The Rewards of Good Behavior

In his usual fashion, David Brooks thoughtfully explores the bevy of screw-ups in recent weeks by politicians. He traces their inability to deal with reality in a dignified way to the loss of “the dignity code” of yesteryear. Here’s the heart of his article:

The dignity code itself has been completely obliterated. The rules that guided Washington and generations of people after him are simply gone.

We can all list the causes of its demise. First, there is capitalism. We are all encouraged to become managers of our own brand, to do self-promoting end zone dances to broadcast our own talents. Second, there is the cult of naturalism. We are all encouraged to discard artifice and repression and to instead liberate our own feelings. Third, there is charismatic evangelism with its penchant for public confession. Fourth, there is radical egalitarianism and its hostility to aristocratic manners.

The old dignity code has not survived modern life. The costs of its demise are there for all to see. Every week there are new scandals featuring people who simply do not know how to act.

At the same time as I read this article, I saw this piece from my friend Jay Michaelson in the Forward (yes, I may be the first to put Jay and Brooks in the same post). Jay writes about the distractions our minds and hearts drag us towards, chiefly doing busywork instead of work developing our own souls, and about how they manifest themselves both in the “small stuff” of our lives and the larger issues of life on the planet:

This is true on a micro and a macro level. The micro level I’ve already described: how most of us have to drag ourselves to synagogue or yoga class or the gym or whatever works for our personal development, even though afterward we’re so grateful that we did. In fact, just this lesson — not to trust the heart and not to believe the mind — is, itself, “worth the price of admission,” so to speak. I suspect we wouldn’t have quite so much bigotry, antisemitism and cruelty if we all second-guessed our gut reactions a bit more.

It’s true on a macro level, as well. Many of us, if we are basically happy and healthy, are often fine just the way we are. Like our obliviously content ex-president, we don’t see the effects of our spiritual atrophy. We don’t know what we’re missing: how much more compassionate, loving or just we could be, and how much energy we’re needlessly dissipating on the maintenance of the ego and the fulfillment of its demands. And this ignorance has consequences.

Some consequences are social or, perhaps, political. For example, the great achievement of mainstream America has been to hide the costs of its profligacy. We love Wal-Mart because we don’t see the sweatshops. We love SUVs because we don’t see their effects on penguins and polar bears. And until recently, those of us who were well off financially could easily ignore those who were not. Yes, the Torah, and our secular values, call us to responsibility (Exodus 23:9, Deuteronomy 15:7), but my experience is that without some inner work to actually open the heart (Deuteronomy 30:6), such calls fall on deaf ears.

The message I hear resonating between both these pieces is that living well–living right–requires discipline. It requires habits. And if we don’t consciously create the habits we want to have, chances are we’ll wind up having bad habits, the consequences of which extend profoundly beyond the confines of our supposedly private little worlds. Whether you get it from the Bible or from Kant, the lesson is the same: Everything we do matters.

 

Kosher Wars

A great article about the ridiculous politics involved in the fact that Orthodox Jews don’t eat Hebrew National hot dogs even though they’re kosher.

Of course, if like me you have questions about whether industrialized slaughter can ever achieve the ethical aspirations of meta-kashrut, then it really doesn’t make much of a difference. But it is a sad story nonetheless.

 

Pinchas 5769: Finding Home in the Sacrifices

One of the major sections of the Torah portion of Pinchas comes in Num. chapters 28-29, which details the laws of the daily sacrifice offered in the ancient Temple, as well as the special additional sacrifices offered on each of the holidays. Like other sections of the Torah that detail sacrificial laws, this one can appear to be boring at first blush. We don’t offer sacrifices anymore (and we might be uncomfortable with the idea of doing so), and we may feel we already know the calendar. So what’s to gain by paying attention?

In the words of the literary critic Denis Donoghue, “Interpretation begins when someone decides to pay attention to a text.” (The Practice of Reading, p. 80) There is meaning here, provided we do in fact pay attention.

With the help of the good people at the Tanach Study Center (www.tanach.org) we can summarize the holiday sacrifices with the following table:

As Rabbi Menachem Leibtag points out, three general groupings emerge from this chart. In the first group we have Rosh Chodesh, the New Moon festival, along with the Festival of Matzot (Passover), and Shavuot. All of these have the 2-1-7-1 pattern, and they are all thematically linked to the Exodus from Egypt: Passover for obvious reasons, Shavuot by its link to Passover through the counting of the Omer, and Rosh Chodesh from Exodus 12:1–the commandment to establish Rosh Chodesh was the first command of the Exodus story.

In the second group are the Tishrei holidays, with the 1-1-7-1 pattern: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, along with Shemini Atzeret. All three of these can be classified as judgment holidays: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur for obvious reasons, and Shemini Atzeret as the time when the land of Israel is judged for the amount of water it will have in the coming year.

Sukkot is the last group, and has the most variety in its numbers. Rabbi Leibtag suggests that Sukkot is a combination of the other two groups, since it both occurs in Tishrei and commemorates the Exodus. This is symbolized in the way that the rams and sheep are added together to yield double the number on Sukkot (2 and 14, respectively, instead of 1 and 7).

When we turn to the cows offered on Sukkot, the same addition process would yield 3 daily cows to be sacrificed. Yet the number of cows starts at 13 and goes down to 7. If we add up the number of extra cows offered (13-3, 12-3, 11-3, etc.) we get 49 extra cows–a significant number corresponding to the number of days in the Omer and the number of years in the Jubilee cycle, and generally understood to connote ultimate completion. Likewise, the total number of cows sacrificed is 70, which the Rabbis understood as a symbol for the “70 nations of the earth.”

Sukkot marks the coming-together of two themes of the Jewish holiday cycle: the embracing nature of the Exodus story, which emphasizes God’s taking us out of one place and setting us on the journey toward a new home; and the challenging nature of the days of judgment, which emphasize teshuva, returning home from our journeys with a renewed sense of completion. Sukkot is the ultimate holiday of homecoming, when we reconnect with our original journey towards home and assimilate the journeys we have experienced into our consciousness.

Shabbat shalom.

 

Most Riveting Column on Madoff

So far this piece by Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is the most gripping piece I’ve read on the Madoff fallout. Cohen and the Madoffs went to high school together. Here’s the final graf:

The 50th reunion of the Class of ‘58 was held about a month before Bernie’s scheme collapsed. He and Ruth came, and although I was oblivious to them — distracted by others, I guess — I am told they were hugged and warmly welcomed. But after that, not a big deal was made of them. Then the news broke and e-mails whizzed back and forth. Prodded by a newspaper reporter, I exhumed the yearbook and was stunned to discover the inscription. It turned out I knew Ruth. It turned out she never knew Bernie.

 

Korach 5769: The Nuances of Questions

At the conclusion of the story of Korach’s rebellion, we find this commandment:

³⁶ The LORD said to Moses, ³⁷ “Tell Eleazar son of Aaron, the priest, to take the censers out of the smoldering remains and scatter the coals some distance away, for the censers are holy- ³⁸ the censers of the men who sinned at the cost of their lives. Hammer the censers into sheets to overlay the altar, for they were presented before the LORD and have become holy. Let them be a sign to the Israelites.”

³⁹ So Eleazar the priest collected the bronze censers brought by those who had been burned up, and he had them hammered out to overlay the altar, ⁴⁰ as the LORD directed him through Moses. This was to remind the Israelites that no one except a descendant of Aaron should come to burn incense before the LORD, or he would become like Korah and his followers.

This is a fascinating denouement to a riveting story, raising a host of interesting questions: Why does God refer to the censers as holy? Why are they made into an overlay for the altar? Why is an object of the tabernacle allowed–demanded–to be changed?

Ramban offers an answer to the first question. Weren’t these censers used for nefarious purposes? Shouldn’t they be unholy for that reason? Ramban argues that they were in fact holy because they were used by Moses to demonstrate God’s supremacy. By answering Korach’s claims and asserting the rightful place of Moses and Aaron and their descendents, the censers became holy.

The Torah itself responds to the second question: The overlay for the altar is to remind the Israelites of what happened to Korach and his followers, and that they should therefore follow the established rules. This is the final line of the story, and forms one of its basic enduring messages.

The classical commentators do not comment on the third question, why is this object commanded to be changed? But an answer might come from a teaching of the Sefas Emes that I taught earlier this year. The teaching took up the question of why the altar in the Tabernacle was of different proportions than that in Solomon’s Temple. While some commentators attempt to harmonize the sources, the Sefas Emes instead highlights the difference, and uses the difference to argue that every generation experiences God in its own way; the way that Solomon experienced and related to God fit his time and place, just as Moses’s relation with God fit his era.

This is of course a potential source of instablility, particularly in the context of the Korach story, where the very roots of authority are at stake. Yet the Rabbis treated Korach and his group with ambivalence–while the dominant opinion was that they had no place in the world to come, the Tosefta records the opinion of Rabbi Yehudah ben Betera that says that they do. The midrash is likewise ambivalent, all of which leads to the thought that perhaps the story of Korach is grounded in greater subtlety than polemics. Perhaps its message is one not simply of cutting off, but simultaneously of the complexities inherent in a close relationship with the holy.

If that is the case, then we can read the story of Korach as telling us not that we should avoid asking certain questions, but that the context of those questions matters. There is a political reality to our question-asking, there are times and places for things. Knowing the right time and place, understanding the context, is as important as the question itself.

 

Shlach: Seeing Goodness

My Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Dov Linzer, offered this dvar Torah, which I think is particularly fitting for this week, which marks graduation at Northwestern.

In his instructions to the spies, Moses includes a potentially problematic phrase. In addition to the general strategic evaluation of the land, Moses asks them to make an evaluative judgment, namely to see “whether the land that they dwell in is good or bad.” (Num. 13:19) The medieval commentators generally explain this as part of the military evaluation. But, Rabbi Linzer argues, it in fact paves the way for the central difference between Caleb and Joshua and the rest of the spies. While the despondent spies emphasize only the strategic challenges, Caleb and Joshua included in their report the very words of goodness that Moses sought: “The land, which we passed through to spy it out, is an exceeding good land.” (Num. 14:7)

I find this observation an approrpriate one for Commencement because the story here is essentially about how we approach knowledge. It is no stretch to say that the spies become a paradigm for our engagement with the world–they interact with new phenomena and make judgments about them. The larger group of spies is unable to see the goodness in the land, or, by extrapolation, in the world. Perhaps more accurately, goodness for them would only come after the empirical facts are dealt with, if it ever comes at all; a moral orientation comes second, not first. Caleb and Joshua, however, approach their discovery with a sense that goodness is there, not in a way that blinds them to the facts, but in a way that sustains their covenantal relationship between the land and the people of Israel.

The Torah is thus instructive about our search for knowledge, which is life itself. In order for life to be meaningful, in order for us to avoid the pitfalls of the relativistic void in which there is no truth except the one each person makes up for him or herself, we have to engage the world with the notion that goodness is possible, that truth is there to be found if only we will look for it.

 

Sam Freedman & Jeffrey Goldberg on Settlements

Samuel Freedman’s piece in the Jerusalem Post is important to read. The main nugget:

Obama… is seeking American Jewish cover for his very public dispute with the Israeli government. The one way in which he can get it is if American Jews, like their Israeli brethren, decide to make the settlement enterprise their defining issue. Counting on that internal argument is a big gamble…

But, Freedman continues,

You can feel the ground shifting. Yes, it’s predictable that J Street, the well-funded left-wing lobby, would back Obama on the settlement issue. What strikes me as far more revealing is that Ed Koch and Jeffrey Goldberg, a politician and journalist respectively who are centrist or even center-right on the American Jewish spectrum, have become so publicly critical of the settlement movement as an obstacle to peace.

Goldberg glosses on this, with this money paragraph:

Malcolm Hoenlein and the other grandees of the organized American Jewish leadership believe that masses of Jews will rise up against Obama if he forces Israel out of its settlements. They won’t. I believe the majority of American Jews want two things: A secure Israel, and a moral Israel that is a light unto the nations. Settlements make Israel insecure, and they make it seem immoral in the eyes of the world.

There’s a storm a-brewin, and we will likely see a big denominational divide if Freedman and Goldberg are right, with the Orthodox supporting the settlers and the non-Orthodox supporting Obama. Those of us who straddle the lines between these worlds will need to stand in the breach.

 

Reflections on Violence

Michael Oren, soon to be Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., is first and foremost an historian. But his academic and diplomatic/political lives come together in this short piece in the current New Republic on the erection of a memorial to World War I deserters at Ypres on the French-Belgian border. Yes, with the last of the WWI vets dying off, the Europeans are putting up a pole to honor those who refused to fight at all.

Oren goes through the logic and the absurdity of this. If World War I was an insane war, then the sane thing to do was not to fight. And most people came to view the war as just that, so deserters look good. As Oren points out,

In contrast to the United States, fortunate to have fought most of its wars overseas, Europe was host to two twentieth-century apocalypses that left it depopulated and permanently traumatized. Torn between ravaging communist and fascist tides, many on the continent came to see war as an inherently no-win, illegitimate endeavor. Consequently, desertion could be conceived as logical, even honorable–and not only from the killing fields of Ypres.

But this has now gone further, as evidenced in a number of European actions that seem to indicate that virtually all military acts are problematic (Oren lists failed peacekeeping on the Israel-Lebanon and Israel-Gaza borders, and failure to fight the Taliban, as evidence, as well has Germany’s harboring of an American deserter from Afghanistan.) While American and European histories diverge over the violence known on our own shores, these ideas have a way of migrating. Oren closes his piece with the question: “It sounds far-fetched, but it is impossible not to wonder: Will visitors to Valley Forge someday see a single pole?”

Some additional reverberations: The current confrontation in Iran, and in my little blogging universe, the conversation around Roger Cohen. Cohen issued a small mea culpa in light of this week’s events: “I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.” (Full article here.) Iran does indeed practice violence, and that was on display for all to see on Sunday. Cohen, the most European of the NYT columnists, seems to have been awoken from a daydream, perhaps because of some deeply ingrained aversion to any form of violence. Iran may as well be Israel now.

Okay, that was a cheap shot. But it brings us to reverberation no. 2, which is Israel. It’s hard to imagine the Israeli police responding to a democractic protest the way the Iranians have. Cohen would have to grant that. Israel does exercise violence, but its record against its own citizens is pretty darn clean. And, as I have often argued before, if a mass Palestinian non-violence movement arose, it would bring statehood quicker than all the armed intifadas in the world. Why? Because no one could argue with it. As a non-violent movement, it would take away any of the moral ambiguity that comes with violence, and that leads ultimately to societies erecting memorials to those who fled military service.

Final reverberation: I think that Oren is on to something important here. As Americans become more aware of human suffering, through the Internet and through travel to the developing world, I imagine we will take on some of the European sensibility towards violence. I see this phenomenon all the time among the college students I work with. Violence is problematic for them. But violence is also linked to forms of particular identity, because so many wars have been fought in the name of maintaining religious or ethnic or national purity. “Let’s all be humanists” is the motto of many today, and would seem to be the European slogan too. Our challenge is to develop a language for talking about difference that does not lead to violence. (On this score, Jonathan Sacks’s The Dignity of Difference is the best book out there.)

 

A Demilitarized Palestinian State

I haven’ t had time to go through all of Bibi’s speech. But read between the lines of this response from Saeb Erekat:

Erekat said Netanyahu’s plan was unacceptable since it effectively imposes a solution on the core issues of the conflict.

”Netanyahu’s speech closed the door to permanent status negotiations,” he said. ”We ask the world not to be fooled by his use of the term Palestinian state because he qualified it. He declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, said refugees would not be negotiated and that settlements would remain.”

Note: He rejects Bibi’s rejection of dividing Jerusalem, Palestinian right of return, and settlements. But what did Erekat not say (at least in this comment)? He didn’t reject the idea of a demilitarized state. Of all of the things Bibi talked about, to me that is by far the biggest one, at least in the realm of the non-apocalyptic. (The apocalyptic realm, in my view, still includes the very real bloodbath that seems inevitable when Israel either tries to evict Jews from the West Bank or gives them over to the state of Palestine. I have no idea how to work that one out.) Jerusalem, right of return, and major blocs can be worked out through land swaps. If the Palestinians are willing to accept a demilitarized state, Israel should go for it.

 

Iran: You Heard It Here First

In the you-heard-it-here-first department, this from The New Republic:

Who knows where this is leading. But how ironic it would be if an attempted demonstration of phantom support for Ahmadinejad wound up severely undermining the country’s clerical regime.