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.

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.  Erma Bombeck
 
I love my kids to pieces. I know their names and their birthdays, but I will admit that as I get farther away from the original event, when I have to call up their ages at the drop of a hat, I hope the hat dropped off the top of a very tall building.
 
When I was a congregational rabbi, I had a small sub-specialty in working with deaf students who wished to convert to Judaism. They were all very patient as I did not know more than a smattering of sign language. I knew nowhere near enough to communicate the specialized vocabulary about practice and faith. Occasionally I would have the luxury of an interpreter if there was someone in the student’s family or circle who would join us, but hiring someone was inordinately expensive, especially for the young people who were my partners in learning. We relied on a lot of writing and their lip-reading skills.
 
One student was a kind and gentle man who could not grasp the concept of mitzvah (divine commandment) no matter how I tried to express it. He had it stuck in his head that the obligations of Jewish law were punitive and heavy, concerned that if he took them on and could not fulfill every one of them, he would be entering some sort of spiritual purgatory. Eventually, this naturally calm and sweet man got furious with me and demanded to know how I managed to live with the constant expectation that I would do the right thing in God’s eyes.
 
As I explained to him how much the structure and meaning of fulfilling each mitzvah enriched my life and added a sense of purpose even to mundane actions, he began to relax. And when I told him I was less concerned about where I fell short than where I succeeded, the light of comprehension washed over him. His hands flew into expressive motion, and he voiced these words: happy burden.
 
Honestly, I had never heard a better explanation of the notion of mitzvah, and certainly not one so succinct. In fact, I have broadened his definition to include more than the specifics of religious observance. I think “happy burden” is a pretty good understanding of what it means to raise children.
 
I will acknowledge that when I was in the middle of that happy burden, I frequently felt more of the burden and less of the happy. I remember many Saturday afternoons, the time when my wife and I each desperately needed our shabbat naps, digging around for the strength and energy to keep my eyes open and my attention focused before she awoke. Each of our kids presented challenges to their parents by having the audacity to have complex feelings and an inadequate vocabulary to express them, especially in those pre-verbal years. And even today, they insist on making their own decisions, sometimes without consulting or even first informing us. The nerve.
 
But I have never been happier than when I bore that burden. Even those times when my heart broke for them or with them, the mitzvah of raising kids (and I am not making that up – you can look it up) is as energizing as it is exhausting, as thrilling as it is overwhelming. Sometimes the combination of those things makes it difficult to know their names and how old they are, at least without a hint.
 
On a smaller level, upholding each mitzvah is the same way – exhausting and energizing, especially if you are expected to remember that what you are doing is a sacred act, intimately connected with a tradition millennia-long and divinely connected. It’s a happy burden.
 
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to call one of my kids to ask how old another one is….

​Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.  Mahatma Gandhi
 
When I was a kid, I developed an aversion to fasting. For me, the worst hours of being Jewish were the concluding hours of Yom Kippur when the last recitations of a year’s-worth of sins crawled like rush hour traffic on the Edens Expressway, and my stomach was furious and took it out on me with a walloping headache. Fasting was neither spiritual nor devotional. If I was going to be redeemed, it was going to be with carbohydrates.
 
I am much more conscious of the world around me now, and so I understand that my voluntary fast was a matter of privilege and personal choice. Gandhi was talking about the people described by Isaiah in the prophetic reading from the morning of Yom Kippur: those who know hunger, nakedness, and homelessness intimately and constantly. But that lesson was easily forgotten for the price of a bagel.
 
Gandhi was not wrong, but he was incomplete. His formulation of this theological claim was designed to call attention to the plight of the poorest of his people. If he were an oncologist, he might have said that there are people so sick that God cannot appear except as a cure. If he were an educator, he might have said that there are people so desperate to learn that God cannot appear except as a teacher. For the desperate and despairing, before they can rise above their suffering and believe, they must be given hope – the lonely, a lover; the freezing, a blanket; the lost, a map.
 
Believing in God has always been hard for those who suffer. Faith traditions have diverse ways to deal with the hard part, and to my disappointment the solution seems to be most often to blame the victim. Either the skeptic is not trying hard enough or continues to put distance between themself and the Divine (by another name: sin). The person committed to non-belief argues that if God is good and loving, why does anyone have to prove fidelity before benefiting from that goodness and love.
 
I cannot make the case for belief in God in less than 750 words, especially since I have already used more than half of them. But I will say this much: though it took me a long time, I eventually gave up on asking the question “what’s in it for me?” It doesn’t matter what kind of hunger overwhelms me, momentarily or continuously. If my belief is dependent on benefiting from a higher being, natural or supernatural, my faith is doomed to dissolve. And if I found comfort and meaning in the way my personal distress was assuaged, then I have a peculiar (I’d even say pathological) interest in maintaining that distress so as not to lose my connection to the divine.
 
It seems to me that faith is a decision influenced by many factors. It is choice that is no more dependent on logic than on illogic, no more on benefit than on need. When the question of God’s existence and presence is answered before it is asked, then the answer is unreliable.
 
Maybe you consider these things to be peculiar coming from a rabbi, especially one who professes belief.  It raises all sorts of issues about revelation, scripture, and, most of all, religion. Our collective and individual attachment to those expressions of the divine are extremely important, but, in the end, not definitive. My desperation for a loaf of bread is no more relevant than my need for love, wisdom, or justice. Or, for that matter, reassurance about the eternal disposition of my soul.
 
I know a guy whose story of faith begins with something remarkably insignificant. Let’s say it involved a terrifying noise during severe weather (not the truth, but it will do). Unaccustomed to prayer, this person nonetheless petitioned the God in whom they claimed not to believe to be a protection from whatever was causing that noise. The sound stopped. That person became immediately devout.
 
I am skeptical of that experience. But over the years, I have seen how that decision to believe has influenced the individual. They have lived into their faith in the best conceivable way. (It is not my way, as it happens, but to stretch the analogy, that’s like arguing that if the hungry person got a loaf of bread, if it wasn’t pumpernickel it didn’t count.)
 
I seek no gain in converting non-believers. The choice of faith informs the way I live that stands in contrast to what kind of person I would be if I did not believe. It tells me that if Gandhi is correct, if I am true to my faith, then somehow I must be that loaf, not to persuade the hungry person to a place of belief, rather to affirm my own.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There is a predatory nature to aging.    Marc Fitzerman
 
I am fortunate to have friends of all ages. The ones who are younger than I am (an increasing percentage at this point in my life!) seem to fret as they approach “significant” birthdays. I am happy to report that my own experience has been that every time of life has been better than those past. It’s not to say that I can run as fast, drink caffeine in the same quantities, or stay up as late as I used to, but the benefits of being older have (so far) outweighed the deficits of what falls away.
 
I have written before about living longer than parents and grandparents. I have quite a way to go to outlive my mother (who made it almost to 93), but I am well past two grandparents who died in their fifties. At this point, I have nothing to prove in my life, so I can live into my values first and address my needs second – a very pleasant reversal.
 
But I cannot deny what my friend and colleague Rabbi Marc Fitzerman says: there is a predatory nature to aging. I feel like I am being stalked. And that’s not (only) paranoia speaking. Old age is out to get me.
 
Of course, it always has been. We are born to die, yet all but a few of us (philosophers, health care providers or the chronically morose) mostly push away the consciousness of it. As younger people we believe ourselves invincible, as young adults we see a perpetual vista, in middle age we discern a horizon. But individually and collectively, there comes a moment when we realize that the faint shadow on the margins of our sunny day has come into focus, wearing a hooded robe and carrying a scythe. And once seen, it cannot be unseen.
 
I pause for a moment in the midst of this cynical observation to note that death visits plenty of people much earlier than that, unfortunately. Too many younger people succumb to disease, violence or tragedy, and the people who love them are injured by that shadow with a perpetual ache that cannot be relieved. They all wish they could go back to constructive denial.
 
But collectively we understand that as our eyes grow dim, our hearing fades, our feet are no longer fleet, the one thing that we seem to be more acutely conscious of is the sign we dismissed when some disheveled guy waving it on the street was mistaken for a religious kook: The End Is Near. Or, at least, nearer.
 
At this point, all I can say is, “Oh.” I look back and recognize how blessed I have been (or, if you prefer, lucky) that I have escaped almost all of the ways the quality and length of my life might have been frustrated.  Two of my best friends from high school died young – one before forty and the other in his fifties. One of the best people I ever knew saw his life fall away in pieces before he was robbed of the consciousness to recognize it. And not just others; I see the mistakes and bad judgments that have derailed the respect for and success of people who mostly don’t deserve to be crushed, called out by people no more righteous or accomplished than they are, and I know I dodged a similar fate. I work hard to understand that I am a random beneficiary of this late-life blessing.
 
I am a long way from welcoming the end of my run, but I am past being sanguine about it. When Marc Fitzerman offered his observation, I am fairly sure he was talking about “aging” as being “getting old,” but there is a predatory nature to aging no matter your age. It’s on public display in child actors, 35-year-old athletes, corporation board members, and the success of pharmacological and technological ways we try to restore our pursuit of beauty and virility.
 
I don’t consider myself to be a particularly insightful example of human being. I know what seems to work for me. Since I retired, I make a point of smiling every morning before I get out of bed. It is an expression of gratitude. My thankfulness mostly does not last all day, but at least I begin on the right foot. Old age may be out to get me. But it hasn’t gotten me yet.
 

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.    Susan Wolf
 
Is it possible to be too good a person?  As I used to say to my kids all the time, everything is possible, but not everything is likely.  And being “too good” falls into that category.
 
Susan Wolf is a moral philosophy who has a refreshingly realistic attitude.  I admit to being a second-hand consumer of her life’s work (taking me out of the “too good” metric immediately), yet even if I knew only this one pithy saying of hers, I would admire her. For those of us who read the Bible, it comes as no surprise that what distinguishes us as human beings is the value of our imperfections.
 
There is a lot of emphasis in this world about how much the same we are. Except for miniscule differences and infrequent anomalies, every human body is exactly the same in every measurable way. The very presumption of the United States is not only that we are all created equal (I acknowledge, not the same as “the same”), but that we have endowed rights – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness among them.  The three Abrahamic religions insist on definitive sameness.  In Judaism, there is one manner of law for all.  In Christianity, God loves every saint and sinner. In Islam, the Five Pillars are the aspiration of every person, Muslim or not.  Perfect law, perfect love, perfect submission – these idealized teachings give the impression that there is no such thing as “too good.”
 
But all those traditions (and all the others) are filled with stories of the failures of their greatest role models.  Even the Dalai Lama engaged with Keith Raniere! (And please, no diverting arguments about the nature of that engagement.)
 
Those flaws are, in my opinion, worth celebrating. And according to Susan Wolf, they are hard-wired at some level. The animal kingdom has no ethics; the behaviors we attribute to pets and wildlife, whether love, loyalty, suspicion, or evil, are all the reactions of instinctual proclivities to environmental circumstances. Dogs don’t sit around discussing the relative value of trees versus hydrants. We human beings, on the other hand, have systemic ways of addressing appropriate and inappropriate conduct. We share ideas, experiences, and imaginings not only on a one-to-one basis in the present, but across geography, culture, and generations. We speculate. And we aspire.
 
 
And we fail, a lot.  Perhaps it is why every one of those systems of definitive moral sameness has an embedded process for atonement. Being good all the time is virtually impossible. And those who set that standard for themselves (and therefore expect that others can as well) are mostly – sorry, not sorry – insufferable.  There seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand, within ourselves and in other people.
 
I am not advocating for immoral behavior, nor excusing my ethical lapses or yours. I may see the value in some occasional mischief, and I will plead guilty to plenty of it myself (and mostly enjoying it).
 
I am suggesting, however, that the quest for moral perfection in ourselves or others is unnatural and even undesirable.  The big and obvious transgressions in our lives are like obstacles on the highway – avoidable and necessitating a change of course or a full stop.  But so many other things that call for judgment in the moment will get past us.  If they did not, we would never learn to be better than we already are. The moral limits Wolf imagines embedded in our beings are the inherent prompts that, ironically, are necessary to our moral growth.
 
Not so long ago, I reflected on an observation by Ernst Gombrich about delight residing between boredom and confusion.  Likewise, morality exists between external absolutism and internal self-indulgence.  Whew, that’s a lot of pretentious words. I guess what I mean to say is this: give yourself a break. 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the president. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.      David Letterman
 
If nothing else, I know that more people will read this column than most of my other ones because of the title. So this better be good.
 
I have never met a person who does not believe he or she has a good sense of humor. Some of those folks are wrong, but I think laughter is so important in this world that I don’t want to tell them and risk taking away what little fun they can find.
 
I used to travel with a talk about humor in which I acknowledged that any time you had to explain it, it wasn’t funny anymore. That’s because humor relies on three things: surprise, injury, and a sense of superiority. Take away any of those three things and the listener/observer won’t laugh, at least honestly. The whole laughing-with-you/laughing-at-you cliché is just an aspect of those three things, especially the last one.
 
Take this classic Letterman joke. The surprise comes with the last option. The injury is, Lincoln is dead. The sense of superiority is a little more complicated: first, the listener is not dead, and second, the intellectual exercise Dave seems to be creating is punctured for its pretentiousness.  And…presto! Now the joke isn’t funny anymore.
 
That is especially true because, if you think about it for a minute, there is nothing funny about Lincoln being dead. He was, of course, assassinated. It was a tragedy on every level. Making sport of a murder victim is the height of insensitivity because it diminishes the condemnatory nature of the immoral act and seems to make it less shocking and more acceptable. Wow, now the joke REALLY isn’t funny.
 
There is so much more to humor than those three ingredients. Context is perhaps the most important.  This joke works more than 150 years after Lincoln’s death in a way it could not possibly have been received at his funeral.  I cannot even begin to define the elements of context. A comedy show sets the context of laughter – people come intending to laugh. A conference of Lincoln scholars, especially if they take themselves seriously, might not be primed to delight at the demise of their subject. But in between those two extremes? You kind of have to be there.
 
I admire the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. They were faced with the unimaginable challenge of the hit musical comedy, “The Book of Mormon,” taking aim not only at their scripture, not only at their values, not only at their being overwhelmingly White, but at their commitment to abstinence from the coarser aspects of culture (and I do not mean only caffeine). In order to gauge a reaction, some devout Mormon had to deal with a script and lyrics that deployed the f-bomb more frequently than negative political ads during campaign season.  And how did the LDS Church respond? They took out ads in “Playbill” that said, “You’ve seen the play. Now read the book.” That is classy. And funny.
 
Would the world have been a better place if “The Book of Mormon” had celebrated the generosity and family-centric ethos of the church instead of the practices and hierarchical culture most people outside the church find off-putting? In a respect-for-the-First-Amendment’s-free-exercise-clause sense, absolutely. But those of us who were surprised, saw the injuries, and felt superior laughed, setting aside humorless outrage. The musical comedy was tasteless, inappropriate, offensive, disrespectful. And funny.
 
A dour rabbi I once knew once offered this critique of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers:” I don’t have to see it to know I don’t like it. (I replied, “Can I have your tickets?”) Humor is no more a get-out-of-jail-free card than the free speech clause of the First Amendment, but a good joke (and how much the more so a great joke) can help us see the absurdity of our obsessions with being serious, even when justified. What constitutes a good joke? Well, I can’t define your context. You kind of have to be there.
 
If Lincoln were alive today, he would be 213 years old, and likely not strong enough to do any of the things Letterman suggested. But I’d like to think that if he were alive, he would at least be chuckling.

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There is nothing noble about being superior to those around you. The true nobility is being superior to your previous self.    Hindu Proverb
 
Stick with me on this one. I have a point, I promise.
 
I have written before about what I have learned from Hindu friends and colleagues. I will admit that I did not have many of them for most of my life, partly for lack of opportunity, partly out of a shameful lack of curiosity, and partly because of an unenlightened understanding of what it meant to be a Hindu. On that last point, the multiplicity of expressions of the godhead and the symbols that represent those iterations struck me as…forgive me…pagan.
 
(Before my pagan readers get too upset over that label, I will unpack only one former prejudice at a time.  Your turn will come.)
 
My growing appreciation of Hindu wisdom has also increased my discomfort at what American society has appropriated from it. The practices of yoga, for example, have a devotional aspect that have been removed and replaced with chairs, goats, and heat, all of which may amplify the health and exercise benefits, but are the equivalent of reducing Christmas to candy canes and Santa Claus. See also karma, guru, kirtan and – if you dare – swastika.
 
However, just because I admire Hinduism does not mean I subscribe to it. And when it comes to the belief in reincarnation, I believe in it with the same skepticism as I believe in consciousness after death. So the proverb quoted above strikes me as a metaphorical piece of genius, though for a very different reason than “orthodox” Hindus would find it meaningful. Perhaps it makes me guilty of appropriation, but I count on the gentle affirmation of Hindus that every path of faith has value to rescue me from disrespect.
 
So, metaphorically speaking, every self is a previous self. It is easy to see the difference in who I am today from who I was at age 13, 25, 37 and 50 (significant ages in my personal life). Am I a more noble person, by whatever definition? I most certainly hope so. I have tried to follow a progression, guided by my evolving understanding of my values, but only with the passage of time can I begin to understand how my temperament, for example, or my desire to be generous, for another example, has evolved. I can’t deny that part of what has impelled me is the example of others around me. Some of those role models are people I love. Some of them are people I admire from afar. Some of them are people I consider bad examples. If my goal has been to contrast with my bad examples and outdo my good examples, this proverb instructs me that there is nothing noble about imitating others or, worse, correcting their shortcomings.
 
The only growth that matters is in comparison to my previous self. And if I am intentional about it, then I need to grow every day, even every hour, not merely every dozen years or so. If I were a literalist about reincarnation (I am not), there might be more hope for me in subsequent iterations of Jack Moline, by whatever name. But since I am not, the inspiration of this wisdom must motivate me to become superior to myself in this one wild and precious life.
 
Here is the point that I promised. Every day is an opportunity to be truly noble. That quality may not be easily quantifiable or even measurable in a tick of the clock or turn of a calendar page, but every day offers an opportunity to do just a little better than your previous self. The great Moses Maimonides encouraged Jews to do so, and others by extension. So, too, teachers in every generation and every tradition from Plato to Rumi to Merton to Freud. Don’t try to clamber over others. Get over your self.
 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived and let me watch him do it. 
 Clarence Budington Kelland
 
Advice on raising a child is easy to come by, but not when you need it.  Any wisdom I might have on the subject comes from the results, not the practice, and children themselves are maddeningly unique, frustrating the kind of mathematical precision that formulae for parenting seem to recommend.
 
But now that my kids are launched, I am in that position of evaluating how my wife and I did in imparting the values and practices we were intentional about. The answer is mixed.  Lest you misunderstand, we are enormously satisfied with the kinds of adults our children have become.  I could not ask for better offspring.  In fact, I admire them each, starting with the choices they made about life partners. 
 
But I have come to terms with the disappointment I felt that they did not follow the program I laid out in my imagination. However, here’s the fact: I was wrong to imagine them as anything other than they are. And I should have known better. After all, I did not follow the path my parents laid out in their imaginations. On some level, I know they were disappointed (they certainly wanted me to be living near them in Chicago).  On another level, they were pleasantly surprised (I had early declared my refusal to consider studying to be a rabbi). On every level, their love for me was greater than their intentions for me.
 
I would like to think that if I had turned out to be a reprobate, their love would have persisted, but I have known a lot of people who have dealt with awful behavior in their families (themselves, their parents, and/or their kids) whose devotion to each other has remained intact. I have also known a few who have never managed to rise above their expectations for others. That’s tragic, in my opinion.
 
Our children turned out great. And by observing them, I can see which of our values they embraced, which they modified, and which they rejected.  In turn, I can see which of my values I represented well enough and positively enough.  They were not always the ones I tried to articulate.
 
Not so many years ago, I received a Father’s Day card from the three of them that had this quotation from Clarence Budington Kelland on the front.  It landed in my collection of cards I have saved for a long time.  It may be my favorite (from them) because it liberated me from being a pedagogue and affirmed me as a parent.  Long after my day-to-day responsibilities as responsible party had ended, I learned this as the first rule of child-rearing.
 
The other rule came to me earlier, but not early enough. We were determined to provide our kids with a Jewish day school education and did so for each of them through sixth grade. But when it came time to choose a middle school and high school, it was clear that the talents and needs of one of our kids would be better addressed in the public school system. Doing what was right for our child was more important than doing what we had decided was in our child’s best interests. It is a fine distinction, but an important one. The better answer begins with the talents and needs of the child. The other answer begins with the values and presumptions of the parents.
 
My wife and I each had loving and devoted parents.  When they raised us, they had the examples of their own parents and no practical experience on which to base their parenting styles. We were in the same boat, and I am sure we made plenty of decisions in imitation of our parents and plenty in reaction to our parents. It is no different for anyone who first beholds that hungry, bawling, loving bundle of effluence and delight and, if so blessed, the subsequent versions who always manage to be totally different than the one before. Given all of the possible variables, and my complete lack of background in medicine or psychology, I am reluctant to offer anything more specific than two things I wish I knew when I needed them more.
 
The first: live your best life in full view of your kids.
 
The second: do what is right for your child.
 
The rest is commentary. Also, carpools.