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.