One of the great blessings of my retirement is that I am under no pressure to think aloud in front of a congregation about complex issues facing us as a Jewish community. That filter is missing as I do what everyone (I hope) does – think for myself without worrying about the two potential losses that enter every rabbi’s calculus: members and job.
That’s especially true when it comes to Israeli politics. What was a non-issue in my youth and became a controversy in my adulthood (and then a minefield) is now a third rail. Almost every day, someone asks me to sign onto a letter of critique or concern. Gatherings of protest happen each week. Israeli friends, many of whom emigrated from the US, find themselves allied with people so far to the right or to the left of them that it is hard for me to believe. A friend on the cusp of his rabbinate asked me what I would say if I were in a pulpit today. I first expressed relief that I am not. And then I put down some thoughts that had rolled around in my head but were not committed yet to print. A dear friend is a Presbyterian minister. We have led two interfaith trips to Israel. The first time, we filled a bus. Last time, we filled two buses. Our upcoming trip already has 65 people registered and the trip leaves in February 2024. The Presbyterian denomination as an entity has been lukewarm (if I am being generous) about Israel, though my friend is much more centrist. Many of the folks who have traveled with us have been very critical and have looked to us to offer some wide perspectives on Israel and Palestine, and we have done it. As the Jewish leader, I take very seriously my responsibility to show these folks the miracle that is modern Israel, not only the holy sites and certainly not predominantly the points of conflict. It is what I have done for 40 years of my rabbinate. I can also say that, when called upon, I have done my service to the government of Israel as best I can. The Israeli Embassy is, of course, in Washington, DC. In a different time (when I was active as a rabbi), I responded to the request of the ambassador at the time to reach into the White House through my personal contacts and to gather groups of colleagues when he needed to speak with them. I was not an advocate; that was the ambassador’s role. But I found him ears, even when my opinion may have been different from his. I have also been close with other embassy personnel, and I am gratified to have been of support to both Israeli and American embassy staff in the performance of their duties (as I have been to government leaders in the United States). So, I consider myself credentialed. And even if there were people who considered me to be anti-Israel (and there were), I can comfortably say (and did) that I did more to promote White House attention to Israel and particularly Iran than they did by their sloganeering and racist inferences about President Obama. But what I have noticed over all of these years is that what is expected of me as an American rabbi is pushed steadily to the right in order to be considered supportive and centrist. In fact, not just to the right, but to the bigoted. I believe that human rights apply to all human beings, including the right to self-determination, but the "Palestinian exception" has become an unapologetic standard for anyone to call themselves pro-Israel. I believe that the support of the American Jewish community is essential to maintaining the full allyship of the US government, but the disenfranchisement of non-orthodox/non-secular Jews (see, for example, access to worship at the Western Wall) has been an acceptable platform in governments we have been instructed to support out of loyalty to the national endeavor. I believe that the beliefs of Christian Zionists are dangerous to Israel and to the First Amendment, but I have been expected to embrace the John Hagees and Mike Huckabees of the world because at least one ambassador speaking for his Prime Minister considered them more reliable allies than liberal Jews. Every time we push back on these dangerous and unrelenting right-wing values, the demarcation of the "center" shifts a little to the right. Positions considered reasonable for discourse in the past are considered dangerous by the members of the current government. Suggesting them puts us on an unofficial enemies list. And the worst of it is we are being dragged voluntarily, not just because the right has mastered the language of subtle accusation that we are enabling another catastrophe for the Jewish people, but because we are asked to consider what we are willing to do to ensure the thriving, even the survival, of the State of Israel. Those of us not as committed to the far left as typifies the partisans of the far right actually contend with breaking hearts when we ask ourselves if our faith in Jewish values as we understand them is more compelling than our faith in the political future of an independent Jewish state as it is presented. My powerful resentment is against those in the Israeli government who exploit this tension rather than acknowledging its hold on us. Former Ambassador Michael Oren said to me that there are only two nations in the history of the world that have had uninterrupted democracies throughout their entire histories -- the United States and the State of Israel. Both are endangered, and I won't give up on democracy any sooner than I will give up on the two nations that are my home. I make that representation independent of the noxious proposals that are roiling Israeli society. My concerns are not new. Today, they are only more pronounced.
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The week ahead includes Yom Kippur. Jews have a single task on this day: to repent. In the service of that mandate, we spend the day in prayer, we deny ourselves pleasures from food to sex to fashion, and we confess endlessly a roster of transgressions. That list of sins is meant to be comprehensive (at least when it was composed hundreds of years ago), but it also serves the purpose of deflecting personal shortcomings that get obscured by all those things we did not do specifically. (I am certain I did not engage in “forbidden trysts” or loan money at “oppressive interest.”) True, I can connect the dots to every wrong in society from my lack of attention or blissful ignorance, but Yom Kippur is less about our economic system and political dysfunction than it is about getting myself right with God and those around me. We have a year less a very few days to work on the world and its troubles. Yom Kippur is about proximate repentance. My most pressing sin is impatience. Things are changing around me in ways that challenge the very comfortable life I have aged into. Things I find funny are considered inappropriate. Compliments I believe to be laudatory are considered predatory. And figuring out the intersection of preferred pronouns and my attention to grammar prompts me mostly to keep my mouth shut – to the relief of many, I am sure. The internal frustration of these and other matters leads me to an internal landscape that is pocked with judgmental attitudes and quietly (mostly) smoldering resentment. The first step to penitence is recognizing the wrongdoing. But immersing myself in my own improvement does not and should not absolve me from the collective effort of atoning with and for a transgressive world and the community I claim as my own. During these recent years I have made a conscious effort to reach out to a different community. If I am impatient with the change around myself, then how much more must evangelical Christians find themselves unmoored. Set aside the aggressive question of whether they have it coming. For every proud boy and oath keeper and gun-toting elected official there are dozens who are horrified by the perversion of what they believe about the teachings of Jesus. They don’t always find themselves in the congressional districts that turn the scoundrels out, but they are organizing to combat “white Christian nationalism.” You can unpack that phrase as you please. I want to be a good ally in that effort, so I show up in every way my integrity allows. But I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that the efforts by some Christians to undo the influence of other Christians is akin to the recitation of the alphabet of sins on Yom Kippur. They are correct in condemning the moral failures at the center of those groups with whom they disagree. But proximate repentance? The abject lack of it results in this struggle to be one for the type of Christian supremacism to which they aspire. Not quite so white, not quite so nationalistic, but also not one that addresses the embedded desire they continue to promote to establish their version of the Kingdom of God. My personal affection and/or respect for so many of these genuinely good people make me reluctant to cite examples that will hold them up to criticism unfairly – after all, the work they are doing is deeply motivated out of their understanding of love for humanity and service to God. But I will mention one because it was not public – a gathering of faith leaders, most evangelicals of many backgrounds – who had come together to discuss how to resist “white Christian nationalism.” In the course of three hours of discussion, there were mentions of institutionalized racism, Nazis, the Holocaust, and Jesus as “a man oppressed because he was brown and member of an oppressed and enslaved community.” There was condemnation of the racism and homophobia of otherwise beloved preachers. There was a brilliant three-word summation of the tactics of white Christian nationalism (Fear. Hate. Violence.). But until the very end (see next paragraph), there was no mention of the Jews, not even obliquely. (To be completely accurate, one person reported they were not allowed to have Jewish friends as a child.) The last comment from the audience began with these words: Do not feel sorry for the Jews, not in the Old Testament, not in the New Testament, not at all; they are oppressors. No one responded. (Except me, to be honest. I caught up with the guy and did my best to shame him. Unsuccessfully, of course.) I have not used the common term for prejudice against Jews, and I won’t. It devalues the term to equate what I pray is a lack of self-awareness with chants of “Jews will not replace us” and accusations of globalism and puppeteering, let alone fear-hate-violence. But the unwillingness to examine these supremacist tendencies and the quiet acceptance of erasure of the Jews (who are, ironically, the most reliable allies against “white Christian nationalism”) is the proximate sin of my evangelical Christian friends. There is a paragraph in the liturgical prayer that ends every Jewish worship service expressing the hope that everyone in the world will come to acknowledge God’s sovereignty and forsake their idolatrous practices. I confront that challenging aspiration every day, and I plant my feet physically and spiritually between a historical reality (the prayer) and, I hope, an enlightened and evolved understanding that different is not automatically wrong. I must remember the collective sins so that I can (try to) refrain from the personal ones. Repentance is not only about regret. It is also about prevention. This story is absolutely true.
Following the impeachment proceedings for Bill Clinton, I was speaking with a friend of mine who, like me, was extremely active in interfaith activities. He was very close to the president. In addition to being the pastor of the church that the Clintons attended, he was one of the faith advisors on whom the president relied as he addressed the fallout from the case. He had also become a trustee of his denomination’s seminary. Notice these credentials: pastor, personal confidante, interfaith activist. He was also a guy who was careful to respect my sensitivities about food (kosher), calendar (Shabbat) and Scriptural references (Tenakh). In the course of the conversation, he bemoaned the news that Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor in the impeachment case, had just joined the board of the seminary, making it necessary for the denomination to deal with all of the baggage that came along with the barroom brawl that impeachment had become. My friend was no fan of Starr’s conduct in the mess. I said, “And we have Monica Lewinsky.” I will pause so that you can cluck your tongue at two members of the clergy speaking judgmentally about two public figures. We shouldn’t have done it, period. Not the point here. My friend replied, “Monica Lewinsky is Jewish?” Aside from the fact that that sounds like a riff on one of Homer Simpson’s most ridiculous lines (“Mel Brooks is Jewish?”), the truth is that the factoid of Ms. Lewinsky’s heritage is really of no importance to anyone but Jews. So I am just stunned that stories are appearing all over the Jewish press rehashing what her role in this presidential scandal meant – and continues to mean! – to the Jewish community. One columnist for a major national Jewish news service wrote a long recap of an article written 25 years ago by another public figure – now a respected broadcast journalist – in which he discussed Ms. Lewinsky’s identity, among other things. A number of articles have appeared to wring hands over the various ways that she offered an insight into the values of Jewish tradition, Jewish community, Jewish place in America. All of them bemoan the way she has been treated, repeating observations and tropes that have not been mentioned for more than twenty years. During that time, Monica Lewinsky has lived her life without trying to exploit for personal benefit the notoriety into which she stumbled as a very young adult. Just as important to the antisemite-watchers among us, there has been no upsurge in prejudice against Jews in this country because of Monica Lewinsky. Apparently, even the white supremacists don’t care. So folks – leave her alone. The public obsession with her private life is more about the writer than the subject. Her indiscretion took place a generation ago with a very high-profile individual. If you are in your 40s (or, like me, 60s), you almost certain did things like gossiping about someone to their denigration that you have (I hope) atoned for and put behind you. And I bet that you did not say to yourself, then or now, “this is going to reflect on the entire Jewish people until I die.” You don’t want to talk about it, and you don’t want someone else to analyze it for an uncomprehending public. I repeat: Leave her alone. (Published on Medium)
Ever since I first became aware of the Holocaust close to sixty years ago, I have had a well-cultivated consciousness of the alarming behavior that preceded it and maintained its momentum. It was more than a cult of personality — though it certainly was that, too. The upending of decency in pre-World War II Europe was the empowering of supremacists who saw their leader’s trajectory as their own. Intoxicated by the removal of limitations on their scruples, they considered themselves divinely authorized to seize power — over government, and over people’s lives. It is a political adage that “whoever says Hitler first, loses the argument.” And let’s be clear, I was not the first to say it. The significant numbers of t-shirts with Holocaust and Nazi references among the insurrectionists laying siege to the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday have that dubious distinction. White nationalists in this country have long invoked the Nazis by name and philosophy, finding their analogue in the pathetic remnants of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. All of them — the Confederates, the Nazis, the Klan — were the big losers of history. They remain an inspiration only to those whose moral character is lacking and who need the scapegoats of past losers to explain away why people of good will and higher principle, who value truth, ethics and generosity, will not acknowledge their self-proclaimed superiority. And so, it is people with “inferior” beliefs — Muslims, Jews, atheists, Eastern practitioners. It is people with darker skin. It is people who speak a different language. And most of all, it is people who “win” when they “lose.” They are the enemy. And the person who will champion their cause will inspire them to loyalty. A president who demands loyalty has a constituency that has only loyalty to give. And when both leader and followers are desperate not to be abandoned, the values they purport to represent become inconveniences. Among those values is religious freedom, freedom of conscience, free choice of belief. We saw those values abandoned in the burning of “Black Lives Matter” banners, in “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirts, in the parading of the stars-and-bars through the Capitol. We saw those values abandoned by a president who responded to insurrection with the message to the perpetrators: “We love you.” For more than a quarter of a century, Interfaith Alliance has warned that the real threats to this country are from within, from those who would deny the full protections of the Constitution to every citizen and who secretively train for domestic terrorism in militias and white supremacist groups. From those whose religious extremism corrupts the meaning of evangelical Christianity from a message of “love thy neighbor” to “keep that guy out of the neighborhood.” Donald Trump has been an embarrassment as president, and it is a danger that he continues to hold the office. He must go. Donald Trump is a loser, in every sense of the word. And if you still support him, then so are you. Once, during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, I parked my car on Capitol Hill. I noticed next to me a bumper sticker on the neighboring car. It said, simply, “I Miss Bill.” The contrast between the Clinton years and the subsequent administration were significant, both in substance and in tone. But even as I chuckled at how three words captured my mood, I knew Bill wasn’t coming back. Well, it’s pretty near twenty years later. Bill is still not coming back, and neither is any other president. But I have to acknowledge that I do not remember the contrast between predecessor and successor being as profound then as I do now. I Miss Barack. That may be a peculiar thing to say as the Trump administration enters its final rambunctious hours. But I have been listening to the memoir of the Obama presidency written by – and read by – the author himself in my daily walks around the neighborhood. I am surprised by a number of things. First of all, I agree with less of his policy approach than I thought I did. He was a little too cautious for me. Second, though he was a fast learner, it’s pretty evident that he could have used a little more seasoning before he took charge of the country. Idealism has its place, but as we learned from his predecessor, the presidency is not a place for on-the-job training. Thirdly (and this is my conjecture), he reads more than he listens to people. I say it because he mispronounces some words as if he learned them from a book and not a conversation. Hey, we survived these flaws, even if we suffered for some of them some of the time. And I know that some people celebrated anything Obama did, and some people trashed anything he did for reasons that didn’t always have to do with whatever it was he did. But you have waited long enough for an explanation of why I Miss Barack. It’s the sheer humanity of the man. Other than Sarah Palin and Mitch McConnell, Obama recognizes the good in everyone, even the people he criticizes. Too often for those who put him on a pedestal, not often enough for those who see only his faults, he is self-deprecating. He delights in those who challenge him. He admires those who are smarter than he is. He owns his mistakes. He likes basketball (a lot). He is embarrassed by the trappings of the office. He cherishes his friends. He has a recurring dream that he is walking around a busy city neighborhood and nobody recognizes him – and says he is in heaven. But most of all, he speaks lovingly and respectfully of his children and, especially, his wife. Especially his wife. He likes her more than basketball, admires her more than smart people, cherishes her more than his friends. And he worries about her and – wait for it – changes his behavior when he recognizes that it troubles her. Yes, the man could give a speech. Yes, he was unflappable enough to go from the capture of Bin Laden to the White House Correspondents Dinner without missing a beat. Yes, he let Republicans yell at him. Yes, he tried to ignore the racist and nativist questions about his citizenship. Yes, the worst personal scandal in his eight years was sneaking cigarettes (until he stopped). But more important, he is a man to admire personally. He is the kind of person I hope my children and grandchildren become. He is the kind of person against whom I can measure myself and be inspired to do better without resentment. He is the kind of person who embodies the American ideal. We have had four years without a scintilla of those qualities. Go back and read my praise and see if the current occupant of the Oval Office has ever inspired you to be a better person on those terms. Not a more effective person, not a more successful person, not a more powerful person. A better human being. I tried for four years to listen to supporters of President Trump to figure out what they saw in him. I even asked some of them, including more than one who professed a deep faith in God’s message of loving humankind so much that God sent us a redeeming child. One of them – no longer a correspondent of mine – answered, “I don’t want to have a beer with him, I just want him to support my positions.” I Will Not Miss Donald. The custom in this country is to make promises to yourself to be better than you are on December 31. A New Year’s resolution is about your internal resolve. Some have it, and others are more like me. But another meaning of resolution is to fix something that is dissonant, something like “President of the United States” who is a “reprehensible example of humanity” by any and all noble standards. Thanks, President Obama, for reminding me that it was not only possible but real. This is one New Year’s resolution I am confident will be kept. The most startling moment of the Vice-Presidential Debate for me was the weaponization of President Trump’s grandchildren. Even when I served the mostly insular community of a synagogue, I knew better than to exploit my kids (or anyone else’s) for effect. Their behavior, including the adorable things they said, were not fodder for my public pronouncements unless, as they got older, they agreed to be quoted. Now that I have grandchildren, I see how their parents (my aforementioned children) have embraced that protectiveness. The little ones rarely appear on social media, and then only to family and friends. Vice President Pence, by contrast, tried to defend his boss’s credibility as a champion of tolerance and pluralism by noting that he has “Jewish grandchildren.” The comment came in response to a challenge familiar to Americans – the president has been equivocal at most in addressing the anti-semitism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim bigotry of some of his supporters. Once you begin with “there are fine people on both sides” and end with “stand back and stand by,” it doesn’t much matter how you fill in the middle. Yet, as if Mr. Trump had anything to do with his daughter’s decision to embrace Judaism or to raise her offspring in a traditional Jewish family, Mr. Pence deployed the most stereotypical of excuses, essentially, “some of his best grandchildren are Jewish.” The notion that the president’s policy decisions and public statements are swayed by children is laughable. I have no doubt he loves his family. But the body of evidence regarding his sacrificial attitude toward children in this country is overwhelming. He denies them a social safety net. He opposes their comprehensive health care. He diverts money from their schools. He wants to send them away if their parents are not legal residents. He insists, against scientific evidence, that they have immunity from a dangerous virus. And, oh yes, he separates them from their parents and puts them in cages. Jewish grandchildren do not inoculate Grandfather Trump from the consequences of his dog-whistles and his encouragement of those out to do them harm. Indeed, even those Jewish Republicans who continue to support the president claim as his bona fides his relocation of the American embassy to Jerusalem and other foreign policy victories. They know better – so many of them Jewish grandparents themselves – than to exploit the innocence of little ones for political gain. They know better because they heard him say to them, “I don’t want your money; therefore, you’re not going to support me.” And with the exception of sidekicks like Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s xenophobic border policy, high-profile Jewish advisors from the respected, like Gary Cohn, to the opportunistic, like Michael Cohen, have distanced themselves from the president and reported his disregard for any real defense of the victims of anti-semitism and other racial and religious bigotry. I am not reporting anything new, nor would I revisit this well-established record of insensitivity to both faith and youth were it not for the vice president’s outrageous attempt at innocence by association. I take Mr. Pence at his word – and his record – that he is motivated by his own religious convictions to protect and defend those he and his allies deem the “unborn” children, but he belies that commitment when he is willing to use little children as a tool of political rhetoric against an abundance of grown-up evidence. Both debates have been a cavalcade of misbehavior and dubious representations. Perhaps we have come to expect that conduct from candidates for political office. But I am with the young student whose question was selected to end the Vice Presidential Debate: where are the role models for young people in this country who will learn by example? I most definitely hope that they have the native wisdom to resist the behavior that made Mr. Pence’s defense of the president necessary, and to refuse to imitate his willingness to turn them into a tool of politicking. The tributes to Cong. John Lewis are richly deserved. They will focus on the public man and his admonitions to people to “get into good trouble.” And well they should. As an inspiration to activists over the course of more than sixty years, he always set the example of what my late mother-in-law, Carol Davidson, used to say: You have a mouth; use it. John Lewis felt the same way about his body, using it whenever necessary to “get in the way.” I was in no way a friend of this man, though he greeted me and treated me like one. It does not make me unusual, but it gives me a couple of unique stories to tell. I say “unique,” but that’s because they are unique to me. For John, they were typical. I have long been active in the Faith and Politics Institute, the most important organization you never heard of. Faith and Politics works primarily with elected officials and their staffs on Capitol Hill to help them actualize their individual and collective commitments to public service and personal values. Most especially, the focus has been on race (though not only on race). For more than thirty years, senators, representatives and others have joined in a pilgrimage to the civil rights south, especially Alabama, where they heard from “luminaries,” veterans of the movement. Those encounters have taken place in Birmingham, Montgomery and, on Sunday morning, in Selma. The host and guide was always John Lewis. I met him on my first pilgrimage and thereafter many, many times. I heard him speak so often, I could tell the familiar stories about preaching to the chickens, holding down the house, meeting Martin Luther King and crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge with an apple and a toothbrush in his backpack. Yet, every time he told those stories they concluded with a fresh message that drew a straight line from faith or opportunity or preparation directly to the matter at hand. No one is always right. John Lewis came close. But here are three of my stories that have less to do with John Lewis the public figure than John Lewis the man. Set aside your interest in his life of public service. Here was a life worth emulating. More than a dozen years ago, I found myself on a bus with John on our drive from Selma to Montgomery. Also on the bus was Susannah Heschel whose father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, had marched with Dr. King in Selma. She and her husband had brought their baby along. I took a picture of John Lewis cradling that child as if it were his own grandbaby. The emotion he exuded was profound. Later that same day, we disembarked from a plane at DCA. My photograph from that moment was from behind John, just after he had gently taken the hand of Ethel Kennedy – a gesture of respect and support. Many years later, I was dispatched by my alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary, to deliver a letter asking John to agree to receive an honorary doctorate. Hoping simply to hand him the envelope, I made an appointment to visit his congressional office. When I arrived, he was waiting for me, and asked me to come into his private office. He brought no aide, set no time limit, ordered his calls held. He engaged me in conversation that was at once personal and respectful, setting at ease a guy still able to be star-struck at sixty. Then he opened the envelope, read the letter, and asked me about one detail it mentioned: this was Rabbi Heschel’s seminary? I said yes. He put the letter down and said, “Then I would be privileged to accept this honor.” No scheduler, no political advisor, no other question. We were finished in fifteen minutes, but he asked me if I would like to see some of the mementos on his wall. He proceeded to walk me through a gallery of photos that chronicled his presence in modern American history. To him, this casual acquaintance who came to impose on his time was, at that moment, the most important person he knew. The last time I was with John was at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. A year ago, I went on the pilgrimage again. At the end of Sunday’s march across that bridge, John volunteered to have his picture taken with anyone who wanted it. I held back – the elected officials went first, then the sponsors, finally the hangers-on. By the time I stepped up, he had taken individual photographs with hundreds of people. He was glad to see me and remembered the visit in his office and the honorary degree. Yes, we were posed for the official photo. But the guy who volunteered to use my cellphone captured the moment that you see illustrating this column. John Lewis never for a moment forgot his public responsibilities. The policy positions he took were often unpopular, and he did not shy away from the controversy he therefore had to engage. I know enough people in public service to know that is not unusual. But first and foremost, he was a man who saw the image of the Creator in whom he deeply believed in every person he met – including his opponents – and the opportunity to lift up the Divine Presence in every encounter, no matter how incidental. His was a life to emulate.
If there is a single aspect of support for President Trump by faith communities that is most disappointing to me, it is the rationale that “he has been so good to us.” I am certainly an imperfect vessel for the teachings of my own Jewish tradition, but I try my best to live life according to the essential messages of my faith. While many of those messages are about personal conduct – we have 613 of them, just to start – the folk medicine of my rabbinic ancestors provides a pithier perspective on what it means to live in community. Millennia ago, people believed that the heart was the center of human thought and behavior. The ancient rabbis posited that it was made up of two chambers and that a single impulse was contained in each. In one chamber was the impulse to goodness. In the other was the impulse to evil. The more I learned about those two impulses, the less satisfied I was with their designations. For example, a fanciful story was told about the day that a band of pious people captured the evil impulse so that the world would be entirely good. On that day, no one built a house, no business was conducted, and the chickens didn’t lay eggs. Is there anything evil about those activities? Not inherently, of course. But each one is an activity that is self-serving. (The chickens are euphemistic for human reproduction!) The tale concludes with the affirmation that the world cannot survive without the “evil” impulse. When I learned this story, I began to call the two impulses altruism and selfishness. We mortals cannot survive this world without meeting our hierarchy of needs. We need food, shelter, safety and, of course, someone to care about us. No person can only give, never receive. Religious folk (like me) posit only one such being in the cosmos – a self-sufficient God. So it is no surprise that faith traditions find different ways to encourage adherents to emulate the altruism of the divine being. The power of this selfish impulse seems never to abate. A consciousness of the impulse to selflessness – that is, to Godliness – is necessary to hold it in check. In the current political climate, nothing is holding the selfish impulse in check, especially among those in the faith communities who are sycophants of the president. They are satisfied to have received support for their own narrow desires. In the conservative evangelical community, in the politically right-wing Jewish community, in the racially-driven supremacist community, the willingness of the president and this administration to feed their selfishness without regard for others strikes me as exactly the opposite of what participants in creating “a more perfect union” ought to be about. In the Jewish community, I hear a lot of how there has never been a president who was better for Israel and the Jewish community. The claim is based on symbolic acts of doubtful effectiveness – moving an embassy, singling out Jews on campus for special protection, reneging on a agreement to control nuclear proliferation that enjoyed wide support. In the end, pandering to the selfish desires of any group makes one an agent of that second chamber of the heart, the one that impels us to take, never to give. Cloaking such activities in the language of piety or framing the desires as inherently good circumvents the character development that genuine religious faith is supposed to encourage. The person who receives abundance and turns their back on those who receive less than they need or deserve is not blessed. Rather, they are unfairly privileged. A famous activist once said, “A person who does not vote in self-interest is a fool. A person who votes only in self-interest is a scoundrel.” In political terms, that formulation is the same as the ancient understanding of the two chambers of the heart. While too often we cynically view our electoral choices as the lesser of two evils, we might have a greater impact on turning our society away from its current political misery if we framed our choices as the greater of two goods. A balance is necessary between self-interest and unlimited generosity. The question to ask of candidates – and of those in office, high or low – is not “whose interests will you serve,” rather “how can we make this a more perfect union.” When “he has been so good to us” is a code phrase for “he has disadvantaged others for our benefit,” the result is a betrayal of admirable faith values. It is a capitulation to the wrong chamber of the heart, the one that contains the impulse to selfishness at the expense of altruism. It is the opposite of Godliness. Each tradition has a name for the agent of selfishness. It should never be President of the United States. While everyone is focused on the state-wide election results in Virginia, it is a local contest that gives me encouragement that Americans have had enough anger and divisive rhetoric from the top.
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