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weekly column

Each week, find a commentary on something connected to verses of Torah or another source of wisdom

​BE THE ONE

8/28/2022

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When everything else looks hopeless, you are the hope. ​
​BE THE ONE
 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
When everything else looks hopeless, you are the hope.  Marcus Raskin
 
Almost two thousand years before Rep. Jamie Raskin’s father inspired him with these words, the sage Hillel formulated a similar sentiment. Unfortunately for Hillel (who also articulated Judaism’s version of the Golden Rule), the gender-bound nature of the language makes the translation come out, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.”  Mr. Raskin captured the essence of the original teaching by capturing the essence of what it means to be an admirable example of the human family.
 
I am comfortable with my interpretation because Hillel certainly did not mean his teaching literally. He was not referring to a city filled with women nor to a man abandoned among wild animals. He meant a mensch, a word he didn’t know because Yiddish wasn’t spoken until many hundreds of years later, and the word itself did not evolve from “man” to “admirable human being” for hundreds of years after that. Clearly, though, what the rabbi intended was to encourage people to set a good example in the worst of circumstances.  Spark the flame that lights the candle in the darkness.
 
At first glance, this brief inspirational message could apply to almost anything.  I can conjure it whispered by a dying prisoner of war to a fellow prisoner with a tear-stained face. I can visualize it bellowed by the football coach in the locker room as his underdog team faces defeat in the championship game. I can hear it proclaimed in stentorian tones by a candidate for public office in response to a reporter asking, “What would you say to the American people at this moment in history?”  But I like best imagining the senior Mr. Raskin sharing it with his son as one of those life lessons parents try to instill in their kids. To me, it sounds better that way, even than beloved Rabbi Hillel making a pronouncement to his rows of students in an ancient study hall.
 
It is great advice, and it is a great life lesson. But more importantly, it is a window into the way parents can and should influence their kids. And not only their own kids.
 
Many years ago, when I was the rabbi of a very small congregation, we took it on ourselves to hold an evening service every weeknight. We needed a quorum of ten adults, no small feat for a synagogue with a membership of one hundred households, most of which were a long drive from the ten-minute service. Among the regular phone calls I would make when we were two people short was to Harvey because he would bring his son Ian with him.
 
At the end of the service, I would offer my appreciation to the gathering with the simple phrase “tizku l’mitzvot,” meaning “may you have the privilege to perform more acts of sacred good deeds.”  (It works better in Hebrew!)  If I had to guess, I would say Ian heard that phrase five hundred times from his bar mitzvah to his high school graduation.
 
One night, Harvey and Ian came to see me so that Ian could tell me what happened on a ski trip with his friends. Without going into details, it became evident to Ian that one of the friends was in distress, possibly life-threatening. Ian decided not to hold the confidence his friend expected and arranged for a life-saving intervention. He was a little shaken by it, but both his father and I assured him he did the right thing. He responded with, “Well, it’s like you say – tizku l’mitzvot.”
 
I know about Marcus Raskin’s lesson to Jamie only because the son credited the father in a book he wrote about his own moment of being the hope in defense of the Constitution. He did not contextualize the instruction; he simply cited it. From his book, it is impossible to know if the senior Raskin said it once or five hundred times, but when he said it, he meant it purposefully. It made enough of an impression to inspire his son to action and integrity.
 
I could say the same thing about Hillel, whose pithy saying turns up as a handful of words in a small collection that is a tiny part of the expansive Talmud. But you don’t have to be a rabbi to inspire. You don’t have to have a child, let alone one who becomes a Constitutional scholar and legislator, to plant a value in fertile soil. And you don’t have to artfully craft a circumstance or motto to make an impression.
 
You just have to be the one who will share a life lesson about the difference a single individual can make in creating a better world.
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​ANOTHER FINE MESS

8/21/2022

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Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Honesty is the best politics.   Arthur Stanley Jefferson
 
The public library in Wilmette, Illinois had a small collection of 8mm films available to borrow. Like every other middle-class family in the 1960s, we had a projector on which to watch the growing collection of home movies that featured silent figures waving at the camera and mouthing unheard witticisms. But when I discovered the treasure trove of classic silent films in the library, I was in heaven. My favorite comedians were Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (still are).
 
I met their work through my father, who was similarly a fan. I have seen just about every movie they made as a team, from “Putting Pants on Phillip” to “Utopia (Atoll K).”  Like many, my favorite was their Oscar®-winning short “The Music Box,” though not for the long sequence of trying to hoist a piano up a long flight of stairs. I still laugh aloud at the scene in which Stan throws a hat out the window and forgets to let go.
 
Laurel and Hardy were among the few silent film stars who did not have to reinvent themselves when talkies came in. Their voices and dialogue fit their characters perfectly. The best of their feature films (IMHO) was “Sons of the Desert.”  In it, at the very end, Stanley delivers one of his famous malapropisms: Honesty is the best politics.
 
In a world in which fungible facts and alternative truths are commonplace, Stan’s observation seems more naïve than funny. These days honesty is terrible politics – it can provoke harassments and threats, exaggeration and condemnation, and ejection from public office. I am not speaking of confession of wrong-doing; I am referring to taking a principled stand based on personal convictions that reflect demonstrable realities.
 
Instead, party loyalty is the best politics. It is my personal bias that the maxim is more true of Republicans than Democrats, but it may be only because I consider myself more Democrat than Republican.  But I think there is evidence for my bias; some Democrats make stuff up and pretend it is true, but there are others who call them out on it.  One Republican, on the other hand, makes stuff up and pretends it is true and dares others to call him out on it at the risk of their political careers.
 
Yet, no one is smart enough to be wrong 100% of the time (as my friend Rabbi Irwin Kula likes to say). The honest truth is that the Republican in question has been right and truthful sometimes, but the more reliable the Democrat, the less likely they are to acknowledge it. They won’t even give him credit for being accidentally wise.  You can’t run a democracy if the only goal of governance is to be in charge.
 
“Sons of the Desert” is misogynistic, violent, absurd, and abusive (to be honest) and, to my mind, hysterically funny.  The boys create a preposterous lie to sneak away from their wives and attend a fraternal convention in Chicago by pretending to go to Hawaii for Ollie’s nerves. When the ship they allegedly were to return on was lost at sea, Stan explains how they made it back to Los Angeles: We ship-hiked! Caught in their deceit, Ollie digs in, but Stan breaks down and tells his wife the truth. She rewards him with forgiveness, while Ollie’s wife breaks every plate in the house over his head (see my earlier description of the movie). In the end, Stan assures his friend, “Honesty is the best politics.”
 
It is more than a little pollyannish to believe that telling the truth cures all ills. At the very least, telling the truth avoids creating more ills. In politics, people will continue to disagree, but better to debate the issues than the truth. The is choice pretty clear in this trifle of a movie from 1932 – stick to your lie and provoke chaos and disaster, or swallow hard, cry a little and tell the truth, because honesty is the best politics.
 
It's another fine mess you won’t get into.
 
(PS – I know that what Stan actually says is “Honesty was the best politics,” but…context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaTJcN4gYnU)

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​BETWEEN

8/14/2022

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Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
[T]he most basic fact of aesthetic experience [is] the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.    Ernst Gombrich
 
A lot of years ago, my wife gave me a copy of Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman.  I was captivated by the vignettes that Lightman imagined were dreamt by Einstein as he tried to understand the nature of time. If you haven’t read it, go out and get a copy, but I offer two cautions.
 
The first is, don’t read it quickly. Like another of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, the short length of the chapters seduces you into reading just one more, just one more, just one more before you put the book down. Force yourself. There is so much to think about in each description of time that you will regret it if you do not pause sufficiently to reflect.
 
The second is, when you finish, you will want to read everything else Alan Lightman has written. And you should do that, too.
 
Lightman is a physicist and a writer who held appointments in both on the faculty of M.I.T. When my daughter had the opportunity to study engineering in the graduate school there, I asked her as a favor to meet Alan Lightman and tell him what a fan boy I was. He welcomed her into his home and signed a lot of books for me.
 
He is an atheist, but both spiritually and faithfully unparalleled among the many atheists I know. His poetic abilities to describe our physical universe are exquisite. Many is the time I have sighed with delight as I read his explanation of some aspect of physics I might otherwise never have approached.
 
And that brings me to the quotation from Ernst Gombrich. I never heard of the guy until he was quoted in an essay in Probable Impossibilities called “In Defense of Disorder.”  Gombrich is an art historian who believes that the space between the human being’s penchant for order and the experience of some level of chaos in the world is where we find delight. Alan Lightman uses the insight to illustrate the paradox of a universe that follows rigid rules of physics yet seems to be hurtling into entropy. (We have only a few hundred billion years left before things begin to get really bad.)
 
It is in that gap between order and disorder that we live our lives, both on a macro level and a micro level. Our expectation that everything is predictable – sunrise, gravity, the second law of thermodynamics, Oreos – is matched by our desire to be surprised by the unpredictable – falling in love, the colors of a sunset, roller coasters, Pop Rocks. I don’t know that Gombrich (who had very defined tastes) would have enjoyed Vonnegut, but one of the delightful details in his novel Slapstick is the discover that gravity is variable. It is a silly detail, but worth a giggle every time it appears.
 
I find it wonderful that Gombrich reminded us that two aspects of our individual lives that generally provoke complaints – boredom and confusion – are existential constants that allow for meaningful life in between. And I find it more wonderful still that Lightman found that observation to help him explain the place we occupy in the universe, bounding and rebounding between order and entropy, structure and chaos, reliability and complete unpredictability.
 
Unlike Alan Lichtman, but like Neil Diamond, the Monkees and Smash Mouth, I’m a believer. A place has been carved out between two contradictory constants that are ultimate truths to make room for us. Each of us in our own way can reach to both places at once and become the conduit from one to the other and back again. That’s where I find my faith.  That’s where I find my delight. 

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SPECIAL EDITION -- SEVENTY

8/7/2022

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Wisdom Wherever You Find It

Celebrate your birthday by counting your blessings and finding a tzedakah (charity) to match each one. Jack Riemer (paraphrase)

Rabbi Jack Riemer is an inexhaustible fountain of wisdom. Among other things, his sermon-writing is legendary. Another rabbi once said to me he was tempted to steal Rabbi Riemer’s trash just to get the sermon drafts he threw away. Of course, it’s not necessary – he is as generous as he is prolific.

A long time ago, he made the suggestion I cited, and I jotted it down in notes I kept of smart things people have said.  I rediscovered the idea when I was going through some old files while I was trying to decide how to celebrate my big birthday on August 10. Inspired by this notion, I sat down to make a list of seventy charitable organizations that had been a blessing to me. It was not hard to do, though I am sure I left some out.

I then wrote a note to each one, enclosed a check for a very modest $18, and sent them off to arrive on or about my seventieth birthday.

Just to avoid insult to anyone, each of the recipients was a blessing to me personally at one or many points in my life. There are a lot of synagogues, most of which are nowhere near where I live today. There are plenty of groups that have morphed into something completely different than when I was connected to them. And in one case at least, my blessing is not available to others; Loretto Hospital no longer has a maternity department. You can’t get born there anymore.

My choice of how to commemorate my milestone is not meant to criticize those who encourage others to donate to a chosen cause.  Even if social media companies get a few pennies from every such donation, there is value added from the generosity of spirit that motivates the suggestion and the response. 

The point of sharing this with you is not to make myself look good. The small donation means very little to any recipient, and I am just fortunate to have the resources to share with others in this way. It is not even to lift up Rabbi Riemer, though he unquestionably deserves it. Instead, it is to encourage you to take stock of your own blessings and find a way to acknowledge them with a note, a call, a gift, even a prayer of gratitude. The satisfaction of counting your blessings, cliché though it seems, can see you through hard times and elevate the good ones. In my case, acknowledging my age and recognizing that I have arrived at it qualify as both.
​
Happy birthday to me.

Adat Ari El
Agudas Achim Congregation of Northern VA
American Civil Liberties Union
American Jewish Congress
American Jewish University
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State
Anti-Defamation League
Bend the Arc
Beth Ahabah
Beth El Hebrew Congregation
Beth Hillel B'nai Emunah
B'nai Israel Congregation
Cantors Assembly
Charles E Smith Jewish Day School
CLAL / Rabbis Without Borders
Clergy Leadership Incubator
Columbia University
Commonwealth Baptist
Cubs Charities
Danny Siegel  c/o The Good People Fund
El-Hibri Foundation
Faith and Politics Institute
Friday Morning Music Club
Gesher Jewish Day School
Good Faith Media
Hebrew University (AFHU)
Hillel
Interfaith Alliance
IsraAid
Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia
Jewish Funeral Directors Assn.
Jewish Insider
Jewish Publication Society
Jewish Theological Seminary/Rabbinic Training Institute
JTA
Loretto Hospital Foundation
Mah Tovu
Masorti Foundation
MIT
Moriah Congregation
National Cathedral
National Council of Jewish Women
NCCJ
New Trier Scholarship Fund
Northwestern University
Pozez JCC
Rabbinical Assembly
Ramah
Religious Action Center
Schechter Institute
Scholarship Fund of Alexandria
Sefaria
Shoulder to Shoulder
Sutton Place Synagogue
Taam Yisrael
Temple Beth-El
Temple Micah
Temple Ramat Zion
Temple Rodef Shalom
The Forward Association
The George Washington University
Trinity UMC
UCSJ
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism/USY
University of Connecticut (UConn Foundation)
University of Virginia
Virginia Theological Seminary
Weinstein JCC Richmond VA
Westminster Presbyterian Church
World Central Kitchen

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    Author

    Jack Moline is a rabbi, non-profit exec, and social commentator.  

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  • Weekly Column
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  • THE SIXTY FUND
  • SOMETHING SPECIAL
  • Wisdom Wherever You Find It