Home » Culture (Page 37)
Category Archives: Culture
Legal Larceny
Earlier this month, voters in a CBS news poll ranked presidential candidates on, among other qualities, honesty. Joe Biden, who was then still in the race, claimed the top spot with an 85% favorable rating. Hillary Clinton scored 68% among Democrat primary voters but only 35% among voters in general.
This is nothing less than staggering. Whatever one may think about Mrs. Clinton’s qualifications to occupy the White House, her record on truthfulness screams for itself: She’s lied about Benghazi, lied about her emails, lied about ducking under sniper fire in Bosnia, lied about being broke when her husband left office, lied about her immigrant grandparents, lied about being named for Sir Edmund Hillary.
The real tragedy is that so much of the voting public is uninformed about or, even worse, indifferent to Mrs. Clinton’s utter disregard for the truth. It’s not just that she tells lies; it’s that she tells lies about things that don’t even matter, tells lies that can be easily verified, tells lies about having told lies without even a trace of embarrassment or remorse.
For whatever reasons, a huge portion of the country has made up its mind to adore Mrs. Clinton. In their eyes, she can do no wrong. Either her lies don’t matter, or else they aren’t lies, since if they were she would never have spoken them.
Whatever the explanation or excuse, the effect upon our society is chilling. For when we lose our respect for the truth, there is no way our culture can survive.
It’s worth reflecting on Harry Truman’s observation that there is nothing more dangerous than a liar in public office. Mr. Truman feared what would happen if the people believed him. But what’s even more frightening is what happens when we follow our leaders’ examples and accept dishonesty as a way of life ourselves.
As I discuss in this article from 2011, originally published in Jewish World Review.
Legal Larceny
70 million Britons can’t be wrong. Can they?
Well, since our cousins across the pond boil their meat and drink warm lager, maybe the British love affair with one-pound coins was not the best indicator that Americans would willingly part with their one-dollar bills. Given the spectacular failures of the Susan B. Anthony dollar and the Sacagawea gold coin, hindsight seems better than 20/20.
If experience were not enough, a 2008 Harris poll found that three-fourths of people questioned prefer their dollars in bill, leaving little room for doubt. According to NPR, however, dollar-coin proponents remain undeterred. When asked about the poll, Leslie Paige, who represents watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, replied, “I suspect that they just don’t understand what the up sides are.” Ms. Paige believes the government should the dollar bill from circulation, thereby forcing Americans to use the coins.
In the meantime, over a billion newly minted coins line the shelves of government reserve vaults sealed in plastic bags. At a production cost of 30 cents per coin, that’s $300 million dollars of tax money spent on very pretty gold-colored trinkets that no one may ever use, with more being added to the pile every day.
Some, however, have found a way of turning fool’s gold into the genuine article.
In an effort to popularize the coins, the United States Mint has offered to mail coin orders to buyers free of shipping charges. Enterprising “travel hackers” quickly figured out that they could buy the coins, rack up frequent-flier points on their credit cards, then deposit the coins to their bank accounts to pay off their credit card> bills. Officials began catching on when they noticed repeat orders adding up to as much as $600,000 worth of coins; they got another clue when banks reported receiving deposits of coins still in their Mint wrappers.
“We’ve used them to go on trips around the world,” Jane Liaw told NPR, saying that she and her husband are planning trips to Greece and Turkey, “all on miles and points.”
“It’s not illegal,” says Mint spokesman Tom Jurkowsky, “But it’s an abuse of the system… The system was set up to promote the use of dollar coins and we are simply trying to do the right thing here.”
NOLO CONTENDRE
Sadly, this seems to be the mantra of modern morality. If the government hasn’t legislated against it, there’s no reason not to do it. Everything that is not forbidden is permitted.
How recently have we witnessed the fallout from this mentality: the false promises of 125% home mortgages to insolvent borrowers, the loan-bundling that turned a fraction of a percent advantage into multimillion dollar profits, the obscene bonuses paid to executives with government bail-out money. None of these practices was illegal, even though they caused and perpetuated an economic tailspin from which the middle and lower classes have yet to recover.
The attraction of easy money is irresistible, it seems, no matter what the risk.
Ironically, the decline of the America work ethic coincides with many Americans working harder than ever. But appearances can be deceiving. While people do indeed put in longer hours, increasingly those hours are frittered away texting, tweeting, checking email, and playing solitaire. Indeed, even when working hard, many of us seem motivated less by a desire to do our jobs well than by the passionate longing to escape work altogether, either through exotic forms of recreation or early retirement.
I can’t help but remember the way my English professor described Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, who fearlessly charged into battle and “fought like hell for the privilege of not having to work for a living.”
I also can’t help but apply the teaching of the sages in the Talmud when they remarked, “Love work, despise lordliness, and do not become overly familiar with the government.”
The Hebrew word for “work” employed here is malachah, derived from the root meaning “walking” or “traveling forward.” To involve oneself in any pursuit that is productive, creative, or designed to benefit those with whom we share our world – this is highest calling of civilized society. This kind of work is truly the labor of love. Moreover, by dropping the feminine ending, the word malachah becomes malach, commonly translated as “angel;” when we strive to create a better world we simultaneously transform ourselves into divine emissaries of the Almighty.
ILL-GOTTEN GAINS
In contrast, the sages warn us to despise “lordliness,” the lust for power that seeks to control others and harness their efforts for personal advantage. More and more, we witness the investment of time and energy in profit without production, in clever tricks to generate income effortlessly without contributing anything to society in return, in seeking the spoils of lordliness at the expense of those who perform real work.
Finally, the sages warn us against over-familiarity with the government, since it is the nature of rulers to care for little except their own continued hold on power. Even in our democratic government, too many of our elected officials are motivated either by their own lusts and avarice or by the conviction that they know what is best for the people no matter how much evidence testifies to the contrary.
In truth, there is no greater satisfaction than that derived from an honest day’s work; neither is there any shortage of individuals desperate to avoid labor at all costs, or to exploit the labors of others to feather their own nests. And no matter how hard it tries, government will never succeed in legislating noble values or a human conscience.
Just ask Ben Schlappig, who writes a travel hacker blog. According to NPR, Schlappig brags that he has “a few million miles” and top-tier status with several airlines.
“Just last week I came back from a trip from Australia and Singapore and Malaysia all in first class, just on miles,” he says, “partly thanks to the dollar coin program.”
Finding Reason in the Midst of Chaos
After last week’s Oregon massacre and last month’s Virginia shooting, it’s worth looking back on these thoughts from the days after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing:
Zebadiah Carter describes himself living in “an era when homicide kills more people than cancer and the favorite form of suicide is to take a rifle up some tower and keep shooting until the riot squad settles it.” In 1980, this remark by the main character in a Robert Heinlein novel sounded like the science fiction that it was. Now it echoes like a prophecy.
Random acts of mass violence in the United States still horrify us but no longer shock us. We’ve heard too many stories, seen too many pictures. And too many of them are depressingly the same:
- 20 students and 6 adults murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
- 12 killed and 58 wounded at the Century Theater in Aurora, Colorado.
- 13 killed and 30 wounded at Fort Hood.
- 32 dead and 17 wounded in the Virginia Tech massacre.
And those are only the bloodiest atrocities going back to 2007. The Columbine school shooting in 1999 adds another 39 victims to the tally. And, of course, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 claimed 168 lives and injured nearly 700.
Now we have to try and make sense of this latest act of senselessness — the Boston Marathon bombings, which shattered an iconic American institution and shook our already precarious sense of order and security.
Amidst all the suffering and all the investigation, the question we most want answered is why?
We’ve asked the same question before. According to reports, Adam Lanza was bullied as a student at Sandy Hook; Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were bullied at Columbine High School; so was Timothy McVeigh as a boy in Pendleton, New York. There were also histories of psychiatric problems, as there were with Seung-Hui Cho before his attack on Virginia Tech, James Eagan Holmes before Aurora, and Nidal Malik Hasan before Fort Hood.
But these explanations offer little in the way of real answers. Almost all of us were bullied when we were younger without seeking murderous retribution against our tormentors, and most of us can lay claim to at least some kind of neurosis. More to the point, why is random violence on the rise, if the root causes have been around for generations? According to data assembled by Mother Jones Magazine, nearly 40% of mass shootings since 1982 have taken place in the last seven years (excluding robberies and gang-related incidents). If so, what has changed? And can we expect it to get worse?
Ultimately, it may be all about control. “These kids often feel powerless,” psychiatrist Peter Langman told LiveScience. “The one way they can feel like they’re somebody is to get a gun and kill people.”
“Out of control” is a term that seems increasingly characteristic of the world we live in. On the one hand, technology provides us with the power of information, opportunity, and access at a level unimaginable barely a decade ago. But on the other hand, our inability to manipulate so much power leaves us feeling both frustrated and inadequate, while the triumphs of others make us feel like pawns in a game we can never win. With the world at our fingertips, success and happiness remain damnably elusive.
And so we flail about with increasing desperation, constantly trying to push ourselves just a little harder and work just a little faster. Day by day, our sense of anger and resentment toward a society that promises so much and delivers so little builds within us until we feel ready to explode. In a world gone mad, what else can we do but get mad at the world?
The fallacy, however, is the world has not made sense since the beginning of time. Last weekend, Jews around the world paused in the midst of their Sabbath morning services to read the Book of Ecclesiastes, compiled over a lifetime by King Solomon, the wisest of all men, in his search for meaning and justice:
And I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, neither is there bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of knowledge; but time and death will overcome them all.
Really, all that has changed is our expectation. We have been taught to believe that anything we desire is within our grasp, that we are entitled to the love of poets, the wealth of kings, the pleasures and the power of the gods. Our culture has etched upon our collective consciousness the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And although Thomas Jefferson had the wisdom not to assert the right to happiness itself, that subtle distinction is lost on most of our generation.
Given the fantasy images of Pixar and Dreamworks, the superhero illusions of the silver screen, and the miracle gadgets that fit in the palm of our hands, what can we expect from a youth wholly unprepared for reaching the age of responsibility? And when they confront the seeming impossibility of leaving their mark on the world through any positive contribution, why should we be surprised when they choose violence as their final recourse to make the world take notice of their existence?
And yet, for all that, Solomon himself did not give in to despair and hopelessness, despite the words of lamentation with which he begins Ecclesiastes:
Futility of futilities — all is futile!
But it is not Solomon’s opening words that contain his ultimate message. It is the words he offers at the end, in sharp contrast to all the observations he offers before:
The sum of the matter, when all is heard: Fear the Eternal and guard His teachings, for this is the entirety of Man.
Viewed superficially, this world is a place of chaos, without rhyme or reason, without justice or pity. Says Solomon: do not look at the outer trappings of creation, but search for the nobility of man. Recognize the greatness that compels a 27 year old first grade teacher, with scarcely a moment’s notice, to give up her life in the protection of her innocent charges. Admire the reflexive heroism of bystanders who rushed to help the injured at the finish line, without regard for whether another explosion might make them victims themselves. Do not lose hope in the face of wanton violence, but take inspiration from the lofty heights to which Man can rise.
In the marathon of life, some finish and some fall. But greatness is measured by perseverance, by pursuing the unique potential that resides within each of us us, by our determination to choose good over evil and show the world that the divine spark of the human spirit will never die.
The War to End all Wars
Originally published by Jewish World Review in September, 2001, two weeks after the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Once upon a time there were three little pigs. One built a house of straw, until the big, bad wolf blew it down and gobbled him up. One built a house of sticks, until the big, bad wolf blew it down and gobbled him up. But one built a house of bricks and was safe from all the huffing and puffing of the big, bad wolf.
Society teaches values to successive generations through its children’s stories. The story of the Three Little Pigs is one of our most enduring fables, teaching the importance of good planning and disciplined effort. But it also carries with it a more subtle message, that safety rests in our own hands and our own labors, that security can be bought for the price of a pile of bricks and a bucket of mortar. This ideal, if it was ever true, went up in flames together with New York City ‘s skyline and Washington’s military nerve center on September 11.
More appropriate now than the Three Little Pigs is Robert Burns’s adage about “the best laid schemes of mice and men.” Indeed, the World Trade Center towers were each designed to absorb the impact of a 727; what the architects failed to factor in was how the fuel carried aboard a transcontinental airliner would create an inferno capable of compromising the structural strength of steel support beams. Of course, we don’t blame the architects; none of us imagined the acts of incomprehensible evil that brought down those towers.
Which is precisely the point. We cannot imagine the design and the reach of evil. We can make our best effort, erect walls of brick around ourselves and roofs of steel over our heads, but we will never be completely safe. The world is too unpredictable an arena, the mind of the wicked too dark a cavern.
As if to drive home the instability of temporal existence, observant Jews around the world will disrupt their normal lives this week by moving out of their homes into little stick houses to live as our ancestors lived in the desert after their exodus from Egypt. But more than an attempt to recreate the experience of a fledgling nation traveling toward its homeland, the holiday of Sukkos offers us an opportunity to attune our minds to a most fundamental principle of Judaism — that however great our strength and the might of our own hands, however elaborate and well conceived our plans, life strews unexpected obstacles in our path that can scuttle our most certain victories and demolish our most solid edifices.
A sukkah may be built of virtually any material: wood, brick, steel, canvas, or even string may be used to construct its walls. But no matter how stable or how precarious its walls, the roof of a sukkah must be composed of s’chach, thin strips of wood or leaves, through which the light of the stars can shine at night. And when one sits in the sukkah and looks up at the s’chach — the barest representation of a roof that won’t protect him from even the lightest rainfall — he is inspired by the recollection of his ancestors who trusted in the protection of the Almighty, the One who took them out from under the rod of their oppressors and guided them through the inimical desert before bringing them safely home.
In his visionary writings, the prophet Ezekiel describes a great battle on the eve of the messianic era, when the all forces of evil in the world combine themselves into a great army called by the name Gog and Magog. The brilliant eighteenth century thinker Rabbi Samshon Raphael Hirsch interprets the prophet’s vision not as a military battle but as an ideological war between the philosophy of gog — “roof”– and the philosophy of sukkah, where those convinced that their fate lies in the power of their own hands and their own resources will attack the values of those who recognize the limits of human endeavor to influence the world.
In the immediate wake of the World Trade Center destruction, cries rang out for vengeance and military retribution. Since then, more measured voices have asserted that this war will be like no other, without defined enemies or defined borders, without clear strategies or decisive victories. This is an unfamiliar kind of crisis, where we find our capacity to respond in our own defense or to secure our own future profoundly diminished in a new world order.
So now the citizens and leaders of the world’s last remaining superpower must grapple with the uncertainties of a violent present and a murky future. Some will respond by declaring that we must work harder to take control of our own fate. Others will concede that we will never be secure again. And they will be right: no building, no bunker, no shelter made of brick or concrete or iron will guarantee our safety from the perverse imagination of extremists who can rationalize indiscriminate mass murder.
Yet for all that, the Jew sitting in his sukkah will look up at the heavens and be at peace. He will recognize that the best laid schemes often come to naught and that, after doing all that can be done, we are best off leaving our fate in the hands of the One who placed the stars in their courses, the One from whom protection ultimately comes for those who trust not in their own strength, but in the source of all strength.
As the winds of autumn blow with the first hint of winter, we may shiver with cold but never with fear. The illusion of the roof we can see reminds of the invisible reality of the wings of the Divine presence. We neither abandon ourselves to fate nor try to seize hold of it, but turn with confidence to face the future, secure in the knowledge that we have prepared ourselves as best we can to meet whatever life holds in store for us.
Gaining Entry to the Glorious Kingdom
Aaron [the High Priest] shall place lots upon the two goats: one lot “for God” and one lot “for Azazel.” Aaron shall bring close the goat designated by lot for God and make it a sin-offering. And the goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be stood alive before God, to provide atonement though it, to send it to Azazel into the wilderness.
Leviticus 16:8-10
One of the most puzzling and disturbing rituals in Jewish practice is the goat “for Azazel.” During the afternoon of Yom Kippur, two goats are brought before the Kohein Gadol, the High Priest. By lot, one is chosen to be placed upon the altar as a sin-offering, while the other is taken out into the desert and thrown alive over the edge of a sheer cliff.
What purpose could such a practice possibly serve?
In truth, the symbolism of this ritual is astonishingly simple and frighteningly relevant. The two goats, identical in every way, symbolize the two possible futures that stretch out before every single human being. Like these goats – which appear indistinguishable from one another – many of the paths open to us in our youth seem equally attractive and filled with opportunity. Every child demonstrates both qualities of virtue and qualities of selfishness. Whether our higher or lower nature will win out in the end can never be reliably predicted.
Only over the course of a lifetime will it become evident whether the individual has chosen the path of righteousness, dedicating his life “to God,” like the goat offered up on the altar, or abandoned virtue for the path of wickedness, wandering through life into the wasteland of moral confusion and making himself into an offering “to Azazel,” a name commonly associated with the Satan but often left undefined.
Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch explains that the name Azazel can be understood as a composite of two Hebrew words: az azal – “wasted strength.”[1] Rather than devoting his life to the ways of virtue defined by God’s law, a person may use his human potential for pleasure seeking, for ego-gratification, for ultimately self-serving ends. By doing so, he squanders the resources of physical health, intelligence, and imagination in pursuit of temporal rewards that leave him, for all his efforts, with nothing of real value. He will have wasted his life, as surely as the life of the goat flung over the precipice in the wilderness comes to a wasted end. Like that goat, his life will have served no purpose except as a warning to others.
On this Day of Atonement, we remind ourselves of the urgency of daily reflection upon our past and our future, of the need to contemplate the awesome indictments of the Day of Judgment that we have only just survived, and of the priceless opportunity we have to influence the verdict of the Celestial Court as it determines our fate for the coming year.
Will we choose to offer ourselves on the altar of divine service by committing ourselves to take greater care in our speech, in our actions, and in our thoughts? Will we show more consideration for our fellow men and conduct ourselves with modesty and humility? Or will we continue on as we have, like the goat wandering blindly into the wilderness of oblivion, persisting in the habits of spiritual and moral insensitivity that may have already led us to the brink of eternal desolation?
It should be an easy choice. But the most important choices that confront us are rarely easy; instead, we grope through the darkness of confusion, blundering through the days and years of our lives.
Except for one day a year, when our eyes are opened wide.
The sages tell us that one who answers amen has greater merit than one who recites the blessing itself: no praise of the Almighty is complete until it is reaffirmed by another.[2] However, we learn elsewhere that in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, the congregation did not answer with the tradition amen but with the phrase “baruch sheim kovod malchuso l’olam vo’ed– Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever.”[3]
Rabbi Samuel Eliezer Edels (Maharsha) explains that amen is an expression of emunah, the faithfulness that compels us to remain true to God’s Law and to our spiritual mission even when the darkness of exile envelops us, even when human logic would abandon all hope that there is any rhyme or reason, that there is either Judge or justice.[4] Amen is the affirmation of our faithful belief in the existence and the divine plan of our Creator even when our senses can make little sense of our existence. When we declare amen – it is so! – not as an obligatory act but as a willing response, we testify to others and to ourselves that the hidden face of God hides from us only so that we can raise ourselves to new spiritual heights by seeking out the divine presence.
In the courtyard of the Temple, however, the radiance of the Shechina (the Divine presence) illuminated the eyes of all who stood in the holy courtyard facing the inner sanctum. Those who made the pilgrimage and passed through those gates were rewarded with a vision of such profound spiritual clarity that every shred of doubt evaporated and absolute certainty overtook them. There was no room left for emunah, and no need to cry out amen.
Instead, the ministrants would proclaim blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever, a formula reserved for the malachim — the celestial emissaries that reside in the heavenly spheres — but which we are allowed to intone only in a whisper.
And why are we not permitted to say these words out loud? Since we do not know and cannot know the name – the essence – of God’s glorious kingdom, at least not until we have lived out our lives in this world and made our transition into the next. We have no right to praise that of which we have no knowledge, and so we dare only speak of it softly in anticipation of the day when it becomes our inheritance.
But in the Temple, in the presence of the Shechina enwrapped in the light of holiness, one gained sufficient clarity so that he could cry out with the malachim, not as an expression of faith but as declaration of absolute knowledge.
And there is one other occasion when we are permitted to proclaim this formula aloud: on Yom Kippur.
On Yom Kippur, we shed the trappings of our material existence and enter the realm of the malachim. Indeed, if we have prepared ourselves properly over the Ten Days of Repentance, then we do not merely give up eating and drinking; rather, we lose all interest in physical indulgences, attaining a vision of such spiritual clarity that we might as well be in the Temple itself, or in the celestial spheres alongside God’s divine emissaries.
And when the day is over and we return to the mundane existence of the physical world, we should find ourselves transformed, no longer malachim but much more than flesh and blood. With renewed spiritual energy and awareness, we are equipped to resolve the contradictions of the higher and lower worlds, and the paradox of the Almighty’s hidden and revealed self.
And this we can accomplish a hundred times a day, with every blessing we pronounce and every amen we answer.
Maharsha goes on to explain that the Tetragrammaton — the four letter name of God as it is spelled out in Hebrew – yud-kay-vav-kay – represents the Almighty in His ultimate form, all powerful and eternal, Master of the glorious kingdom whose name is known only to the malachim. On the other hand, the spoken name of God, the name in our prayers and our blessings – Ado-noy – represents the Creator as He reveals Himself to us as Master of our world.
With every blessing that we recite, we have an opportunity to act upon the revelation we experienced on Yom Kippur, uniting the revealed and the concealed names of God, proclaiming the unity of the Master of the Universe. And even more so when we respond amen.
According to Jewish numerology, or gematria, every letter in the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical equivalent. The numerical values of God’s written name – yud-kay-vav-kay – is 26. The gematria of God’s name as we pronounce it – Ado-noy – is 65. And when we respond to another’s blessing, affirming our faithful conviction that the same God we perceive imperfectly through our limited human eyes is one with the ineffable God who created the heavens and the earth, we ourselves transcend both the simple obligations of Torah observance and the finite nature of our earthly existence with one simple word: amen – with the gematria of 91, the sum of 26 and 65, representing the absolute unity of the Almighty.
And if we can achieve this awareness, despite all the darkness and confusion of our world, the malachim can do nothing but look on and covet the opportunity all of us have to serve our Creator in the way that is uniquely our own.
[1] Commentary on Chumash, loc. cit.
[2] Berachos 53b; Rashba, Sha’alos and Teshuvos 5:53
[3] Sotah 40b
[4] Ibid.
Do we really want a leader?
The second Republican debate provided three indisputable facts:
- The mainstream press can barely disguise its bias in favor of the democrat party. Virtually every question was designed to promote inter-party bickering rather than elicit either policy positions or evidence of executive experience and aptitude. Whether in the debate itself or beyond, the press devotes disproportional attention to Donald Trump, not because he is the front-runner, nor even because he’s good for ratings, but because he discredit the Republican party in the eyes of most Americans with his ill-mannered and self-serving bluster.
- Far too high a percentage of the electorate lacks any real understanding of the responsibility implicit in the right to vote. Donald Trump has insulted a war hero, insulted women, insulted his fellow candidates, and has skirted giving meaningful responses to specific questions while telling us all to trust how great a job he will do. That he maintains such a commanding lead over so many truly qualified candidates is perhaps the most depressing aspect of the primary race so far. True, represents a reaction against political corruption and political correctness. But incivility is not the opposite of either.
- Carly Fiorina stands head and shoulders above every other candidate. She is well-informed, specific and to the point, poised and articulate, strong yet civil. She’s exactly what the country needs, and she should be leading by a mile.
When the Children of Israel approached Samuel the Prophet to ask for a king, Samuel responded with anger and rebuke. It was not the people’s request that was wrong; it was their reason.
“Give us a king,” the people said, “like all the other nations.”
The surrounding nations submitted to the rule of kings to absolve themselves of the responsibility of making choices and of the consequences of their actions. A Jewish king was supposed to inspire the people to live up to their mission as children of the Almighty. But the people wanted to take the easy way rather than challenge themselves to strive for greatness.
Ultimately, this country will only find its way back to greatness when we, the people, stop looking at the window dressing, stop looking for an entertainer-in-chief, stop looking for who will promise us the most goodies or tell us what we want to hear. We can only restore our country to greatness when we rally behind a true leader who is qualified to understand complex issues, who is willing to make difficult choices that are best for the nation, and who has the character to earn trust and respect from friends and enemies alike, at home and across the world.
Remembering 9/11: Visionaries and Ideology
Who knew a trip to New York could be so emotional?
Our first stop was the 9/11 museum. I marveled at the artistic vision that had conceived the memorial pools, the water channeling down in rivulets that mirrored the face of the fallen towers, the continuous downward rush balanced by the redemptive feeling of water — the source of life — returning to the heart of the world. Here there was solace, closure, and consolation.
But a very different feeling accosted me inside. Almost upon entering the doors a single word brandished itself across my mind’s eye: Holocaust.
Obviously there is no comparison between the monstrosity of wantonly dehumanizing genocide and any single act of terror; obviously there is no equivalence between the systematic psychological, spiritual, and physical destruction of millions and a few thousand relatively instantaneous murders.
But then again, yes there is.
Read the whole article here:
Balancing the Scales of Freedom
Originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the week after 9/11, between Rosh HaShonah and Yom Kippur.
It was Judgment Day — exactly one week after the World Trade Center buildings collapsed and so many illusions along with them.
“Judgment Day” is the expression found in the traditional liturgy for Rosh HaShonah, the first day of the Jewish new year. And as I stood in the midst of the congregation intoning the High Holiday prayers, the vision of exploding passenger planes and twin towers crumbling to dust hovered before my eyes.
On Rosh HaShonah we will be inscribed … who will live and who will die … who by water and who by fire … who by storm and who by plague … Who will have peace and who will suffer … who will be cast down and who will be exalted.
The judgment upon Jews became kinder after the United States opened her doors to us a century ago. Where no one else would have us, America took us in, allowing us to live both as Americans and as Jews without persecution.
Yet for all that, American Jews often feel torn by opposing cultural forces, especially approaching our Day of Judgment in a society where there is no greater sin than “judgmentalism.”
Without judgment, however, society cannot endure. As good citizens we must judge others – not based on race or religion but upon actions and behavior. And we must judge ourselves as well, by constantly reexamining our motives and our prejudices and our values and our goals. To condemn even this kind of judgment as a threat to freedom is to retreat from our responsibility to discern right from wrong; it is to embrace the illusion of absolute theoretical freedom – moral anarchy – which is in reality no freedom at all.
September 11 brought us face to face with moral anarchy in the form of incomprehensible evil. Perhaps the first step toward confronting it is to remind ourselves that freedom is not a right – it is a privilege, and privileges carry with them obligations that are often inconvenient and occasionally painful. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that the tree of liberty must sometimes be refreshed with the blood of patriots, he warned that the threat against freedom can only be met by not taking freedom for granted.
Freedom is not democratic, as less than a score of suicidal zealots understood when they commandeered four transcontinental airliners. The duties of freedom are non-negotiable, as New York firefighters and policemen understood when they rushed into crumbling skyscrapers. And the rules of freedom cannot always be legislated: sometimes we have to choose between necessary evils, as the passengers aboard United Airlines flight 93 understood when they drove their plane into a Pennsylvania field.
These are the kinds of judgments we must make, every day and every year, to preserve our society, all the more so in a nation built out of so many cultures and beliefs as ours. Every freedom of the individual cannot be permitted if it threatens the collective, nor can every interest of the collective be observed if it oppresses the individual. But when we share the collective will to make our society stable and secure, then the individual will set aside his personal freedoms for the national good and the nation will bend over backward to protect individual freedom.
This is the mark of a great civilization, and it rests upon an informed and devoted citizenry prepared to debate, sometimes passionately but always civilly, the moral direction of our collective journey.
This Rosh HaShonah I stood shoulder to shoulder with friends and neighbors singing ancient liturgical poems in praise of our Creator, just as so many Americans stood together the week before singing “G-d Bless America.” There were no agendas, no politics, no grudges, no rivalries. All of a sudden we were one nation, indivisible, a people with one noble history and many noble ideals whose differences vanished in the shadow of our many common values and common goals.
As the Jews have had ample opportunity to learn, now America has learned that nothing brings us together like a common enemy. What we have yet to learn is how to continue to stand together even in times of peace.
In Praise of Superficiality
As we get deeper into campaign season and the Trump phenomenon gains traction, here’s a look back on my retrospective of 2008, a year of political circus and economic implosion.
Beauty is only skin deep. Don’t judge a book by its cover. All that glitters is not gold.
These well-heeled sound-bytes of conventional wisdom warn us against granting value to appearance, form, and externality. They assert that depth and substance are the determinants of genuine value and true worth. They teach us to look behind every facade and eschew form over content.
Obviously, the people who composed these popular aphorisms were themselves unattractive, moodily self-conscious, or terminally unpopular — quite possibly all three. Yet somehow they succeeded in foisting upon Western Civilization one of the great propaganda victories of the ages, convincing the masses that physical form is quantitatively less important than such insubstantial qualities as character, aptitude, and integrity.
Astonishingly, this shameless hoax continues to shape our outlooks and attitudes even though we all know better. After all, no one would dream of visiting Washington D.C, without seeing the National Gallery, Paris without taking in the Jeu de Paume, or Croatia without experiencing the Muzej Turopolja. And what are these meccas of cultural sophistication? Art galleries — collections of paintings, sculptures, and countless testimonials to aesthetic form and external beauty. When was the last time you visited a metropolitan museum of internal organs or auto parts?
True, beauty may be only skin deep, but that’s precisely the point. Where would Julia Roberts’s career be without her skin? She may be a fine actress, and I’m sure she’s a very nice person, but her movies wouldn’t draw much of an audience if she had her skin surgically peeled away before production.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? EVERYTHING!
Modern psychology has begun to recognize the fallacy of substance over form. In his bestselling book Blink: the Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell marshals compelling evidence in support of superficiality. In one study, college students concluding their semester courses were asked to evaluate the quality of their teachers. Other students, who had not attended these classes, were shown three ten-second videos of the same teachers in action. Their evaluations matched closely those of the students who had actually attended.
The experimenter then shortened the video samples to five seconds, and then to two seconds, each time with comparable results. And this was with the sound turned off! Unfortunately, Mr. Gladwell does not pursue his train of thought to its logical conclusion. If two seconds is just as good as five seconds, ten seconds, or half a year, why do we need any seconds at all? A picture of the teacher should be enough to determine his competency or, even better, merely his name. It should be obvious that Mr. Sunshine, Professor Smiles, or Ms. Summer will create a more positive classroom experience than Mrs. Stern, Dr. Gaunt, or Miss Winter.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, observed William Shakespeare, but let’s remember that most historians now believe that those revered plays and sonnets were not actually written by William Shakespeare, the merchant who lived in Stratford-on-Avon. For all his great literary work, Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare, and no one knows who he was. Imagine if the real author stepped forward today and claimed credit for his writings. Nobody would believe him. Of course, hardly anybody would care. We’ve all moved on to reading more relevant novels about teenage vampires.
Consider the last presidential election. Almost the entire Republican Party establishment agreed that Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was the best candidate to lead the country. But he never had a chance. Can you imagine the elites of vote-laden New York, New England, and California ever voting for someone named Huckabee? If he’d been clever, the governor would have changed his name to Mike Skywalker-Sanchez, thereby establishing himself as an epic hero while attracting the critical Hispanic vote at the same time.
MIND OVER MATTERS
Consider also the recent economic collapse. Everyone was perfectly happy until someone found that all those companies enjoying soaring stock prices weren’t really making any money. As soon as the media started uttering words like downturn, recession, and pyramid scheme the entire market dove into a tailspin. Wouldn’t we all be better off if those misguided people obsessed with digging beneath the surface had simply satisfied themselves with the illusion of prosperity?
Of greater consequence is the effect of our misguided quest to bring depth, complexity, and meaning into our personal lives. Human nature as it is, how much anxiety do we cause ourselves through self-help books that teach us to look for inner peace, and through therapy that prods us to resolve neuroses of which we weren’t even conscious? How many relationships would flourish if we accepted physical attraction and physical gratification as the ideal rather than pursuing fantasies like “self-actualization” and the search for “soul-mates”?
Further evidence can be found in America’s obesity epidemic. Our subconscious minds, confused by the contradictions implicit in the rejection of two-dimensionalism, leave us with no alternative than to impose our misguided objective of becoming three-dimensional upon our physical bodies. The more we seek depth, the more three-dimensional we become — which may be good for the diet-book industry but not for our wardrobes.
So why don’t we all stop pretending? If superficiality is bliss, and if depth and meaning cause only confusion and discontent, it should be a no-brainer.
Here’s the problem. Superficially, depth is “in.” We don’t want to appear shallow because shallowness appears superficially inferior. Of course, on deeper reflection, we understand that superficial appearance is infinitely preferable to the complexity of depth, but our superficiality doesn’t allow us to admit this fact because it seems too obvious to be significant. Get it?
But today we find ourselves poised on the brink of a new era. Ours is the generation of change! Let us seize the moment and rise up as one people with one objective. Let us cast off our superficial adoration for depth and substance. Let us not be afraid to declare our commitment to all that is two-dimensional and raise up the banner of simplicity and externality. Let us purge our worldview of the pernicious urge to discover meaning in our existence, and let us join hands in our conviction that everything worth having should be available to everyone without any effort, thought, or accountability.
Well, aren’t you feeling better already?
The Virginia Shooting: Nihilism and the Culture of Anarchy
“What has happened to us as a society that we now devalue life to such a level? What has happened in our society that people have become so violent? That’s the fundamental question we need to confront… We have a societal problem in our country. It reminds us of the most important job any of us will ever have … the job of a mother, a father or a parent.”
Senator Marco Rubio summed it up nicely… or tragically. But the deeper question is this: How do we stop the cultural inertia that is driving our society ever further into nihilism and moral anarchy?
Senator Rubio gets the answer perfect: If it doesn’t start in the home, then there really is no hope for the future. Without respect for traditional values, without recovering the lost ideals of civility, selflessness, modesty, and integrity, then the tide of history will sweep us away as it did the Roman Empire and leave behind a new Age of Darkness.
Bill O’Reilly makes the same point with his usual brass-knuckled pithiness here.
Someone is Always Watching
“Someone is always watching.” Movie fans will recognize this as the punchline from “Ocean’s Eleven,” a glib repartee that ultimately recoiled on Andy Garcia and drove Julia Roberts back into the arms of George Clooney. Political observers might remember it, now that former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is back (briefly) in the news, as a line the convicted politico should have uttered when he found himself the subject of state and federal investigators.
But just the opposite was true. The AP reported:
“You would think he would see his life collapsing around him,” said Chicago defense lawyer John Beal, who was in the courtroom with Blagojevich this week and noted how carefree he seemed. “But he was the center of attention and seemed to love it.”
One almost envies Mr. Blagojevich the comfort of his delusions.
At the beginning of the last century, the invention of electric lighting,telecommunication, and cinematography began to change the complexion of modern society. At the time, the leader of European Jewry, the venerable Chofetz Chaim, observed that the introduction of technologies scarcely imagined a generation before provided a lesson for any spiritually sensitive person to recognize that the Universe is not indifferent to our moral conduct.
Previously, the natural cycle of night and day imposed strict order upon human activity. Because most people in those times could not afford the limitless supplies of candles necessary to transform night into day, all activity was cut short early by the long nights of winter, and only in summer could the workday stretch late into the evening. Now, inexpensively and with the flick of a switch, the night could be expelled and the secrets of the darkness instantly revealed.
Can you say AshleyMadison?
Yonason Goldson 