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Spiritual Gridlock
With congress increasing paralyzed by gridlock and our president usurping monarchic power by executive fiat, it seems appropriate to revisit this essay from 2008, originally published by Jewish World Review and adapted in my book Proverbial Beauty.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to end traffic congestion in Manhattan. However, as sympathetic as New Yorkers may be to Mr. Bloomberg’s vision, his proposed method is most likely to produce madness.
To curb the number of vehicles entering downtown (which has grown annually by an average of 8000 per day since the 1920s, according to U. S. News and World Report), the proposed law would encourage (or coerce) commuters to rely on public transportation by imposing a daytime tax of $8 per car and $21 per truck traveling onto the island. City officials believe that this “congestion pricing” would reduce traffic by as much as 12 ½ percent.
Whether or not commuters can be persuaded to practice even occasional abstinence in their love affairs with their cars makes for interesting speculation. However, the concept itself is sound. In fact, it has been used for some time on a much larger scale, implemented throughout every borough of the world by the Mayor of the Universe.
EXPRESS LANES TO FREEDOM
The most the dramatic experiment in mass transit came over 3300 years ago when the Almighty split the Sea of Reeds, allowing the Jews to pass through and escape their Egyptian pursuers. In contrast to Cecil B. DeMille’s famous recreation, the sages teach that the sea opened up into twelve distinct passageways, one for each of the Tribes of Israel. As they passed through, the water separating the passages turned clear like glass, so that each tribe could see its fellow tribesmen traveling alongside them.
The design of this miracle teaches three lessons. First, the division of the sea into separate passageways demonstrates that there is more than one way to have a relationship with G-d. The Almighty does not want us to be automatons or clones, sheepishly following whoever is in front of us. Each individual is unique, and his divine service should be tailored to the nature of his singular soul.
Second, the water turning clear like glass reveals the lengths to which we must go to master the human ego. Had the walls of each passageway remained opaque, each tribe would have thought that it alone had discovered the correct avenue to reach the other side, and that it alone was traveling in the right direction to serve G-d. When they saw the other tribes traveling along side them, the Jews of each tribe recognized that they were not the only ones who had discerned the proper path.
The final lesson can be learned from recognizing that there were a limited number of paths. Anyone who did not follow one of the twelve passageways was, literally and figuratively, under water. Every spiritual movement does not become legitimate simply because it declares itself so, no matter how sincere its leaders or followers may be. Every self-proclaimed “holy man” is not genuine simply because he hangs out his shingle or attracts parishioners. Natural laws govern the operation of the spiritual universe just as they govern the workings of the physical world. One cannot render those rules null and void simply by wishing them out of existence or declaring them defunct, any more than congress can annul the force of gravity.
THE PRICE OF PRIDE
There is yet one more insight to be gained from the illustration of the Jews’ passage through the sea, one that is echoed by the New York mayor’s effort to cure his city’s traffic woes.
Consider the car as an allegory for personal autonomy. In a very real sense, we are all control freaks. We want to control our destiny, to chart our own heading, to have our hands on the wheel. Often the greatest demonstration of inner strength comes through humbling ourselves, giving up control and placing our fate in the hands of another. Often this is a concession we are either unwilling or unable to make.
But do we consider the cost? For car owners, the cost is rolled up in the price of the vehicle itself, of gas, insurance, repairs, parking fees, tolls and, perhaps, congestion tax. Public transportation is far cheaper and often more efficient. But still we refuse to relinquish control.
In business, the most efficient workers are those who work as part of a team, who coordinate their efforts with the efforts of others and trust their coworkers to get their own jobs done. Those who try to do everything themselves, or to micromanage others at their work, create confusion, inefficiency, and frustration.
Our relationships, marriages, and families function best when the individuals within them tend to their own responsibilities and allow others to look after theirs. Hovering, ordering, or criticizing before a spouse or child has even had a chance to complete an assigned task breeds resentment and destroys trust.
Spirituality is much the same. We like to think that we are in control of defining our own relationship with the Almighty. We strike out in whatever direction seems right to us, often without any roadmap or compass to guide us in distinguishing good from bad, right from wrong, moral from immoral. We believe that intuition alone will get us to our goal, when we have only the faintest notion of where we are trying to get.
Worst of all, there is available transportation ready to take us to our final destination in the most efficient way. By keeping G-d’s laws and following in His ways, we guarantee ourselves the smoothest possible journey through this world until we arrive at the World to Come.
THE FAST TRACK
But still many of us won’t give up control. So the Almighty levies His “taxes,” creating obstacles that make the paths of personal autonomy increasingly difficult. We feel stifled in our jobs, unhappy with our families, and discontented with the direction of our lives. So we seek out “detours,” looking for fulfillment in the least likely places: alcohol, drugs, gambling, or extramarital affairs. We think change will make us feel better, but we usually find ourselves worse off than before.
Rabbi Elyahu Dessler explains that we find ourselves in emotional or spiritual darkness at those times when we have cut ourselves off from the source of spirituality in the world. But when we “look into the darkness,” when we recognize that we have created the darkness for ourselves by distancing ourselves from the ways of the Creator, then and only then will we begin to find our way back to the light. By giving up control over our destiny, we regain mastery over our soul.
Whether taxing drivers will solve New York’s traffic problems remains a mystery. But it is in our hands to solve the mysteries of the spirit by following the well-trodden path of the generations that have gone before us. By retracing their steps, we can have confidence that we are not solely dependent upon our own devices to chart our way out of the darkness of confusion, but that we have a clearly marked path to follow toward the light of true meaning.
Terrorism Close to Home
This morning’s terrorist attack by a Palestinian who rammed his car into Israeli soldiers at a bus station struck a little closer to home. Both of the injured soldiers had just drafted into the army and were friends of my son from the same Lone Soldier group. They were released on leave a day before my son was, or he probably would have been standing right beside them.
At least one of them will be disabled for months: the Guardian reports this as “light to moderate” injury.
The story in the Guardian led by stating that the attack took place in the “occupied West Bank,” implying a John-Kerryesque legitimacy, then went on to report that the “incident raises the number of Palestinians killed since 1 October to 98, including an Israeli Arab.” In the interest of balance, the story did concede that, “More than half of them have been alleged perpetrators of stabbing, shooting and car ramming attacks aimed at Israeli civilians and security forces.”
However, the story neglected to mention that after ramming his car into the crowd, the Arab attacker was shot as he tried to stab one of his victims.
Allegedly.
Not the worst example of media bias by far, but shoddy journalism by any account. Our children who put themselves in harm’s way to protect others from violence deserve much better.
The Heroism of Giving Thanks
Originally published in 2002 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Baltimore Sun.
Will Rogers couldn’t have said it better: No nation has ever had more, yet no nation has ever had less. And it’s easy to understand why the two go together.
The Talmud observes that the moment a person acquires $100, he immediately wants $200. The more we have, the more we want. And the more we believe in our own entitlement, the more likely we are to forget both our humble origins and our obligations to others.
It’s somewhat heartening, therefore, that Thanksgiving has retained so prominent a place in American culture, even if most of us rarely give a passing thought to the Puritan ideals that gave birth to the first Thanksgiving.
Who were the Pilgrims? The settlers who stepped off the Mayflower in 1620 were not adventurers or opportunists. They were devout Protestants seeking a pure, uncorrupted expression of the Christian values they had found wanting in their native England.
They paid a high price for their idealism: Half of them died during that first, brutal, Massachusetts winter. But summer brought hope, and out of hope they declared a festival to thank their Creator for their survival and for their hard-won religious freedom.
Political freedom was still a novel idea in Europe then, although the concept had existed for nearly 3,000 years, since the Jewish exodus from Egypt. The notion of religious freedom, introduced to the world somewhat later, was already 17 centuries old when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
Back then, the Jewish nation had been at war not only with the Selucid Greeks, which controlled Israel, but also with itself. The Hellenist Jews found much in Greek culture that they admired and eagerly sought to incorporate into Jewish practice, while the majority of the Jews recognized the inherent incompatibility of Judaism, with its focus on the perfection of the soul, and Grecianism, with its self-worship of body and intellect. Behind the Hellenists, however, towered the full power of the Selucid Empire, before which the ideal of Jewish cultural purity seemed to have little hope of survival.
But the weak rose up against the strong and the many were vanquished by the few. Shouts of freedom echoed through the streets of Jerusalem as the Maccabees rekindled the lights of the Temple in purity, and the festival of Chanukah was established as “days of thanksgiving and praise to [the Almighty’s] great name.”
“This year we’re having goose instead. It was flaunting its wealth and showing off its golden eggs.”
The complacency of the Jews and their unwillingness to toil in the preservation of their own cultural values put them in danger of cultural extinction. The complacency of Christian Europe, in the eyes of the Puritans, led to a dilution and a depreciation of Christian values. And the ultimate realization of the Jews, like the realization of the Puritans centuries later, was that ideals not fought for and defended cease to remain ideals.
The true heroes in any society are those prepared to struggle for their ideals, those ready to sacrifice for a greater good, those who understand that nothing of value ever comes cheap or easy. When we take freedom for granted, we stand in danger of losing it. And the surest way of taking anything for granted is by failing to express appreciation.
Life begins with struggle. And when struggle ends, life ends with it. Indeed, it is that very struggle that makes life worth living. Both Thanksgiving and Chanukah remind us to be grateful not just for the success, but even for the struggle.
Especially for the struggle.
A Message to my Son
My oldest son enters the Israeli army this week, motivated by nothing other than a sense of commitment to the security of his people.
It seems fitting to revisit these thoughts, written on the occasion of his bar mitzvah ten years ago.
It’s not difficult to sympathize with the skeptics who questioned the ability of Avrohom Mordechai Altar, then still a teenager, to succeed his father as leader of the Gerrer Chassidim, possibly the most influential Torah community in Poland at the end of the 19th century. But the young scholar, who would grow up to become a great rabbi and author of the Imrei Emes, answered his critics with the following parable.
A small town in an isolated land rested at the foot of a great mountain, a peak so high and steep that all reasonable people considered it unconquerable. From time to time, however, some impetuous youth would set out to climb the mountain. Some of these returned admitting defeat. The rest were never heard from again.
Despite the warnings and prophesies of doom, a certain young man decided to challenge the mountain. Many times he nearly turned back, and many times he nearly met his end, but through sheer persistence he finally reached the mountain top. But he was utterly unprepared for what he found there.
A thriving city of people lived upon a great plateau at the mountain¹s summit. There were houses and farms — an entire community living where everyone believed that no one had ever set foot.
The inhabitants of the mountain top laughed at him when he expressed his astonishment. “Do you think you¹re the first one to climb the mountain?” they chided. “We also reached the top and, having done so, chose to build this town and make our lives here.”
Not yet recovered from his dismay, the young man noticed a small boy, only six or seven years old. This was more than he could believe. “Did you climb all the way up here, too?!” the young man exclaimed.
“No,” replied the boy. “I was born here.”
The youthful rabbi explained to his followers that indeed he was young. But he had been born into a dynasty of great Torah leaders, raised by and taught by the greatest sages of his generation who had in turn been taught and raised by the greatest sages of their generation. True, he was young; but he had been born on a mountain, and from his place atop the shoulders of the spiritual giants who preceded him he would build upon their greatness. In this way would he succeed as a leader of his people.
And so he did.
Every year, on the sixth day of the Jewish month of Sivan, Jews around the world celebrate the revelation at Sinai, over 3300 years ago, when the Almighty gave us the Torah. It was the Torah that provided the moral and legal foundation that has enabled the Jewish people to build a nation devoted to spiritual ideals, a nation that endured for nearly 1,500 years in its land and nearly 2,000 years scattered across the globe. It was the Torah that introduced the concepts of peace, of charity, of justice, and of collective responsibility to a world that knew no value other than “might makes right.” It was the Torah that formed the basis of Christianity and Islam, spreading monotheism throughout the world and fashioning the attitudes of modern progressivism.
It all began on that mountain called Sinai, and from that point on the Jewish people have labored to climb the mountain of morality and virtue, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, sometimes wondering whether our efforts are worthwhile, but always persevering in our mission to attain the summit of spiritual and moral perfection.
Had our mission demanded completion within a single generation, we would never have held out hope of success. But every generation climbs a little higher, building on the accomplishments of their parents and grandparents, fighting for every handhold, struggling for every foothold, occasionally slipping back but never surrendering.
The mission that defines us as a people began 33 centuries ago; it continues today as we recommit ourselves to the study and observance of Torah, and celebrate it on the holiday of Shavuos.
And it was two weeks after Shavuos that I celebrated what happens only once in a lifetime — the bar mitzvah of my eldest son. In his first 13 years of life I did my utmost to teach him that he was born on the mountain, that he has the accomplishments of generations beneath his feet to support him, and that future generations will depend upon him for their support just as he depends on those who went before.
And so it is with every Jewish child. Each has his own contribution to make in the eternal mission of our eternal people. It is the Torah that defines us, the Torah that guides us, the Torah that sustains us, and the Torah that will ultimately bring us to the fulfillment of the spiritual goals for which the Almighty created us.
Climb, my son. Climb and keep climbing toward the top of the mountain.
Originally published by Aish.com.
Diversity, Einstein, and Identity Politics
Hear my interview with Ross Kaminsky from earlier this month:
The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson
Once Iowa Democrats decided to rename the venerated event known as the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, it was only a matter of time before PC zealots would start demanding the purge of historical icons all across America. After all, how in good conscience can a country continue to commemorate its most influential leaders if they failed to anticipate that the legal and universally-accepted institutions of their times would eventually be regarded as immoral by their great-grandchildren?
Now it’s Woodrow Wilson’s turn, as students at Princeton demand that the memory of their university’s former president be expunged from under the heavens because he supported segregation, a policy viewed by many as progressive a century ago, no matter what we may think of it now.
There is a deeper irony in their campaign, however. In terms of political acumen, Woodrow Wilson has quite a bit in common with a much more contemporary figure, one who is revered by the very people who are protesting President Wilson’s racism and misogyny: Barack Obama.
Pollard and Nuremberg
The case of Jonathan Pollard was more complicated than most people understood. His actions may have placed others in danger, and may have contributed to the death of agents he compromised. But almost everyone agrees that his punishment was disproportionate to his crime, and the sense of joy upon his release is more than justified.
The real take-away is this: whether one agrees with or disagrees with what Mr. Pollard did, he followed his conscience, and he was prepared to accept the consequences of his actions. If only more of our fellow citizens and more of our political leaders demonstrated the same courage and conviction.
Of course, not everyone’s moral compass is adequately calibrated. Edward Snowden also believed that he was following his conscience, and the morality of his actions is far more questionable for his having caused more damage by far than did Jonathan Pollard.
The Nuremberg trials after WW II changed forever the interrelationship between civil and moral law. No longer would it be legitimate to claim “I was only following orders” as a defense for crimes against man. A soldier has an obligation to refuse to carry out an immoral order, even if by doing so he puts himself in danger of court martial.
We should all consider ourselves foot-soldiers in the culture wars that threaten our society. But moral obligation implies more than just following our conscience. It means investing the effort, energy, and thought necessary to understand the decisions we will have to make and their consequences. Otherwise, our claim to the moral high ground can become a smokescreen to hide our moral irresponsibility.
That’s what makes Jonathan Pollard a hero in the eyes of so many, and Edward Snowden, perhaps, something very different indeed.
The Ostrich Mentality
More unprovoked murders today in Israel: this time the victims included men in the act of prayer.
The approach taken by the Obama administration and much of European leadership, differentiating between terrorism and Islam so not to further alienate the Muslim world, might sound plausible. But the incontrovertible evidence from Paris, Beirut, and Tel Aviv is that it’s not working. Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes a case no thinking person can refute.
But, of course, that’s the point: people aren’t thinking; they’re feeling. If only the rich and powerful Western nations would humble themselves before the oppressed peoples of the third world, then there would be peace. If only the intransigent Israelis would stop their illegal occupation, then there would be peace. If only the culture of white supremacy in America would confess and atone for its evil ways, then there would be peace.
From the United Nations to the European Union to the White House to many of the elite universities around the country, Utopian ideologues bury their heads in the sand and ignore reality so they can persist in their chants of kumbaya and we are the world, reaching out to embrace people who want nothing but to watch the world burn.
In every aspect of our lives we are becoming more confused: we alienate our friends while we appease enemies who want to kill us; we disdain the blessings we have while chasing shadows in pursuit of happiness; we preach tolerance while attempting to silence all who disagree with us; we dream of a perfect world while we stand idly by and let madmen tear down the world our fathers and grandfathers worked so hard to build.
The chaos of our times didn’t start this week in Paris. It won’t end there, either, unless we open our eyes and start confronting the moral anarchy that is eating away at the heart of civilization.
Are you Smarter than a Pigeon?
In the name of science, I’d like to propose a new study to investigate how researchers choose the topics they study. If my proposal finds acceptance, Jessica Stagner of the University of Florida will almost certainly figure prominently in the investigation.
Professor Stagner and her colleagues hoped to find support for evidence indicating that gamblers feel the same thrill of excitement when they almost win as they do when they actually win. To do so, they created an experiment in which pigeons had to peck at colored markers in order to receive hidden rewards.
That’s right: Pigeons.
And what was their conclusion? Pigeons are smarter than people.
The Cost of Voyeurism
Where were you on Tuesday, August 19th, 2014? That’s the day ISIS terrorists beheaded American journalist James Foley. Or, to be more accurate, that was when they posted the video of their atrocity on YouTube
Did you watch it? If you did, you had plenty of company. According to one poll, an estimated 1.2 million people in Great Britain watched the beheading in just the first few days after the video appeared online. In the United States, pollsters found that 9% of those surveyed had watched the brutal execution, suggesting that about 30 million Americans had witnessed the spectacle by mid-November.
And back in 2004, the video of Islamists beheading freelance repairman Nick Berg was the most popular search topic for a solid week; the al-Qaeda-linked website hosting the video received so much traffic it had to temporarily shut down.
According to Oxford anthropologist Frances Larson, this fascination with violent images is nothing new.
Read more at: http://www.learning-mind.com/voyeurism-violent-images/
Yonason Goldson 