Election 2020 / A Lesson from the Days of Barry Goldwater

On October 21, 1964, Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf wrote the following in his monthly synagogue bulletin:

 In every single deviant position, Senator Goldwater has opposed not only the American consensus but also the religious commonality. No religious body in America, no serious church leader, no responsible congregation would today dream of sharing his dangerous nationalism, his economic primitivism, or his incredible appeal for good feeling rather than plain justice between the races. No Protestant, no Catholic, no Jew. Goldwater has placed himself squarely against the whole ecumenical struggle of the American churches to find a better way to live together.

…I believe that religious men and especially Jews, and most especially members of this congregation, of whatever party and whatever conviction, should take it upon themselves to name Goldwater their enemy… He will not be the last threat to our American integrity, but he is the clear and present danger, and we should fight him while we still can.

 May G-d help us to elect Lyndon Johnson president![1]

Rabbi Wolf was one of the great Jewish voices of the 20th century. Much of his career was based in Chicago, first in its northern suburbs (where this was published), then, after an interim at Yale, on the south side of city. He was a profound religious philosopher and a great teacher of halacha and the imperatives that underpin being a religious person in the modern world.

He obviously knew that congregations are not supposed to be politically partisan. The power of this writing is that he was saying: there is a limit; we are at a once-in-a-lifetime moment where our typical behavior must change.[2]

My commentary to the above, in light of where we are right now in America:

In every single deviant position. Goldwater was an extremist and nuclear warmonger. But at least in 1964 they were debating issues! Today that notion seems almost quaint. This election is not about a rational discussion about the issues that challenge our nation. It comes down to this: Does Donald Trump have any middot/virtuous character traits that you would want your child to emulate? 

No religious body in America. I presume Rabbi Wolf was overstating the situation in 1964, just as this would be an exaggeration today. Conservative religious bases are often the last refuge of right-wing extremists, especially since Reagan.

But I understand it this way. People of good faith do not have to agree on policy matters, as long as we agree to a certain common ground, namely: Human beings are endowed with a basic dignity. Hungry people should be fed. Homeless people should be housed. The oppressed should be liberated. Peace is a primary value. So is equitable distribution of justice. The individual’s pursuit of dignity and success and happiness should not be infringed upon—unless that pursuit causes harm to one’s neighbor. And every human being, being made in the image of G-d, is therefore endowed with inalienable rights.

And people of good faith—conservatives and liberals—can rationally disagree on the valid, best paths to take in order to arrive at these shared goals. It seems to me that this is the basis of how to live together respectfully in a community, or family, of people with different opinions.

I see nothing in today’s Trumpian agenda that shares those once-mutual goals. That is why Wolf’s “no religious body…” statement remains valid.

Between the races. 1964! And 2020. The Trumpian embrace of white supremacy is just one of a multitude of reasons why this regime must be vomited out.

No Protestant, no Catholic, no Jew. It was 1964, so this is what was understood to be an ecumenical/interfaith statement. Will Herberg’s famous sociological study of the American mid-20th century melting pot was called Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and surely that is what Wolf is referencing. Of course in 2020 we wouldn’t say it that way; our interfaith tent is much wider, to include many other faiths, especially Muslims (who continue to be cast as a fifth-column by right-wingers), Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Native American traditions. Our pluralistic tent is richer and broader than it was in the Sixties, to the betterment of all.

He will not be the last threat. Yup.

While we still can. The current president’s dictatorial instincts have been made clear in the past few weeks (and in truth, much much longer), and the urgency of this message is that the basic institutions of our democratic society—such as fair and free elections and peaceful transition of power—are gravely at risk.

This is a most perilous moment for everything America represents; like never before has its democracy been ready to unravel. Rabbi Wolf was prescient about the stakes in 1964, a time when it was time to say yesh g’vul, there is a limit to what we, in a free society, may accept.

May G-d help us to elect Joe Biden president!

Photo credit: Doug Mills, New York Times

[1] Congregation Solel (Highland Park, IL) Pathfinder, October 21, 1964; in Unfinished Rabbi: Selected Writings of Arnold Jacob Wolf, Ivan R. Dee: 1998, 187-188.

[2] Sometimes—with great and weighty hesitation—extreme moments call for conventional rules to be broken. In the language of halacha:  It is a time to act for the L-rd, for they have violated Your Torah (Psalm 119:126). The Rabbis read this verse backwards, violate Your Torah, because it is a time to act for the Lord;  and they interpret: Because we are facing the most extreme set of circumstances, the moment calls for extreme measures to be adopted. Rashi: “When the time comes to do something for the sake of the Holy One, and we must violate the Torah.” See the Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 69a; Berachot 63a.

A Troubling Thought on the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg זצ''ל

.תני רבן שמעון בן גמליאל אומר אין עושין נפשות לצדיקים דבריהם הן הן זכרונן
Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel taught:
We do not need to make monuments for the righteous—
their words serve as their memorial. (Talmud Yerushalmi, Shekalim 11a)

Like many of us, I’m grieved by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg זצ''ל (the memory of a righteous person is a blessing) on Erev Rosh Hashanah. She was everything people are saying about her: an icon of justice and equality, a shatterer of glass ceilings, and a role model for all Americans. And like others, I gape at the transparent hypocrisy and ethical hollowness of the GOP seeking to fill her seat six weeks before the election: We remember Merrick Garland.

For Jewish Americans in particular, her stature was enormous. Which is why the decisions around her funeral are burial are so unfortunate and saddening.

As has been widely reported, Justice Ginsberg* will receive national honors, with public viewings and opportunities for admirers to pay their respects. First her body will lie “in repose” at the U.S. Supreme Court, and subsequently it will lie “in state” in at the Capitol building. Amazingly, she will be the first woman in American history to lie in state. Second, the funeral and burial will be held after Yom Kippur—more than ten days after her death.

These national rites are intended to honor her in a manner befitting her stature, to be sure.

But these secular honors contravene Jewish tradition and values, and that’s a shame—especially for a person who carried her Judaism as proudly and confidently as Justice Ginsberg.

Two Jewish laws in particular are in play here. First, Judaism rejects “viewing” the deceased. Second, Judaism urges that a body should be buried as quickly as is feasible. Each of these traditions are rooted in two thousand years of practice.

The overarching principle for these laws is the idea of k’vod ha-met, which literally means “the honor/dignity accorded to a dead body.” In Judaism, the body is considered a holy container that once held a person’s spirit. After death, that container is washed and purified with love and respect. And it is to be lovingly returned to the earth from which it came. 

But that container is not the person who died. “Viewing” is not the Jewish way of showing honor or respect. We maintain that kavod—honor and dignity—means that people don’t view you when you have no control over your appearance. Kabbalah refers to the countenance of a dead person as a mareh litusha, or “a hammered image,” a grotesque distortion of the human being, made in the Image of G-d.

We bury quickly for the same reason: that Divine Image should be restored to the earth as promptly as is feasible. Sometimes there is a delay, when we honor a person by making appropriate arrangements for a Jewish burial, but Jewish law emphasizes that praise and honor require a quick burial (Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De’ah 357:1-2).

But here’s what troubles me the most: Those who justify these violations of Jewish tradition by saying, “Yes, but she was important.” I’ve seen that argument in print—and even from rabbis. Yet the glory and beauty of Jewish burial practices is precisely this: we are all important, and we are all equal, in death.

A short excerpt from the Talmud’s laws of burial should make this principle clear:

At first, they would uncover [for “viewing!!”] the faces of the deceased rich people, but they would cover the faces of decease poor people, because the faces of the poor were often blackened by famine. The Sages established that every cadaver’s face should be covered—for the honor of poor people.

At first, deceased rich people were carried out for burial on an elaborate bier, and deceased poor people were carried out on a plain bier. The Sages established that every cadaver should be taken out on a plain bier—for the honor of poor people. (Talmud, Mo’ed Katan 27a-b)

And most striking of all:

At first, burying the dead was more difficult for relatives than the death of a loved one itself (because of the great expense of funerals)!  It got so bad that relatives would sometimes abandon the corpse and run away. Then Rabban Gamliel came and set some of his own honor aside, and instructed that he should be buried in plain linen garments. And the people adopted this practice after him, that the dead should be buried in plain linen garments.

Rav Pappa said: And now, everyone (!!) follows the practice of burying the dead in rough, cloth garments that cost only a zuz. (Ibid.)

All the Jewish funeral symbols—pocketless shrouds; a plain pine casket; no viewing; a speedy burial—emphasize humility and the idea that we are all equal in death. They even teach us about economic justice: there is no “rich” and “poor” when it comes to facing the Angel of Death.

Surely Justice Ginsberg, whose legacy is so bound up with the principle of equality, would have appreciated these extraordinary and powerful ideals.

I fear that when rabbis say, “Yes, but we make an exception for her—she was important,” they are not only denying these ideals; they are setting a bad precedent for the future. What happens when some super-wealthy financier dies and the rabbi is told, “Look, he was important, so we’re going to have a viewing, an extravagant casket, and bury him in a $10,000 suit”? Or some big donor says, “Rabbi, you have to make an exception to Jewish custom for my mother; she was important”? It’s a dangerous precedent—precisely what Rabban Gamliel was trying to save the Jewish community from so long ago.

It is a sublime religious ideal that even in death, we can still teach our family, friends, and students, by dying according the ideals that we lived by.

I concede there are more important issues to focus on right now, like stopping Mitch McConnell’s hypocritical crusade to fill her seat before the election. But imagine how rousing it would be to Jewish people—including all those young girls whom Justice Ginsberg so inspired!—if they said, “We appreciate the state honors, but she lived and died as a Jew, and we will honor her according to Jewish values.”

Justice Ginsberg taught and inspired us in so many ways with her life. I’m saddened that she did not choose to teach and inspire us in her death.

* I’ll refer to her as Justice Ginsberg in this essay. Out of deep respect, I’ll avoid calling her “RBG”, even though I appreciate her iconic status to liberals everywhere, who affectionately say “RBG speaks for me” and humorously call her “Notorious R.B.G.” And I won’t call her “Ruth,” as if I knew her personally. While she did have a public image that made people feel affectionate towards her, there is a casual sexism in referring to her by her first name or nickname, while similar men would be afforded the respect of title and surname.

Have We Forgotten What Good News Looks Like?

Today there was good news in the world. After months of unremitting bad news, I fear we may have forgotten what good news looks like.

Watching the historic peace treaty signings today between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, I felt detached and dispassionate about the proceedings. I’m usually much more emotional when it comes to these things. I have strong memories of September 13, 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawn. I was alone in my apartment in Jersey City, NJ, with tears streaming down my cheeks as Yitzhak Rabin z”l intoned, “Oseh shalom bim’romav…”

And I still have hanging over my desk a large photo of Rabin and King Hussein lighting each other’s cigarettes on the occasion of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in October 1994. It makes me melancholy and wistful when I look at the faces of these leaders from a different era. I take these things personally.

Today: no tears, and no goosebumps. Maybe that’s because Trump and Netanyahu are a different species of leader: unvarnished opportunists with grotesque records when it comes to promoting democracy. Or maybe because the UAE and Bahrain have abysmal human rights records, and it feels a bit like making friends with the nasty kid on the playground—he’s cool as long as he picks on others, not us.

But my own sentimentality doesn’t matter. To tell the truth, I am well aware that this is, in fact, a momentous occasion.

I’ve had conversations with lefty friends in recent days who scorned this turn of events. They’ve said that Trump is a self-serving narcissist, and doesn’t care about peace, and this is all about his reelection. They point to his unabashed statement this summer, when he admitted that the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 was “for the evangelicals”—recalling Secretary of State James Baker’s “F—k the Jews, they didn’t vote for us.” They argue that Bibi, too, is an autocrat who is solely bent on self-preservation.

To all of which I say: Point taken, but so what?  It’s not exactly breaking news to say that politicians act in their own political interests.

But I fear there’s something dangerous in my friends’ opposition to these peace deals. I think that they would unequivocally support the exact same deals if they were marshaled together by an American president whom they respected. I think that some left-leaning, pro-Israel people oppose this deal because Trump himself is so noxious, and they imagine that anything that makes Trump look good—anything that he can put in his “win” column—makes his prospect for reelection go up, G-d forbid.

In other words, they say: if it’s good for Trump, we oppose it.

That’s a pretty disastrous way of thinking. It’s just like hoping that the economy will tank, because presidents tend not to be reelected in a bad economy. Or hoping that there won’t be a coronavirus vaccine until after the election. It’s a manner of thinking that says: Trump is so grotesque that I don’t care how many people suffer in the short term, as long as he is booted out decisively in November.

I, for one, hope that in the short term, bad things won’t happen: that the economy won’t completely implode; that there won’t be more slayings of innocent black people by police; that there won’t be any more school shootings; that the fires ravaging the American West will stop.  (Can you imagine someone saying, “I want the fires keep burning until after the election?” That’s just sick.)

And I can hope for all these good things while campaigning with vigor for Trump to lose. You know what they say about broken clocks… 

In that spirit, I can rejoice that finally Israel is normalizing relationships in its “neighborhood.” This is what we’ve been yearning for since at least the Six Day War, when people prematurely fantasized that, due to Israel’s victories, the Arab nations would accept the fact that Israel was a permanent part of the modern Middle East. To hold otherwise is to play right into the hands of those who believe that what is good for them is what’s good for the world—and vice-versa.

What about the Palestinians? Yes, they are going to be the losers here—because of precisely this same logic. People who say, “You shouldn’t be allowed to engage with Israel until there is progress with the Palestinians” miss the whole point. When the PA and its enablers give up the pipe dream of “from the River to the Sea”, and engage with Israel as a permanent neighbor, there will be progress. I’m not absolving Israel of its responsibilities toward the Palestinians—Israel’s policies of dissembling and humiliation have been disastrous. But, frankly, I think that the deals with the UAE and Bahrain (and others that have been whispered) show that this has nothing to do with the Palestinians. Or, if anything, that the Arab world is nearly as exhausted with Palestinian rejectionism as Israelis are.

And while these protagonists make it impossible to feel unmitigated happiness, we should be able to recognize good news when it comes our way. At the end of a year’s ceaseless flow of bad news, this is indeed good news. Kein Yirbu—may it grow and expand in the New Year ahead.