Friendly readers, after almost fifty installments of this project, I am interrupting weekly musings on “Wisdom Wherever You Find It.”  Here is why.

Though I cannot be exact, I know that the “open rate” on these columns has decreased significantly.  If you are one of those people who reads my writing religiously (thank you both), you may disagree, but trust me – I am not wrong.

I am also contending with major transitions in my life, professionally and personally, and my ability to focus on innovative messages has dwindled.  These changes are all for the good, thanks for your concern, but as you likely know, all change is difficult.

I began this blog in 2015 determined to spend some time reflecting on the weekly Torah portion presented in synagogues around the world.  I no longer had the opportunity to learn with others in a satisfying way, so I spent some time each week thinking about what I would like to hear.  Within a year, I started my project of chapter-by-chapter commentary on a single verse, and when I reached the end after more than five years, I turned to wisdom that was not from the Torah.  If you want to review, you will find more than 325 entries archived on www.jackmoline.com under “Weekly Column,” or let me know to subscribe you to my Google group, “Aliba D’Rav” (a slight Talmudic pun meaning “according to a rabbi.”)

Maybe I will be back at this in a few weeks, maybe during the summer or maybe when autumn leaves start to fall.  By then, an email from me will have become unexpected again, and you will wonder if maybe you should give it three minutes.

PLEASE do not write to tell me I am making a mistake.  I am not fishing for affirmation or taking my ball and stomping off.  Likewise, I am not looking for compliments; I have received many of those, and I thank you.  If you want to tell me I am making the right decision…well, why were you reading these in the first place?

Some of these columns will continue to appear in other places, including www.goodfaithmedia.org, which I will note on my Facebook page.  Occasionally, you will hear something from me when I am inspired or peeved. 
​
Meanwhile, thank you for your attention for almost six years.  See you soon!

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
You have a choice whenever you encounter something from another tradition.  You can look for the differences, or you can find the resonances. I advise you to find the resonances.    Sadruddin Patel 
 
Here is a piece of advice that a young Eboo Patel received from his father.  It is among the things that propelled him down an extraordinary journey among people of many faiths and none at all. Sadruddin was a Shia Muslim, a Gujarati from the Indian subcontinent.  (Gandhi, a Hindu, was likewise Gujarati.)  Eboo was raised in a multicultural community outside of Chicago, and not always happily.
 
I think about this piece of advice a lot.  It strikes me as one of the more effective antidotes to the poison we have ingested as a society in which every difference is weaponized for local gain. There is simply a stunning amount of umbrage that is provoked by the plain notion that someone may have a distinct point of view from your own.  And while I might find some level of understanding if the subject were the now-infamous “deeply held personal convictions,” the fact is friendships and families have been torn apart over the gentlest exercises of constitutional rights.
 
The senior Patel’s instruction was about religious diversity, and I will stick with it for a moment before I come back to its larger implications.  I have written before about my own reluctance in my younger days to consider favorably the beliefs and practices of others.  I looked for the differences.  I will go so far to admit I took offense at the affirmations of others that differed from my own.  I think I was probably pleasant enough about it outwardly, but I know my inner commentator was insisting that these poor self-delusional religious folks (including some who were Jews) were somehow missing out.  I have spoken with enough people about faith and tradition in the intervening years to know that many of them felt the same about me.
 
What changed?  Honestly, it began with a conversation I had with a Presbyterian.  I won’t do well explaining how a Presbyterian church works (or, at least, is supposed to work), but the premise is that everyone is taken care of. Like any congregation, the lay leaders deal with budget and bylaws, but there is an entire structure that makes leaders responsible to keep in touch with and address the concerns of every member.  There are formal names and guidelines (which I never committed to memory), and the traditional iteration was pretty much White and male, but the notion struck a chord within me as a rabbi.  Somewhat accidentally, I found a resonance.  And once I was able to adapt that resonance to my own Jewish congregation, I found others from many other traditions.
 
(Let me commend the Sikh practice of hospitality, for example.)
 
The junior Patel used this and other bits of wisdom to become a remarkable leader in interfaith relations.  As his father inspired him, he has inspired others to find resonances in other traditions.
 
But it seems to me this is good advice not only for engaging with practitioners of other faith traditions.  My aforementioned larger implications are about society in general, especially but not just politically.  There are, to be sure, people who are immovable in their convictions.  In other contexts, I have wondered whether they are motivated by conviction or fear, but it does not matter.  Mr. Patel’s model was not addressed to the “other,” but to you.  Independent of campaigns and elections, nominations and appointments, legislation and policy declarations, there is always – always – a resonance for you, however deeply muted.  In any situation, the matter at hand can be most effectively dealt with when both parties’ concerns are addressed.  Will someone be unhappy when they don’t get their way?  Yes.  But they will be less unhappy if the resolution resonates than if they are defeated by mere power.
 
This is not the place for an extended example, but I will mention one: marriage equality.  In less than a generation, the vast majority of the American community turned 180 degrees on the question because advocates presented the matter not as a matter of law but as a matter of love.  Civil rights implications still present challenges to those whose “deeply held personal convictions” define their concerns, but overwhelmingly Americans resonated with the similarly deeply held personal conviction that you love whom you love, not the person you are told to love.
 
For those who, like me, lean hard to the left on social issues, finding the resonances is no less important.  There is always a choice when you encounter some from a different perspective.  Like the senior Mr. Patel, I advise you to find the resonances.
 
By the way, the picture above is not of Sadruddin Patel, but of his son, Eboo.  More resonance.

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
It’s one thing for the minority to speak up.  It’s up to the majority to say they are right.     Bob Roberts, Jr.
 
I think that if I am going to quote a Baptist preacher, I myself ought to begin with the Bible.  In recounting the oppression of the Israelite slaves, the Book of Exodus (2:23-24) notes that when Pharaoh died, the Israelites groaned, which God took note of.  The ancient rabbis looked at that text and wondered what took God so long to notice their groaning.  After all, they had been enslaved to that Pharaoh for many years!
 
The answer they formulated was this: the oppression was so severe, they were not allowed even to groan under their burden. Only when the king died could they cry out under the guise of mourning Pharaoh.
 
I think it is pretty easy for people who are comfortable to imagine that everyone is comfortable.  Intellectually, the person with a roof and a refrigerator and reliable transportation knows that some folks have less, but it is hard to feel another’s pain when you have none of your own.  And when something happens to challenge the good life a person is living, all too often the focus is on the return to comfort rather than considering that others might be suffering as well.
 
Mostly, we live at a time and in a place rife with blessing.  We enjoy opportunities and freedoms never imagined even by the elite of generations past.  But it is undeniable that some of us are much more richly blessed than others.
 
The thing is true not only in a material sense.  I am trying hard to avoid introducing the word “privilege” into this column, but I won’t succeed.  Many, many, many people in the United States enjoy the automatic advantages that come with being White, or financially secure, or well-educated, or all of the above and more.  They are well-documented and indisputable.  Intellectually, people with those advantages (like me, just so you shouldn’t think I am merely pointing fingers) know that life is tougher for lots of others, but it is hard to feel another’s pain when you have none of your own.
 
And here’s where it gets more than a little dicey.  When those seeking a more equitable society speak up, those who are living on the plus-side of equity begin to worry that the (ouch, here it is) privilege they have enjoyed is going to be diminished.  They hear the criticism of their advantages to be a judgment against what they have earned, if not by their own specific efforts, then by the community to which they belong.
 
It is not worth denying it.  When the minority wants what the majority has – material wealth, influence, earning power, representation, security, respect – those who believe any or all of those benefits exist in limited supply can hear only, “they want what I have.”  And deep inside a voice responds, “but it’s mine.”
 
Bob Roberts is a conservative Evangelical pastor who lives outside of Dallas.  And he came to understand that there were a whole lot of people who practiced Islam who were considered less-than by the members of his community even thought they likely never met a Muslim.  You can look up what his personal revelation led to by visiting his website, www.glocal.net.  Bob knows that all the advocacy in the world will not result in justice and equity if those with power – the majority – will not acknowledge legitimate grievance.  As a White man, a Christian, a person who lives a comfortable life, he knows there is enough respect and opportunity to go around. 
 
If those of us with privilege are only just hearing the groans of the oppressed, it is worth wondering not what took them so long to speak, rather what took us so long to hear.  And if what they are saying is anywhere near the cries of the ancient Israelites, then it is up to us to say they are right.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
The best revenge is not to be like that.   Marcus Aurelius
 
It was Henny Youngman who said, “A patient says to a doctor, ‘Doc, it hurts when I go like this.’  And the doctor says, ‘Then don’t go like that.’” I know better than to try to take apart a joke to see why it is funny.  Fortunately, I have Marcus Aurelius to analyze instead.
 
The quotation is actually in Greek, which means that I am working in translation.  In my attempt to be certain was at least close to the original, I looked at a number of sources, each of which put the translator’s own little spin on the original.  Most of them wanted the observation to sound more like Marcus Aurelius and less like Henny Youngman.  But the one that splits the difference (by using archaic English) is this: “The best way of avenging thyself is not to do likewise.”  In other words, if it hurt when someone did that, don’t do that.
 
It may be a little heretical to say I like this version better than the aphorism that emerged from Jewish and Christian sources roughly at the same time in history.  Jesus phrased it positively: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  Hillel phrased it preventatively: That which is distasteful to you, do not unto others.  (Disclaimer: those are also translations.)  But Marcus Aurelius acknowledges what is really part of the human condition. People who have been wronged want revenge.
 
Revenge is a peculiar emotion that has motivated bad history and great literature, but in the end it is imitative.  The person who seeks revenge wants to preserve, even intensify, something hurtful and outrageous.  In dispassionate moments, most people would likely come around to the notion that nothing but private satisfaction is gained by returning wound for wound, and even that satisfaction is short-lived.  But in the throes of injury, especially when it is intentionally inflicted, the victim thinks from the place of pain rather than wisdom.
 
In fact, the more popular translation of this Greek phrase is “The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”  By substituting the offender – presumed to be an enemy – for the offending behavior, the sufferer animates the pain by giving it a body and life force, which can then be eliminated or, for the principled Stoic, spared.  It’s almost as if Henny Youngman’s patient replies, “You’re a quack, and I am going to give you a bad Yelp review.”  Ruins the joke.
 
The notion that the best revenge is to delegitimate the bad behavior is, to my mind, a huge step forward.  I could say that unlike tit-for-tat, taking the high road gives me the sense that I am improving the world around me by modeling a kinder, gentler way to comport myself.  I am not that noble.  Rather, it allows me to feel smug, which is not a particularly admirable character trait, but it keeps me out of jail.  Also, it actually does improve the world.  Revenge may be organic, but it pollutes the human family the way carbon emissions make life more difficult for everyone.
 
Whether you take your cues from Marcus, Jesus, or Hillel (or even Henny), the formula for living a good life is to reduce the suffering in this world, not only for yourself and those you love, and not only for people you never knew, but for the people who did you dirt.  Might that latter group feel they got away with something and try it again?  It’s a possibility, and maybe even a likelihood (if I am feeling a little cynical).  The resolution to a grievance is the pursuit of justice, not revenge.
 
I have plotted revenge many times in my life.  If you don’t hold me to it, I may admit I attempted it once or twice.  But honestly, all it does is renew the original pain, and what I always really wanted was for the pain to go away.  That’s why the best revenge is not to be like that.
 
Take my advice.  Please.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time – or even knew selflessness or courage or literature – but that it is too late for us…In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger…In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies, to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss, or to endure torture.      Annie Dillard
 
Nelson Mandela, Natan Sharansky, Wang Weilin, Ieshia Evans, Annette Goodyear.  The names may or may not be familiar at first glance, but the reasons you should know them most certainly resonate.  Within your lifetime, these individuals made the times we live in heroic by their actions.  They are, in retrospect, remarkable, even exceptional individuals.  In other times and other circumstances, they may have been ordinary and unnoticed.  But, as Annie Dillard says, they were wiped by the finger of the sacred.
 
They are products of our generation – not a pure cohort, certainly not rustic, and positively not an iteration of the human family that can claim to know God personally.  At a moment in the natural course of their lives, each one responded to an opportunity that presented itself and refused to be overwhelmed by it.  It was a choice, not an inevitability.  Some went on to build on that moment and others disappeared into ordinariness.
 
I admit to enjoying the achievements of other people.  I find them inspiring.  It prompted me to create The Sixty Fund, which irregularly awards a nice letter, a home-printed certificate and a small check (really small) to people I notice who display courage, compassion, wisdom, or generosity that might otherwise go unnoticed.  Actually, to say I created it is not 100% accurate; my family gave The Sixty Fund to me as a 60th birthday gift, and it has turned into one of the best things I do. I have the chance to acknowledge people who were wiped by the finger of the sacred.
 
Some of their stories will be told for generations while others will be discarded with the newspapers and expired online links that brought them to attention.  But what is correct is that not a one of them – just like you and me – was born to be a hero.  They were presented with an opportunity and found themselves without a real choice of how to act if they wanted to do the right thing.  Countless others have faced similar chances.  Some rose to the occasion and others responded to different impulses.
 
A debate among rabbis took place many hundred years ago about Noah the ark-builder.  The Bible calls him a righteous man “in his generation.”  Was he righteous only in comparison to the general wickedness of his society, or would he have been considered righteous even among a community of admirable people?  That is, in “his” generation or in “any” generation?
 
The debate is unresolved, but the question is more important than the answer.  In righteous times, Noah’s heroics would have been unnecessary.  He would have been an ordinary man, even if he were among the righteous.  Circumstances even in those allegedly pure and rustic times were what produced heroes who expressed selflessness or courage or literature. Writ large or small, you yourself have been that person when you otherwise had no choice – the comforting arms for a bereaved companion, the rebuke to a bully, the acceptance of responsibility for a hurtful mistake, the profession of love to a lonely friend, the endurance to power through pain – if you wanted to do the right thing.  Your action was biblical, epic, legendary, emulable.  It was not dependent on reportage.
 
So many stories and teachings we call holy attain that status because they are distant and old.  Did the people who lived them recognize their significance as they occurred?  Maybe.  More likely, no matter how close they felt to revelation or inspiration or holiness or achievement, they still fell short of their ancestors who lived in a formerly pure generation and more rustic times.  They believed that the noise of contemporary society drowned out the primal connections to nature and creation that the Elders knew in their bones.  They were as wrong then as we are now. 
 
Our lives attest to the potential for greatness.  Especially in complicated times, simple survival is heroic.  If our forebearers beat a path for freedom across the wilderness on any continent, then we and our descendants are no less the successful pioneers for navigating asphalt and technology.  And if, when presented with a chance to rise even above the extraordinary fact of living every day, we do so by reflex or intent, then we owe it to ourselves and those insecure ancestors to acknowledge and give thanks for having been, in that instant, wiped with the finger of the sacred.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
To the Prophets, a moral infraction was a cosmic outrage.    Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
 
If you made a short list of modern thinkers who have inspired humanity, it would necessarily include Abraham Joshua Heschel.  He lived his life at the intersections of existence – spiritual and practical, heaven and earth, human and divine, particular and universal, momentary and eternal.  He was exquisitely exacting in expressing himself.  His daughter Susanna remembers that he considered a successful day to be one on which he wrote a good sentence.
 
This quotation must have made for a very good day.
 
As with most of what he wrote, reading Heschel too quickly puts you in danger of missing the point.  There is no incidental language in this sentence.  An infraction is often a very minor transgression – in contemporary language it is used to describe illegal parking.  A moral infraction sounds like a mere lapse in judgment, like not returning excess change from a small purchase or perhaps embarrassing someone with a casual remark.  In fact, the person who commits an “infraction” may very well object to the notion that such a powerful word as “moral” is attached to it.  But that is, I believe, Heschel’s point. 
 
The phrase “cosmic outrage” is loaded with power.  If an infraction, moral or otherwise, is something one might excuse or overlook, there is no ignoring the explosive description of indignation writ large.  Here is the intersection of the inconsequential and ultimate.  And Heschel, who sought out those places of connection, invites you into the place where those concerns connect.
 
Please don’t stop there because I do not want to overstate my case.  This formidable assertion has a modifier.  It appears in the introduction to the book that established Heschel as a voice of his generation, The Prophets.  His examination of the Biblical prophets, individually and collectively, opened a window to the unique messages of each one and the ethos of prophecy.  The prophets were not self-anointed orators.  They were messengers, often reluctant, whose sensitivity to the divine presence provoked listeners then and down through the centuries to consider the way every person and every group of people (and especially the Jewish people) might live up to the sacred nature of being created in God’s image.  That’s pretty old-fashioned language, but please remember that the Bible is an ancient collection.
 
It is “to the Prophets” that the moral shortcoming was the source of divine anger.  The prophets were our instructors, not necessarily our role models.  To live at the intersection of human fallacy and divine rectitude, a person needs to know both.  The first qualification is widely accessible.  The latter is in scarce supply, and not something that any person can merely claim. Heschel and other believers in the Bible attribute the knowledge of God’s will to God’s will, not to human deduction.  Prophetic teaching, which is not predictive (the modern sense of the word) rather instructive, is meant to make us sensitive to what Heschel called the “divine pathos.” 
 
The general lesson that Heschel describes is that our misconduct breaks God’s heart. Reading the Prophets with that notion in mind (in fact, reading all of the Bible with that in mind) casts the God of the Hebrew Bible in a much more sympathetic light than ancient and modern skeptics accusingly shine on the “Old Testament.”  (An aside: “old” sounds much less pejorative to me now that I am old.)
 
But here is the other lesson of Heschel’s teaching.  Modern activists who lay claim to the insight of the Prophets almost always overstep their bounds.  Those who confuse personal outrage with cosmic outrage commit their own moral infraction. Actions that purposely cause suffering to others, justified by the would-be prophets, cause divine heartbreak, not approbation.
 
If Heschel could take great satisfaction in one carefully crafted sentence, we, his students, should be at least that deliberate in applying his lessons.
 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
May your homes not become your graves.   High Holy Day prayerbook
 
In the liturgy for the afternoon of Yom Kippur is a recollection of the long-ago service of atonement in the Holy Temple.  At the end of the description of the sacrificial rituals is a tiny addition.  The High Priest says to the pilgrims who have gathered from the Sharon Valley on the coastal plain, “May your homes not become your graves.”
 
That section of the Holy Land is subject to earthquakes, and when they occurred the stone structures in which people lived could collapse without notice.  In the liturgy, the prayer is just that brief, but even thousands of years later, thousands of miles away, hundreds of thousands of days since the last catastrophic earthquake, I am always captured by the poignancy of what feels like a spiritual afterthought.
 
Of late, the prayer feels more immediate. The rash of violent natural occurrences that have produced unusual and ferocious tornados, volcanos and tsunamis, deluges, fires, and earthquakes each produces photos of the aftermath in which our homes have become our graves.  There is barely a week that goes by in which multiple people do not lose their lives in collapse, explosion, fire, or asphyxiation in private or public housing, making our homes become our graves.  The global reach of daily news brings constant shock over the homicides and suicides – most often by gunshot – of entire families, turning our homes into our graves.  There is always an element of complicity in these tragedies by human hands – the ones that hold the firearms, the ones that do not maintain the housing, the ones have contributed to climate change.
 
The prayer has a much larger metaphoric resonance as well.  Eastern Europe was home to millions and millions of Jews (and other minorities) in the early 20th Century.  Our homes became our graves.
 
My goal is not to depress you, though I have probably succeeded, nonetheless.  My goal is to illustrate how easily the specter of death can overwhelm the heart that needs to grieve and remember other hearts.
 
Late last year, I lost a dear, dear lifetime friend who succumbed to a phalanx of health challenges that finally dominated a heretofore indominable spirit.  As her family grieved, death paid another visit to her mother who was, no doubt, made more fragile by the death of her beloved child.  Unbelievably, during the funeral for the mother, her mother-in-law died.  The husband, my soul-friend, was bereaved three times in two months.  No place he could lay his head was untouched by death. 
 
I am no longer the rabbi of a congregation.  I like to say I am out of the retail end of the business, but old reflexes can come back pretty quickly. I was distressed for the family and for myself (almost a part of the family) that the circumstances had conspired to replace grief for each loved one with a sort of death-fatigue.  Compassion for the survivors is important after any loss, but it is no less important than the respect that the distinct memories of the deceased demand.  Three genuinely remarkable women had died so close to each other, and our natural inclination was to push against death, not to grieve the uniqueness of each.
 
That’s the danger of that painful prayer: may your homes not become your graves.  Of course we pray for that.  Of course it is appropriate.  Of course we do not want to conflate the place we live with the place we die.
 
But the death of another is not our own death.  It does not matter the cause – the Holocaust, the covid virus, the hurricane, the assault weapons.  The life that death has claimed deserves our grief in a way that does not allow our fear of death itself to claim that life a second time.  Death will successfully stalk each one of us, God willing for 120 years.  And when we die, as we must, we deserved to be mourned uniquely, whatever form that takes.
 
May our homes not become our graves.  May death claim those we love only once.

​ONE-WAY STREET
 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t place their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.              Rep. Jamie Raskin
 
In most cities, some streets are two-way and some are one-way.  Lots of things in life are that way, too.  Your breath flows in and out of the same tubes in your body, but you want each corpuscle to follow all the others in the vessels that carry blood to and from your heart.  A movie or book can move back and forth in time, but a working clock moves in only one direction.  And while memory can, in some cases, shift and change, there remain some things you just can’t unsee.
 
A friend of mine is the grandson of a renown rabbi.  The rabbi once shared his pulpit with a cantor whose musical abilities were remarkable, but who valued his renditions of the prayers over their accuracy.  My friend told me of the time the cantor, in embellishing a phrase from a central moment in the service, sang “David ben Yishai, Yishai ben David.”  Musically it was lovely.  But what he sang was “David son of Jesse, Jesse son of David.”  Wrong way down a one-way street.
 
I will acknowledge that things are not always as clear-cut in imagining the direction that things flow – think chicken and egg.  But it is not the case with the disease of historical revisionism that has afflicted some Christians in the United States.  It has variations and multiple names – Christian nationalism, Biblical patriotism, “corrections” to the accepted knowledge about our founders – but it is part and parcel of the attempt to convince water to flow uphill.  No amount of conviction or faith can legitimate the notion that our founders looked into the Bible to construct the Declaration of Independence and/or the Constitution.
 
Rep. Raskin, who is a scholar of the Constitution and, though Jewish in his identity, secular in his outlook, has correctly identified the one-way street every public official travels.  To be accurate, one need not place a hand on the Bible to swear to uphold the Constitution.  I am guessing Rep. Raskin did not.  The symbolism of the Bible – or the Qur’an, or the Baghavad Gita, or the Kitáb-i-Aqdas -- is to impress on the incoming president, mayor, zoning commissioner, or secretary of state that the oath of performance that they are about to proclaim must be as authoritative in public life as heretofore Scripture has been in their private life.  Indeed, our collective agreement that raising a right hand during the swearing of an oath is as effective as adding a Bible under the left or “so help me God” to the declaration further illustrates that the integrity of any office relies on the commitment to the ultimate authority of the Constitution to determine our laws and values.
 
To borrow a notion, this truth ought to be self-evident.  Unfortunately, it is not. By plucking a phrase selectively from the beginning of the First Amendment that guarantees freedom of conscience (“the free exercise” of religion) and ignoring the immediately preceding phrase that prohibits “an establishment of religion,” a segment of the Christian population concludes that if they believe deeply enough in the authority of the Bible in civil society, the Constitution protects and endorses their convictions.
 
That may be a harmless self-delusion in private, but when an individual – or more dangerously, a group of individuals – attempts to act on that delusion, the result can call into question the legitimacy of the democratic process and the rule of law.  When legislatures and courts, after hearing arguments from all sides (including those grounded in faith) reach a conclusion, it is binding on all citizens, not just on those without an objection based in religious belief.  The rights guaranteed by our Constitution include equal treatment under the law.
 
By the same token, a citizen may choose not to take advantage of a legally available opportunity.  No one is obligated to read everything protected by the right to free expression.  No one is obligated to petition the government for redress of grievances.  No one is obligated to terminate a pregnancy.  Yet, neither is anyone permitted to deny another citizen their own exercise of those legally protected rights.
 
I am hoping that all of these matters are obvious, certainly for private citizens and most especially for those in public service, and even more so for legislators and judges.  Whatever personal devotions lead an individual to public service, they are protected by the Constitution.  But it is a one-way street, like David son of Jesse.
 
In the end, whatever the correct word for “sacred” might be in civil society, the Constitution is it.  No amount of indignation, no level of volume and no uncompromising affirmation can change that.  I would swear to it.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
When you hate other people, you are, in essence, hating yourself…We can choose to hate the other or we can choose to love the other.           Kelvin Pierce
 
A few years ago, my friend Peter Maer called me with a request.  Peter had a very successful career as a journalist for CBS Radio, and he knows an important story when he encounters it.  He had gotten to know the guy he hired to do some work on his house in Northern Virginia.  As they talked, he discovered that Kelvin Pierce was the son of William Pierce who was, at one time, the most dangerous white supremacist in America.  Under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald, William wrote the book The Turner Diaries about a white supremacist overthrow of the government.  It was the blueprint for both the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  (Especially chilling: the episode termed “the day of the rope” on which Jews, Blacks, and government officials were hanged in public.)
 
Kelvin was shaken by the events in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 and decided it was time to tell his story.  Peter brought him to me hoping I could help him to do so.  As it turns out, he did not need my meager assistance.  His book, Sins of My Father, recounts in unembellished terms the hateful trajectory of the man who became the successor to George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.  Kelvin offered his personal testimony to the Virginia Commission on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  And he continues to speak and write about his terrifying childhood.
 
Perhaps you would consider it sufficient if he simply blew the lid off of the foundations of this racist hate network.  Certainly, we are educated and shocked by the misconduct of all sorts of people practicing evil on their fellow human beings – abusers, hatemongers, predators, and others.  The ones who bear witness certainly feel a catharsis in the telling and a vindication in the resulting support.  The listeners and readers certain feel more sensitized and educated as a result.
 
And perhaps you would be supportive if Kelvin Pierce embarked on his own national tour, using his father’s notoriety to amplify his repudiation of the repugnant philosophy William promoted.
 
But that just doesn’t fit the man Kelvin has become.  He kept his head down for a lot of years, raising two adopted daughters from the Republic of Georgia and establishing a construction business (Commonwealth Home Design) that brought him into friendship with Peter – a Jew who represents just about everything his father hated.  Softspoken and naturally introverted, Kelvin has put considerable energy into overcoming his fear of being identified with his father’s legacy.  It was Charlottesville that impelled him to make a choice to embrace the good man he had become and carry a message aimed at mitigating the damage his father caused.
 
It seems especially appropriate to me that Kelvin Pierce is a builder by trade.  Each Saturday night, when Jews conclude Shabbat and begin the work week ahead, we recite a verse from Psalm 90: May the favor of Adonai, our God be upon us; may the work of our hands be established for us; may the work of our hands be established.  Kelvin is not Jewish, but he epitomizes this verse, and not only in his commercial life.
 
As I noted, he is the father of two daughters adopted from Georgia.  He and his wife consider them the great blessings of their lives, and so have established a foundation to assist the homes for orphaned and abandoned children in Georgia.  The story of his work there – as effective as it has been modestly pursued – is the subject of a brief documentary from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty called “Healing Hate.”  (If the link doesn’t work, search for it on YouTube; it is worth your time.)
 
It is not possible for one individual, however motivated, to undo the suffering and misery sown by another during the course of a lifetime.  And for the child of such a perpetrator who has made the difficult choice to continue the family name, there is a particular frustration in witnessing the poisonous fruit of the family tree consumed to such ugly effect.
 
But it is possible to live a redemptive life in which love, compassion and reconciliation flourish at home, throughout the land, and even across the sea.  If you are motivated by hate, whether of others or of yourself, redemption is that much more difficult.  But when you discover the transformative power of love, making that choice can redeem entire worlds.
 
Learn more about Kelvin Pierce’s foundation at https://divinechildfoundation.org/.
 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs.  But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth…All labor has worth.         Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman during the middle of the last century.  He grew up in a hardscrabble existence, orphaned, itinerant, and impoverished.  Early in his life he recovered somewhat unexpectedly from an injury that took most of his vision, and to protect the return of his eyesight, he read.  A lot.  And then he began to write.  Eventually, as a brief biography notes, “he left the docks in 1964, and shortly after became an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley.”
 
Longshoremen, of course, are the guys who unload cargo from ships at the docks.  These days, they are the heroes who are working to overcome the bottleneck in the supply chain that is part of our economic upheaval during the pandemic.  Most people remember Hoffer for his philosophical writings, including his seminal work, The True Believer.  But his career before and after UCB was just as honorable.  All labor has worth.
 
A generation ago, I had an argument with a friend who worked in the White House persuading Congress to reconfigure public assistance.  The proposal was to enhance the incentives for recipients to work. I charged in with my belief that it was just a way to save money on welfare expenditures.  My friend insisted otherwise.  He made the point that in our society, there was dignity in productivity.  People would be lifted up, by others and by themselves, if they were working.  Society had a responsibility not only to support them, but to encourage them.  All labor has worth.
 
Of course, the notion has been abused, as most good ideas can be.  The gates to Auschwitz celebrated the liberating power of physical work.  The Khmer Rouge consider anyone who worked with their mind instead of their hands to be parasitic. The missing ingredient was serving humanity, all of humanity.
 
But in these last years of quarantine and isolation, we have come to understand the value of the efforts of people we have belatedly termed “essential workers.”  Delivery people, trash collectors, shelf stockers, truck drivers, longshoremen – these are the people who, at some personal peril, have made it possible for so many of us to adjust to the current reality.  While doctors, lawyers, academics, artists, and clergy, to name a few, remain celebrated for their accomplishments and devotion, the rediscovery of what was not so long ago the consensus about the dignity of workers is more than nostalgia.  It is affirmation of a truth.  All labor has worth.
 
King’s words were spoken shortly before he was assassinated.  While most people associate his last speeches with the lofty sentiments about the Promised Land – “I may not get there with you” – because they seemed tragically prophetic, too often we overlook that they were spoken on behalf of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. More than fifty years before we returned the designation “essential workers,” this hero of human dignity and civil rights was reminding the men who were often used as cautionary examples for affluent families that their job had dignity.  All labor has worth.
 
With understandable impatience, we are hearing from rights activists that they are tired of hearing people merely echo Dr. King’s words.  It is long past time for action, they insist.  Part of that effort is the emphasis on securing voting rights for all citizens, demolishing the obstacles historical and recent that disadvantage segments of the population when they try to exercise the franchise.
 
But that’s not the only kind of action we can take.  Every one of us can treat the workers we know better – you never want to be the worst part of someone else’s job, as Rabbi Eric Solomon says.  For all of the controversy, labor unions remain the most effect means of ensuring collective rights for workers; they should be held to account, but never opposed.  An honest week’s work should result in an honest week’s pay; it should take only one full-time job to support a family.  And until that’s the standard in the land, that little extra self-taxation we call a tip should be considered a moral obligation.
 
Not every longshoreman can be a philosopher.  And not every philosopher can be a longshoreman.  But whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth. All labor has worth.