Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.     Václav Havel
 
This is the time of the year when lots of faith traditions have significant observances. We have just passed Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and anchor holiday for a number of traditions. This year (2023), Ramadan occurs during this month and next, sacred time to Muslims. The essential holiday to Christian faiths of all stripes is Easter. And for Jews like me, there is Passover, known indigenously as Pesach.
 
Ask an outside observer about the common thread for each of them and the answer is likely to point to the vernal equinox. It is true enough, but not entirely true. While all these holy seasons connect to some astronomical and/or agricultural phenomena, too much effort has been put into crafting these observances when a simple bonfire or festive meal would have sufficed. Like most religious observances, no matter the label, all these springtime devotions are about finding a sense of place in the world.
 
I learned a long time ago neither to speak for nor interpret religions that are not my own. (I barely get away with presenting the one I allegedly know first-hand!) Looking at the Passover story, I am surprised to discover that the notion of being lost is not more prominent. The exodus from Egypt begins with a story of a lost home in Canaan, continues with lost freedom, proceeds to lost children (and one particular lost child), emphasizes the lost reliability of nature through the plagues, descends into the lost first-born on the night of departure and leaves us lost in the wilderness for forty years. So much is lost!
 
I encourage you to imagine what it is that “lost” means in the defining stories of the other traditions that celebrate now (and at other times). The back-stories may conveniently place themselves in the context of natural phenomena – spring renewal, phases of the moon, harvest of the winter – but more profound is their teaching about what it takes to be oriented in this world, how I once was lost, but now I’m found.
 
Václav Havel introduced the notion of being lost in his poem entitled “It is I Who Must Begin.” It is this last verse that carries the burden of meditation this poet/politician expresses: how do I know the path ahead. It is not just the famous and powerful who must contend with the need for orientation and direction. As faith communities also know, it is a challenge that faces each and all of us as well.
 
The absence of direction, that is, the sense of being lost, is probably one of most usual and inescapable fears in human life. For something so common, it is surprising that it has the power to persuade each of us that we are alone in our struggle with it. Along come the religions we embrace – those human constructs to communicate spiritual values – to let us know that there are directions, external and internal, to point the way. Whether it is Haft-Seen, five pillars, a miraculous resurrection, or a tower of fire by night and smoke by day, the voices and experiences of our ancestors resound in the rituals of the season to let us know that all the direction we need is embedded within. The road ahead may sometimes lead to nowhere known, but it never leads to nowhere.
 
Let me add that a close reading of Havel’s wisdom is important. He talks about whether all is lost, and even in translation, the play on the word “lost” and the nuance of what it can mean is important. Of course a person can be lost. Try driving in Boston, finding your way around the Phoenix airport, or figuring out the quadrants of Washington, DC. Try sitting through unfamiliar religious services. Try raising a child. Like Waze, crowdsourcing can help.
 
But the direction that comes from the faith and cultural traditions that inform our lives is the data that activates our existential GPS, giving us (I hope!) confidence that all is not lost because others have been here already.
 
At the beginning of Passover, I sit with family and friends for hours at a table. Yes, we eat and drink and chat and sing, but we are really there to figure out where we are going by rehearsing where we have been and how we got to where we are. You will do it, too, whichever sacred season you embrace, even if it is March Madness. If I am not lost, then all is not lost, and if all is not lost, then neither am I. And all is not lost.
 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Do you suppose God created diamonds only for the rich?  Dorothy Day
 
A long time ago, I had an argument with a friend who worked in the President’s administration. The public assistance program of the federal government was undergoing one of its cyclical reevaluations, and a proposal had gained some currency that required recipients without a disabling condition to find work after a period of time or lose their benefits. I was opposed, and I told him so. He replied that, like it or not, the way we consider worth in this society was through work. It was not enough to provide subsistence to people in need. They also deserved dignity. And there was dignity in work.
 
I have presented his argument to many people over the years, and mostly they argue the politics, not the principle. Those who disagree with the work requirement say that there is no dignity is not being able to feed your family or keep a roof over your head. Those who disagree with a welfare program of any kind say that there is no dignity is living off a handout, especially from the government.
 
But as I think about, nobody argued against dignity.
 
Dorothy Day was a hero to the poor and an exemplar of goodness, especially to her Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. I was introduced to her name before I knew anything about her legacy because the volunteer shelter and food bank in Danbury, Connecticut, where I served my first congregation, was named for her. Look her up to know more, but the source of this quotation may tell you all you need.
 
A wealthy patron approached Dorothy one day in her “hospitality house” and gave her a diamond ring as a donation. She tucked it in her apron. Later that day, a surly and unpleasant woman who was a regular at the kitchen came in. Dorothy gave her the ring, saying she thought she might like it. Another worker challenged her, saying it might have been better to sell the ring and pay rent for the woman for a year or more. Dorothy replied that the woman had her dignity and could do what she liked with the ring. She could sell it for rent money or take a trip to the Bahamas. Or she could enjoy wearing a diamond ring on her hand like the woman who gave it away. She asked, “Do you suppose that God created diamonds only for the rich?”
 
I doubt I would have the moral audacity to make such a decision. Like most people, I imagine I would do some mental calculus about where the greatest good would be served and whether the recipient was the best steward of this unexpected windfall. And, I imagine, if Dorothy Day had a board to which she had to answer, there might have been some exasperated questions for her to address.
 
But there is no denying that in her passion to live out her faith in service to those without, she placed dignity at the top of the list of unmet needs for the poor. And those of us who are richly blessed with the security of stocked refrigerators and rainproof roofs can understand that. Dignity may be an inherent entitlement, but without the wherewithal to make discretionary decisions for oneself – how to spend a paycheck, for example – it is too easy for others to deny.
 
You might well ask “what is dignity?”  (I’ll wait.) I am not sure I can give you a definition. But I can tell you what it is not. Prescribing the choices for others that we cherish making for ourselves is the opposite of dignity. That includes the wrong choices and, not incidentally, the need to take responsibility for them.
 
If you are fortunate enough to have a pocketful of diamonds, I do not suggest that you have an obligation to distribute them among the poor. But should you decide to do so, rest assured that just like other rare and remarkable treasures – love, rainbows, family, health, learning, arts – God did not create them only for the rich.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.  G.K. Chesterton
 
He was serious. Well, sort of. G.K. Chesterton was one of those English literary figures whose popularity somewhat mystifies Americans. Mostly, he wrote and spoke about serious stuff – politics, values, Catholic faith, Jews (don’t ask). His essay on cheese bemoaned the lack of attention to it in ancient and modern literature, including poetry. A man of considerable girth and questionable style, most of the essay described his adventures eating cheese and bemoaning restaurants in London that believed biscuits (we call them cookies) were a better snack than, um, cheese.
 
Maybe he was trying to be funny – you’d have to ask a mid-century fusty Brit to know. But this week in particular (I write this on the cusp of Purim, arguably the precursor to Mardi Gras), I take issue. Not merely in poetry, but everywhere, the cheese never stands alone. Especially in America.
 
Currently on television, you can see a commercial for a popular mayonnaise that highlights the name Brie, identifying a famous actress who is about to become part of a sandwich. Late night television boasts the popular star who is the offspring of Colby and Camembert, first name Stephen. Everybody loves Ray Romano. Linda Ronstadt had a huge hit with “You’re No Gouda.”  Robert Blake starred in the police drama “Burrata.” Emily Litella often called Chevy Chase “Cheddar Cheese.”
 
And if that reference isn’t old enough for you, think of Arthur Godfrey’s famous greeting, “Havarti, Havarti, Havarti.” Or of famed actress Dorothy Provolone.
 
In education, the two schools of thought in Italian early childhood approaches are Montessori (which everyone seems to know) and Parmigiana Reggiano (which everyone seems to prefer on Caesar salad). Children of privilege often go from there to Swiss boarding schools, where they live in nine dorms, called the Neufchatel.
 
Geographically, cheese is everywhere. Towns in Texas (Muenster), Indiana (Munster), and Wisconsin (New Munster) are governed by a mayor known as the Big Cheese. I have visited coastal California and the suburbs of Cleveland where I was known, at least temporarily, as Monterey Jack and Pepper Jack.
 
And what is the name we bestow on the best there ever was? From Lebron to the Beatles to Eleanor Roosevelt to “Citizen Kane,’ it is GOAT, which also enhances salads other than Caesar.
 
Chesterton, being British, was most concerned about poetry, and he might very well have dismissed with a pooh-pooh and poppycock all of these other embedded cultural celebrations of cheese in the colonies.  But there is no denying that the great American poets were anything but silent on this subject.
 
It was Edgar Allen Poe who wrote:
                It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the seas, that a maiden lived, whom you may know, by the name of American Cheese.
 
It was the great Robert Frost who wrote:
                …miles to asiago before I eat..
 
And it was Emily Dickinson who wrote:
                Hope is a thing with feta.
 
And with that, this column is a feta complete.
 

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Kindness begins where necessity ends.  “Sally” in Amor Towles’s Lincoln Highway
 
The folk wisdom of my Jewish tradition posits that seat of behavior is the heart. Residing within its two chambers are competing inclinations, one to good and the other to bad. While those ancient Jews may not have known physiology well, they certainly knew that a person couldn’t live with half a heart. The “bad” inclination was perhaps more accurately the selfish or self-serving inclination – those yearnings that serve myself ahead of others. The appetites are located there, including a desire for wealth, physical gratification, fame, and dominance over others. Without those impulses, the same tradition teaches, there would be no commerce, no families, no homes, and no progress.
 
The other half of the heart is where altruism resides. Not surprisingly for a faith tradition, the aspiration to emulate the divine lives here, as well as all the finer qualities we associate with the loving, living God.
 
Religious or not, most everyone would agree that you can make your way just fine in this world by relying on the qualities attributed to the bad inclination, but it won’t make you beloved.  If you hope to be remembered well (or, as they say in religious circles, get to heaven), then you have to invest much more of your effort in promoting your good inclination.
 
Neither folk medicine nor religious thought gives much attention to the wall that separates the two chambers, so it gives me free rein to muse about it. I call it the wall of necessity. It touches on our better nature and our worse, the things a good person would like to think about themself and the things that person fears about themself, the proclivities a not-so-good person indulges and the proclivities that person gives into reluctantly. A person who does not address natural appetites cannot survive. A person who never considers others lives in unbearable loneliness. That wall is the neutral zone where choices are available because it represents equilibrium.
 
I think that we mostly worry about slipping to the “bad” side of that wall. Certainly, religious life is so often about misdeeds by any name – evil, sin, immorality, selfishness – that it is easy to conclude that the essence of living a life of devotion is avoiding the sin that crouches at the door. Yet, it is not true that the neutral setting of our lives – the wall of necessity – is what makes for a good or admirable life.
 
In Amor Towles’s novel, mostly concerning a road trip, but far more complicated than I can explain in a few words, the main character (a young man) is the beneficiary of an act of generosity by the young woman who bears an unrequited love for him. He protests that it is not necessary. She responds with the words at the beginning of this column: kindness begins where necessity ends.
 
Falling into the chamber of the heart that houses the bad inclination is all too common. It is, however, a choice. One can just as easily choose to lean into the good inclination, leaving necessity behind to immerse the soul – and by extension, another person – in kindness. People who are unnecessarily kind (and face it, all kindness is unnecessary) lift themselves along with their recipients.
 
I know – blah, blah, blah. But we are living in a societal climate in which kindness and other positive values are too often seen as flaws. And there are plenty of people – even admired public figures – who have attempted to attach dismissiveness toward others and sometimes cruelty to that wall of necessity. That is to say, they have tried to redefine bad behavior as neutral and compassion as weak. Don’t fall for it. On the cusp of another electoral brawl, it is worth giving some thought to what it means to be strong, which is different than what it means to be effectively self-serving. In the heart, kindness begins where necessity ends. So does cruelty.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
No peanuts, no ball game. No ballgame, no peanuts.  Vendor, Chicago baseball parks.
 
At the end of daily morning worship, the rabbi from my New York synagogue, the remarkable Rachel Ain, teaches briefly, these days from a small but delightful tractate (larger than a chapter, smaller than a book) of the Talmud known as Avot or Pirkei Avot. It contains scores of pithy teachings (Pirkei) from the fathers (Avot) of rabbinic wisdom – the great rabbis of 1700-2000 years ago. The other day, she expanded on a teaching of Rabbi Elazar the son of Azariah, from chapter 3, teaching 21. That’s already more information than you need to know, but I am diligent about attribution.
 
Rabbi Elazar said, “No sustenance, no Torah. No Torah, no sustenance.” You gotta eat, and you gotta learn. You can’t have one without the other.
 
Though I have studied those words many times, the way Rabbi Ain presented them started me laughing as I remembered an old vendor at the ballparks in Chicago when I was a kid. I am certain I heard him for the first time at Comiskey Park and also pretty sure I heard him at Wrigley Field.  Back then, the White Sox and the Cubs were almost never at home on the same day, so the vendors could work both sides of the city. He would prowl the stands and shout, with a voice that could pierce through whatever else was going on among fielders and fans, “No peanuts, no ballgame. No ball game, no peanuts.”
 
He was enormously successful, much more so than the “hey, bottle-o-beer, bottle-o-beer” guy or the “COKE-a-cola” guy. The reason: he was right. No peanuts, no ballgame. No ballgame, no peanuts.
 
No, not literally. I watched a lot of baseball without peanuts, and I ate peanuts even in the dead of winter before pitchers and catchers reported or Topps released the first bubblegum cards of the season. But with three words ingeniously arranged, he created an association that was unforgettable. My proof: I haven’t heard him in probably sixty years, but his voice was clear as a bell just a few days ago.
 
Comparing a millennia-old religious teaching with a modern bit of micro-marketing might seem a little blasphemous, but this series of columns is entitled “wisdom wherever you find it,” and I mean it. The association of two ideas, one the listener considers essential and the other the expositor considers necessary, is a great way to persuade people of both.  People are naturally committed to earning a living. They have to feed themselves and those they love, provide for shelter, acquire clothing to present well and avoid shame.  A rabbi who wants to lay claim to their time with a less-natural inclination – to study God’s revelation and thus live a more righteous life – needs to create an equivalency that urges his priority upon them.
 
Mr. Vendor was likely not a student of Rabbi Elazar (trust me on this one). His goal was to convince people for whom baseball took its place with food, shelter, and clothing as essential that they needed to buy peanuts. His peanuts. By creating the association through his sing-song cry, every kid said to the grown-up who bought the tickets, every teenager said to friend who skipped school with them, every buddy said to their fellow fan, “Want some peanuts?” in a way that seemed natural. And at least in my family, it added to the soundtrack of happy memories that transcended eventual dispersion and the rift between Cubs and White Sox fans under the same roof.
 
I am confident in asserting that little boys did not go with their dads to the study hall, hear Rabbi Elazar and say to their fathers, “Want some Torah?” But whether you call it effective marketing or effective pedagogy, establishing an association between the organic and the desirable that rises above the noise is the best way to get results. Even sixty years later. Even 2000.
 

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
A special repeat column in a different context.
 
Eighteen months ago, I published “Why I Am a Coward.” Today, I resubmit it in the midst of the scrum surrounding one small part of Prince Harry’s new book, Spare. In it, he affirms that during his service, he killed as many as 25 in combat.  The New York Times reported:
 
 “You can’t kill people if you see them as people,” he wrote. “They trained me to ‘other’ them, and they trained me well.”
…Col. Richard Kemp, a retired officer in the British Army who served in Afghanistan, told the BBC, refuting Harry’s characterization of insurgents being seen as chess pieces to be knocked over. “That’s not the case at all, and it’s not the way that the British Army trains people.”
 
Whatever else you might think of Prince Harry, in this matter you can’t fault his honesty.  Instead of rebutting, refuting and rejecting his experience, every person of conscience – Taliban, British or otherwise – should be thinking hard about one young man’s experience of war.  As you can see, he is not the first.
 
WHY I AM A COWARD
 
June 12, 2021
 
I only killed one human being in Vietnam, and that was the first man I ever killed. I was sick with guilt about killing that guy and thinking, “I’m gonna do this for the next 13 months, I’m gonna go crazy.” Then I saw a Marine step on a “bouncing betty” mine. And that’s when I made my deal with the devil, in that I said, “I will never kill another human being as long as I am in Vietnam. However, I will waste as many gooks as I can find. I will waste as many dinks as I can find. I will smoke as many zips as I can find. But I ain’t gonna kill anybody.” Turn a subject into an object.  It’s Racism 101. And it turns out to be a very necessary tool when you have children fighting your wars for them to stay sane doing their work.
John Musgrave
 
I spend some time each week tending to people in public service.  It’s the least I can do.  I am a devoted patriot, and I subscribe to the notion that the blessings and freedoms we enjoy as Americans are secure only as long as they are defended.  So I pay my taxes without complaint.  I vote in every election, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.  I join with others to seek redress of grievances.  I defend the rights that are ours as citizens.
 
But I would not serve in the military, and I recognize that, all my life, that meant sending someone else to do my job.
 
I have known a lot of people who served honorably – my dad, an uncle, many friends and colleagues, and now, even some of my friends’ kids.  But I am a coward, and cowards have no place in a circumstance that makes people dependent on each other to survive.
 
I am not bragging, by the way.  I am just being honest.  I have enough courage to speak truth to power, to say aloud uncomfortable facts and to hold to unpopular opinions even when surrounded by those who disagree.  I have handled firearms.  I have been in fights, though few and far between.  But I would be no good in combat.
 
Part of it, most certainly, is self-preservation.  I do not wish to be shot or blown up.  I do not think that people in the military disagree with me, but I know that I actively imagine myself in harm’s way whenever I think about service, and it is paralyzing.
 
But part of it, too, is a conscious decision not to become the person John Musgrave describes in discussing his Vietnam experience in the Ken Burns documentary about that war.  More than a fear of injury, I think I was afraid to lose my moral compass.
 
When I was a kid, my father would not discuss his service in World War II.  He acknowledged that he shot and killed enemy soldiers, but only in a brief answer to a direct question.  When I was a college student, I asked him if he ever thought he was shooting some other mother’s son during the war.  He replied, without irony, “I wasn’t shooting anybody’s son.  I was shooting Nazis.”
 
Turn a subject into an object.  It is a necessary tool when you have children fighting your wars.
 
As I said, I have known a lot of people who served honorably.  One was a high-ranking officer in Vietnam.  He was one of the kindest people I ever met.  Another was a combat-proven officer who eventually served as Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  He holds every casualty in his heart.  It is not necessarily the case that you lose your moral compass in battle.  On the contrary – sometimes, it is the only place you can be sure you have it.
 
And I am not a pacifist.  War may be obscene, but there are times it is a necessary obscenity.
 
Call it my moral shortcoming or my self-indulgent privilege or my character flaw, but I know myself well enough that I could not carry heavy arms and do my duty.  My fear – rational or not – was that I would lose myself on the back end of a weapon.  And that makes me a coward.
 
It makes me more grateful for those who serve.  And more concerned.
 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
No Jew in the history of Judaism ever looked smart by saying things aren’t as bad as you think.             Rob Eshman
 
Since I retired, my phone is a lot quieter than it used to be. My thirty-plus years in the pulpit and subsequent leadership of advocacy non-profits made me a logical person to call when people, Jewish and not, had any kind of question about Jews, Judaism and Jewish community. But now that I am a man of leisure, I mostly hear from people (and mostly of the non-Jewish persuasion) who are struggling to understand antisemitism.
 
I have said before that Jews have the sad distinction of being the only people with a prejudice named specifically for them. The term was coined in the very late nineteenth century, so technically speaking you can’t call bigotry against Jews by that modern name before the 1890s. But that is a technicality. There is no era in Jewish history without oppression. In our earliest holiday – Passover – to our latest traditional holiday – Chanukkah (note spelling) – the telling of the history includes both the specifics of the persecution we overcame and the affirmation that in every generation, someone is out to get us. The modern days of commemoration we have for both tragedy and triumph are all framed in the context of antagonists who wanted to drive us into ovens, gas chambers or the sea. You have heard the joke about the story of every Jewish holiday: they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat.
 
By whatever name, anti-antisemitism has become the religion of most modern Jews.
 
So it makes sense that people who are not antisemites want to understand how to be good allies and how not to be accused of prejudice against Jews (or enabling it). Those are the calls I field more than any these days.
 
Privately, Jewish parents fret about intermarriage. Ironically, the best evidence that Jew hatred is at a low ebb in this country is the high rate of non-Jews marrying Jews. You don’t fall in love with someone you hate. And acceptance of Jews as Jews is unquestioned; no more Jack Benny, John Garfield, Judy Holliday – now it’s Jerry Seinfeld, Jesse Eisenberg, Gal Gadot.  A Jew is the Second Gentleman. A Jew is on the Supreme Court. A Jew is most dangerous person in the world (at least according to Mike Pompeo, who doesn’t like the teachers’ union for some reason), but not for being Jewish.
 
But there are still plenty of people who believe ridiculous lies about the Jews and are willing to express them in words or deeds. Public figures who leap to rebut the idea that a white patriarchy is inherently dangerous to people unlike them nonetheless promote the notion of space lasers, banking cabals, or comprehensive replacement strategies in the hands of the International Zionist Conspiracy.  Some of them will act violently. They make my grandchildren into conspirators-in-training.  They will fail.  Let’s eat.
 
And yet. (Here’s where I get not-smart.) Things aren’t as bad as you think. Jewish community is awash in what we call defense organizations. Both Jewish groups and secular groups supported by Jews devote a huge cache of resources to identifying and combating antisemitism. They do audits, post banners in cities and on interstates, offer trainings, develop curricula, and circulate suggested sermons to remind the Jewish world that in every generation, including this one, the bad guys arise to destroy us.
 
Among the results is that Jews report antisemitic incidents more frequently than most other victims of bigotry and hate crimes.  Should we? Yes. Does that mean that the antipathy toward Jews in the United States exceeds prejudice against Blacks, Muslims, Asians, Sikhs, Spanish-speakers, immigrants, Mormons, Roman Catholics, poor people, and Southwest Airlines in whole or in part? Only if you posit and promote the notion that 97.5% of the population agree on only one thing: the other 2.5% deserve the worst they can muster.
 
And I don’t. The effectiveness of our defense groups and reportage is evidenced by the numbers of people who are not Jews but would rather be Daniel Patrick Moynihan than George Lincoln Rockwell, who would rather read Ann Frank’s diary than the magnum opus of he-who-shall-not-be-named. These folks are not worn down and covering their backsides; they are our sisters and brothers and, as I mentioned a moment ago, our husbands and wives. We betray them when we suspect every non-Jew of being an antisemite until they prove themselves otherwise.
 
Greater challenges to the future of the Jews come from disaffection and neglect from within than threats from without.  After I thank the people who call me with their loving concern, that’s what I tell them. Smart or not.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see things that are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.         F. Scott Fitzgerald
 
My education as a rabbi was an indoctrination into the value of uncertainty. Sure, there were some things I was expected to affirm without much more than a smidgen of doubt, but once you get past the basics, the foundation of everything rabbinic is machloket. In English, the word is often translated as “dispute,” and it describes the typical form of interaction between two scholars who may be sitting face to face or may be separated by generations. The traditional Jewish way of learning is by arguing. It explains a lot.
 
We live in a time when disagreement has become a value rather than a methodology. And here is where my rabbinic education has helped me the most. When a machloket takes place, both parties are expected to be able to articulate and honor each other’s position. So closely is this kind of disagreement modeled that the contemporaneous rabbis who sat and argued (and raised their disciples to do so in their names) were called “couples,” and they were often dearest of friends. The most famous were Hillel and Shammai, but the most remarkable were Rabbi Johanan and Rabbi Simeon son of Lakish – mutual admirers and brothers-in-law.
 
Many centuries after the Talmudic couples and deep into my career as a rabbi, I sat in a room with dozens of my colleagues to listen to Tal Brody, a stellar Israeli teacher. He recognized the challenges of arguing simultaneously for interests and principles. “You have to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time,” he said. “Who better to do that than rabbis?”
 
Well, nobody, I think. I don’t say that with ego or chauvinism as the determining factor. I say it because the presumptions of a lot of other cultures (especially in America) do not include the value of the dissenting opinion.
 
Before I go any farther, I acknowledge that these days, even rabbis don’t always endorse principled disagreement. When that happens, they betray our heritage, I believe. You have to make a decision when a decision is called for, true. But even if all of us light Chanukkah candles in increasing numbers all eight nights (as Hillel instructed) it is common knowledge that some believed (as Shammai instructed) that we light them in decreasing numbers.
 
There is a value in certainty. But certainty is elusive. As a result, the insistence on public certainty is (I think) a reflection of the pervasiveness of private uncertainty. Whether it is the affirmation of a particular kind of religious faith, or unwavering fidelity to a political party, or the insistence on an immutable solution to a question of policy or behavior, people who insist on the universal validation of “my way” are simply terrified of even the possibility of “the highway” leading to a better answer.
 
F. Scott Fitzgerald (just “F,” as I like to call him) uses a great example, hard to contradict. Each of us has, at some time, recognized things are hopeless – climate change, a league championship, programming a new phone – yet we commit to an approach we don’t necessarily believe will succeed. F might not have had machloket in mind, but the same principle applies. Democrats ought to consider what Republicans have to say. Conservatives ought to give thought to liberal ideas. Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, Western and Eastern thinkers, Red Sox and Yankees fans can each reject thoroughly the beliefs and practices of the other yet recognize their value.
 
It is instructive to consider the reason that Jewish practice almost always follows the teachings of Hillel and infrequently those of his debate opponent, Shammai. Each of them taught both points of view whenever they instructed their students. But whereas Shammai taught his conclusions and followed them with Hillel’s dissent, Hillel always taught Shammai’s first. That modeling of respect is the difference between knowledge and wisdom – there are lessons that are teachable by example, not only by words. Doing so is an indicator of a first-rate intelligence.