towards Israel. At first feeling at sea, readers—or at least Jewish readers—will eventually find themselves in the book as they realize that one of the traveler’s portraits mirrors his or her own life story more than slightly. But, like all great novels, this is as much a book about the human condition as it is specifically about the people whose story it reveals. I recommend it highly: for a novel that overtly has nothing to do at all with the Holocaust, is nevertheless an exceptionally powerful contribution to Shoah literature because within its pages lies a portrait of European Jewry on the eve of destruction that both could not be less flattering and yet somehow which also draws readers in and invites them to travel along with this motley crew of thieves, rabbis, and children on their way to the future of the Jewish people on the other side of an abyss none of them can see and which surely none of them could ever begin even remotely to imagine.

There are a lot of other books by Aharon Appelfeld I could recommend. The Healer, The Iron Tracks, Badenheim 1939, and Age of Wonders come to mind. (Age of Wonders  I would like especially to recommend as one of Appelfeld’s true tours de force, a comment on Jewish reality that no one who reads will ever forget).  Appelfeld has won all his awards—the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, the Prix Médicis in France, the National Jewish Book Award here in the U.S., the Nelly Sachs Prize in Germany—so, at least in a sense, this last one is just a bit more icing on the man’s cake. But it is also satisfying to see one of our greatest authors, now a full half-century into his career, still being recognized for his work both inside and outside Israel. We should all be proud! If any of you has yet to start reading through the oeuvre, this is surely the right moment to begin.

Just as were many of you, I’m sure, I was caught off-guard by the president’s almost off-hand announcement the other day that he has come to believe that same-sex couples should have the right to get married. And that, for a few different reasons. First of all (and also, I’m sure, like many of you), I suppose I supposed that the president’s comments not two years ago to the effect that his views on same-sex marriage were “evolving,” was polito-speak for “Don’t ask me that question again, because I won’t answer it anyway”. So I was intrigued by the revelation that the president actually meant it, that his ideas apparently evolving, that he apparently did continue to feel himself engaged by the concept as his personal thinking on the matter developed  in new directions. Second, who could have foreseen that the president would announce the final evolution of that line of his thinking before, rather than after, the coming election? Aren’t politicians supposed to be vague and non-committal about contentious, potentially divisive issues when the alternative—speaking out clearly and unambiguously—could easily involve paying a serious political price? What’s happening to American politics? Thirdly, it feels amazing that the vice president, who addressed the Rabbinical Assembly convention in Atlanta earlier this week (I was present and in attendance) without mentioning his remarkable comment of one day earlier regarding his own support for the concept  of same-sex marriage, got to go first. Isn’t that specifically not how it works? Don’t vice presidents always follow their leaders when it comes to the announcement of major policy shifts? (Or was the idea just to make sure that the earth didn’t actually open up and swallow Vice President Biden when he made public his support for the concept, or when US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, an even less likely candidate for the role of presidential trial balloon, did? I suppose that could have been the plan, but that too feels out of character for the president who seems generally more than able to speak for himself.)

It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing as an election ploy. According to a Gallup poll released before the president’s announcement, more Americans favor same-sex marriage than oppose it. (The numbers were 50% for and 48% against. By comparison, the numbers when President Clinton was running for his second term in 1996 were 27% in favor and 68% opposed. So it is clearly not only the president whose thinking has been evolving, but the citizenry’s as well. And the numbers along party lines are also very interesting: 65% of registered Democrats and 57% of independents in favor, but, in some ways even more noteworthy, 22% of Republicans, almost one in four, also in favor.) So you could just wave the whole thing off as an election-year ploy to lure some uncommitted independent voters and the odd registered Republican into the president’s camp. Nor is it entirely beside the point that the federal government is not itself in the marriage business, which, practically speaking, means that the president’s announcement will not mean much practically to same-sex couples living in states in which same-sex marriage is not permitted. And there are a lot of them. Same-sex marriage only is permitted in six states, including New York, and in the District of Columbia. And thirty-two states have either passed laws or altered their constitutions to prohibit same-sex marriage within their borders. (Six of those states, however, have only banned same-sex marriage per se, not the registration of same-sex unions under some other name.) 

It doesn’t feel to me like an election ploy, however. For one thing, voters in North Carolina, a key swing state, voted just last Tuesday overwhelmingly to add to their state constitution an amendment banning both same-sex marriage and civil unions between gay citizens and I have to assume that the president’s announcement is not going to play well with the 61% of the voters in that state who voted that proposition into law. That there will be a serious political price that the president will now have to pay for his forthrightness, therefore, goes without saying. But there will also be political gains, so the real question is how to balance the potential losses and gains out to determine if the president has acted in his own favor or to his political detriment. Surely, though, it can never be a bad plan, including (especially) for politicians, to speak out openly and frankly about how they feel on contentious matters facing the people they wish to represent, to say where they stand, and openly to have the courage of their own convictions.

Like the president’s until recently, my own thinking on the matter of same-sex marriages has also been evolving over the years. I have written twice before in this space about the reasonableness of treating gay citizens fairly and equitably in the civil arena. Some readers took issue with some of what I said, but I believed then and continue to believe now that it is never in the best interests of society—and to speak from the more narrow perspective, it is never ever in the best interests of the Jewish community—to condone the discriminatory treatment of minority groups within society when that discrimination cannot be justified rationally and logically. To use the example I gave when I wrote on the topic last, no one thinks it is unjust that we discriminate against blind persons by denying them driver’s licenses! But to compare the right of gay citizens to marry, to form monogamous unions recognized under the law as indissoluble other than by legal decree, to live in dignified family units recognized as such by the various levels of government that control crucial aspects of all of our lives—to describe that kind of prejudicial treatment of gay citizens as no less justifiable than not allowing blind people to drive cars seems to me beyond irrational.  I wrote that then and I think it now: it seems impossible to say that we, speaking as a nation, wish for all citizens to live in dignified, stable, faithful, loving relationships sanctioned by law and then to deny by law that exact right to a significant portion of the populace based on the deeply personal question of whether the gender of their chosen partners matches or does not match their own.  So with respect to the issue from a civil point of view, my thinking has not really changed much since I first wrote about the matter to you.

From a religious point of view, however, my thinking has indeed evolved. As mentioned above, I was in Atlanta earlier this week attending the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly. The convention itself was the usual mix of things—nice hotel, great davening, horrible food (and such small portions!), terrific sense of professional comradeship and warm fellowship—but the highpoint for me, other than attending the reception honoring me personally for my work in the rabbinate over these last three decades and particularly for my work on The Observant Life, was attending a session offered by Rabbi Daniel Nevins, the dean of the Rabbinical School of the Jewish Theological Seminary, my alma mater. 

Rabbi Nevins, who cannot possibly have known his remarks would precede the president’s by one single day, spoke about a proposal he, Rabbi Avram Reisner, and Rabbi Elliot Dorff are bringing to the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the highest legal body within the Conservative Movement, later this month regarding the possibility of Conservative clergy officiating at same-sex marriages. I have the proposal in front of me as I write and, although there are many questions I have about specific details in what they have written, the overall sense I came away with after reading it carefully now several times through—that the time truly has come to act in a principled, halakhically reasonable way to treat gay people not as pariahs, but as fully invested members of the Jewish community whose presence is not begrudgingly tolerated but actively encouraged—was as encouraging as it was palpable. Working within the limits of tradition and attempting only to be just and kind, these three rabbis—all of them friends of mine for many, many years—have attempted to create a version of marriage that would suit same-sex couples. They have not tampered with the Torah’s arayot laws delimiting human sexual conduct. Nor have they redefined marriage itself in any fundamental way. Instead, they have gently sought to find a way to sanctify the relationship between same-sex couples who are prepared—in exactly the same way as are heterosexual couples who choose to marry—to commit formally and absolutely to live out their lives by each other’s sides and fully devoted to each other’s welfare.

I was impressed. I am impressed. Elliot Dorff is one of the great intellectual lights of American Judaism, a man I feel beyond honored to call my friend, my mentor, and my teacher. Avi Reisner is one of our brightest lights, a creative, innovative thinker whose work in medical ethics has informed our decision making process about some of life’s most important issues not for years now but for decades. Danny Nevins, as noted, works at the helm of the JTS Rabbinical School and thus personally bears the burden of training the men and women who will serve our Jewish community as its spiritual leaders for decades into the future. Together, they represent a troika of dedicated, intelligent leaders whose work cannot be waved away as frivolous or negligible merely because it would have been unimaginable when I began my career in the rabbinate thirty-four years ago. Whether the CJLS will adopt their proposal, I have no way of knowing. How my colleagues in the rabbinate will respond to its acceptance or rejection I also obviously cannot say. But, like I suspect the president also must have felt in the days leading up to his announcement, there are moments when invoking tradition to work at cross-purposes with what we ourselves say we wish for our country or for our people simply stops making sense. If we truly believe that the Torah calls all Jewish people forward to sanctify life through the establishment of monogamous unions, through the raising and educating of Jewish children, and through the principled intertwining of lovers’ souls, then it seems beyond peculiar to turn away from the possibility, finally before us, of broadening the circle to include those traditionally left on the outside merely because doing so involves innovative, creative thinking. 

I felt more proud than ever to self-identify as a Conservative Jew and a Conservative rabbi after listening to Rabbi Nevins speak. I will write again about this topic after the CJLS issues its decision later this spring. 

I’m sure many of you saw the article in the paper the other day noting that the United Methodist Church, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, debated and debated and finally voted against divesting itself from (which is to say, refusing to do business with or invest in) any American companies that it perceives as being somehow related to, and thus at least nominally supportive of, Israel’s presence on the West Bank, a group that includes such giants Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola. In a sense, the Methodists were only following a recent trend. The Evangelical Lutheran Church, this country’s largest Lutheran denomination, voted just last year for a second time to reject this kind of politically-motivated divestment policy. In 2006, the Presbyterian Church USA rescinded its vote of two years earlier calling for divestment. (The issue is scheduled to be revisited yet again at this year’s convention at the end of June, however.)  Just recently, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Reverend Katharine Schori, came out personally against divestment and boycott calls aimed specifically and solely at companies deemed supportive of Israel. 

On the other hand, the largest Protestant church in Canada, the United Church of Canada, released a report earlier this week calling for an economic boycott of Israel focused on products produced in what the report referenced as “illegal” settlements, in which category the report includes not only the handful of settlements that Israel actually deems illegally to have been built on West Bank of the Jordan but also sections of Jerusalem comprising neighborhoods that are home today to almost 200,000 Jewish Israelis.  (What Jesus of Nazareth would have said to the notion that he and his family, were they alive today, could reside legally in certain Jerusalem neighborhoods but only illegally in others was left unexplored in the report.) The language used to announce the publication of the report was beyond vituperative. The chairman of the group that composed the report, the Very Reverend David Giuliano, himself a former head of the United Church, referred openly to Israel’s presence on the West Bank as a crime, then moved on from there to draw the natural conclusion that buying goods produced by Israelis living on the West Bank would be no different than buying stolen goods from any thief. So far, the report represents only the opinion of its authors, not official church policy. But the report will be considered and then either adopted or rejected by the church’s General Council in August.

I’ve shied away from discussing the whole issue of settlements on the West Bank in the past, partially because the issue itself is so contentious and partially because I myself am of mixed feelings in its regard. For some reason, however, hearing a former moderator of the United Church of Canada openly label Jewish people living in the heartland of the Jewish homeland as criminals merely because of their existence in that place has moved me to express myself nevertheless. 

There is, of course, lots to say about Israel’s presence on the West Bank. There are even lots of cogent reasons to feel strongly that Israel would only be serving its own best interests by withdrawing from most of the West Bank and permitting a Palestinian state to grow to maturity in that place and thus to take its peaceful place in the family of nations. But the point that most of the columnists and politicians, including any number of American political figures, seem never quite to seize is that the real issue is not whether the West Bank should or should not be part of some future Palestinian state, but whether it exists at all in any truly meaningful way.

The notion that the West Bank is a single parcel of real estate that can be discussed in terms of its history and its future is itself not part of our biblical heritage, nor was it ever part of the political reality  of the Middle East. If anything, the Bible presents the ancient Israelites puzzled over the future of the lands on the east bank of the Jordan, not its western bank.  (In the end, Moses permits the tribes of Reuben and Gad, and part of the tribe of Manasseh, to settle on the East Bank on the condition that they nonetheless participate fully in the conquest of the lands across the Jordan, which they are depicted as not only willing but eager to do.) But the notion that there was or is some sort of meaningful distinction between the lands currently collectively designated as “the West Bank” and the rest of the Land of Israel is not only geographically meaningless, but also historically without any sort of precedent or foundation. For better or worse (and I mean that literally), the lands in question are the heartland of Israel. Its major cities—Hebron, Jerusalem, Shechem (called Nablus by the Arabs), Bethlehem, and Jericho—are the settings for the most famous incidents in Israelite history to such an extent that it seems forced and artificial not to take God’s promise of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people as their eternal patrimony to refer almost specifically to the lands today collectively called the West Bank. And that, I believe, is the crux of the problem. I would like to think of people—and particularly people who earn their living by preaching the Bible as the word of God—who blithely use the language of criminality to describe the presence of Jewish people living in the heartland of the Jewish homeland as more naïve than truly malign. But in my heart that is not at all what I think. Nor do I think it is what most people who study the matter dispassionately would conclude.

In the end, the Jewish claim to the West Bank is no different—no stronger and no weaker, and no more or less historically real—than the Jewish claim to the land under Tel Aviv or Beersheva. It may well turn out to be politically expedient, therefore reasonable, for Israel to relocate its citizens from their legal homes on the West Bank—legal in the sense that the territory was and is on the Israeli side of the ceasefire line that ended the 1967 war and no peace treaty, not with Jordan and not with the Palestinians, has ever replaced the original cease fire agreement brokered by the United Nations and accepted by the parties to the conflict—but that does not make the land in question any less a part of the Jewish homeland than any other part. More to the point is the ominous sense I get that the argument to the effect that the settlements on the West Bank are criminally illegal is merely the thin side of a deeply anti-Jewish wedge, the mere precursor to the far greater and more momentous “discovery” to follow that there is something illegitimate and unlawful about Jews living anywhere at all in the Land of Israel. In the end, it might well end up making sense for Israel to cede those lands to the Palestinians. In a certain real sense, the Palestinians are already in control. (Just to muddy the waters a bit, I might pause here to ask the Rev. Giuliani why, even if we were to accept the ahistorical notion that the West Bank somehow isn’t part of the Jewish homeland, it should be a crime for Jews to live there when it is considered entirely legal and normal for Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, to live in Israel proper. Or is that merely the childish argument of someone who hasn’t yet fully internalize the principle that the same rules that apply to other peoples never apply to Jewish Israelis?) It is true that the area also remains under Israeli military control. But that is just how things are when a war ends and no peace treaty is subsequently signed: things stay as they are. That, in and of itself, is merely unfortunate. But the deeper and more upsetting question to ponder is what truly is motivating these people so full of the need for their churches (or food co-ops or universities) to divest from companies doing business with Israelis living legally in the Land of Israel.

I am neither a fundamentalist nor a fanatic defender of the inerrancy of biblical tradition. If anything, I think of myself as a political realist and I really do believe fully that things change with the passing for centuries, that the rules that applied millennia ago in King David’s day, or in Moses’s, cannot simply be applied to today’s world without any accommodation to political reality. I’m all for political realism! But I can’t keep myself from wondering how churches founded on the word of God, on the Bible and its foundational promise of the Jewish homeland to the Jewish people, can find it in themselves to divest themselves of their own heritage, to turn their back on God’s own sworn pledge of the Land of Israel to the people Israel, and to preach to the world that Jews who live in the “wrong” parts of Jerusalem are not merely behaving politically inexpediently, but criminally so. The solution to there being no peace in the Middle East is for there to be peace in the Middle East. The solution to the thorny dilemma of Jews living in a future Palestinian state is for the Palestinians to adjust to the concept. The solution to the lack of Palestinian resolve to move forward, to sign a treaty with Israel, and to accept the Israelis as neighbors and as partners is for the Palestinians to move forward, to sign a treaty, and to accept the Israelis as neighbors and partners…and then to accept that the point of a two-state solution is neither to dump the Arab citizens of Israel across the border in future Palestine nor to shove the Jews of the West Bank over the line into Israel proper, but for both sides to the conflict to live in peace…which means learning to live with the presence of each other’s people on lands both people claim as their own.

Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve spent time the course of these last weeks pondering the case of poor Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager who was shot and killed at the end of February by the community watch coordinator in a gated community near Orlando, Florida.  How this will all play itself out in the courts, who knows? Whether George Zimmerman, the shooter, will eventually be convicted of second-degree murder remains to be seen. If this will turn out to be a precedent-setting trial with far-reaching implications or merely a case of someone being made to pay the price for behaving recklessly in public can also not yet be known. From every vantage point, in fact, there are far more questions so far than there are answers. As the arraignment of the shooter is only scheduled for the end of May, it seems clear that this is going to remain a raw, upsetting issue for Americans to contemplate well into the summer and probably long after the summer as well. And it also goes without saying that the specific way Florida’s bizarre “Stand Your Ground” law will be interpreted in the context of the incident at hand—an interpretation that has yet to become obvious to anyone, including, it seems, our most senior jurists—will be at the heart of the matter.

Yet, for all the lack of clarity regarding all the issues mentioned above, there are also many aspects to the story regarding which all Americans can surely agree. The death of a child is a tragedy for us all regardless of the circumstances that bring it about, an unspeakable horror for that child’s family, a disaster for any society that wishes to think of itself as civilized and secure.  Trayvon leaves behind parents and an older brother, and we can surely all agree that their grief does not need to be explained or justified with reference to what the boy may or may not have done in the minutes prior to his death. And, of course, none of us can dispute that whatever good Trayvon might have done in the world had he lived will now be left undone. (Whether the same will eventually have to be said of George Zimmerman will depend on the outcome of his trial.) Nor do I think this national paroxysm of emotion we have been experiencing over the last month and a half has been unhealthy or unwarranted. Indeed, I am proud to be part of a nation that grieves for the loss of a single child regardless of its circumstances and regardless of whether that child’s death does or does not turn out eventually to be a legally punishable offense. And the recently re-opened investigation into the 1979 disappearance of little Etan Patz leaves me feeling the same way: horrified and dismayed by the story itself, but also proud to be part of a nation that considers it entirely reasonable to pursue the disappearance of a single child this long after the fact even if the only truly plausible outcome to the renewed interest in the case seems now to be the possibility of bringing some belated closure to his parents.

Today, however, I would like to write specifically about the “Stand Your Ground” law that is at the heart of the Trayvon Martin case and which is similar to laws on the books in sixteen other states as well, New York State not included.  To understand those laws, however, it is necessary first to understand the legal principle called the Castle Doctrine, which is defined the most simply as the right any home owner has—because a persons’ home is his “castle”—to use force, including deadly force, against an unwanted intruder when, as the New Jersey version of the law reads, “the actor reasonably fears imminent peril of death or serious bodily harm to himself or another.” The idea is simple, then: if someone invades your house and you feel reasonably that your life or anyone’s life, or your or anyone else’s physical wellbeing, is in serious danger, you have the right to attack that person without becoming liable to subsequent prosecution. The concept of the “Stand Your Ground” law is simply the same concept applied to wherever an individual might be when he or she reasonably fears imminent peril, and not just one’s home or (in some versions of the Castle Doctrine) one’s car or workplace.

As noted, there are sixteen states along with Florida that have expanded laws based on the Castle Doctrine into laws loosely called “Stand Your Ground” laws. (These laws have also been called “Line in the Sand” laws or “No Duty to Retreat” laws, but in the wake of the Trayvon Martin affair it seems the “Stand Your Ground” label will be the one that sticks.)  Nor is this a specifically Floridian issue: all together there are thirty-two states, not including New York, that have or are currently considering enacting some version of Castle Doctrine or “Stand Your Ground” laws on the books.

From a Jewish point of view, the most interesting part of the issue has to do with the concept of self-definition: the right to self-defend using deadly force without needing to fear subsequent prosecution becomes operative when an individual, to cite the Arizona version of the law, “reasonably believes himself or another person to be in imminent peril of death or serious physical injury.” In other words, the laws grants an individual the right to act on how he or she feels at any given moment regardless of how an uninvolved bystander might understand the situation and also regardless of any details regarding the situation that come out afterwards, for example as part of a police investigation, but which the individual applying the deadly force has no way of knowing at the moment. It’s all about how you feel, about whether you self-define as an individual in imminent peril of death or physical injury.

Should thoughtful citizens condemn these laws simply because no legal system can function well—or even, perhaps, at all—when accused individuals can simply announce that they felt some specific way at the time of some specific incident, then walk away from the proceedings secure that no prosecutor, no matter how skilled, can prove beyond any sort of reasonable doubt that that person was not feeling that way at the time of the incident? You could argue just that, I think, and reasonably. And yet Scriptural precedent is equivocal. I am thinking specifically of the passage in Deuteronomy that sets forth the various grounds for exemption from military service. (My colleague and my friend, Rabbi Ben Kramer, has just been writing about these laws and I’ve been reading along as he’s worked, so my understanding of this specific passage is based to a certain extent on his interpretive efforts.) The law as set forth in Deuteronomy 20 seems to be based on the rational supposition that the ability of an army to fight effectively will be seriously hampered by having in the ranks individuals whose hearts will be elsewhere and who consequently will possibly be thinking more of their own survival than of playing whatever role necessary to achieve victory.

There are four grounds for exemption, of which three seem to go together. If a soldier, for example, has betrothed a woman but not actually married her, he is deemed exempt from military service because he will be overly focused on the possibility of some other man marrying his betrothed should he die on the battlefield. The same situation pertains for the soldier who recently has built a new home but has not yet moved into it (the Torah talks a bit vaguely about “dedicating” the house, presumably by affixing a m’zuzah to the doorpost and moving in)—he too, it is feared, will be over-focused on his own survival and the concomitant possibility of someone else moving into his new home in his place.  And the same too applied to the soldier who recently has planted a vineyard, but who has yet to harvest from it its grapes—his mind too could possibly be elsewhere—and specifically on his own survival instead of the good of the fighting corps—and so he too must be exempted from service.  These three exemptions are easy to understand and easy to prove: either a soldier is or is not engaged to be wed, and he should be able easily enough to prove his status, as should the owner of a new home or a new vineyard. But the fourth category is the more interesting one, as it grants an exemption from service to the timorous, faint-hearted soldier, who must be sent home not because of unfinished business elsewhere but simply because, as the Torah says explicitly, his terrified presence will demoralize his fellow soldiers and induce in them the same fearfulness to which he himself has fallen prey.  Interestingly, the Torah itself sets this fourth exemption apart, setting it clearly on its own and in its own category but without saying exactly why. What the ultimate reason is, who can say? (Rashi has the idea, based on a passage in the Talmud, that it has to do with who formally announced the exemptions to the men in the ranks, but that is only one possible explanation.) In my opinion, thinking along with Ben Kramer here, the issue has to do specifically with the question of an individual’s right to self-define.

The sages in ancient times debated whether there needed to be physical evidence of the soldier’s pusillanimousness or if the soldier could simply announce that he feels too terrified of battle—for whatever reasons at all—and needs to be permitted to go home. There are many different opinions regarding how such inner terror could be adequately “proven” (one idea in the Talmud is that the test should be whether a man can keep his bladder closed when he is shown an unsheathed sword), but the law ultimately requires that the soldier’s inner fearfulness be manifested in some demonstrable way: merely saying he feels that way is not to be enough. 

I think that line of thinking could be thoughtfully applied to the debate surrounding the “Stand Your Ground” laws.  Clearly, there are moments when anyone can prove that his life is in danger.  One can imagine many scenarios in which any reasonable onlooker would conclude as much, and the right to defend one’s own life, or the life of another person, against imminent attack is a basic human right. The question worthy of debate has to do with the degree to which one can self-excuse for using deadly force against another person by self-defining as someone who felt his or her life to be in danger.  Is it reasonable simply to require a defendant to assert as much under oath? That seems to be the way the laws in many states are written. But even our sages in ancient times understood the perils involved in allowing such an unbridled right to self-define to function as a get-out-of-jail (or, in the Scriptural mode, a get-out-of-the-army) card. It seems to me that a legal system cannot function well if accused individuals are awarded the right to avoid responsibility for their actions merely by saying after the fact how they felt at the time. If a jury of reasonable citizens cannot be convinced that they too would have felt their lives in danger had they been in the defendant’s shoes at the specific moment under consideration, then the mere assertion that one felt oneself to be in danger should not be enough to require a verdict of not guilty.

The best Yom Ha-atzma’ut of my life was in 1984. We were living in Jerusalem that year, because I had the great good fortune to have been awarded a post-doctoral fellowship for a year’s worth of research and study at the Hebrew University. (This was before I came to my senses and remembered that I had become a rabbi in the first place to serve actual Jewish people in the congregational setting, not to lecture to mostly non-Jewish undergraduates in university classrooms.) My oldest son, Max, had been born a week earlier.  Even that is a bit of a story—no one plans for a child to be born on Yom Ha-shoah, obviously, but that was nonetheless when Max ended up entering the world. At first, Joan and I were both a bit dismayed, confused by the weirdness of the greatest day of our lives to date falling precisely on the Jewish people’s national day of remembrance for the k’doshim who perished during the Holocaust.  But once we calmed down, we saw things differently.

My whole life, I think it is fair to say, had to that point been one long, complicated response to the Shoah. In many ways, it still is. (The same could be said, probably, for most of us.  But we do differ in how we embrace that thought, or even if  we allow ourselves to embrace  it in terms of actual life choices and not merely worldview.) For me personally, even despite having spent a lifetime in the congregational rabbinate, I believe that the most profound way in which I have personally responded to the Shoah was to marry and then to become the father of Jewish children, thus seeing to it as best I could that the Jewish people would rise from the ashes, if not quite phoenix-like than at least in terms of me personally doing what I could to create a viable future generation of engaged, committed Jewish young people. And so, at least eventually, Joan and I concluded that perhaps giving birth to a firstborn child on Yom Ha-shoah—and in the thriving capital city of an independent Jewish state, no less—was not something to be regretted or stoically accepted, but rather something to be embraced, to be considered richly meaningful and deeply satisfying.

And so was Max born on Yom Ha-shoah in 1984, forty-one years almost to the day after the Jews of Warsaw—and my father’s people came originally from a shtetl just outside Warsaw—rose up in their futile, yet incredibly noble, effort to die not as victims but as heroes. Could any of those people fighting the Germans in Warsaw have imagined my little baby being born in the thriving capital of a Jewish state possessed of its own powerful army just four decades later? I doubt it! But I, blessed (as are we all) with hindsight, could see them…and I could also see my baby, my little Yerushalmi, coming into the world precisely on a day that once Jewish children only died.

Boys born on Yom Ha-shoah, like all Jewish healthy boys, have their brit milah eight days later. Yom Ha-shoah falls on the twenty-seventh of Nisan. Normally, Yom Ha-atzma’ut is eight days after Yom Ha-shoah, but the dates are altered slightly from year to year to avoid interference with Shabbat observance. And so it came to pass in 1984 that eight days after the day of Max’s birth was not Yom Ha-atzma’ut at all, but Yom Ha-zikaron, the Memorial Day devoted to remembering both the members of the Israel Defense Forces who died in the service of their country and also those who died before statehood was proclaimed in the effort to create a Jewish state in the land of Israel.  It’s a somber day in Israel, one that is marked with memorial ceremonies, with some national minutes of silence, and with a general sense of somber gratitude to those who paid the ultimate price so that the State might come into being, then endure.  And Yom Ha-zikaron is always followed immediately by Yom Ha-atzma’ut, Israel Independence Day, which commemorates specifically the day on the Jewish calendar, the fifth of Iyar, on which statehood was proclaimed in 1948.  Max’s whole first week was fraught with symbolism!  His bris, held in the gorgeous home of friends of ours on Tel Chai Street in the Katamon section of Jerusalem, was held in the late afternoon on Yom Ha-zikaron. It was a warm day. My mother-in-law and I made the trek to Machane Yehudah earlier in the day to buy fruit and cakes and other treats to serve to our guests. The brit milah itself was fine. (By that I mean that the mohel  was fine and our guests were fine. The sandek, Joan’s great-uncle Mordechai, was fine too. As first-time parents, Joan and I were slightly in shock.) But the best part was still to come: evening fell, the sky was suddenly filled with fireworks, our baby was fast asleep, and the entire nation began to celebrate…not precisely Max’s entry into the covenant, but its own birthday, the birthday of the State of Israel. Now that  was a Yom Ha-atzma’ut to remember!

Since then, no Yom Ha-atzma’ut has come or gone without bringing me back to those days in Jerusalem.  As you all know, I harbor no ambivalence at all about my Zionism or about my unyielding support for the State of Israel. I’ve just finished reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book, Jerusalem: A Biography, which I heartily recommend to you all. It is a long read, but a fascinating one…and one that will bring to your attention all sorts of details about Jewish history and about the history specifically of the Jewish community in Jerusalem that you will probably not have known. (Many of them, I too did not know.) It is a rich book, a powerful book…but its power for me personally lay not in the accuracy of its detail (which is impressive in its own right), but in the backdrop it provided for my family’s great Yom Ha-atzma’ut in 1984.

Obviously, I had known that there have been Jews living in Jerusalem since biblical times. But the almost unimaginable tenacity that has made permanent the bond between a people and its holiest city is what Montefiore brings to the fore in his book, which also describes in detail the background of the Arab sense of Jerusalem being one of Islam’s holy cities and also the history of Christian Jerusalem and its relationship to world Christendom.  I came away from reading the book deeply imbued with a sense that our family’s minuscule role in the history of the city—Joan and I are, after all, the parents of one single Jewish Yerushalmi among millions and were the hosts of one single brit milah among the brisses of millennia—has a context that makes it not only meaningful, but profoundly so.

Yom Ha-zikaron falls next week on Wednesday. Yom Ha-atzma’ut in on Thursday. We in the diaspora have chosen to live on the sidelines, yet we should not allow that thought to justify a sense of disengagement from either event. Therefore, I recommend two simple, highly doable ways of commemorating both days. On Yom Ha-zikaron, I suggest that you consider lighting a yahrtzeit candle in memory of all those who gave their lives so that Israel might live. And on Yom Ha-atzma’ut, I suggest you consider coming to shul and there reciting the version of the Al Ha-nissim prayer we add to the Amidah on that day only, the one that acknowledges the victory of newly-born Israel over its mighty enemies as a miracle for which Jews everywhere should be grateful. It isn’t much. No one will know that you light a candle or, other than everyone else who shows up, that you came to shul. I can promise you they’ll be having way more fun in Israel! But both acts would be something rather than nothing…and pausing on Yom Ha-zikaron to remember those who gave their lives so that Israel might live and then again on Yom Ha-atzma’ut to thank God that we were all privileged to see the a thriving, self-reliant Jewish state in the land of Israel in our own day—that doesn’t sound like such an inappropriate way to nod to two days that only appear at first blush to be more about Israelis than about American Jews such as ourselves.

Can it really be that Pesach is so soon upon us?  Part of me is always caught unawares as this holiday more than any other feels as though it sneaks up on us—and, yes, there may be a bit of denial in there, which is not only the river in this particular tale we are about to tell—but perhaps this year part of the reason I’m feeling that way especially profoundly is because the winter never really came, thus making it that much more disorienting for spring suddenly to have arrived and, with it, Pesach, called in our tradition chag ha-aviv, the springtime holiday.  But another part has to do with the nature of Pesach itself, for in its own way, Pesach is the quintessential festival of unexpected things.

We naturally tend to focus on the end of the story, but the truth is that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt for many centuries. In Parashat Bo, for example, the Torah gives the specific number of 430 as the sum total of the years that Israel was in Egypt. We rarely think of the story in terms of those long, unaccounted-for centuries, but there’s something there well worth contemplating. To say the same thing in other words, the Israelites we always focus on are the ones whom God led forth with “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” But those were the lucky ones, the liberated ones who escaped, the ones with whom the Haggadah wants us to self-identify…but 430 is a very long prelude to the story and that part of the tale is obviously about the Israelites who did not leave Egypt, who never met Moses, who groaned under the exhausting burden of their labors, but whom no one brought forth anywhere other than to another week of slaves’ work. The story we tell at the seder is about the lucky ones. But there were a lot of unlucky ones too, people whose stories are just a bit too blithely passed over.

In response to that thought, I suggest that we take a moment to consider that number, 430. To set that figure in its modern context, 430 years ago was 1582.  Does that feel like a long time ago? It should! The Gregorian calendar has just been invented. (1582 was the one solar year in recorded history that had way fewer than 365 days in it. In most of Europe, by virtue of a papal bull imposing a new calendar on the West, Thursday, October 4, was followed directly by Friday, October 15. So if someone ever asks you what happened, say, on October 13, 1582, the correct answer is absolutely nothing!)  The new calendar wasn’t the only news that year, however. The eighteen-year-old Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior, that year as well. Teresa of Avila, one of the greatest Christian mystics (whose autobiography I recommend to you enthusiastically as an exquisite example of spiritual introspection well worth anyone’s time to peruse), died that year. But can any of us name any of our direct ancestors who were alive in 1582?  I am more or less certain that not one of us can! And I also cannot. We all must have had ancestors alive then, the men and women who produced offspring whose further reproductive efforts eventually led to all of us being born to our parents, their direct descendants. Yet they are lost to us,  those men and women, and in that mysterious way that the past simply slips away even despite our best efforts to hold on tight. Most of us could only guess vaguely where those ancestors—the great-great-grandparents, say, of our grandparents’ great-grandparents—would have lived. (I’ve observed many times from the bimah that only the smallest number of us can name all eight of his or her eight great-grandparents, let alone name all sixteen great-great-grandparents. (Your great-great-grandparents are only your grandparents’ grandparents! But who can even say their names, let alone speak about their lives? Will the grandchildren of our grandchildren say the same of us? Don’t even go there—some questions are best left unanswered!) So now consider how things must have been in Egypt as generation followed generation without leaving a trace behind of any sort other than the building projects on which they worked. But even that work went unacknowledged and unmemorialized, somewhat in the same way that the great skyscrapers of New York nowhere record the names of the people who actually built them.

My point is that 430 years is a long time. And, on top of that, the Israelites living in Egypt lived there without any of the things we ourselves have come to rely upon as memory aids in terms of keeping our family legacies intact. They had no photographs, obviously, no home movies. We know nothing of their lives in Egypt, in fact, not even their names. The beginning of their story, we know a little. The first decades must have gone well. Indeed, Joseph was forty-four years of age when the famine that brought his people to Egypt finally ended.  Yet when he died sixty-six years later at age 110, they were still there, apparently having forgotten entirely about going home when the famine ended that had brought them there in the first place. And then there eventually came to power a Pharaoh who “knew not Joseph,” and that must have been some time after that, long enough later for the memory of a personality like Joseph to have faded from the national recollective consciousness sufficiently for the new king to know nothing of his legacy or of the offer of friendship that his predecessor had made to Joseph’s father and family.  So even the figure of 430 years, which references the years of Israelite slavery in Egypt, does not reveal the full story because there must have been almost a century that preceded that during which the Israelites were in Egypt as welcomed guests and not as slaves. So let’s say, roughly, that this is actually a story covering five hundred years of which the Torah tells the story of the final one only. 

Things must have been going on just as always when, out of the blue, things changed. Scripture says that God took note of the Israelites’ suffering, that God “heard” their groaning and moaning. But would that specific generation of slaves necessarily have suffered more than the previous ones? And even if it were so that the misery inflicted upon the Israelites was that much worse in Moses’s generation than in earlier times, would it have seemed that way to the Israelite slaves themselves in Moses’s day? I don’t see why it would have. Indeed, how could they have known how much worse or better they had it than their ancestors from a century or so earlier? My guess is that they would have had no way at all to know that and that redemption must have seemed to them, other than perhaps in retrospect, unearned and inexplicable, an example of divine beneficence not only unanticipated but unanticipatable.

After the fact, most historical events develop a feel of unavoidability to them. But that is truly only how things seem in retrospect and to the Israelite slaves in Egypt, the notion that freedom was nigh, that the hour of their long-awaited redemption was upon them…it must have seemed like the most unimaginable of miracles. Later on, the stories they recorded spoke of the various signs and wonders that God brought against the Egyptians as acts of judgment. But surely the redemption itself, after so many generations of nameless, faceless Israelites lived and died as slaves, was the greatest miracle, the greatest example of God’s presence in history. 

That’s how we tell the story. But it behooves us also to pause and remember all those who never made it out, who lived and died in captivity, whose hopes for freedom never came to fruition. It is, after all, on their backs that the story unfolds, on the backs of the uncountable millions who lived and died so that those who had the good fortune to live at precisely the right moment to experience redemption might go free.  As we approach Pesach, I invite you to consider the endless generations of Jews who didn’t make it out alive, who lived and died without breathing free, without experiencing even a day’s respite from their misery. It is on their back that the story unfolds! And so, when the Haggadah invites us to consider ourselves as though we were slaves in Egypt—and the temptation is mighty to consider ourselves as the slaves for whom the sea parted, for whom the manna fell,  for whom the presence of God became manifest atop Sinai—I propose we pause also to think of ourselves as the people in the back story, the ones who lived and died so that the other people, the heroes of the Haggadah, could experience the signs and wonders that led to their freedom.

It is in the nature of backstories not to be so interesting. That’s why we call them backstories, because they serve to highlight not themselves but precisely the people in the foreground. But they are there, and their ghosts are hiding between the pages of the Haggadah just as surely as are those of their more illustrious descendants, the generation that fled slavery and became a free people. They are all our ancestors…and this Pesach I think it would behoove us all to spend at least a moment recalling their unhappy fate. The Haggadah, it is true, calls upon us to think of ourselves as if we personally left Egypt. My suggestion is simply that we also think of those who didn’t leave, who couldn’t leave, who simply entered and left the stage of history so that their descendants could become our ancestors, the ancestors of a free people traveling the path from history to destiny, from Kadesh to Nirtzah, from redemption-past to redemption-future.

I didn’t expect to find the Supreme Court deliberations regarding the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 to be especially engaging. And, in some ways, I wasn’t disappointed. The Democrats said what their script required them to say. The Republicans said what their script required them to say. Nor did the justices themselves deviate much from the expected path: each asked sharper questions of the lawyers representing the side of the aisle with which he or she is generally not identified than of the lawyers representing the point of view usually associated with that justice, yet generally without abandoning the necessary mantle of presumed judicial impartiality regarding matters before the court. (I was initially amazed, but also impressed, that the justices felt they would, or even could, hear enough from both sides in just six hours to make it possible to render a decision. The darker side of my personality wondered if that was simply because they all already knew how they were going to vote and didn’t want to waste more than three days listening to pointless presentations. But maybe, to grant the system the benefit of the doubt, the complexity of the issues involved simply demanded that a time-limit be set that absolutely would require the lawyers representing the parties to the suit—the attorneys-general of the twenty-seven states trying to overturn the act on constitutional grounds and the federal government—to get as quickly to the point as humanly possible.)

But in other ways I was wrong. Almost to my surprise, I’ve found these last three days fascinating. For one thing, discussing the ideal way to define, and the best way to defend, the civil rights of our citizens is not something ever lightly to pass by. And, indeed, if one thing came through as I listened and read my way through the week, it was that both sides were staking out the very same ground as the territory they were claiming to wish to defend: the rights of the citizenry to live free lives in a free state (and in fifty free states) governed solely by laws designed to protect their freedoms and not to burden or encumber their rights or their freedoms. By any measure, that will always be a debate worth undertaking! And so I thought I’d write this week about the issue from that specific vantage point: without claiming the background or the expertise in constitutional law necessary to proffer a truly informed decision about the extremely technical legal matters that are now before the court (both of which—the background and the expertise—I surely lack), I’d like to approach the issue from the far simpler vantage point of a citizen whose rights both sides claim they have come to the Supreme Court to protect.

There are certain rights that we as a society have determined exist outside the framework of wealth or social status. I believe, for example, that we in this country are universally of the opinion that even the poorest of the poor are entitled to drink clean water; surely no one seriously thinks that parents who do not earn enough money to pay income tax and who therefore do not participate personally in subventing the costs involved in keeping our water supply clean and free of pollutants should be expected to make their peace with their children having to drink brackish, filthy, or contaminated water.  We feel the same way about clean air; no one seriously argues, or ever would seriously argue, that we should reasonably permit levels of air pollution in towns and neighborhoods mostly lived in by people who earn too little meaningfully to participate in the effort to keep our air clean than we would ever tolerate in richer, more affluent places. When you think about it, we feel that way about a lot of things related to the maintenance of a healthy lifestyle—about the right to work in a smoke-free environment regardless of personal wealth or status, for example, or about the right of all children to be vaccinated against potentially life-threatening diseases as part of our national interest in protecting the public weal.

Clearly, there are also things in our world that we do deem appropriate to deny to people who cannot afford them. And there are lots of those things too, including some things that people of means would be loath to do without. In our society, for example, we do not consider owning an automobile to be a civil right despite the fact that finding a good job and earning a living is far easier in our society for someone who does own a car. Nor do we consider it to be the right of every citizen to have unfettered access to the Internet (also despite the fact that it must be impossible or almost impossible to find a job without such access) or to send his or her children to a summer camp in the country. Or to attend live concerts. Or to go to the theater. Or to see the Knicks play at the Garden or the Yankees at the new Yankee Stadium. The things in this category, we deem perks of wealth: if you can’t afford them, you have to do without them. And that, I suppose, is as it should be in a capitalist democracy: when simmered down to its most basic level, after all, the great perk of possessing wealth consists precisely of having the money to buy things you couldn’t have if you didn’t. Nor is that something to be decried or lamented, I don’t think: people shlep themselves out of bed in the morning and go to work precisely because they wish to have things they know they’ll never have if they don’t get up and go to work. (Nor is it fair to rephrase that thought to suggest that, in the end, it is greed alone that fuels our American society. What pushes us forward is the desire to live better lives, to be able to provide more for our children, to be able to be more generous with the needy, to better the world by bettering our own situations. To denigrate that grand set of internal impetuses baldly as “greed” seems, to say the least, meanspirited and more than a bit insulting to people, myself included, who work for a living.)

Health care, however, we have placed in the former category. Not because it must be there by law, but because we as a society have determined that it shall be there, that it should be there.  As a result, we do not deny health care to sick people in our country. Public hospitals are barred from turning people away from merely because it is not obvious how exactly they are going to pay for whatever services are rendered. Even private hospitals are barred by the Emergency Medical and Treatment Labor Law of 1986 from turning away patients in emergency situations. We underwrite vastly expensive programs like Medicaid specifically to provide health care to citizens and legal residents unable to afford their own health insurance. (And to say “vastly expensive “ is to say almost nothing at all: in 2010, the federal government spent $275 billion on Medicaid, up from $118 billion in 2000.)  But not all the uninsured or under-insured qualify for Medicaid—and, according to the Census Bureau’s 2011 Current Population Survey, there were approximately 49.9 million Americans who did not have health insurance in 2010. So we are talking about scores of millions of people whom we can’t quite bring ourselves to shut out of the system, but who are personally not bringing anything into it. And that is the crux of the problem, as I finally understand it in the wake of this week’s hearings: we lack the heartlessness simply to tell people who can’t afford health insurance simply to do without health care, yet the burden of paying for that care ends up falling squarely on the shoulders of the insured. And that, it seems to me, was the crux of the matter as it played itself out in the Supreme Court this week.

So what do I think, I felt myself challenged to ask, as I listened along to the debate in the course of this last week. Is it the greater infringement on the civil rights of citizens for them—for us!— to be obliged by law to carry health insurance or pay a commensurate fine for failing to do so? Or is it the greater infringement on the civil rights of those same citizens to be unable to escape paying for other people’s health care just because the system operates on the backs of the insured and the taxpayers? Surely, both impact negatively upon the civil rights of the average (insured, tax-paying) citizen. It’s hard to imagine anyone arguing with that! And so the question, as I think I heard it being framed, comes down to determining which constitutes the greater infringement on those rights, thus the greater evil, thus something for our nation to determine that it wishes to avoid even if it means opting for an alternative that is only slightly less unpalatable. The real alternative—making healthcare into a commodity and letting people who can’t afford it simply do without—seems to be unimaginable to most citizens, which reality frames the debate as being essentially between two alternate alternatives to that one. And thinking of the issue in that specific way is what transformed the hearings this week, at least for me personally, from something dull and perfunctory into a debate I felt drawn into and engaged by.

Our Jewish tradition understands the obligation to care for others to be a function of our obligation not to burden others by failing to care for ourselves. Therefore, our first obligations in terms of healthcare provision is for us to make sure we ourselves are properly looked after. And our obligations move out in concentric  circles from there: first to our spouses and children, then to our parents and siblings, then to our extended families, then to our neighbors, then to other residents of our towns and cities, then to the wider world. At the heart of the matter, though, is the expectation that society functions best when the first responsibility of each citizen is to avoid burdening others by accepting responsibility for his or her own needs…and only then by expanding out one’s ability to attend to the needs of others in reasonably drawn concentric circles of obligation. That sounds like sound thinking to me. And so I find myself, after wading reading and listening all week, hoping that the baby does not end up getting tossed out with the bath water. If the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act turns out either partially or entirely to be inconsonant with constitutional law, surely a decision the Supreme Court is entitled to make, then I hope we can find a  constitutionally-acceptable way for each of us, prosperous and less prosperous alike, to shoulder our fair share of the burden of healthcare in our country, thus personally to become responsible for our country being a place in which no one’s life is ever forfeit for lack of funds to see a doctor, and in which all citizens share reasonably and fairly in the costs involved with making that noble goal part of day-to-day reality for us all. 

Like all of you, I’ve been glued to the news this past week as the drama in Toulouse has unfolded day by day. As I write this, in fact, CNN has just announced that the police have confirmed the death of Mohammed Merah, the man who is said to have confessed personally to seven murders over these last two weeks, including the slaying of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two children Aryeh and Gabriel (ages six and three), Miriam Monsonego (age eight),  Imad Ibn-Ziatan (age thirty, a French paratrooper), Abel Chennouf (age twenty-five, a corporal in the French army), and Mohamed Legouad (age twenty-four, a French army private). To say that each death was a tragedy is almost to say nothing at all because each of these young people—young soldiers serving in the defense of their country, innocent children on their way into school for what was to have been a normal school day, a rabbi devoting his life to the instruction of Jewish children—each of them embodied unlimited potential to do good in the world. Each had a future. Each had the potential to change the world. Now, of course, none will. Even their murderer, age twenty-three, is dead. And his death too is a tragedy—a tragedy because, instead of succumbing to the rage-filled hatred apparently instilled in him by his Al Qaeda handlers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he too could have had a future. He was a citizen of France, a pluralistic democracy. He was thus a heir, at least in theory, to French culture, to French learning, to the sense of égalité and fraternité that have characterized French society at its most enlightened since, well, the Enlightenment. He will have none of that now. Nor, obviously, will he have a chance to be presumed innocent before being convicted of his crimes and sentenced, as he surely would have been, to life in prison, thus even in defeat sending a valuable lesson to his co-citizens that mindless violence leads only to perdition, never  to paradise. 

Now, of course, none of that is to be. Rabbi Sandler will teach no more classes. His little boys will not grow to adulthood, nor will little Miriam. The three soldiers, all cut down in the prime of life by a fanatic who found it objectionable for French citizens to serve the French people in the French armed forces because of their ethnic origins outside of France, will serve no longer. And the assassin too will have no future, no possibility of redemption, no chance to seek atonement or repentance.  The world, of course, will keep spinning. Toulouse, a provincial city that not one American in a thousand could have found easily on a map until earlier this week, will return to normal. Even Jewish life in that place will resume, diminished yet resilient, as the Ozar Hatorah school re-opens, as a new teacher is quietly hired to replace Rabbi Sandler, as the children’s cubbies are without drama or ceremony simply re-assigned to other children for their future use. In their barracks, the soldiers’ lockers too will be re-assigned. In the end, they will all simply vanish from the stage to be remembered vaguely as yet more victims of mindless terror. I myself don’t recall the names of the Chabad rabbi and his wife who were murdered in Mumbai in 2008.  Or the name of the poor woman murdered at the Seattle JCC in 2006.  (Just for the record , they were Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, and Pamela Waechter. But I had to look that up, which I just did.) 

It is natural to respond to the deaths of children differently than to the deaths of adults. And it is also natural to respond to the death of unarmed civilians differently than to the deaths of soldiers. But the key for us to remember is that these seven, a group of individuals unknown to each other in life, have somehow been linked permanently to each other in death.  And I would like to consider what they have to say to the world not as individuals, but as a group formed in death, as people who would almost never have met had they lived yet who have ended up linked to each other both posthumously and permanently. What Rabbi Sandler would have made of Corporal Chennouf, or vice versa, I have no idea. Whether under other circumstances they could have befriended each other, I also do not know. At best, it would have been unlikely. But these unanswerable questions are not what I want to write about today.

The dead in Toulouse are, by any measure, an odd group: four Jews and three Muslims; two Franco-Israelis and five French citizens with no other passports or allegiances; four men, two boys, and a girl; a rabbi, three soldiers, and three schoolchildren.  Together, they can serve to remind us that Muslims are as often the victims of terror as its perpetrators, and that the mindset of the terrorist is nowhere nearly as meaningfully rooted in political philosophy or in religion as in rage, in a kind of dementia so severe that even the murder of a little girl at point blank range is deemed not only justifiable but reasonable, even virtuous. Although they would surely bristle at the comparison, the terrorists of the world, in this like all true fanatics, have more in common with each other than with the more reasonable elements within their own religious or ethnic groups. That being the case, it is folly, I believe, to try to reason rationally with people who have embraced terror as a valid means of political self-expression, and for the same reasons that it is pointless to attempt to argue rationally with irrational people. The whole concept of being irrational is that you don’t see things rationally! And the whole concept behind the worldview that countenances the murder of children to make some vague point about your nation’s politics or some other nation’s policies or practices is no less bizarre. In other words, to describe the murder of Miriam Monsonego as a valid response to Israel’s insistence that the Hamas terrorists who control Gaza be inhibited in their ability to send missiles against Israel’s southern towns and villages is to abandon rational discourse and move into the realm of true craziness. That Nicolas Sarkozy said as much the other evening was heartening. But that there are quarters in the world in which Mohamed Merah will be celebrated as a martyr also goes without saying and that is not heartening at all. 

We should not respond to violent irrationality by mouthing our own set of irrational platitudes. The Mohamed Merahs of this world are not going to calm down and become rational because we would like them to.  Al-Qaeda is not going to morph into a political party worthy of participation in the democratic process, and neither is Hamas or Hezbollah. To confuse the kind of mindless rage that yields incidents like this week’s in Toulouse with the kind of dissent that is healthy for any democracy and crucial for its wellbeing is as pointless as it is outrageous. To descend so far into the pit of moral relativism so as not to be able to distinguish between reasonable military action taken in defense of one’s own country and violent terrorism undertaken with no specific goal in mind other than the murder of innocents is to come perilously close to abandoning moral thinking entirely.  And yet the world dithers. No less a personality than the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton, came perilously close the other day to equating the murder of Rabbi Sandler’s children with the plight of the children of Gaza. Back-pedaling furiously, she tried (and is apparently still trying, although only semi-successfully) to undo the damage. But the remark itself was and is still out there, as is its raw, unpalatable implication that when Hamas terrorists locate their missile launchers in civilian neighborhoods and use local children as shields, the fate of those children is no less the fault of Israel than the death of the children in Toulouse. To decry that kind of skewered parallelism is merely to state the obvious. But I wonder how many people out there secretly agree with High Representative Ashton’s comments even as she labored to take them back.

Our job, other than making even more secure our schools and our synagogues in the wake of the Toulouse massacre, is to remind the world that once a forest fire is raging it becomes impossible to save any particular tree. And similarly will the world never be safe or secure until the notion of terrorism itself is made such anathema that no one will want to be labelled a terrorist. We have all become inured to the problem, so used to the regular flair-ups of unprovoked violence against innocent civilians that even 9/11 seems different from Madrid and London (and Mumbai and Buenos Aires and Seattle and now Toulouse, plus countless other sites of terrorist murder inside and outside of Israel) only in terms of the magnitude, scope, and intensity of the disaster. Is it imaginable, even remotely, that a time could come when the murder of innocents ceases to serve as the ultimate political statement? I’d like to think so. I actually have to think so. Because if I stopped thinking so, then I also would be obliged to abandon my belief in the ultimate redeemability of the world. And that, being the cornerstone of my faith, is not something I am prepared to give up lightly. Or at all, actually. The challenge, therefore, is not to wonder whether the peoples of the world could ever renounce mindless violence and live together in peace, but to ask ourselves what exactly it is we ourselves are doing to bring the world to the messianic moment, to the edge of redemption. And if the answer to that question is unsatisfying, then the proper response—and particularly as Jewish people everywhere prepare to celebrate the ultimate Festival of Freedom in just a few weeks’ time—is to see the tragedy in Toulouse as a burden we must all share: the perpetrator because he committed an unspeakable crime, his handlers in Pakistan and Afghanistan because they inspired incomprehensible villainy, and the rest of us because we have too easily made our peace with living in an unredeemed world. 

Perhaps some of you felt the same peculiar pang in your hearts that I felt in mine when I opened the paper on Wednesday and read that the Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer exist as a printed work after the 2010 edition sells out, but will instead continue on solely as an on-line enterprise. I’m hardly in a position to complain, given that I can’t actually remember the last time I opened a printed encyclopedia to look something up. Nonetheless, and despite my own partial responsibility in creating the climate that led to the Britannica’s demise, I still find myself saddened by their decision and—this is the more rational part of the response—possessed of the conviction that some sort of line in the history of human intellectual pursuits has been crossed with their decision to acquiesce to the reality of the age of digitized information. (Okay, maybe that’s a bit too much to say. But it does feel momentous, the thought that future generations will not encounter culture or science packaged in anything like the way I first encountered them as a child.) So maybe I will complain, just not too loudly, lest I sound like one of those people who endlessly laments the disappearance of bookstores and record shops but who personally stopped buying books and CDs in stores once they became available on-line for less money and for less effort. But wait a minute…I am one of those people! And, that being the case, why shouldn’t I also regret that volumes that I personally haven’t opened in decades will no longer be updated and printed annually for me to continue not to consult? Why not? A bit of inconsistency never killed anyone! (For my younger readers, CDs were silver disks with music embedded in them that people used to buy before music began simply to waft through the air directly into people’s iPods. I’ll explain what books were some other time.)

We didn’t own a Britannica when I was growing up, but my Uncle Raph and my Aunt Molly did. It was kept in a low bookcase facing the front door of their apartment on Highland Avenue in Queens, so you couldn’t miss it when you came to visit. And I certainly didn’t miss it, not ever. I believe the story is that my uncle won it appearing on some radio quiz show long before I was born, which detail only added to its luster in my mind: the thought that one could actually win such a thing in a contest was only one step removed from my own fantasy that I might one day receive a set of books like that as a present for Chanukah or for my birthday. And I coveted those books! As some readers may recall, they were very handsome volumes, each bound in brown leather with golden letters on the spine that distinguished the tomes not only from each other but also from every other book I had ever seen. They even had a particular smell to them, those books, something hard to describe but not at all unpleasant. In my child’s eyes, those books were the embodiment of knowledge, the source of all truly reliable information, something to be proud of being related to someone who owned a full set of which. My father told me many times that my Uncle Raph, who was revered in our family both for the breadth and the depth of his knowledge (and who, incidentally, was one of the few true autodidacts I’ve ever met), had read the entire thing. Could that be true? Even now, it seems unimaginable to me: I don’t know what edition my aunt and uncle owned, but the index of the 2007 edition listed a quarter of a million topics covered and another half million sub-entries under those topics.  Even if the earlier editions were shorter (which I have no specific reason to think they were), that’s still an awful lot of reading even for a man possessed of my uncle’s thirst for knowledge and talent for mastering intellectual challenges. The World Book, which we also didn’t own but which many of my friends did have at home, paled by comparison. Everything paled by comparison. I wanted a Britannica at home, just like my uncle and aunt. I wanted to read the whole thing too, starting with the aardvarks and working my way through to the Zulus, just like my uncle did (or may have). And I wanted people to see our books too as soon as they stepped into our apartment and thus come to think of our home as a place in which people who truly revered learning.  I was that kind of kid. (I heard that! Is it that obvious?) 

It never happened. We never bought the books. I don’t recall even discussing buying them. I’ve certainly never read them, not entirely and not even mostly. When I need some information nowadays, even to find out when and where the Britannica was first published (1768-1771, in Edinburgh), I go to Wikipedia. It’s free. It’s always there. (I have the Wikipedia app installed on my phone, so it really is always there.) It’s remarkably accurate and generally, at least as far as I can see, free of bias. There’s a Britannica on-line site as well, but it costs $70 a year for full access.  Part of me wants to pay, but the other part of me—I heard that too, but isn’t “frugal” a nicer way to say the same thing?—can’t quite bring myself to fork over the money.  What for? So I can gather even more material I’ll never find the time actually to read?   Plus, you can always amuse yourself, also for free, by perusing Wikipedia’s index of articles in Yiddish or Yoruba or Xitsonga. (There are editions of Wikipedia in an astounding 283 languages. Who even knew there were that many languages in the world to look things up in?)

The demise of the print edition has been coming for a long time. In 1990, they sold about 120,000 copies of the thirty-two volume set. This year, only a little more than two decades later, they printed a mere 12,000, of which they have managed to sell only 8000 copies at $1395 per set. It’s not that much money.  For the same money, roughly, you can spend somewhere between 250 and 300 hours at the movies. But you could read the Britannica for  years and years—really, for a lifetime—and never be done learning what there is to know in the world. And yet, as noted above, who am I to lament the demise of the printed edition? I myself wouldn’t dream of getting in my car and driving to a library to look something up in an encyclopedia, much of parting with $1395 to look that same thing up at home. Nor does anyone with an internet connection have to: for $70 you can have the whole thing in your pocket or your purse. And for free you can have Wikipedia, which paradoxically by its very existence proves the need for encyclopedias in the modern world, just not for printed ones bound in leather that weigh a ton and are the opposite of portable. (By way of comparison with the EB, Wikipedia has 21 million articles, 3.8 million of them in English. On the average month, Wikipedia receives about 2.7 billion pageviews from the United States alone. And since all the information lives in the cloud somewhere, it doesn’t take up any space at all, not on your bookshelves and not on your hard drive either. It’s just there, something in the spirit of what the psalmist described God as being nimtza me’od—“intensely present.”)

And so the world moves forward into unknown and unknowable future.  Features of our childhoods that once felt absolutely permanent and fully real turn out to be fully impermanent and totally replaceable. The print edition of the Britannica was a kind of anchor for me as I was growing up and trying to invent myself, something the mere existence of which proved (at least to the young me) that knowledge was attainable (if not quite finite), that you could—if you only had enough patience and sitzfleisch—find in one single place more or less everything there was to know. So I was wrong, so what? I felt beckoned to by those books, called to see just what (I naively imagined) everybody else in the world knew about everything and that somehow only I had yet to find out. 

My uncle and aunt are gone now, as are my parents and all of their siblings. That much of the world, we all know. But who ever thought the Britannica would vanish, that it even could vanish? I related to the article in the newspaper Wednesday not that differently from the way I responded at the end of Planet of the Apes when the monkeys come across the ruins of the Statue of Liberty and you realize this has all been happening on earth: that the Statue of Liberty is a man-made thing that could somehow be destroyed is obviously true…but who can imagine it not being there watching over the harbor? I suppose one could say the same thing about the Twin Towers. But perhaps that is the big lesson to be learned from all of the above, both the horrific and the relatively benign: nothing is truly permanent, everything is in a constant state of change. As King Kohelet noted millennia ago, the rivers are constantly flowing in to the sea, but the sea never seems to fill up but merely exists in the context of ongoing change so that its apparent permanence is just an illusion and nothing more.  Can the same be said of human knowledge, even absent the innately ephemeral nature of the printed books in which it has up until now been presented to the reading public? That, I suppose remains to be seen!

Friday is Shushan Purim, the day after “real” Purim that commemorates the fact that the Jews of Old Shushan were so successful in defeating their would-be assailants that they required a second day to mop things up, an element of their story to which we nod slightly by giving this day a special name and, frankly, not much else.  Still, it’s a nice touch. How many other holidays commemorate a victory against would-be oppressors so massive and far-reaching that it couldn’t even be accomplished on a single day? Other than Purim, I can’t think of a one. (Mind you, how many massive victories over murderous anti-Semites are in the pool to consider? Not so many!) But I had an idea while listening to the Megillah the other night that perhaps we should respond to the peculiar feature of Purim having an after-holiday by considering the aftermath of the story itself.

We don’t ever go there. We get to the end of the scroll. The band is already warming up. They’re already frying up the falafel balls. It’s a challenge to keep people in their seats long enough to sing Shoshanat Yaakov, let alone to hang around to discuss the story of Purim in any detail at all. Perhaps that’s as it should be, even: Purim is about celebrating, and the huge party we have at Shelter Rock is always a huge amount of fun. So who doesn’t want to get the party started? And yet…thinking about where the story leads is a worthy way to lend meaning and dignity to the story that is at the heart of Purim observance. (The “what happens next” motif is not, after all, foreign to our way of analyzing our ancient books.  What happens after the Torah narrative itself finishes with Moses’s death is told in detail, after all, in the Book of Joshua; we have just made a communal decision notto go there, but instead to begin reading the Torah again from the beginning of the scroll, that’s all.  And Ruth, the other one of the five megillot with a clear narrative story line, in fact ends precisely by following the offspring of its protagonists for generations into the future.) Only the Megillah ends with a vague summary of how things wound up, but without peering even momentarily into the future or nodding to the “what happened next” questions that modern readers seem inevitably to want to ask about the characters in their favorite books.

If anything, the Megillah draws to its end with a surfeit of good news. King Achashveirosh invents a way to raise even more money by invented new taxes to impose on even the furthest flung reaches of his empire, thus making himself even more wealthy than he was at the beginning of the story (which, as you’ll recall, was already pretty wealthy).  Mordechai ends up not only second-in-command to the king himself, but also formally, possibly even permanently, installed as the head of the Jewish community. (Moreover, the enormous power vested in him, the Megillah assures us, never went to his head, never made him imperious or overbearing, never made him into a self-absorbed little dictator so exaggeratedly concerned with the honor due his office as to turn himself into an ironic, if wholly unaware, parody of the very Haman whose downfall triggered the events that led to his own great success.)  For their part, the Jews of the realm are safe under the protection of a wise and benevolent patron, their position in Persian society happily and unassailably secure. All, we are obviously supposed to imagine, is well for the Jews of Persia as the story ends with a brief final chapter clearly intended to wrap things up nicely and neatly.

But left unmentioned in this epilogue to the larger story is the player whose quick thinking and whose bravery were the true catalysts that led both to the people’s survival and to Mordechai’s amazing success, Queen Esther herself. Given that the maidens left unchosen to become queen were forever sequestered in a special harem placed under the watchful aegis of the eunuch Shaashgaz, we can suppose that no one simply walked away from the king’s bed in old Shushan and just went back home. And surely a queen would least of all have had that option available to her! And so we are left imagining poor Esther forever in place in the palace, a prisoner in a gilded cage stuck spending the rest of her life sleeping with her drunken nincompoop of a husband and either thinking the deliverance of her people to have been worth the price she was left forever afterwards paying or not thinking that. The questions that come next almost ask themselves. Did the Achashveiroshes eventually have children? (Why wouldn’t they have?) But if they did, then was the next king of Persia himself a Jew, the son of a Jewish mother? Did Esther, having successfully come out of the closet to pursue her Jewishness openly once the events retold in the Megillah were well in the past? The next time the king asked her to ask for anything at all even unto half the kingdom did she ask that a mikveh be installed in the palace?

None of these questions has an answer. The story ends where it ends. Esther, far more of a literary figure than a historical one, exists only within the tale as told. But the question that readers are left with is one still well worth asking, and it is that specific question that Shushan Purim seems invariably to bring to my mind. Is the moral of the story that there actually is no bottom line, that anything at all is worth doing, any law worth breaking, any taboo worth ignoring, if it leads to the downfall of the enemies of the Jewish people? How that squares exactly with the obligation of fealty to the law every Jew theoretically bears as his or her part of the eternal covenant between God and Israel is a question that each must answer for him or herself. And yet, the Megillah’s deepest lesson—that the destiny of Israel is ultimately the responsibility of every single Jewish soul and that nothing (and certainly no norm of normal behavior) can be imagined to supersede that responsibility—cannot seriously be debated. Indeed, such is both the Megillah’s ultimate lesson and its most profound point. In fact, I imagine that it is that specific point that constitutes the ultimate reason Jewish people continue to read this story over and over. (Is that also the reason that the law requires that even a kohen offering up sacrifices at the altar in the Temple abandon his efforts—which is to say, to abandon the formal worship of God—when the time comes to hear the Megillah read aloud? It could be!)  And surely this specific lesson is the reason that the sages of classical antiquity declared that, although the advent of the messiah will eventually obviate the need to observe most Jewish festivals, Purim alone among the holidays of the Jewish year will never be considered obsolete or passé. Nor, taught the sages, will its back story ever be forgotten. Or its lesson regarding the role every Jew must play in fulfilling the destiny of the Jewish people ever be deemed to be of mere historical interest.

Obviously, Purim is about something that once happened, about a pogrom that failed to take place and about a people rising up instead to defend itself against those who were apparently already lining up to become their willing executioners. But it is also about Esther breaking so many different rules and going against so many different norms of Jewish behavior that they can barely be counted…and still being held up to the children, and especially to the girls, of every generation of Jewish people as a heroine who risked everything to save her people, and who in the end did save her people.  By omitting to tell the rest of her story, the part that follows the story told in the Megillah, tradition is inviting the reader in, inviting all of his who gather annually on Purim to hear the Megillah to step into the narrative and ask ourselves if we have it in us to risk everything for the future of the Jewish people and to contemplate all that thought entails. Had Esther lost that beauty contest, she would have disappeared into the seraglio never to be heard from again. No one would recall her name, Nor would any of us know or care that she ever lived. But because she won—surely as much a gift of Providence as an instance of success deriving from her own efforts to risk her virtue to charm her sot of a king—she is not only not forgotten, but still, all these millennia later, cherished as a role model from whose example all may learn. Perhaps we can honor Shushan Purim, then, by asking what exactly actually it is that we have learned from her example. And then, once we have found it in us to answer that question, to proceed on bravely to the truly stress-inducing part of the exercise by asking ourselves whether we have internalized that lesson ourselves…and whether we have it in us to live up to the example Queen Esther set for us so many countless centuries ago.

In my experience, one generally makes much more trouble for oneself in this world by opening one’s mouth than by keeping it shut. But that is apparently not always the case, as was amply evidenced the other day by Justice Salim Joubran, the only Israeli Arab among the fourteen judges on Israel’s Supreme Court, who managed to create a huge brouhaha in Israel without saying a word. The incident occurred the other day at a ceremony honoring the Dorit Beinisch, the ninth president of the Supreme Court on the occasion of her impending retirement. The ceremony ended, as these things invariably do in Israel, with the singing of Hatikvah. But Justice Joubran chose not to sing, a position he is widely understood to maintain on principle. Generally speaking, I admire people who hold fast to their principles and do not abandon them merely to curry favor with others. (Don’t most of us feel that way?) And in that sense I have to say that I admire the justice for having the courage of his convictions. On the other hand, there is something bizarre and unsettling about the image of a man occupying a position at the pinnacle of the justice system of his own country, yet finding it impossible to express his allegiance to country he serves simply by doing something as innocuous as singing its national anthem in public. But nothing in Israel is ever that simple!  And although the whole incident is surely in the larger scheme of things just a minor kerfuffle, it so perfectly encapsulates the dilemma facing Israel as it moves into the future that I thought I would write about it today. Nor is this entirely without implications for the way we see our own country and its much-vaunted, yet often more-honored-in-the-breach separation of church and state.

Israel was founded as a Jewish state. Zionism itself is the sturdy philosophical structure built on that single foundational idea, a philosophy that self-defines as the political expression of the Jewish version of the natural longing all nations have to live in peace on their own land and to thrive within secure boundaries. When understood in that way, it feels entirely normal to me for the Jewish people to have its own state in its own homeland, to pursue its own cultural ideals according to its own lights on its own territory, to defend itself from its enemies in the manner of all nation-states, and to self-define in whatever way it wishes. Nor, given the way our people have too-often fared in the lands of our dispersion, is this mere political theory: over the years, Israel has provided refuge for Jewish people from uncountable diaspora settings where their very lives would otherwise have been in danger or at least in which they would otherwise have been unable to live as Jews freely and without impediment. Indeed, when the United Nations finally bowed both to reality and common sense in 1991 and revoked its resolution condemning Zionism as racism, it was merely nodding to the fact that Israel has the same right to self-define that is accorded naturally to every other nation on earth.

Or rather, not to every nation, but rather only the ones with their own property.  The world, in fact, is filled with nations that are not awarded the right to self-define as independent states. The Inuit in Canada. The Maoris in New Zealand. The Navahos in our own country, and the Cherokees and all the other Native American nation-tribes. The Chechens in Russia. The Basques in Spain. The Bretons in France. The Copts in Egypt. The Lapps in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The Tamils in Sri Lanka. You see where I’m going. Nations that merely exist are specifically not automatically awarded the right to exist as independent states, not by the United Nations or for that matter by anyone at all. So it is hardly possible convincingly to argue the Jewish right to self-definition with reference solely to the existence of the Jewish people. The Basques also exist! What was on the table in those dark years between 1975 (when the United Nations voted to equate Zionism and racism) and 1991 (when that hateful resolution was finally revoked) was not whether the Jewish people existed at all, but whether they were rightly to be considered a mere ethnicity with no natural claim to statehood or an actual nation that has the inalienable right to self-define.  In the end, and slightly amazingly, the U.N. (at least in this one instance) did the right thing. But where does that leave Justice Joubran? Not in such a comfy seat, it turns out. And that is where the issue of principle comes into play.

Hatikvah, surprisingly, only became Israel’s official national anthem in 2004. But it was widely recognized as the national hymn since the state was founded in 1948 and long before that. (The British briefly banned the public performance of the song in 1919, apparently because they felt it too overtly identified with the political aim of the Zionist movement to rid Palestine of the British and to proclaim on its territory a Jewish state.) The song itself is about the longing of the Jewish people  to live the normal life of a sovereign nation. Nor could its lyrics, which all together constitute one long, complex sentence, possibly be more transparent in that regard: “As long as in the inner heart the Jewish soul yet yearns, and as long as an eye still gazes towards Zion, towards the east, towards the future, our hope, the two-thousand-year-old hope to be a free people in our land, in Zion, in Jerusalem, has not been extinguished.” As sentences go, it’s a little convoluted. But as poetry it could not be clearer: as long as the Jewish heart yearns for Zion and as long as the eyes of the Jewish people are trained on the land of Israel, then the hope of the Jewish people to be a free people in its own land cannot truly be said to have been extinguished. The sentiment could not be more noble, but the reality is more messy: if you were an Arab Israeli—Justice Joubran is a Christian Arab, not a Muslim, but that’s hardly the point—would you be able to sing that song with the fervor a Supreme Court justice would naturally be expected  to bring to his nation’s national anthem?

It’s not such an easy question to answer. The French-language version of the Canadian national anthem defines the great accomplishment of European Canadians as the conquest of the territory that now is Canada with a sword in one hand and a cross in the other, but most Jewish citizens—if they even know the words in French—consider that a joke, an amusing comment on their nation’s past rather than a provocative insult to non-Christians in Canada today. Other nations too define themselves in terms of the majority’s sense of the nation’s inmost ethos. British law requires that the head of state be a member of the Church of England. Norwegian law requires that the king be a member of the Church of Norway. The president of Lebanon has to be a Christian, but the prime minister has to be a Muslim. (The deputy prime minister has to be a member of the Greek Orthodox faith.) Nor is any of this unusual in terms of the way the countries of the world conduct their affairs. All countries pass laws regularly intended to promote their national character in uncountable ways ranging from the languages that are taught in their schools to the specific days they endorse as national holidays to the designs on their national flags and coats of arms.  And so too does Israel seek to promote itself as a Jewish state in a thousand different ways, including its choice of its national anthem.

I’ve just read the most interesting novel, a book called Dancing Arabs by Sayed Kashua. Born in Israel and fluent in Hebrew, Kashua is a graduate of the Hebrew University and writes regularly for Haaretz and for the local Jerusalem newspaper, Ha-Ir, as well as the dialogue for the Israeli sitcom Avodah Aravit (“Arab Labor”), which once won the award for best television series at the Jerusalem Film Festival. He is also an Arab who writes openly about the situation of Israeli Arabs and the bizarre, sometimes tragic, way in which they are inevitably caught between the dominant culture of Jewish Israel and their own Arab culture. It’s a painful book to read in some ways, affecting and upsetting at the same time, because it highlights the paradox with which Israel must live, and with which those of us whose hearts beat with Israel must therefore also live. We want Israel to a Jewish state. We want Jewish culture to flourish there. We want the gates always to remain open to Jewish refugees from wherever they must flee to safeguard their lives or their property or their heritage. We are nothing but proud of the degree to which Israel has managed all that. But we also want Israel to be a democracy in which all citizens are treated fairly and equitably, in which no citizens are by definition second-class or deemed to possess fewer rights than others.  Most of the time we tell ourselves that there’s no real problem, that we American Jews feel fully possessed of the rights of citizens and have made our collective peace with living in a Christian society that, for reasons none of us truly understands, considers it rational for Christmas to be a national holiday and does not find it bizarre for there to be Christmas trees in post offices or public hospitals, let alone in the White House itself. It’s just how it is, we tell ourselves, and, on the whole, it’s not that bad. In fact, we are beyond fortunate to be here, to be citizens of this great democracy. And that we surely all know as well.

In my opinion, the Israelis who were outraged by the incident involving Justice Joubran last week are making a huge deal out of nothing . The man is a respected jurist and, by all accounts, an intelligent man. He has made his peace with who he is and with where he lives. He serves his country in a very public position and has, by all accounts, acquitted himself well. (He was, among other things, one of the three judges who upheld former Israeli president Moshe Katzav’s rape conviction last November.) So he doesn’t want to sing a hymn in public that ignores his people’s presence in the Jewish homeland and fails even to nod to the issue of their presence.  He’s not the first. Ghaleb Majadale, the first Muslim appointed to serve in the Israeli cabinet, also got himself in hot water for refusing to sing the song, remarking at the time that the song was clearly written “for Jews only.”  There were those who responded to that thought not by acknowledging its reasonableness (for the record, Majadale was certainly correct in his assessment of Naphtali Herz Imber’s original intention when he wrote Hatikvah in 1878), but by being outraged at his scandalous behavior. My counsel is for everybody to calm down. I could not feel myself to be more of a patriotic American,  but I still avoid the post office in December as a silent (and, yes, meaningless and other than by myself unnoticed) protest against that irritating tree and all that it gratingly represents. It’s my small way of asserting, at least to myself, my sense that America has failed to live up to its own ideal of no religion being granted primacy of place, let alone “established” as our national faith.  President Kennedy’s vision of an America “where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials” is exactly right. That we come up short was not his problem, then, but it remains ours. (If you haven’t read President Kennedy’s remarks lately, originally delivered to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, and you are reading an electronic version of this letter, then you can click here to read them in full. They are beyond inspiring!) And maybe that’s the way it should be, that it has to be: minority types make small gestures to assert their identity in a sea of otherness while nevertheless serving their nations and feeling proud and happy to do so. That’s how I feel about my country. That’s presumably how Justice Joubran feels about his. It’s even sort of how Sayed Kashua feels, although in a painfully raw, disconcerting way. I encourage all my readers to read his novel, Dancing Arabs. His second novel, Let It Be Morning¸ I’m just about to begin. A third novel is due out in the spring. I’ll read that one too, I’m sure.

Wanting Israel to be a multicultural democracy that embraces all its citizens and wanting Israel to be a Jewish state should not be incompatible ideas. The Norwegians seem to have figured it out. So have the Brits. And so will Israel. Not all paradoxes, after all, are fatal. There are those you can just learn to live with. I hardly go to the post office anyway.                          

Like many of you, I worry about our great country: about where it’s going, about what emotions are motivating our fellow countrymen as they prepare to take sides in the coming election, about what historians looking back will eventually be able to identify as the specific spirit that motivated our co-citizens to make whatever decisions eventually become the ones that define the opening decades of this century in America.

What I specifically see and don’t much like is a certain lack of generosity—and I mean specifically generosity of the spirit, not of the purse—that seems to me to characterize a lot of what I’ve been hearing said, published, and broadcast just lately.  Like most people, I suppose, I live in a ghetto: a gilded one, to be sure, but nevertheless one in which most of the people with whom I have contact on a daily basis share my ethnicity, my faith, major elements of my personal story, and a certain basic orientation towards the world that I learned as a child in a different version of the same gilded ghetto, albeit one with lots more apartment houses and way fewer cats. But Joan and I were away for a few days earlier this week and the word on the street in paradise—and I am, if I may say so, a very good listener in this specific regard—was similar to what I’ve been hearing at home, only more shrill, more strident, and, if anything, less kind. I loved our time away, but in this specific regard came home troubled.

All my readers know I live peacefully in a world filled with ghosts. I speak and write often of my parents in that regard, but also of my grandparents, of the kedoshim who died during the war, of others who come not so much to haunt or to admonish but merely—and always gently—to whisper a word, to tarry for a moment. And among those specters always—or almost always—is Walt, the greatest of Long Island’s gifts to humanity, by any reasonable reckoning the first among America’s poets. (A few weeks ago I referred in one of these letters to the great William Cullen Bryant as Long Island’s second greatest poet. I got a lot of interesting feedback to that letter—it was the one, I believe, about the earth having about fifty million centuries left before the sun’s fiery tentacles reach out into space to swallow it up and spit it out as a lifeless space-cinder—but it pleased me that no one needed to ask me to identify the first greatest. As well they shouldn’t have!)  And so, sitting on the shore at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park, the most beautiful beach in Key West (which is saying a lot), I found myself re-reading some of Whitman. This being the twenty-first century, I have Leaves of Grass on my Kindle and also on my phone. (What if I go somewhere without my Kindle?) And what I found myself reading was one of the man’s finest works, his long, complicated poem about America’s poetic soul, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore.”

This is how Whitman characterizes the birth of our nation: “The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation of the Constitution, / The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants, / The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and impregnable…”  Those words suggest to me a certain confidence, a certain useful arrogance, a certain sense of destiny that seem to be lacking in the current version of our American world view. Perhaps Whitman was overstating things just a bit when he moved on from there to write about the way in which America is characterized by “the perfect equality of the female with the male,” but he was so right—or I hope he was—about the rest of it, about the “noble character of mechanics and farmers,” about America’s “freshness and candor,” about America’s “boundless, expectant soul.”  The poem, one of the longer ones in the collection, goes hand in hand with Whitman’s shorter poem, “America,” in which he describes our nation as “Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, / Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, / A grand, sane, towering, seating Mother, / Chair’d in the adamant of Time.” (What an adamant is, I also had to look up: a legendary stone of impenetrable hardness. Also, if I may digress, there is something incredibly cool that I came across in preparing to write to you this week: a 36-second wax cylinder recording, possibly made by Thomas Edison himself, of Whitman himself reading the lines from “America” quoted just above. Go to www.poets.org and search for “America” and the recording will pop up. It could also not be him. [You can find the very interesting essay, “Walt Whitman Speaks?” by Allen Koenigsberg—not Woody Allen, just someone with a similar name—reproduced on the site as well.] But how indescribably cool would it be if it really is his voice on the recording? Go listen, you’ll see what I mean. And it apparently really could be him!)

The man heard America singing.  And the song he heard was one of a people possessed of the confidence to be generous in the judgment of others, who had the courage of their convictions strongly enough in place to allow them to wish for others to join them, to be willing to self-invent for the sake of the future rather than relying on rules set in place by others in the past.

I’ve been allowing those thoughts to take me off in different directions. As our political leaders or would-be leaders appear to be vying with each other to see who can formulate the harshest position possible towards the eleven million illegal immigrants living in this country, I find myself wondering if the qualities most lacking from the discussion are not exactly the ones enumerated by Whitman a century and a half ago. Obviously, criminal behavior cannot and should not be condoned, let alone rewarded. As the husband of an immigrant to this country who waited on line for years and then duly jumped through a thousand different hoops on her way to becoming an American citizen, I find it outrageous that people who jump the queue should simply be rewarded for their efforts with citizenship. And yet I also remember that three of my grandparents and all eight of my great-grandparents came to this country when there were no immigration quotas, when the system was simply that you booked passage, arrived at Ellis Island (or somewhere similar), and demonstrated your good health and your ability to support yourself or to be supported by someone other than the government. I understand the point of limiting immigration. But I also can’t quite imagine that the solution to the problem is either mass deportation or else doing nothing at all, thus creating (or rather, continuing to create) a huge underclass of non-citizens who cannot seek medical attention when they are ill, who cannot complain to the police when they are assaulted, including violently or sexually, and who cannot pay taxes because they cannot self-identify to the IRS without risking deportation. I don’t have a specific plan in mind for coming to terms with the problem. But I wonder if what is required, and far more than harshness, vindictiveness, and punition, is the kind of generosity that could guide Americans forward to finding a way for illegals (like other lawbreakers) to pay their debt to society, to pay the back taxes they owe, to be safe in their homes and on the street, and finally to apply for residency permits without getting in the way of all those waiting their turn patiently and legally.  I suppose the key to finding such a plan would rest with the willingness of our nation to think of our union as “sure and impregnable,” and then to bring to bear Whitman’s idea of an “elastic scheme” that can stretch theory to accommodate reality. The way the debate is framed these days seems to require people who wish there to be a reasonable solution also to embrace the concept of just ignoring illegal behavior. I can’t imagine that has to be the case and I present myself as an example: I have absolutely no interest in condoning criminal activity of any sort and  I can find it in my heart to wish for a solution to the problem rooted in fairness, kindness, and generosity.

I find myself thinking about the mortgage crisis along similar lines. As you all know, the government has proposed a program designed to help homeowners who are in danger of losing their homes. It’s a huge program, one that will end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Whether it will work or not, I have no idea. But doing nothing at all to help can only be justified by arguing, not without cogency, why anyone should care if people lose their homes if they themselves are the ones who chose to buy homes they couldn’t afford and took out mortgages that presupposed an income level they didn’t have or could rationally have been expecting soon to attain? Shouldn’t there be consequences when people buy things they can’t afford? Or, to ask the question even more pointedly, why should citizens who do not live beyond their means, who don’t buy things they can’t pay for, who live in homes matched to their income level—why should those people bail out those of their co-citizens who made all the wrong choices? It all makes perfect sense: isn’t one of the underlying principles that guides our American culture precisely that people must clean up their own mess, that once people make errors in judgment it then should fall to those specific people to fix things as best they can?  These principles are logical. They all sound reasonable and just. But there is a certain generosity of spirit that could be brought to bear to frame things differently by asking what would happen if people, instead of the smugness born of having made the right decisions personally, brought boundless compassion to the millions upon millions of people who are in danger of losing their homes. No one should be obliged to pay anyone else’s bills. Why should they? I wish someone would pay my bills! But I am also privileged in a thousand ways and I know that too. And I find that, despite my general disinclination to clean up other people’s messes, I don’t want to live in a country in which foolish people with too-big eyes and underdeveloped understandings of how mortgages work end up living in shelters or on the street.

Whitman wrote that “this America is only you and me, / Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me, / Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, are you and me, / Its Congress is you and me, the officers, capitols, armies, ships, / are you and me,” and that’s how I see it too. In the end, we’re in this together. We have every reason to expect our co-citizens to bear the consequences of their folly and to pay the price for their greed or their naiveté, just as we have the right to demand that people who behave illegally be brought to justice and obliged to pay out their debt to society in whatever way our legal system requires of them.  But there is also the possibility of viewing our society’s problems, and the two discussed above foremost among them in this regard, from the vantage point of traditional American generosity of the spirit and endless kindness towards the downtrodden, towards the desperate, and, yes, towards the naïve and the foolish. Am I going out on a limb by suggesting that generosity be restored to its traditional primacy of place in our national hierarchy of values? I hope not! But America is not a thing, not an entity, not a concept, but only we ourselves. And that too wrote Whitman: “I match my spirit against yours you orbs, growths, mountains, brutes, / Copious as you are I absorb you all in myself, and become the master myself, / America isolated yet embodying all, what is it finally except myself? / These States, what are they except myself?”

There have been moments in my life when I’ve been overcome by the sense that the distinctions we insist on making between different cultures, nations, and ethnicities are petty and small, that we are all far more similar than we are different. I feel that way when I read the novels of Naguib Mafouz, for example, the late Nobel-Prize-winning Egyptian author whose books underscore—to me personally, at any rate—how easy it should be for Jews and Muslims to live in peace, how much cultural baggage (and how many obsessions and how much inexplicable peculiarity) we share, how comfortable I would be in the settings he describes in Cairo and Alexandria that ought to seem foreign and threatening to me, but which actually remind me more than anything of the New York of my own childhood and of Israel. (If you haven’t read Mafouz, you’re in for a huge treat. Start with the three novels collectively called the Cairo Trilogy and move on from there. And speaking of Egyptian novels, I just finished Alaa Al-Aswany’s book, The Yacoubian Building, which I recommend to all my readers. It’s funny, touching, intelligent…and it too reminded me how similar Egyptian culture and Israeli culture really are, how easy it would be for “brethren to dwell together in peace” if we only had the nerve to set politics aside and simply to look at each other clearly and directly.)  That sense of the brotherhood of humankind comes to me often when I read novels in translation, actually. As you all know, I read a lot. But whether I’m reading my way into the Japan of Haruki Murakami or Kenzaburo Oe (and in some ways especially the latter), or into Orhan Pamuk’s Turkey or Manil Suri’s India or Aravind Adiga’s…the sense I have is always the same, always how amazing it is not how different we all are, but to what degree we are all so similar.

 But then there are also moments when I realize that Jews, in addition to living in the same places as their neighbors, also view the world entirely differently than their co-citizens. (When a cockroach looks at a pineapple, does it really see the same thing I do? It’s hard to imagine that it does. Yet it’s the same piece of fruit!) This truth too has been visited upon me in many different contexts. For example, I remember once walking with a very good friend of mine, the Methodist minister who served the church down the road a piece from the synagogue in California in which I worked before I came to Shelter Rock. Somehow, the name of a member of my synagogue came up and I mentioned in passing that that person’s parents and grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz as were also all but one of his siblings, a younger sister who also survived.  He mentioned that he hadn’t ever met anyone who had experienced the murder of a close relative, let alone more than one. That sounded reasonable to me in terms of his life, but when I told him I couldn’t even begin to count the people that I’ve known or met in my life who had experienced just that—the senseless, violent murder of one or many close relatives—I could almost feel the chasm growing between us, not one of hostility or of distrust or dislike, but of unshared experience: I couldn’t imagine seeing the world through his eyes and I don’t think he could imagine seeing it through mine. When I mentioned, as we walked further, that I didn’t believe a day has passed in my life since I was a teenager in which the Shoah hadn’t insinuated itself into my thinking in one way or another, I could almost hear the chasm widening even further. We were friends. We were good friends, friends who truly liked (and still do like) each other, who got along, who always spoke openly with each other. Yet, despite the fact that we were friends in the best, not the least, sense of the word, I was struck by the degree to which we were both looking at the same pineapple and seeing entirely different things. We live in the same world. We lived in the same town. But we also lived (and live) in different universes. I used to be afraid of the ghosts, but even that has changed as I’ve grown older. I’ve gotten used to living in my world. I accept things as they are and am at peace with my own obsessions. I might as well be!

And so these are the thoughts I bring to the topic I actually wish to write about today, the question of the ever-more-likely prospect of the world having to learn to live with a nuclear Iran.

Like many of you, I read Dennis Ross’s article in the Times Wednesday with the greatest interest. A man I admire and respect, Ross seemed cautiously optimistic that the sanctions are working, that even the most conservative members of the Iranian leadership are slowly coming around to accept the need to back down, to understand that the world will not tolerate their nation’s acquisition of nuclear weaponry.  It is a very encouraging article, which (if you are reading this electronically) you can access by clicking here.  But even if you didn’t read the piece, his opinion is worth taking into account and was at least provisionally encouraging.  Even more encouraging was the follow-up piece by Scott Shane and Robert F. Worth (accessible by clicking here) in Thursday morning’s paper that suggested that the recent spate of artless and mostly unsuccessful Iranian-backed acts of terror in Thailand, India, Georgia, and Malaysia, are signs of desperation that should be taken as indications that the leadership in Iran is becoming frantic, their erratic behavior a sign not of their inveterate intransigence, but of their growing realization that they are not going to get away with bullying the world into backing down.

I myself am feeling less sanguine. But I’m also aware of the fact that I find myself unable to consider the issue other than in the context of the lead-up to the Shoah.  Does that make me insightful or obsessed, wise or paranoid? It’s hard to say. At center stage, we have a world leader who commands a large army and controls enormous amounts of money, and who also regularly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. That this would include the murder of its civilian population goes without saying. The world’s leaders, almost to a man (or woman), insist that this is just rhetoric, just bluster. The less sympathetic refer to the man as a lunatic or worse. But everybody counsels us to assume that he can’t actually mean it, that it would be too devastating to too many people (including Muslims and including the Iranians themselves) for a nuclear war to begin in the Middle East. Yet that same world that insists that he can’t possibly mean it also never tires of heaping ridicule on Neville Chamberlain for imagining that he could buy Hitler off with a few acres of Czechoslovakia, that peace could be had for the rational asking. (You may remember that Stalin also imagined he could make peace with Hitler, as a result of which 25,000,000 Soviet citizens died. If the USSR had gone to war with Germany the day after Poland was invaded, would the civilians among those 25 million souls—including millions of Jews—have survived? They surely might have!)

So, looking through my eyes, the question isn’t whether Iran should or shouldn’t be free to develop whatever kind of weapons it wishes, but whether Ahmadinejad is Hitler, whether he is ultimately crazy enough to risk the annihilation of millions of his own countrymen for the sake of murdering another six million Jews. (In this regard, I have to say the Holocaust denial conference that the man sponsored a few years ago suddenly strikes me as more chilling than weird: is he secretly hoping that someone will someday start a movement to claim that he too didn’t actually murder millions?)

The world will clearly not respond in a fully unified manner because the world mostly can live with a nuclear Iran. The papers last week, for example, featured long stories about how India is champing at the bit to pick up all those Iranian goods that the West is busy embargoing and not buying for itself, including oil. The Russians and the Chinese are, at best, half-hearted opponents of a nuclear Iran.  In the end, Iran will acquire nuclear weapons unless it is stopped by some combination of Western embargos, international pressure, and fear of the consequences of defying the world.  So the problem is not having a crystal ball. After the Jews of Israel are annihilated, of course, all will politely agree that the world should have done whatever it would have taken to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.  If Iran builds a string of nuclear reactors and then devotes itself solely to peaceful pursuits, we will all agree that going to war to prevent them from going nuclear in the first place would have been a huge error. But without the benefit of a crystal ball, all we can do is try to guess the best we can which path will lead us to the best place.

We can dither for a while, but the bottom line, at least for me, is this: if it had become clear in the mid-1930’s that the Germans were about successfully to develop nuclear weaponry, who could argue that no course of action, no matter how extreme, would not have been appropriate to prevent that from happening? It pleases me to hear President Obama say, as he has repeatedly, that no option is off the table, that no response, including a military one, has been ruled out. Senator Gillibrand said just the same thing the other week at Temple Sinai when she came to address her Jewish constituents on Long Island, and she said it unequivocally. Whether going that route would be an unimaginable disaster or the most prescient of pre-emptive strikes, who can say? Yet answering that question correctly is the great challenge facing our nation and its allies, most especially including Israel. May God grant our president and our allies’ leaders the wisdom to make the right choice.

Whatever else the world has to say about the Jewish people, they can’t say we’re not entertaining. Just this week, we had the spectacle of a formerly hasidic woman meeting with a New York Post reporter over crab cakes in some Manhattan eatery to discuss, among other things, the least savory aspects of her hasidic sex life with her hasidic former husband.  And then we woke up a day or two later to find the New York Times breathlessly reporting that an Orthodox rabbi publicly ate a chicken nugget that had been produced under his own supervision even after the caterer whose operation he was being paid to certify as kosher had been denounced by two former employees as demonstrably non-kosher.  Later that day, the news services followed up with a story about a Hasidic youngster from New Square who thought a good way to express his disapproval of his neighbors’ choice of synagogue would be to firebomb their home.  Really, “entertaining” is hardly the word!

 
All that notwithstanding, however, the real question for American Jews to consider this week has nothing to do per se with Jews or with Judaism itself, but with the place of religion—and specifically religious values—in American culture and society, and with the specific way religion should and should not be permitted to influence public policy. I am, of course, referring to the Obama administration’s decision of last month to require all health insurance providers, regardless of religious affiliation, to provide birth control to women free of charge.  At first blush, it doesn’t sound like much of an issue. The right to plan out one’s family in accordance with one’s wishes is widely considered a basic right. The right to have whatever kind of sex life one wishes without necessarily ending up producing unwanted children in the process is, if anything, even more widely considered sacrosanct. Moreover, the fact that the endless debate about abortion that has riven American culture in the almost forty years since Roe vs. Wade would become a non-issue if no woman ever became pregnant unintentionally would, you would think, make it all the more obvious that the public weal would only be served, and served well, by providing adequate and accessible birth control to people who might otherwise be unable to afford it. (That it is unimaginable that we could ever get to the point where no womanever became pregnant unintentionally is not really the point. Not all sex is consensual. And no form of birth control is 100% effective in every instance and under every circumstance. Nonetheless, it seems undeniable that more widely available birth control will lead to fewer unwanted pregnancies.)
 
Nonetheless, the fact that a large number of our healthcare providers, including hospitals, are run under Catholic auspices has made this decision into a huge bone of contention. I myself hadn’t realized to what extent our healthcare is provided by Catholic institutions, actually, but the numbers are beyond arresting. One out of every six hospital patients in the United States is hospitalized in an institution affiliated with the Catholic health care system. More to the point, those hospitals employ a staggering 765,000 people, not all of whom are Catholics but all of whom will be affected by the ultimate decision regarding what their employers must provide in terms of healthcare and what they may decline to provide.  (That number, incidentally, represents almost 14% of all hospital employees in the United States.) The nation’s fifth-largest provider of health care, Dignity Health—formerly called Catholic Healthcare West— has 44.000 employees and had $11 billion in revenue last year.
 
The Catholic Church has made its response as clear as could be: they’re going to go to the mats to resist any law that requires them to provide medical services to anyone at all that contravenes their religious beliefs, most definitely including the provision of counseling or material assistance with respect to the conventional methods of birth control to any whom its institutions serve regardless of whether they themselves, the people being served, are or are not Catholics. Nor does it matter, apparently, that the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit organization (albeit one with its own publicly-stated agenda with respect to abortion rights and birth control), has published the results of a survey according to which an amazing 98% of sexually active American Catholic women report having used some form of birth control other than the rhythm method touted by the Catholic Church as the sole acceptable method of family planning, and that two-thirds of those women report regularly doing so. (If you are reading this on-line, you can find the Guttmacher report in its entirety here.) 
 
The rhetoric has been, to say the very least, vituperative. The bishop of Pittsburgh, David A. Zubik, summarized the situation by stating, “The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To hell with you.’” Newt Gingrich, never one to mince words, referenced the administration’s decision as “war on the Catholic Church.” Other responses that I noted on-line were, if anything, even more shrill. Clearly, this issue is not going to go away. Whether the administration will cave in and abandon the policy is not clear. More likely, I suppose, is that some face-saving alternative will be put forth, one that would allow religious institutions formally not to provide services in contravention of their own policies and beliefs but which would also guarantee citizens’ access to basic healthcare services, including contraceptive services, regardless of the religious affiliation of their employers. How exactly that will work, who knows? The inclination of the Catholic hierarchy to resist compromise will possibly be affected by a poll released earlier this week, and much quoted by administration spokespeople, according to which a majority of Catholic Americans actually favor the policy and that it is really only their leadership that is implacably opposed.  Or else it won’t be. I suppose we’ll all find out soon enough what happens. Nor is the fact that this is all unfolding during a presidential campaign an unimportant detail to take into account when imagining where this will all end. As I said, we’ll all find out soon enough.

Behind all the rhetoric, however, is a set of questions that are unrelated specifically to birth control or to the Catholic church.  One of the most basic of all civil rights is the freedom to live within whatever faith one wishes. Freedom of religion is not just basic to our worldview, but is one of the foundation stones upon which American culture rests. And should rest! So the question at hand is not solely whether the administration’s policy with respect to the provision of birth control services is a good idea, but whether it is ever reasonable in a democratic state for the government to oblige citizens to act contrary to their own religious principles to serve a greater good, or whether the right to conduct oneself within the boundaries of one’s beliefs should be absolute.  For Jewish Americans, this is not an issue to pass lightly by.  We got a pass during Prohibition, but other groups (for instance, native Americans who use peyote as part of their rituals of worship) have fared less well.  On the other hand, I wrote a few weeks ago about the so-called “ministerial exception” rule that the Supreme Court just unanimously upheld as constitutional, a rule according to which, among many other things, religious institutions are free to consider themselves exempt from anti-discrimination laws if those laws can be construed somehow—even tenuously in the extreme—to contravene some religious principle or another. (The case the Supremes considered had to do with a woman who was denied the right to sue the Lutheran Church in court because church policy conveniently dictates that all employer/employee disputes must be resolved within the church and not in the secular court system. I’m still outraged by that decision and still can’t quite believe I understand it correctly.) 
 
Surely, we do not want the government obliging us to act contrary to the dictates of our faith. On the other hand, once an institution steps into the public square, accepts public money, and serves a public much, much wider than it would if it really was a church or a synagogue open only to members of the specific faith it exists to promulgate, then I think it is entirely fair to oblige such institutions to play by public rules  and not to impose its own dogma on people who themselves are not even nominally affiliated with the religion that institution espouses as its foundational culture.  In other words, if a university or a hospital is open to the public and employs people of all faiths, and if that institution accepts public money and so steps away from the cloister and into the public square, then I don’t think it is at all unreasonable to expect such institutions to play by the public rule book. Why not?  There are, after all, Jewish hospitals as well. They too employ many, many non-Jewish employees and, of course, serve many non-Jewish patients. To the extent they accept public money and function under Jewish auspices but not specifically as Jewish institutions, they too should play by the rules. To describe an effort to require public employers of citizens of all faiths to obey the rules society puts into place specifically for the benefit of those citizens as an act of war against a specific faith seems to me to be an example unreasonably inflammatory rhetoric. If anything, institutions that self-define with respect to one or another of our nation’s great religious traditions should feel themselves more, not less, obliged to treat their employees fairly and with dignity….which precludes denying them services that that same institution if it were a real church would counsel those employees if they adhered to that faith not to accept. To my way of thinking, that’s two too many if’s to serve as a sound basis for public policy.

(Source: theruminativerabbi.com)