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Lessons from the Hurricane Harvey

August 28, 2017 3:02 pm / Leave a comment

Our hearts go out to the suffering people of Houston and the Gulf Coast who are beset by the violence of nature. Rather than just shake our heads in wonder, we should reflect upon our own fortunes and the illusion of security in a capricious world.

The following is adapted from an article originally published by Jewish World Review after the Pacific Rim Tsunami of 2004.

The Tsunami and the Circle-Maker

Volcanoes. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Fires. Tornadoes. Blizzards. Drought.

In a time when reports of terrorism have become all too common, it is sobering to consider the myriad ways nature can inflict death and violence on a scale surpassing the most destructive instruments devised by man. Of all these, however, water holds a unique terror in the scope and measure of its devastation.

Aside from the 300,000 lives lost across nearly a dozen countries along the Indian Ocean, millions more suffered dehydration, disease and hunger in the wake of the catastrophic tsunami. And rare though tidal waves may be, the more familiar trial-by-water of flooding leaves similar numbers homeless and in danger of starvation almost every year.

It seems ironic that water, the source and foundation of all life upon our planet, can become nature’s most malevolent instrument against the beings whose lives depend upon it.

Of course, devastation by water occupies a prominent place in human history. Virtually every ancient culture records the tradition of a great flood that inundated the world, lending credence to the biblical account of Noah and the ark. Jewish tradition describes this not as a random event, but as a divine response to the corruption of mankind.

Talmudic tradition, however, hands down a much more enigmatic account of heavenly intervention through water.

BLESSING AND CURSE

It was a time of terrible drought. The Jewish people approached the sage Choni HaMagil and beseeched him to pray for rain on their behalf. When Choni’s supplications to the Almighty went unanswered, he drew a circle in the dust and stepped inside of it, vowing not to leave the circle until God bestowed rain upon His people.

Immediately, a fine mist settled upon the earth, too little to alleviate the drought but sufficient to free Choni from his vow.

Choni called out to heaven: “I asked not for this, but for a rain to fill all the wells and cisterns.” Immediately, raindrops larger than melons began to fall, wreaking destruction upon homes and fields.

Again Choni called out to heaven: “Neither did I ask for this, but for a rain of blessing.” Immediately a normal rain began to fall, filling the wells and cisterns of the people as Choni had requested. But the rain did not stop, and soon the entire population of the land feared that they would drown in the rising waters.

One last time Choni called out heavenward: “Master of the World, Your people can tolerate neither too much blessing nor too much misfortune.” Immediately the waters abated, and the people returned to their fields. From this time onward, people referred to Choni by the name HaMagil — the Circle-maker.

What is the point of this story? What did Choni mean that the people could not tolerate too much blessing?

START-UP NATION

The history of the Jewish nation begins with the Exodus from Egypt. In commercial terms, this was the largest line of credit ever extended in the history of man. It was a loan from on high for the greatest start-up enterprise ever, a nation built on the principles of moral and spiritual refinement. With no credit-history of any kind, the Jews were given freedom from slavery, freedom from oppression, and freedom to chart their own course into the future.

Moreover, the coffers would remain open and accessible: immeasurable blessing and unbounded prosperity would continue to flow from heaven on one condition — that the people would repay their loan by living according to the dictates of ethical and moral values. By rising above material pursuits and petty self-interest, the Jewish nation would continue to receive an infusion of capital enabling them to pursue spiritual goals and ideals.

In this light, blessing may be understood as a double-edged sword. Wielded in one direction, it cuts down all obstacles that stand before us. Wielded in another, it obligates us to a standard of righteousness and refinement that we may find nearly impossible to meet.

TWO ROADS DIVERGE

This was the symbolism of the Almighty’s response to Choni the Circle-maker’s plea:

Two roads lie before this people, and it is their choice which to follow. Misuse of the abundance of this world leads back to the oppression of materialism and the slavery of self-indulgence, back to spiritual emptiness and the absence of all blessing. Aspiring toward the fulfillment of a higher purpose and discarding lesser goals, however, leads to moral greatness accompanied by the many blessings of the material world.

And this too was the meaning behind Choni’s prayer:

Master of the World, whatever potential this people may have, they still suffer from human failings and human shortcomings. They cannot tolerate too little material blessing, lest the struggle to survive overwhelms them and they abandon all higher aspirations. Nor can they tolerate too much blessing, lest they cower before the goal set for them and lose all hope of its attainment.

By all accounts, the world we live in today enjoys a level of material affluence unattained and unimagined by previous generations. Such basic necessities as rapid transit, instantaneous communication, indoor plumbing, electrical lighting and refrigeration, which we take for granted, provide us with an ease of living simply unavailable to even the wealthiest, most powerful monarchs until the last century.

Spiritual refinement demands neither abstinence from material pleasures nor the forcible redistribution of wealth from the haves to the have-nots. But it does require us to recognize the responsibilities of prosperity.

So how should we respond when the waters of the earth that are the source of our greatest blessing — life itself — rise up to inflict enormous tragedy, swallowing human life and draining billions of dollars of aid to spare human suffering? We should pause to consider whether we are using our blessings wisely, and what we must do to ensure that we will continue to deserve them.

Winning Through Consensus

August 24, 2017 1:17 pm / Leave a comment

From the moment our current president began preparing for his ascension to power, the outgoing president began showing signs of concern — if not outright anxiety — over his legacy. And he had good reason.

Whether or not one approved of Mr. Obama’s policies or performance, there is one undeniable fact: as president, he made little effort to govern by consensus.

Click here to read the whole article.

No Safety in Numbers

August 23, 2017 2:19 pm / Leave a comment

“While nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.”

In his eerily prophetic 1975 novel, The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner describes the Delphi pool, a futuristic incarnation of the Las Vegas betting boards. It works this way:

Ask large numbers of people questions to which they can’t possibly know the answers. For example: How many victims died from influenza in the epidemic of 1918?

Even though few of the subjects know anything at all about the question, their guesses will cluster around the correct answer. In the novel, the principle held true even for things that hadn’t happened yet, creating a reasonably accurate window into the future.

As it turns out, Mr. Brunner wasn’t far from reality. Although his system doesn’t hold true for actual statistics, it’s right on target when applied to human psychology.

In a recent series of experiments, marketing professor Gita Johar of Columbia University and her team discovered that people in the company of others are more likely to accept unverified reports as true than people who are by themselves.

More compelling still is that the company we are in doesn’t have to be physical to impair our natural skepticism. Even in a social media setting – connected only virtually with other people – we are more likely to accept information at face value, especially if it fits in with our preconceived notions.

Professor Johar explains this as a manifestation of herd mentality, an unconscious response to the belief that there is safety in numbers. We don’t feel the need to question or fact-check because we rely on the group for authentication, even as everyone one else in the group simultaneously relies on everyone else in the group.

Welcome to the modern Delphi pool for the dissemination of fake news. The more people who hear a report, the more likely they are to believe it. In no time at all, news becomes accepted as fact regardless of accuracy, even when it is easily verifiable as false.

With groupthink becoming the standard of our times, we not only become less able to recognize the truth – we become less interested in doing so. We condemn reports as fake news not because they are factually incorrect but because they refuse to conform to our own vision of reality. As long as we keep company with others who are similarly disinterested in the difference between true and false, we have no reason to question the status quo.

In fact, probing for the truth can be positively dangerous. One word against the party line is guaranteed to bring down upon our heads the wrath of the ignorant majority among our own allies determined to hold fast to their fabulist misconceptions.

So as accusations of lying – real and imagined – fly back and forth across the aisle, we have to ask ourselves a question: do we want to do anything about it, or have we become too comfortable with our culture of falsehood to seek resurrection of the truth?

King Solomon says, A sophomoric person believes every word, but an insightful person minds his every step.

If we want to live in reality, we have to break away from the delusions of the herd and follow the path that leads back to the real world. If we want true answers, we have to be willing to ask hard questions – and then we have to be able to face up to the truth no matter how uncomfortable or how unpopular that might make us.

Published in Jewish World Review

Video — The Ethics of Eclipse

August 22, 2017 2:27 pm / Leave a comment

Emphasizing Empathy

August 18, 2017 3:25 pm / Leave a comment

In our age of isolation, self-absorption, and ROI, we’ve forgotten that empathy is not merely an essential component of civil society but also makes good business sense.

These observations from LaRae Quy writing for SmartBrief are well worth reading:

Empathy makes you a more Effective Leader

Video: What are Ethics? Dare to Debate

August 17, 2017 1:15 pm / Leave a comment

The Problem with Ethics

August 16, 2017 11:43 am / Leave a comment

“The hate and division must stop. And must stop now.”

~President Donald Trump

Is this the best we can hope for from the president who tells it like it is? Do we need yet another uninspired chapter lamenting the “cycle of violence” added to the tedious narrative of moral equivalence?

After eight years of an administration too feckless to acknowledge radical Islam as the leading force behind global terrorism and so vapid as to dismiss the Fort Hood massacre as “workplace violence,” we have a right to expect the new regime to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis for what they are.

To his credit, the president got there… eventually. But it took him way too long. If we want to stop these kinds of incidents before they start, we need to confront them with clarity and courage.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

The sad reality is that we have to let bigots and racists hold rallies like the one last weekend in Charlottesville. And the sadder reality is that we have to encourage young idealists like Heather Heyer to put themselves on the line by speaking out against bigotry and racism, even though we know it sometimes ends in tragedy.

But passion has to be tempered with reason. Case in point: the outcry against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not immediately launching a hate-crime investigation is all heart and little head.

The very term “hate-crime” is symptomatic of the ethical confusion of our times. With left and right more polarized than ever, each side brands the other side as evil and thereby legitimizes its own hateful rhetoric.

The result is that we criminalize the motives of people we don’t like and excuse the actions of people we do. And that just leads us deeper into the quagmire of moral anarchy.

WHAT GOES AROUND…

The day after the Charlottesville attack, a drunken American tourist got it into his head to give the Nazi salute in Dresden, Germany. A scandalized local physically attacked the man, then fled before police could arrest him for assault.

Are you nodding your head in approval? That’s only natural. But ignorance, loutishness, and racism are not illegal, nor should they be. If we want to live with freedom, we have to tolerate those who wield their freedom irresponsibly, if not criminally.

And when they do cross the line into criminality, we should let the law work the way it was meant to work. It’s a sure bet that the deranged extremist who rammed his car into the Charlottesville crowd had convinced himself he was acting on the side of the angels. But he should be prosecuted as a murderer, not as a zealot.

… COMES AROUND

What sparked this ugly episode was the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a southern hero revered in his time for his honor and nobility. Should we ignore General Lee’s support of slavery because of his other virtues? Or should we discount his virtues because he fought for slavery?

No and no. People are complicated, and often contradictory. That’s why attributing motive is both tricky and risky.

It’s easy for us in our age of equality to condemn man’s oppression of man, as we should. But it’s also unjust to demand the same level of moral clarity from those who lived in different times with different values.

Indeed, when the values of future generations undergo another sea-change – as they will – who will defend us for our beliefs and actions before the indictment of our grandchildren?

IT’S NOT ALL BLACK AND WHITE

What are ethics but the slippery discipline of gleaning the spirit of the law from within the letter of the law? Even more slippery is the awareness that the morality of Man is subject to human bias and shifting cultural values. Sometimes the law is wrong; and sometimes so are we.

We dare not excuse every historical movement merely because it seemed right in its time; but neither should we condemn all those who lacked the moral clarity of our own times. 19th Century slavery and 20th Century Nazism were both evil. But they are not equivalent. And 21st Century white supremacism is much closer to the latter than to the former.

So how do we navigate these treacherous moral waters? We look to our leaders, who have the responsibility to help us set our collective moral compass as much as they have the obligation to steer the ship of state.

King Solomon says, A magic rests on the lips of the king; let his mouth not betray him in judgment.

You’ve got the helm, Mr. Trump. Be very careful what you do with it.

Published in Jewish World Review

Our Dormant Morality

August 14, 2017 1:30 pm / Leave a comment

A bridge over untroubled waters

August 9, 2017 2:37 pm / Leave a comment

After 50 years, no one believed it would ever happen. That’s why they called it the bridge that was going nowhere.

But now that’s all water under the… well, you know. The new St. Croix Crossing Bridge opened last week to great fanfare, connecting eastern Minnesota with western Wisconsin and replacing the Stillwater lift bridge that was built in 1931.

Which just goes to show that two sides are never so far apart that they can’t be brought together.

The project was first proposed way back in the 1960s, but every imaginable obstacle conspired to prevent its construction. Needless to say, funding was the first challenge. Then came the predictable squabbling among federal and local agencies. Finally, the inevitable lawsuits brought by the environmental lobby threatened to kill the plan before it could begin.

People said it would take a miracle for the bridge to get built. What they got was something even more remarkable than divine intervention.

They got cooperation.

In 2012, an unlikely alliance formed between two Minnesota congresswomen, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar and then-Republican Representative Michele Bachmann

Their task was herculean. They had to persuade, convince, and cajole U. S. representatives and senators, as well as state governors and local legislators, to sign off on the project. Incredibly, they had to get unanimous approval from all 100 U. S. senators to gain an exemption from the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Ms. Klobuchar personally prevailed upon every one of her colleagues in the senate to give their support.

The final product is more than just a river crossing. It’s a work of art, a thing of beauty. The bridge is a hybrid, a cross between box girder and cable-stayed designs, only the second like it in the country. The innovative design minimizes the number of piers in the water while keeping the tops of the towers below the tree-line. Even opponents of the bridge grudgingly conceded that their fears were unfounded.

Could there be a more fitting allegory for our troubled times than the new “miracle bridge” of St. Croix? In a time of knee-jerk partisanship, of hyperbolic rhetoric, of militant groupthink that drives all proponents of moderation to the far extremes lest they be slaughtered on the altar of ideology by their own comrades – in times like these it is the concerted effort to bridge the divide that can calm the waters below. All that’s needed is the courage set aside personal agendas and the willingness to work together for the general welfare.

Nothing puts an end to quarreling faster than a spirit of common purpose. Nothing builds trust more certainly than a shared commitment and collaboration toward a universal goal. The feeling of being united in a higher mission, combined with a sense of urgency to achieve results, raises the rewards of success above egoism and ideology.

Once we resolve to make the effort and take the first step, almost anything is possible.

King Solomon says, Like water reflects one face to another, so too the heart of one man to his fellow. By showing our adversaries that we are committed to peaceful cooperation, the chances increase dramatically that they will see themselves reflected in our sincere intentions and respond in kind.

Of course, there will always be those too petty to seek common ground. But strong, sure leadership will relegate them to the footnotes of history while inspiring others to discover greatness within themselves. With vision and determination, we can refashion the world into a place where human spirit can overcome any obstacle and truly soar toward the heavens.

Published by Jewish World Review.