From Tel Aviv to Washington: We Need Leadership

The Bronfman fellows and their counterparts in the Israeli Bronfman program spent today in Tel Aviv. In the morning we attended a dance class from a member of the Batsheva Dance Company, then had a conversation with Israeli author Etgar Karet. From there we walked to Rothschild Boulevard, where we had been two weeks ago. It has since been covered in a tent city of thousands, who were at the heart of a 20,000+ strong demonstration yesterday. The stated purpose of the demonstrators is to advocate for more affordable housing in city centers, though the tent city is also attracting and generating more generalized rage against the machine types. (And love–there was a giant teepee at the corner of Rothschild and Sheinkin with signs saying things like “the love tent” and the like. As the saying goes, it takes a village to make a protest.)

I had Jonah with me today. (I’d like to say it was intentional, but the truth is that he was really not looking forward to camp for some reason, and so I offered to have him come along, provided he didn’t whine. It worked–more or less.) I told him that this was an historic event: tens of thousands of Israelis gathered to demonstrate for issues of civil society–not for Israeli-Palestinian issues or for a political party demonstration, but coming together to respond to a social problem. (I did have to bribe him–30 minutes of talking to the protesters in exchange for a popsicle. He bargained me up to ice cream.)

Though the tent city was instructive on a Biblical level (“Jonah, do you think this is a little like what the camp of the Israelites in the desert was like?”), it was a letdown as far as history and politics were concerned. The protesters are disorganized. They don’t have a platform. Worse, they don’t seem to have the basics down: if you’re going to protest about expensive housing prices, then you need to have a political idea of how to solve the problem. Yet, after a 20,000-strong march yesterday, the best they could muster was that one of the organizers went to the Knesset this morning and threw plastic cups at the finance committee.

They have embraced the notion that they are “apolitical.” Asked by my colleague Andy Bachman if they had read Dror Etkes’s provocative and insightful piece in Haaretz that pointed out the obscene disparity between funding for housing within Israel proper and for Judea and Samaria, the same organizer clammed up and said, “We don’t talk about that here.” Well guys, good luck.

There’s an episode of the West Wing (okay, I happened to watch it last night; it’s not like I’ve got these things memorized) where Jed Bartlett is debating his challenger for re-election. Asked to sum up his economic philosophy, the Republican says, “I believe in lower taxes, because lower taxes will stimulate growth.” At this point Bartlett responds, “That’s a great ten-word soundbite. But we don’t govern in ten-word soundbites. So let me ask you, Governor, what are the next ten words? Where would you cut taxes? What programs would you eliminate? This is a complex world that demands complex responses, which are a lot more than ten words.” Or something to that effect.

I can’t help but think, as I watch this melange of the Israeli left up-close, and as I gaze at the American right from afar, and as I look around at the Arab Spring and the Tea Party and Greek protestors, that we are seeing versions of a pattern: individuals that become masses without any ability to do the real work of organizing and making decisions in a polity. The people who could and should be leading these movements–who have sharp minds and good organizing skills–are busy as social entrepreneurs, frequently for profit. Many of the best and brightest in Israel and the U.S. would never get into politics, because it’s a cesspool. Why do they need the aggravation?

Well folks–we need you. We need good people to step up and lead. We need people who can think in paragraphs, not sentences. And we need you in the public square, not in an office building. We need you to be willing to take personal, professional and financial risks. Because if this is the best we’ve got, my kids won’t even be interested in it for an ice cream cone.

 

The U.S. Senate: An Undemocratic Institution

Hooray that the Senate voted to start debate on the health care bill. But can someone please explain to me why it is a healthy thing in a democracy that we require a 60 percent supermajority for a procedural vote? The Constitution already provides for a bicameral legislature, for checks and balances and division of powers. And in allocating an equal number of senators to every state, the Constitution reduces the representation of those of us in populous states, such that a resident of Wyoming (pop. 532,668) have over 24 times more representation than I do as a resident of Illinois (pop. 12,901,563). Isn’t that enough? Why add on the need for 60 votes in the Senate?

For the record, I made this argument back when the Republicans controlled the Senate and wanted to “go nuclear” and approve judges with a simple majority. I was of the opinion then, as I am now, that if you want to influence the political process, you need to win elections. The Democrats won the last election. They are doing the work they were sent to do. Why the will of the people should be thwarted, by the invocation of supposed safeguards beyond what the Constitution already provides, is incomprehensible to me. Unless, of course, you want to say we don’t live in a democracy. Which we evidently don’t.

 

… or get off the pot

From this a.m.’s NYT:

Roosevelt understood that governing involved choice and that choice engendered dissent. He accepted opposition as part of the process. It is time for the Obama administration to step up to the plate and make some hard choices.

Health care reform enacted by a Democratic majority is still meaningful reform. Even if it is passed without Republican support, it would still be the law of the land.

Amen.

As I believed when Obama was elected, real change is not possible given the existence of the United States Senate and its rules. The Senate is designed to be an anti-democratic institution–that’s the essence of having two senators for every state, as opposed to representation based on population, by which the House is organized. So all this talk about change, and all the talk about post-partisanship, has been and remains hooey.

A majority of the elected officials of the United States support Obama’s program. They should be able to vote in favor of that program; otherwise, what did we elect them for?

 

Who Writes Our Scripts?

I spent yesterday in downtown Chicago at a Federation-sponsored training seminar on professional-volunteer relations (morning) and e-philanthropy (afternoon). I was one of the only people there who does not have a “standard” Federation job (and I don’t technically work for Federation, either–my paycheck comes from Hillel–but since Hillel in Illinois is an agency of Federation, I was eligible to attend). So I was a bit unprepared for what set off the chain of thoughts that led to this post.

The presenting issue was a discussion in the lay-pro session on “how much you script your volunteers.” In the Federation world, and I’m sure in other volunteer organizations, the professional staff writes the scripts for big speeches by volunteer leaders. The staff in the room yesterday were talking about how they will often script even the running of meetings (not all staff do this, by any means; it depends on the federation’s culture and the people involved).

To me, this was a pretty foreign concept. I don’t staff our “grownup” board, so I’m not intimately involved in the preparation for board meetings. My experience is with students, who would chafe at the idea of being scripted–and who I wouldn’t want to script. Unless, of course, it were something really important. So, for instance, we script student callers during phonathons (“Hi, my name is ____ and I’m calling from Fiedler Hillel…”).

The basic theory here is that you script someone when you want to have complete alignment with the organization’s language. This leads to efficiency (meetings don’t go off on useless tangents) and common words and ideas (everyone is talking about the same stuff in the same language).

Okay, so that was round 1. Round 2 came from the afternoon presentation on e-philanthropy, courtesy of BlueState Digital, the people who brought you Barack Obama’s web presence last year. The conversation was about how to raise supporters and money online, as the Obama team did so well last year ($550 million). The major ideas: Invite your supporters to contribute their stories, their words, their pictures–more than just their money. And segment, segment, segment: Make sure you speak to your supporters the way they want to be spoken to. (The Obama campaign had 300 different market segments that they sent different emails to. Unbelievable.)

The message here: Communication has to be two-way, not one-way. Sound a little different than the morning session?

So all this is swimming in my head as I listen to a story on NPR this morning about a guy making a video game about the battle of Falluja.

 

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.

 

Israel Roundup

1. Gary Rosenblatt’s column on Roger Cohen.

The first 95% of the article is fantastic–balanced, fair, giving Cohen a reasonable hearing but also citing his critics and raising important questions. It’s a model of journalism. And then, somehow, Gary pivots in the last 30 seconds to this:

Cohen called his book about the Balkan war experience “Hearts Grown Brutal.”

It would seem from his writings and conversation that he believes that when it comes to the Mideast conflict, it is Israeli hearts that have hardened and that the government in Jerusalem is trying to ignore terrible things. He is welcome to his beliefs, of course, but Roger Cohen should be wary of conflating one tragedy with another.

Call it lack of balance or fairness, but to cite only one party to blame for the Israeli-Arab conflict is to deny history and reality, and to weaken one’s credibility beyond logic or truth.

Reading Cohen lately — the anger, blame and one-sidedness of his argument — one wonders whose heart, indeed, has grown brutal.

As readers of this blog well know, I have been among Roger Cohen’s critics. But I think that Gary undermines his own case with this move at the end. I don’t think that Cohen’s “heart has grown brutal,” and to make this kind of argument simply misses the point. Yes, Cohen should be more up-front about the lack of fairness in the Iranian elections (see Friedman’s piece yesterday, which compared Lebanon and Iran), but Cohen is also operating in the prophetic tradition, calling Israelis–and diaspora Jews–to take responsiblity for the things for which we should take responsibility, namely whether to attack Iran (which from what I can tell would be a strategic blunder of epic proportions) and how to use the force we have built up in a manner that befits our national aspirations.

2. Ari Shavit on Bibi and the “Seven Word Solution”

The heart of Shavit’s piece is this: “A demilitarized Palestine alongside a Jewish Israel.” Worth reading, and sums up pretty much what seems necessary.

3. I haven’t written anything about Obama’s speech last week. It was, in general, remarkable and amazing. My two bones to pick:

1) I don’t actually care about equating suffering; I think we need to get over that one. But I do care about ignoring history and making it seem as though Israel would not have happened without the Shoah, which is misleading and plays into the basest elements of Holocaust-denying anti-Semitism. Zionism happened before the Shoah for two or three generations, and the Jewish people have 3,000 years of history in Eretz Yisrael.

2) As Andre Aciman points out (his memoir is well worth the read), and as here quoted by Jeffrey Goldberg, the displacement of Jews in Arab and Muslim countries in 1948 needs to be remembered as part of the narrative.

 

Roger Cohen on Iran’s Jews

I read Roger Cohen’s columns on Iran’s Jews last week and this with interest, and fully expecting what evidently followed: A barrage of condemnation. I have liked Cohen for a long time. Like David Brooks, my other favorite NYT columnist, Cohen defies easy caricature. While one could write a Bob Herbert or Tom Friedman column with something of a Mad Lib, Cohen both espouses unconventional opinions and writes beautifully.

Yet whenever it comes to Israel (and now, by extension, Iran), many of my Jewish friends get the heebie jeebies about our fellow-MOT. Cohen argued that Iran’s Jews actually enjoy a good deal of freedom, that most of them don’t want to leave, that they were against the Israeli operation in Gaza. Yes, he admits, they face occasional trumped-up charges of conspiracy with the Zionist Entity. But, as he argues this morning in his rebuttal, this is within the context of something that is not a totalitarian state. Not a free state, but no Fourth Reich either.

I’m not ready to take sides here (I like Jeffrey Goldberg a lot too), and I am surely risking the opprobium of some of my friends and colleagues. But many of us strongly supported the election of Barack Obama, on the basis that he was smart and sophisticated, that he would not be the reductivist thinker that George Bush was. (Of course, many of my friends did so feeling that Bush had been the best friend Israel ever had. I demur.) Why do we want someone with supple thinking when it comes to health care, education, the environment, and foreign policy challenges in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, but not the Middle East? Let’s at least have a fully fleshed-out and informed coversation. Cohen has given one side. I’d like to hear the other.

 

Parshat Vaera: The Hardening and Softening of Hearts

One of the key moral dilemmas in Parshat Vaera (Ex. 6:2-9:35) is the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. Though Pharaoh hardens his own heart at first, ultimately God is the one who causes his heart to be hardened. Many commentators have dealt the this problem, namely how could God have hardened Pharaoh’s heart? How could God take away Pharaoh’s choice?

One answer perhaps comes through a teaching of the Sefat Emet about the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, which was taught to me by Rabbi Michael Balinsky. The Sefat Emet carefully reads the language of the story, and concludes that God actually took away Joseph’s free choice in that encounter, such that Joseph did not have to hesitate at the moment of temptation but rather fled the scene. Though the Sefat Emet probably goes a bit farther than me, I would argue that what he means for us is that there are moments when the choice before us is so clear that our will and that of God are aligned, there is no distance. In the case of Pharaoh, however, just the opposite is true: his heart has become so hardened that he no longer can make his own choices, and he continually chooses to do wrong.

The Hebrew phrase for the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart stems from the root K-B-D, kaved, which means heavy or weighty. In other contexts it connotes honor, because of the weightiness of ceremony or station. Avivah Zornberg, in her book Exodus: The Particulars of Rapture, writes that Pharaoh is the “king of heaviness, whose heart continually grows heavier,” and who therefore becomes ever more oppressive even as he is punished. He simply can’t stop his heart.

Contrast this with King Solomon, about whom I wrote a few months ago. As a young boy who just assumed the throne, Solomon asks for a lev shomeah, a listening heart. Solomon seeks a heart that is open, not closed; loving, not hating; listening, not shutting out the world. In this he is the polar opposite of Pharaoh.

Much has been made this week of our new president’s language about openness and listening and transparency. And I myself, in the post referenced above, have hoped that he can be something of a King Solomon. (This is not meant to imply, by the way, that the previous president should be compared to Pharaoh.) As we enter a world of manifold problems and challenges, of Gordian knots all around, the contrast between Pharaoh and Solomon reminds us that the beginning of finding wisdom and making the world better begins with opening our hearts to the voice of holiness within one another and ourselves.

Shabbat shalom.

 

Lech Lecha: Leaving and Going Home

At the heart of the story of Abraham is a particularly Jewish conundrum. On the one hand, Abraham is the paradigm of breaking from the past, as the opening lines of his story suggest: “And God said to Abram, Go, get yourself from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house, and go the land I will show you.” (Gen. 12:1) The story of Abraham, and the story of the Jewish people, could not happen without this moment of shattering individualism. Abraham leaves behind everything he knows in order to found something new.

And yet God’s promise to Abraham is that his biological descendants will inherit the land God will give him. Heaven forbid that one of Abraham’s progeny would choose to leave the fold, to go from his own promised land, his own father’s house! If the beginning of Abraham’s story is marked by a radical break with the past, his children’s story will be marked by a deep engagement, and formation by, their history. Thus the conundrum.

This paradox exists in every generation, of course. But it is particularly pronounced in the American setting. One of the central narratives of the American story is that of the rugged individual who comes from a distant land, boldly breaking with the past, often taking a new name. Yet these same immigrants also often want to perpetuate the traditions of their ancestors, they want their children to walk in their ways. And the working out of each generation’s engagement with the traditions of its forebears becomes the stuff of psychology and literature (see ‘The House of Ramon Iglesia’ being produced by the Jewish Theater Ensemble this weekend, for one example).

Of course the American story is on all our minds this week. (If you’re interested, see this letter of mine to my kids about how Election Day moved me to tears.) We can plainly see that we have broken with the past, and boldly set out on a new chapter in the story of our nation and the world. We sense that we are entering a moment in which new challenges and possibilities of identity–conversations and intersections of races, ethnicities, and religions; and, we hope, a new dynamic in the relationship of religious and secular culture–these possibilities are tantalizing and challenging, even threatening, at the same time.

It is this dynamic sense of possibility that Abraham represents. Yet we must remember that as much as Abraham sets a new course, he does so in a way that demonstrates integrity and a deep understanding of who he is. Abraham’s tent is open to all–it is symbolized today in the huppah, the Jewish marriage canopy, which has four open walls. But even when packed with hundreds of guests, there is no question that it is Abraham’s tent. Though Abraham is a man who leaves home, he is our paradigmatic host. And as my own Hillel Rabbi, Jim Ponet, taught me, one of the definitions of feeling at home is being able to invite guests. Abraham leaves one home, but he creates another.  That challenge is a human one, and Abraham’s example speaks to us all.

 

A Letter to My Children

Dear Jonah and Micah,

It is very late at night. You are both asleep, and I should probably go to sleep soon too. But tonight is an historic moment, and I want you to have a sense of what this history means.

In some ways I wish you were a few years older than you are right now, because then you could understand how deep our frustration and fear have been, and how deep our hope and yearning are now. I think most adults I know had largely given up on the idea that our leaders could inspire us. We had good reason: too many of our leaders have let us down; too few of them possessed the combination of personal integrity, oratorical grace, and poetic imagination to stir our hearts. We grimly looked forward to what we figured was a bleak future of elections between the lesser of two evils. 

But tonight Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Tonight the feeling we have is hope. Tonight a political leader asked us to sacrifice. Tonight a man brought us to tears. And boys, it’s not because he’s the first African-American to be President. It’s because he inspires us. It’s because he reminds us of what we can be. It’s because we trust him–we trust that he’s smart, that he will appoint good advisers, that he will make good decisions. It’s because we have seen just how bad leadership can be, and he seems to be the opposite of all that. 

One of my favorite stories from the Bible is that of King Solomon. When King Solomon became King of Israel, he was young and inexperienced. God came to him in a dream and told him he could have anything in the world: riches, power, you name it. Do you know what Solomon asked for? A “lev shomeah,” a listening heart. Solomon asked for the ability to listen, to listen deeply, and thereby to become wise. And because Solomon asked for something so deep, so useful, so genuine–and not something as superficial as jewels or armies–God made him the wisest man in history, and made his reign successful. 

When Barack Obama says “I will listen to you, even when we disagree,” he shows me he has the same instinct as Solomon. And it is this instinct, boys, that is so rare and so crucial. I know we talk about listening a lot. But when you are a grownup, you’ll find that listening–real, deep listening–is the most challenging and most important thing in your relationships with other people. It is at the heart of a marriage, a family, a community, a nation and a world. And the fact that tonight we elected a leader who knows how to listen brings me to tears–tears of joy. 

One of my teachers defined leadership as the art of letting people down gently. I know Obama can’t possibly live up to all of the hopes we have for him. But I pray that he and we find the capacity to make good on enough of those hopes to keep inspiring each other, to keep hoping.

By the time you are old enough to appreciate all of this, Barack Obama won’t be the President anymore. You and I will likely vote in many more elections in the future when the choice is between two people, neither of whom we feel great about. But I bless you that, at least once in your life, you experience the kind of hope and pride in America that I feel tonight. Even at this, one of our darkest hours, there is a ray of light. 

Love,

Abba