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Wrapping Up My First Semester

I am probably already getting a late start on my second semester of college review, so here I am bundling all my leftover notes about first term.

I haven't mentioned my Hebrew literature class with Professor Safran. I don't know that I have notes. We read mostly Agnon stories, and talked a lot about his interesting religious concerns and in general his mode of creating characters that were "projections of his own inner life", or I suppose of the dilemmas of modern Jewish intellectuals. Alas, almost everyone else in the course could speak Hebrew; I could understand but hardly say a word at the time. 

I haven't said much about Expos (Expository Writing). I am sure my notebook is somewhere, but all I have found so far are a couple of stories and my final paper. I was delighted to see some great phrases here and there in my stories. As a fiction writer, I was heavy on interiority, not so much on plot, a bit on relationships. At least twice there was a character named Sam or Sammy who was not the narrator, obviously a stand-in for me (middle name Samuel), or a kind of idealized version of me or who I wished people saw me as!

My final paper on Malamud was pretty good! I remember how hard it was to really come up with a thesis that was interesting and actually borne out by my examples. I wrote about main characters who were somewhat conventional but also dreamers inside themselves, who were then challenged by unconventional characters who disrupted their equilibrium or their projects in profound ways. It's interesting to see what I was thinking about "conventional" Jews the year before I became more observant myself. It was a nicely written paper, tight and crisp and confidence.

My final psych paper was a stretch, an attempt to crystallize a cognitive+social psychology perspective on moral development. I am sure we were encouraged to stretch. I didn't find the analysis terribly resonant today, it was rooted again in the limits of my own experience, though I stumbled toward a couple of things. One was a good attempt to clarify what it would mean to synthesize a cognitive and a social perspective on development. The other was a nice typology that sort of anticipated the David Riesman types I'd read about a few years later. I liked that whoever graded the paper -- not sure if it was Scott the TA or Professor Demick -- really went over the language. This one was more unruly than the Expos paper.

I haven't conveyed yet just how excited I was to study psychology for the first time. I always had wanted to, to explore more about why people do and say and relate the way they do. The course did not disappoint, and I just ate it up all the time. Professor Demick, as I think I've commented, was a terrific lecturer, engaging and completely information-packed. Even though it was specifically Intro to Development, it was such a great general intro to the field that my next course, Intro to Psych, seemed a lot like I was reviewing.

When the school year ended, our family picked me up and we went out to Rockport for some days before going home. I bought two books from Justice that had been excerpted in the sourcebook -- Walzer's Spheres of Justice and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In my memory I read them both cover to cover while in Rockport; perhaps I only started there but I did absolutely read each one. I was determined to have a more solid, less debater/argumentative hold on both liberalism and conservatism, to take the critiques super seriously. Though Walzer is and was more fun to read, Nozick had his entertaining parts, and I slogged through the parts that had more symbols in them. 

I guess I'll leave it there, and start to catch up on second semester!

College: Wrapping Up "Justice"

For much of Justice, certainly the last many weeks of the course while I was a freshman, my main interest was finding a good philosophical justification for distributive justice. Both of my papers were critiques of libertarianism, attempts to buttress the politics I had (and have). The choices in the class were between a Rawslian justification and a communitarian one.

The Rawslian view is that people with and without egalitarian values personally would choose, in the “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance”, that it would be in their interest to choose a system where property rights would be qualified by the need to make the worse off better off whenever the wealthy gained. The communitarian view, exemplified by Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice, is that people like us, in order to be true to our own actual understandings of the nature of exchange and property and the idea of equality, could realize our social ethic only in a society egalitarian in a variety of ways. Those would include certain social welfare policies, certain ways of limiting the market in the spheres of health and education, certain limits on the translation of financial power into the political sphere.

Walzer was trying to answer the question of how a society of libertarians and social-welfare liberals ought to act, and he appealed to a thick common ethic. That seems to be the ground of his argument, even though of course the libertarians don’t share the ethic. (I think Walzer was arguing that unreflective conservatives and probably religious conservatives ought to recognize his egalitarianism as their own if they thought about their own actual values.)  

In any case, back in college the communitarian approach seemed to me more persuasive. Partly I’m sure because the course set it up that way, as the last stage of a dialectic Professor Sandel was guiding. Also because Rawls’ ingenious move to make egalitarianism independent of any substantive ethic just rang wrong or maybe feels a bit off, like it’s an intellectual alchemy of turning self-interest into something else. That may be also tied up with my own personal story at that point, which was about finding community among peers for a first time over the prior couple years, and thinking about the role of communities in my family's civic and religious life, and the notion of covenant that was important to the congregation my parents were helping found. (Ironically, freshman year was the year I was most distant from Jewish community in all my life, though not because of any principle; I just hadn't found my place and wasn't urgently on that.)

Looking over my last few weeks of notes in the course as me now, I find myself engaged mostly with a different question. Why would someone choose a democratic politics over one that advances one’s own or one’s group’s substantive social ethic? Why are values of democratic process and pluralism the kinds of things that someone with a strong ethical position should support as a matter of principle? Why would someone give higher priority, even just at times, to considerations that would legitimize another competing ethic “winning” for a time, an ethic that you think is morally wrong?

And I ask that thinking mostly about the Christian right today, but also wondering what a committed egalitarian would say given what has been going on in our own American politics. Sandel’s own critique of Rawls is that the latter’s philosophy is built on a concept of human nature that isn’t real for anyone: that there is a “self” who can experience a separateness from one’s own “ends” or conception of the good, who views those things critically and can see why another would choose a different set of ends or goods. That kind of “self” isn’t universal; it is the preferred self-understanding of people with a certain philosophy, or who are in certain social groups like the ones who study ethical philosophy and not just their own group’s ethics. If Sandel’s critique holds, then on what grounds would we expect a “narratively situated self” to surrender or subordinate their conception of the good, particular when what’s at stake is a core belief like the equality of people or the right to have enough to live on?

And I still don’t have a great answer. In section, Benor suggested that a truer picture is that a person has many attributes and convictions and they can be arrayed on a scale from complete commitment to able-to-detach-from. I didn’t remember that until I reread it, and it seems like it would add to the philosophical picture though I don't see how he played it out for us. I think in the notes from Sandel (and I didn’t remember this either), Rousseau suggested that a civic republican version of democratic politics would educate people toward more of a common sense of the good and toward the ability to look more critically and deeply at their own values and to engage with the values of others. Those are the best case, but still not an answer to why someone would enter that politics in the first place.

Lately I’ve been listening a bit to Professor Danielle Allen, who adds a more Aristotelian layer, which is that all people need to engage in public matters to flourish truly, and that engaging in political debate in certain ways itself cultivates the self. Again, I would like that to be true. Professor Allen has a genius idea that such a view allows for the choice to sit back and opt out, which would be a particular civic posture, not an individualist withdrawal. A "higher-order withdrawal", not an apathetic or disconnected one. I don’t know what she says about people who hold a strong ethical view and don’t acknowledge that others do too, even after being willing to engage with such others.

So while I can argue against a Christian view of America, and certainly a Christian-nationalist view, I don’t have a good answer for why people with those views ought in their frame of reference to put democratic values high up.

I listened to an interview with Dr. Yuval Levin, who in a way flips my question around and says that there is really no alternative to being a classical liberal if you hold a committed conservative viewpoint. I think I have to go back and probe that more, and understand why his argument might make sense on the right (or the left).

I have to myself thought at times that a more liberal-egalitarian or even just classic liberal response might be that even people who live by right in insular communities that don’t let in other ideas are only able to do so in the first place because of the (Rawslian?) social contract that lets them set up such enclaves in the first place. Neither this idea, nor Levin’s, is anything like Sandel’s or Walzer’s. I don’t think it answers the distributive justice question at all.

So that’s where I am, still. I think I have one more thing to write before the "end of the semester", about the books I wanted to read after taking the course.

Back to College: From Aristotle to Rawls

So back to Justice. I’m trying to see if there’s anything from Aristotle that is in the notes but didn’t stick in my mind back then. One thing I see is the distinction between habits and character. Which is really what distinguishes Aristotle from any old consequentialism. One ought to act the way a virtuous person acts, but the added thing is the deeper seeded virtue, which isn’t captured only in this specific act. Kant says a superficially beneficial act isn’t good unless it is done via the rational will. Aristotle says that a beneficial act doesn’t have enduring moral significance unless it derives from a virtuous character and/or helps develop that character.

Although I became more traditional in my Jewish practice starting maybe a year after this course, I held onto a view of ethics rooted in “the right thing” as something outside the inner process, the character process. Maybe. If you’d have asked me, I still would have been thinking in terms of moral dilemmas and better answers to them, separate from the individual actor. At whatever point Aristotle comes more into my picture, and I may write about that later, I think I asked a kind of consequentialist question, which is whether a “virtuous” person is better because the outcomes of their choices are better or last longer or are more sustained. It’s an external view. I think I still grapple with it – in the grand scheme, is virtue somehow icing on the cake or is it essential to the cake in the first place.

The notes say, and Aristotle says, that the best state is one that cultivates virtue in this way and is the arena for it. How? The notes don’t say, and Aristotle to my recollection asserts this in the Ethics but it’s a desideratum, not a detailed plan. I also see in the notes that virtue action is responsive to the individual case and not only to abstract rules, which makes this all the more difficult.

In section, Benor identified honor as the name of the highest virtue in social life, to go with wisdom which is the highest telos for each individual. So for Aristotle a state is based on cultivating honor as well as wisdom, and modeled on/cultivates the relationship between people with those virtues. I have a sense of what wisdom is supposed to be in this account but I don’t remember about honor.

Around this time I wrote paper #1, which was a critique of Ayn Rand’s short paper on libertarianism. My approach was to attack Rand from within. Her conception of a right to life, which to her is the only fundamental right and the grounding of the right to property, is undermined when people do not have the means to guarantee their own life. So a minimal state that took from the excess of the wealthy would be justified in the name of the right to life. I got a B-, largely for two reasons. Benor said the right to life for Rand is not the right to be alive, but the right to try to sustain one’s life, no guarantee. That seems right. The other flaw is that I had a squishy definition of society that did not address Rand’s position that society isn’t a thing of moral significance at all.

I like that I swung for the fences. I didn’t do any better job than what I wrote last time Professor Sandel hadn’t done yet offering a critique of libertarian assumptions. I do see in my paper a tiny seed of a Rawslian idea, which is that the wealthy are entitled to their wealth so long as everyone else has a minimum. I know later Milton Friedman is going to say in our readings that market-based social policies are more Rawslian than liberal government solutions, but I didn’t have that yet! Or maybe Rawls’ positions (have to get there) are really obvious.

[I reread the paper assignment to see whether I got what was being asked, and noticed that word “critique.” It wouldn’t be until a few years later that I came across the term “critical theory”, and I think a long time later, long after college, that I got what I think it means. That some theories specialize in clarifying and critiquing other theories, more than generating substantive world-pictures on their own. I think what I did in this paper was a mix, a bit of this and a bit of that. Obviously it was both a short paper and my first of its kind.]

Professor Sandel – I didn’t remember this quite – now set up a debate between Aristotle and Kant. Aristotle doesn’t really put freedom on any definition at the center, and for Kant it’s the main thing. For Aristotle, the highest purpose defines morality, and it is “natural”, and thus in a sense freedom is counter to nature. For Kant, freedom (autonomy) is the one of the few fundamental natural moral laws.

Professor Sandel used this to introduce the distinction between the framework for political society and the substance of morality. The idea of a social contract is what joins these two together – rational actors with different notions of the moral life/the good create a framework that they are obligated to which enables everyone to pursue their own conception of the good. That gets us to John Rawls, who sought a grounding for individual rights that did not rely on any metaphysics at all, particularly not a teleological one or a utilitarian one, which would make individual rights subordinate to the collective or an outside moral absolute.

Locke’s state of nature account is basically utilitarian when it comes to the transition from the state of the nature to civil government, so that doesn’t work, Rawls does away with any such account and instead has a hypothetical situation, which would yield the two principles of liberty and equality (the “difference principle”). Anyone like us who found ourselves in the original position would agree to those principles, and the contract would bind us.

There was a whole lecture about what makes contracts binding, and a key point is that contracts aren’t justified only by their benefits. It’s only by their being freely agreed to for the purpose of mutual benefit that a contract has force. Real contracts are always flawed. But the social contract posited by Rawls is without those flaws. It didn’t happen at a point in time, but it is the only justification possible for our liberal-egalitarian constitution, because that is the only one we would have contracted with each other if we could have made an ideal contract.

Benor in section helped us see that Rawls, which talking abstractly, really presumed both cultural specificity (us) and moderate scarcity, which makes the second principle relevant. I think he made explicit the genius of Rawls, which is to make freedom and equality the product of self-interest and detach them from a substantive view of the good. Even though we might well hold liberty and equality as goods, some of us, that isn’t their justification across society on Rawls’ account. This is the distinction between “right” (the framework) and “good” (morality.).

We spent a ton of time on Rawls, more than we delved into anything so far. I guess Kant was there as an important piece but not really as political philosophy? This issue of the right and the good as separate things, that’s really important and I sure would never have understood those before. I found this a really helpful way to approach egalitarianism as a political position, at the time, because it did not require persuading anyone out of ideas like the value of hard work and individual effort, or into gooey ideas about common humanity.

I did notice in section this idea of the “well-ordered society”, which strikes me as a bit of Aristotle snuck in at the end? Benor says Rawls imagines a society where it’s more than institutions that embody the two principles of justice. It’s where citizens know the principles and actually imagine themselves having chosen them. I don’t know or remember how much Rawls cares about this or whether it’s as necessary to his picture as such a thing was for the Greeks.

For the couple weeks we were steeped in Rawls I really loved it, and I think it stayed with me for a long time as  beautiful (though not on the page – Rawls’ book is so conceptual and repetitive and full of methodological stuff, which is of course important). I think I struggled with the precise definition of economic equality. Rawls holds that unequal starting conditions for people are relevant, but doesn’t define if there is a degree of wealth inequality that is too much. He gives a standard to judge by, which is in real life impossible to assess. This issue was one of the things Professor Sandel pointed out as a question to Rawls. So how at the time did I see this; as a way for me to excuse existing gaps in wealth with just some tweaks, or as the best a theory could do and a marker for something more progressive? This was peak Reagan times. My first paper didn’t reach for a big redistribution; I didn’t have a theory for that.

I’m also impressed how much time Professor Sandel focused on it, when he was clearly a critic of some of its foundations as we would learn soon.

Avraham: Extraordinary Compassion and Justice in the Same Chapter

This is the draft of my D'var Torah for tomorrow, focusing on Genesis 18 within Parashat Vayera.

One afternoon when Avraham did not feel at all great, two things happened. First, he saw three strangers going along their way and he ran out to them to bring them home. Second, and right after, he had a major debate with the God about whether five cities should be destroyed.

I was saying a few weeks ago, when we started from the beginning of the Torah, that we often deal with the Torah one story at a time. So Sodom and Gomorrah is one thing. Welcoming the three travelers is another thing. Each one has a lesson perhaps. But the Torah also has a structure and a flow, and among others the Talmudic rabbis were always wondering about what they called hekesh or juxtaposition – why is this story right next to that one.

So why are these two stories right next to each other?

One is a story of extraordinary chesed, love or lovingkindness, in which Avraham and Sarah go to great lengths in every way to bring people into their home and take care of them. The other is a story about tzedek, about the nature of justice and its application, and it’s also extraordinary because in all other places where God and people debate about tzedek it’s between doing it and not, but here God and Avraham are debating about how it applies.

The people who divided up the Torah into chapters in the Middle Ages, both the Jews and the Christians, made these two stories a single chapter. Which happens to be Genesis chapter 18, and maybe it’s a coincidence but 18 in Hebrew is represented in letters by chai, which means life. Both stories are actually life and death stories, which I’ll talk about. Somehow this chai chapter is about the relationship between chesed and tzedek, compassion and justice, which is both an evergreen topic and also something particularly of the day.

So what’s extraordinary about the first story is hinted at in the second verse. Avraham lifted up his eyes and whoa, three men were standing over him, and he saw and he ran toward them from the opening of his tent and he bowed to the ground (18:2). If they were standing over him, what does it mean that he ran toward them, and that he bowed?

Avraham didn’t just want to do something for them. He felt that he should make the effort to go up to them, even though they were already next to him. He felt that he should not stand over them, as some kind of lord, or as a wealthy shepherd like himself might do over a scraggly wanderer – he wanted to look up to them, even though he was already sitting and they were standing.

The Torah describes what Sarah and Avraham did next in the language of maher, which means hurrying. They didn’t stop to find out anything about these people until they could offer them some refreshment of water and food and restoring their feet. Only when they were sitting would Avraham and Sarah and their people stand.

We find out quickly that these aren’t random travelers, and they have a chai message especially for Sarah and Avraham, a message that they will be welcoming a new life in the next year. But for the first verses Avraham and Sarah have no idea. They don’t have a people where they live, except the camp of followers they have put together. Their land does not lack in enemies. They live on the edge of the desert, which is a dangerous place, and who knows if these are maurauders. As we will soon see, Avraham and Sarah don’t live too far from S’dom and ‘Amorah, where the people are known to be generally vile – maybe these three people come from there.

So I don’t think it’s too much to think that Sarah and Avraham are taking some risk in running toward these travelers and bringing them into their home. At the very least, Sarah and Avraham are do good and ask questions later. As far as they are concerned, it’s the three men who are in danger, from thirst and hunger and bandits. It’s life and death for the three possibly, and at the very least they need something now. That’s the only thing that Avraham and Sarah process.

So there is no hesitation. This is extraordinary chesed.

Avraham escorts them from his home, because it’s dangerous to go out from settlement and there is desert in two directions. They and Avraham stop on the mountain ridge overlooking S’dom and ‘Amorah, and God engages him in conversation. The Torah says that God has an inner monologue: “Should I cover up from Avraham what I am doing? Avraham is surely going to become a large and powerful nation, through whom all the earth’s nations will be blessed” (18:17-18). And God continues to think that all of this is because God wants Avraham to charge and command his descendants in the ways of justice so that they can become great in these ways. So God then speaks to Avraham and says essentially: What is going on down in the valley in S’dom and ‘Amorah is so evil and I’m going to check it out to see if it’s as bad as it sounds. I’m sending my team to investigate. That’s all God says at first, and the messengers leave and now it’s just God and Avraham.

And without hesitation Avraham says: “So you will even sweep away the innocent with the guilty, or the righteous with the evil, tzaddik im rasha?” (18:23) Not, “Tell me more about what you meant by that” – Avraham cuts right to it, and then posits this situation of fifty tzaddikim, and winds it up by saying, “It would be profane for You to put to death tzaddik and rasha, and the tzaddik would be just like the rasha. Profane for you – the Judge of all the world will not do justice.”

And as you know from there, Avraham and God have this negotiation which ends with an agreement to save the cities if there are ten tzaddikim, which again might mean righteous people or just innocent people.

So what’s interesting to me is how this part of the chapter, the tzedek part, has Avraham doing different things than the chesed part. He talks here very differently about people, and his relationship to the people down in the valley is very different, even though what he is trying to do is the same which is to save their lives.

The chesed story is up close human contact. In the tzedek story, Avraham is far away from the people he’s talking about, whom he describes in terms of numbers and concepts, abstractions even.

In the first story Avraham is bowing down to people he doesn’t know and who may be a threat to him. He calls them “my lords.” He makes a presumption of good. In the second, Avraham is on a mountain ridge looking down on them. He calls them tzaddik and rasha, righteous and evil. He has no problem with the language of good and evil, toward people or toward God.

The midrashim say that the people of S’dom believed what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine to a punctilious extreme, punishing someone who took a short cut across their property just as severely as they would punish a thief.

They had no language for cooperation, only isolation that would surge into small-scale violence and occasionally a mob. Avraham does not volunteer to go up close and get to know them better, and he’s fine looking down on them from the hills.

At our Ritual Committee meeting this week, Larry Rubin brought us an interpretation of Avraham’s pointed words to God. It’s not necessarily an accusation that God isn’t intending to treat the people in the cities justly, but a statement that it’s not enough to apply principles of legal justice. “The Judge of the entire earth wouldn’t only do justice.” Sometimes you have to figure out how to mix the law with mercy, and just calling people guilty even when that’s true is not enough to tell you what to do. Mishpat is the law, but tzedek or mishpat tzedek is the integration of the law and a higher justice.

How could Avraham be such an extraordinary man of chesed and such an extraordinary man of tzedek, not just the same person but the same day? To see all people as potentially good and essential for him, and to see people honestly as good and evil? To be generous up close and to make difficult justice decisions from 10,000 feet?

So I don’t know for sure, or at least I can say I haven’t learned how. There are some extraordinary people like that and they are in our local civic community and our Jewish community.

And I love to contemplate such people, and try to become like them, and I love to contemplate Avraham even when he is so beyond who I am. It is inspiring to be in the light of any real person who is an amazing ba’alat chesed or ba’al chesed, and to be in the presence of someone who is an amazing ba’alat tzedek or ba’al tzedek. There is a reason we were put in this community of Beit Avraham v’Sarah and connected to those two souls.

And I want to leave just three other points, which are not easy but are important.

One is that this analysis of Avraham is to remind us that chesed and tzedek are different and require different actions and words and thoughts. Avraham with the travelers is not the same as Avraham looking at S’dom. A thousand points of light are incredibly important, but they do not necessarily make one big light. Justice does not happen, injustice is not pushed back only by individual and small group acts of generosity and caring, no matter how many.

Nor can the right laws and the right policies by themselves create a compassionate society.

So second, most of us can’t be both Avrahams. But among us we can do both. So if you are more the person of chesed, make sure also to do anything you can for the people of tzedek, whether that means contributing to their causes and organizations, sharing their wisdom, or giving them moral support by taking them out for coffee if it’s a local person, or an encouraging word. And vice versa, if you are focused on tzedek work make sure to give to and support the chesed work even if that’s not what you yourself are mostly doing.

And finally I want to come back to where I started, which is that on the day Avraham did these two extraordinary things, he was not feeling great. It was right after his bris, so he didn’t feel physically like himself, and also I think he was carrying the weightiness of the brit, the covenant that God had just reaffirmed to him. Part of being so committed to a certain world, and knowing you and your descendants would be charged with making big dreams real, is feeling the weight of that responsibility. So whatever pain you are feeling right now, about the country and the world, know that it is covenantal pain. Avraham found extraordinary chesed and tzedek in himself precisely when he was not feeling like himself. So can we. So will you.

Shabbat Shalom.

Catching Up in College: Justice

I have more than a month of “Justice” to catch up on, after I took what I thought would be a short break for the Jewish holy days during which I’d catch up every few days. I’ll try not to do that again. It's also more than interesting that I have been thinking about this course and reading notes in the period around our recent election.

I noticed in my notes about the draft vs. conscription that there’s a note about Rousseau, who I didn’t think really came up in the course. It cites him for the idea that “in a true free state citizens do and not buy.” I think it’s talking about a radical distinction between public and private goods.

Professor Sandel used the question of military service to iterate the concept of equality. Previously, in utilitarianism, every person weights the same in social calculations. Now he went back and asked: What if equality is not in fact a self-evident given? Which brought us to libertarianism.

I didn’t remember quite how explicitly the link was made between libertarianism and the Reagan administration – the notes mention both Milton Friedman and David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director. But what I do remember is that this was the point in the course where my own understanding of what a contemporary political philosophy is changed in the most important way.

Growing up in the ‘70s and as a teen in the ‘80s, I basically thought that Democrats believed in equality, both economic and racial, and were willing to spend public money for those, and that Republicans believed in free enterprise first and put more of an emphasis on national defense. I thought that Republican-ism was basically cruel.

The turn in the course to libertarianism was the first time I understood that there is a more fundamental disagreement that centers on the nature of freedom. So in Robert Nozick’s version, you posit an equal “initial state” and ask whether people are coerced in any way in their transactions and life choices. If not, you can’t critique the end result, which just emerges from free choices and exchanges. Nozick grounds this is in a kind of equal individual liberty, Locke’s theory of property where anyone can acquire something initially through their own labor, so long as enough is available for everyone to be able to do that.

I didn’t buy that from the beginning, clearly because the first premise doesn’t represent the real world. There was no initial state of equality that our current inequality emerged from. Nozick seems to reject that, at least in his writing (though I have heard very recently somewhere that in real life he thought of course there are reasons for state action). But I certainly did take seriously the argument that an “equality override” over individual liberty could be arbitrary and needs a robust justification. Professor Sandel, who clearly did not support Nozick’s libertarianism, absolutely made us presumably liberal students sit with the premises about liberty and property for a good long time. Taxation was presumptively forced labor or slavery, my notes say about liberatarianism.

In section, Benor gave a deeper dive into Locke, and possibly some interpretation. He leaned into Locke’s reliance on reason over power as a justification for private property in both the state of nature and under civil government. Somehow, in a way I don’t understand, the initial appropriation of property, by mixing land or things with labor, is limited by the need to leave enough for everyone else. A class society is just and it’s good for everyone. But in a state of nature this order is unsafe and tenuous, so people will rationally consent to a government that secures this order. So Locke seems to posit that even poor people are better off in a class society with private property than in a more equal state of nature. Locke’s is an argument, based on reason, or more accurately based on an account that can be couched in terms of reasons. It hardly looks airtight and it’s actually quite a consequentialist argument all the way down.

Professor Sandel pointed out the dialectic so far of the course, and one thing I marvel at is how he did make all of this into a dialectic and not just a survey. Utilitarianism we milked for a lot, but it has a problem with individual rights. Libertarianism corrects for that, but its account of rights is limited to property and economic rights. So what about human rights, and is there a more robust account of equality?

That got him to articulate the concept of a “right”, which is a claim that is fundamental and overrides otherwise sensible claims.

So he brought us to Kant. There is a big conceptual step back, toward a concept of human nature – that we are both sensual and rational beings, who can act out of inclination or choice. Our capacity to choose is what makes us human and gives us dignity, and morality in general is to treat all human beings in light of our dignity. Individual rights flow from and secure dignity, not property. On this account, morality cannot be about material consequences at all, but duty, the moral law itself.

There is a paradox in Kant – the more free we are, the more we are morally bound to a universal law that will be the same for everyone. It seems like the very determinism that a pure materialist might hold to. Kant says that all other ways of acting are however based on the finitude and contradictions of desire and inclinations, so only a moral law chosen purely on rational grounds can be just.

Kant’s critique of Locke and libertarianism is that rights are not in nature at all, not in physical nature or the nature of the land. So rights cannot be derived from land or property and a person’s interaction with them.

At this point, Professor Sandel grouped libertarianism and Kantianism as two forms of “liberalism.” In both, there are rights that cannot be overridden for a utilitarian good, and a presumption that the state should be neutral with respect to the good life. I’m not sure how he got to the second premise as a Kantian one. But it was really important for me to get this definition of “liberalism”, which I think had been in the Milton Friedman reading, as different from the liberalism of being a Democrat. It was also important to see the political debate in the U.S. potentially as a philosophical debate.

Also at this point, and for the next couple of lectures, there was a gap between Kantian equality of dignity, and two other colloquially “liberal” things: economic equality, and a state neutral with regard to the common good. Safeguarding individual autonomy seems as I read like something a Lockean libertarian state could do also, if it is not going to force people into a specific conception of social or economic equality?

I think this might be an imperfection in the dialectic design of the course, in that I’m not sure that Kant himself was ever an egalitarian liberal politically. The course went toward issues of public education, like whether a state could teach creationism and whether school vouchers are better or worse than universal public school. Things got a bit muddled.

Although I have to say that the paper I think I wrote about education launched me on something professional. Educational policy questions were obviously interesting philosophical questions. But all the thinking about education and the different dimensions of content and access planted a thought I hadn't had before, that education might be a super important area for the practice of moral philosophy. And maybe I should think about being an educator, even though I didn't think of myself as much of a classroom teacher. Maybe it would be worth developing that aspect of myself, because of its ethical importance. I know I had that thought at some point in college for the first itme, and I am trying to remember if this is when. I ought to track down my paper in the class and see if there is evidence there.

As I say, the course seemed a bit muddled for a week or two; there were a lot of balls in the air. But then in this muddle Professor Sandel named a problem, though he named it philosophically. Isn’t equality itself a specific good, that a neutral state has no grounds to impose any more than creationism? Isn’t building a neutral state also dependent on a specific conception of society? As he put it, isn’t the categorical imperative of Kant just another teleology, just one with freedom and dignity as its highest good?

That took him to Aristotle (and way faster than I remembered; this is the end of October in the notes, and there are still a couple of months to go!). The idea of teleology is that any moral or political theory, according to the ancients, flows from a conception of the good society and is about how people group together to create such a good society. Rights are not categorical, but exist only to serve that end.

Professor Sandel crystallized this with the negative example of pornography. A “categorical” liberal would say that the state should not be involved in policing what people choose to look at, even though most people would objectively classify pornography as evil. A “teleological” liberal might permit pornography even if it is objectively evil and has a social cost, depending on smaller communities to teach standards and cultivate people who would squelch the demand for or interest in pornography. In both cases there is the same policy but different grounds.

I’m going to take a breather here even though I’m not quite caught up! I will say that at this point in the course, I saw and I still see that the grounds for a libertarian politics and even a conservative teleological politics seem much stronger in the sources. I’ve written before about sitting and reading Kant for the first time, and the thrill of that. Reading Aristotle for the first time was also really interesting. I remembered in the early chapters certain things in Maimonides I had read in English as a teen, in a book I had gotten for my Bar Mitzvah with excerpts from the Mishneh Torah. Both are very propositional texts, and the feel of reading them was the same even separated by a few years. I recognized in Aristotle a lot of Maimonides; obviously Maimonides was the one drawing on Aristotle. I know that the questions I had in Justice about Aristotle – about the connection between different virtues, the connection between individual virtue and politics, and whether individual virtue or the political good is fundamental – these I still have. I have to look at the notes more to see if there are suggested solutions; I don’t recall them.

Catching Up in College: Justice

I have more than a month of “Justice” to catch up on, after I took what I thought would be a short break for the Jewish holy days during which I’d catch up every few days. I’ll try not to do that again. It's also more than interesting that I have been thinking about this course and reading notes in the period around our recent election.

I noticed in my notes about the draft vs. conscription that there’s a note about Rousseau, who I didn’t think really came up in the course. It cites him for the idea that “in a true free state citizens do and not buy.” I think it’s talking about a radical distinction between public and private goods.

Professor Sandel used the question of military service to iterate the concept of equality. Previously, in utilitarianism, every person weights the same in social calculations. Now he went back and asked: What if equality is not in fact a self-evident given? Which brought us to libertarianism.

I didn’t remember quite how explicitly the link was made between libertarianism and the Reagan administration – the notes mention both Milton Friedman and David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director. But what I do remember is that this was the point in the course where my own understanding of what a contemporary political philosophy is changed in the most important way.

Growing up in the ‘70s and as a teen in the ‘80s, I basically thought that Democrats believed in equality, both economic and racial, and were willing to spend public money for those, and that Republicans believed in free enterprise first and put more of an emphasis on national defense. I thought that Republican-ism was basically cruel.

The turn in the course to libertarianism was the first time I understood that there is a more fundamental disagreement that centers on the nature of freedom. So in Robert Nozick’s version, you posit an equal “initial state” and ask whether people are coerced in any way in their transactions and life choices. If not, you can’t critique the end result, which just emerges from free choices and exchanges. Nozick grounds this is in a kind of equal individual liberty, Locke’s theory of property where anyone can acquire something initially through their own labor, so long as enough is available for everyone to be able to do that.

I didn’t buy that from the beginning, clearly because the first premise doesn’t represent the real world. There was no initial state of equality that our current inequality emerged from. Nozick seems to reject that, at least in his writing (though I have heard very recently somewhere that in real life he thought of course there are reasons for state action). But I certainly did take seriously the argument that an “equality override” over individual liberty could be arbitrary and needs a robust justification. Professor Sandel, who clearly did not support Nozick’s libertarianism, absolutely made us presumably liberal students sit with the premises about liberty and property for a good long time. Taxation was presumptively forced labor or slavery, my notes say about liberatarianism.

In section, Benor gave a deeper dive into Locke, and possibly some interpretation. He leaned into Locke’s reliance on reason over power as a justification for private property in both the state of nature and under civil government. Somehow, in a way I don’t understand, the initial appropriation of property, by mixing land or things with labor, is limited by the need to leave enough for everyone else. A class society is just and it’s good for everyone. But in a state of nature this order is unsafe and tenuous, so people will rationally consent to a government that secures this order. So Locke seems to posit that even poor people are better off in a class society with private property than in a more equal state of nature. Locke’s is an argument, based on reason, or more accurately based on an account that can be couched in terms of reasons. It hardly looks airtight and it’s actually quite a consequentialist argument all the way down.

Professor Sandel pointed out the dialectic so far of the course, and one thing I marvel at is how he did make all of this into a dialectic and not just a survey. Utilitarianism we milked for a lot, but it has a problem with individual rights. Libertarianism corrects for that, but its account of rights is limited to property and economic rights. So what about human rights, and is there a more robust account of equality?

That got him to articulate the concept of a “right”, which is a claim that is fundamental and overrides otherwise sensible claims.

So he brought us to Kant. There is a big conceptual step back, toward a concept of human nature – that we are both sensual and rational beings, who can act out of inclination or choice. Our capacity to choose is what makes us human and gives us dignity, and morality in general is to treat all human beings in light of our dignity. Individual rights flow from and secure dignity, not property. On this account, morality cannot be about material consequences at all, but duty, the moral law itself.

There is a paradox in Kant – the more free we are, the more we are morally bound to a universal law that will be the same for everyone. It seems like the very determinism that a pure materialist might hold to. Kant says that all other ways of acting are however based on the finitude and contradictions of desire and inclinations, so only a moral law chosen purely on rational grounds can be just.

Kant’s critique of Locke and libertarianism is that rights are not in nature at all, not in physical nature or the nature of the land. So rights cannot be derived from land or property and a person’s interaction with them.

At this point, Professor Sandel grouped libertarianism and Kantianism as two forms of “liberalism.” In both, there are rights that cannot be overridden for a utilitarian good, and a presumption that the state should be neutral with respect to the good life. I’m not sure how he got to the second premise as a Kantian one. But it was really important for me to get this definition of “liberalism”, which I think had been in the Milton Friedman reading, as different from the liberalism of being a Democrat. It was also important to see the political debate in the U.S. potentially as a philosophical debate.

Also at this point, and for the next couple of lectures, there was a gap between Kantian equality of dignity, and two other colloquially “liberal” things: economic equality, and a state neutral with regard to the common good. Safeguarding individual autonomy seems as I read like something a Lockean libertarian state could do also, if it is not going to force people into a specific conception of social or economic equality?

I think this might be an imperfection in the dialectic design of the course, in that I’m not sure that Kant himself was ever an egalitarian liberal politically. The course went toward issues of public education, like whether a state could teach creationism and whether school vouchers are better or worse than universal public school. Things got a bit muddled.

Although I have to say that the paper I think I wrote about education launched me on something professional. Educational policy questions were obviously interesting philosophical questions. But all the thinking about education and the different dimensions of content and access planted a thought I hadn't had before, that education might be a super important area for the practice of moral philosophy. And maybe I should think about being an educator, even though I didn't think of myself as much of a classroom teacher. Maybe it would be worth developing that aspect of myself, because of its ethical importance. I know I had that thought at some point in college for the first itme, and I am trying to remember if this is when. I ought to track down my paper in the class and see if there is evidence there.

As I say, the course seemed a bit muddled for a week or two; there were a lot of balls in the air. But then in this muddle Professor Sandel named a problem, though he named it philosophically. Isn’t equality itself a specific good, that a neutral state has no grounds to impose any more than creationism? Isn’t building a neutral state also dependent on a specific conception of society? As he put it, isn’t the categorical imperative of Kant just another teleology, just one with freedom and dignity as its highest good?

That took him to Aristotle (and way faster than I remembered; this is the end of October in the notes, and there are still a couple of months to go!). The idea of teleology is that any moral or political theory, according to the ancients, flows from a conception of the good society and is about how people group together to create such a good society. Rights are not categorical, but exist only to serve that end.

Professor Sandel crystallized this with the negative example of pornography. A “categorical” liberal would say that the state should not be involved in policing what people choose to look at, even though most people would objectively classify pornography as evil. A “teleological” liberal might permit pornography even if it is objectively evil and has a social cost, depending on smaller communities to teach standards and cultivate people who would squelch the demand for or interest in pornography. In both cases there is the same policy but different grounds.

I’m going to take a breather here even though I’m not quite caught up! I will say that at this point in the course, I saw and I still see that the grounds for a libertarian politics and even a conservative teleological politics seem much stronger in the sources. I’ve written before about sitting and reading Kant for the first time, and the thrill of that. Reading Aristotle for the first time was also really interesting. I remembered in the early chapters certain things in Maimonides I had read in English as a teen, in a book I had gotten for my Bar Mitzvah with excerpts from the Mishneh Torah. Both are very propositional texts, and the feel of reading them was the same even separated by a few years. I recognized in Aristotle a lot of Maimonides; obviously Maimonides was the one drawing on Aristotle. I know that the questions I had in Justice about Aristotle – about the connection between different virtues, the connection between individual virtue and politics, and whether individual virtue or the political good is fundamental – these I still have. I have to look at the notes more to see if there are suggested solutions; I don’t recall them.

Back to College: Critiquing Utilitarianism

"Today" in Justice (Moral Reasoning 22), it was both a lecture and the first section! In the big lecture, the focus was on critiquing Bentham's utilitarianism, from the outside and the inside. I remember Professor Sandel's funny thing about how a research attempting to measure comparative utilities by survey found that living in Kansas was less desirable than having a tooth pulled. So obviously, practical issues with applying the principles of Bentham. Even John Stuart Mill, whose father attempted to apply Bentham to his education, ended up claiming that certain pleasures should factor higher in the utilitarian calculations.

JSM's bigger revision was to base individual rights on utility, a bold move that seems to go against the principle of aggregation. In the lecture it was also noted that Bentham was a penal reformer, on the basis (so say my notes) of the excessive pain inflicted on prisoners. My notes say something about liberty being taken into account, but I have no idea what I actually heard. I am surprised that more of a point wasn't made to compare the imputed social "gains" from incarceration to this pain factor. It doesn't seem a slam dunk that Bentham would support penal reform, but that's his major public policy contribution I think.

Professor Sandel chose utilitarianism as the starting point for the dialectic of the class, rather than starting chronologically with Aristotle. No question he wanted to feature the critiques, which go in so many directions (come from so many directions). At the same time, he wanted to give the broad consequentialist intuition its due. Over time, it's been clear to me just how tenacious utilitarianism remains as a metaphor, if not a method. I mean I still think all the time about whether I am doing enough good, in some kind of measurable way. That's the positive part. The negative of course being the treatment everywhere of people as commodities. Which I think I only started to get the language in this class.

The section, with (now Professor) Benor, had such a different feel. He talked about wanting us to learn how to read philosophical texts. It looks like he had two methodological points. One being to track certain concepts and the debates over them through different texts, being careful to identify each thinker's take on a term that might seem common among philosophers. So Bentham did not hold by the concept of "community" as something other than the aggregate of its members. (Benor asked the clarifying question: If there is no community, how is the idea of "general utility" even relevant?) Benor also instructed us to read a philosopher as though their picture of the world is true, rather than critique as we go along. Later on, I learned from my co-teacher Leslie Bazer to call this "the believing game", from Peter Elbow. I forgot that I had heard it long before.

This move is incredibly hard. It's gotten easier for me, I think because I have the time to do it when I am preparing to teach, and because I know there will be a time for the believing game and a time for critical reading. My students, even adults, have much more trouble doing this. It's really hard to hold a picture of someone else's thought when they seem wrong. And even more so when you feel strongly about a problem and the new idea you're being asked to consider seems not helpful or relevant even, and you want to talk to the merits of the issue. Just today in Torah class, we were talking about the idea of malchut, and my whole point was what are various approaches to making anything out of a problematic metaphor for the Divine. But a lot of the conversation was: Here's my solution, or here's why I don't even consider that metaphor worth considering.

Back to substance -- I don't know if I had thought much about what a "community" is before this discussion. I still wrestle with the concept, and even last week and this week have been back and forth with some people about it. Eager to see what I learned and thought later in the course. Bentham's position that you can't say the community is prior to the individual -- I don't like it at all as a normative proposition. I would like to believe it's not even descriptively correct. Do I have a refutation, at this point in my life? Not a universal one. I am working long-term on this idea of a podcast series called "I in We", which is about how the individual emerges as a distinct, sacred (if you will) entity out of prior groups and possibly communities.

The Grape Cluster and the Two Who Carry It: A D'var Torah for Pride

This is the D'var Torah I gave for Pride Shabbat 5781/2021, for Parashat Sh'lach L'cha (Numbers 13:1-15:41).

I love this parasha about the scouts, the m’raglim, and the fact that the Torah is so brutally honest about how hard it is to go forward even to a land of milk and honey, even when the alternatives are to stay in a desert or to return to Mitzrayim (Egypt). I love the duality of feeling like giants vs. feeling like grasshoppers -- and as I’ll tell you in a bit, thanks to Pride Shabbat I love the big cluster of grapes, so large it takes two people to carry it.

When I look forward on Pride Shabbat, toward a promised land, I personally have to start by looking back, to a day I think of as “The Lunch of the Three Jonathans.”

It was right after a final exam during college, and I remember this lunch partly because we ate at one of the dining halls I almost never went to. I can’t remember if I ran into two other Jonathans by accident or if I had plans with one and the other showed up too.  These two other Jonathans were distinct and important in my life at that time.

Any one of us could have become rabbis, and we briefly talked about it that day because I thought I might and I really thought they should too, both of them. Of the three, Jonathan #1 -- I’ll call him just Jonathan -- he really was the one most suited at the time to become a rabbi. He had the widest vision; he had the widest ranging intellect of the three of us; he had integrity and fearlessness about being an activist; he had been an active youth group person in high school. I brought up the rabbi thing and Jonathan laughed, a certain look on his face that was trademark for him -- a combination of a silly grin and a knowing, “no-way” laugh. If it’s possible to be simultaneously loving and telling someone how stupid they sound for the thirtieth time, it was that kind of laugh.

Jonathan #2 at the table was me, the only one called Jon to the exclusion of Jonathan. Jonathan #3 was a star yeshiva student, sometimes called Jonathan and sometimes Jon, and he’s a whole other story.

I knew Jonathan wasn’t going to rabbinical school but it was fun to poke him about it periodically and I didn’t mind the look and the laugh. I thought I knew at the time why Jonathan wasn’t going to be a rabbi, because we were good friends and had talked about it. But it turns out, I didn’t know at all.

I didn’t know until another lunch three or four years later, in a different cafeteria, this one at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I was in rabbinical school, and Jonathan was on a panel of three people brought in to talk about what it had been like to grow up Jewish and gay.

I knew Jonathan was gay, but that was the first time I heard him speak about what it was like to have been a gay Jewish teen, in a liberal Jewish community in Boston in the 1980s. People in his youth group thought of Jonathan as the ultimate insider, a leader, he said -- and Jonathan told his story of being unseen, of the closet as the price he had to pay to belong. Other people, straight kids, could be draped on someone of the opposite sex in a friendly way as they hung out, but for him this kind of regular youth group behavior was a constant reminder of what he couldn’t share, and the very cameraderie that was so essential for other teens was alienating to him, and told him that there was no room for him within Judaism. We didn’t use words like “heteronormative” so much back then in the early ‘90s, not even the gay and lesbian speakers on the panel that day. But that’s what Jonathan was talking about.

Listening to Jonathan I was crushed on so many levels. Ashamed of ourselves as a Jewish community. Ashamed of the myself for the things I thought were tough for me when I was in USY. After hearing him talk that day at JTS, I couldn’t believe that Jonathan had ever set foot in Hillel.  He had so much Jewish and Israeli in him that just walking away was never an option -- that too would have denied him so much of himself. Jonathan came to the Seminary and said he appreciated that we students were listening to their stories, even though we couldn’t ever fix Judaism for him enough that it wouldn’t be painful. At least maybe we could do better for kids in the future.

I was crushed and ashamed that I had known Jonathan by then for at least five years, intense years, and considered him a good friend -- and I never knew any of this. What kind of a friend had I really been. What must have I communicated, out loud or in unspoken assumptions, that he wouldn’t think of me as someone he could share any of this with when we were in college.

I hold up these two lunches next to each other in my mind, the lunch of the three Jonathans in college and the lunch listening to Jonathan at JTS, because the second lunch was the first turning point for me when it came to think about Judaism and LGBTQ+. It was Jonathan’s gift to me and hopefully his gift through me. That was the first time I got that it wasn’t enough to be unfazed when someone came out, to treat it as no big deal, an interesting and important thing about someone just like other interesting and important things. That was the moment I realized that the Torah about LGBTQ+ lives ought not be confined to two verses in Leviticus. It’s because of Jonathan that I eventually became convinced about marriage equality -- later when his partner Peter was dying and I saw what was already one of the most beautiful love stories I had known become even more beautiful and heartbreaking. It took me quite a while even so to arrive where I got to about gay marriage right around the time I arrived here in New Hampshire.

I cannot stand here as an ally, or tell you that I use he/him/his pronouns, without acknowledging Jonathan, and the impact of his friendship and pain and integrity on me. It would not be truthful to say I always knew what the promised land looked like, that from the start I was like Kalev (Caleb) in our parasha and knew how to be a giant and not a grasshopper.

Jonathan might be horrified that I am talking about him to you only through a series of stories about Mitzrayim and the midbar, Egypt and the wilderness, and not getting on to talking about visions of the promised land. (I should say that Jonathan is someone I’ve also learned from about other things, such as affordable housing and Israel-Palestine.)  I really want to embrace the terrific formulation that the Tzedek crew created about this Shabbat, which I stole for my note yesterday. We are celebrating LGBTQ+ Jewish lives and we are celebrating what queer Jews have brought to Judaism, to Torah itself.  So let’s talk about that enormous cluster of grapes, so unexpected, so big and juicy it takes two people to carry.

A cluster like maybe you’re not sure what it is, and I can say about myself that I’m only just beginning to get a view of what might be called queer Torah, just in the past two or three years. And I have to say, I’m excited and challenged. Here are a few things I’ve begun to see, on my own scouting of the land we’re heading to.

Liz brought to my attention the Queer Niggun Project -- melodies composed and traditional prayers interpreted by LGBTQ+ Jewish creators. Last night I was so taken by the “Carousel Niggun” for L’cha Dodi, one of the big Shabbat love songs -- this version mashes up very traditional, yeshivish Hebrew pronunciation with both old and new idioms for the metaphor of God and Israel as lovers, married partners.

Or take Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder and Rosh Yeshiva of Svara, which she calls a “traditionally radical yeshiva.” Her insight is that queer theory is actually the key to understanding the Talmud, because the Talmud was originally a project of marginal Jews who saw the world shaking before other Jews did, and these different-living, different-thinking sages were far more ready when the Temple was destroyed than any other Jews to pick up the pieces and make something strong and beautiful, which is the foundation of all of our Judaism today.

Rabbi Lappe says that a queer perspective is actually helpful and necessary for everyone, because the Talmudic rabbis were brilliant at tooling for a world exactly like that of the scouts in our parasha, who knew they would have to move into a new world about which so much was uncertain.  So at Svara you study in Aramaic, the rabbis’ own language, whether you’ve ever studied before or not, and sometimes their study events attract an aundience that is majority straight, because they find it’s the queer perspective that is illuminating. Once upon a time, this kind of thinking was the very definition of Conservative Judaism. I heard this same kind of perspective encoded musically in Itai Gal’s niggun from last night.

So this is my very new-for-me take on queer Torah. People like me, communities like ours, have tended to talk about LGBTQ+ Jews as people “we” quote-unquote need to “welcome”, to “include”, and to do that we have to let go of something we have had, some earlier definition or some certainty. But really, these queer teachers and creators are saying: What we have is this cluster of fruit, and we can carry it together. Yes, you could say it’s heavy, it’s unusual, I don’t know what to make of it. Or you could say it is nourishing and it’s sweet and it’s been missing. It’s been there rooted in the land the whole time, but until we went looking for it, hopefully together, you didn’t recognize it. You thought milk and honey was in the future, but the truth is the promised land is even richer.

When I think about us, this community in particular, I think about the two scouts holding that large dowel between them, carrying this new and large fruit. I can easily imagine that one of them, but only one, was Kalev, confident about the future and ready to live in it right away. The other was concerned or had questions, felt the weight of it more than the sweetness. But they carried it together. That’s a moment I treasure too in the parasha. That’s why we invited Mimi Lemay here. That moment is a hope for us, so that we don’t get stuck in the desert for 40 years. We don’t know exactly what the promised land is like when it comes to equality or what it means truly to celebrate LGBTQ+ Jewish lives all the time. What we can know, and what I do know, is like this in the Torah’s words: tova ha-aretz m’od m’od. The land of our Pride is a good land; it is very, very good.

Yom Hashoah Remarks 5784 (2024)

This is what I said at the ceremony of lighting candles at the end of our annual Holocaust Remembrance Program in Nashua which the Jewish community holds at Rivier University in conjunction with the school, our Catholic partner in remembering. After the thank you's I said this:

We came here this evening to learn and to mourn. We learn to pick up lessons, and charges -- but we mourn just because. Not because everyone whose memory we honor was righteous or heroic or resilient. But just because they were ours.

We comfort each other, and we comfort especially those who are mourning a loved one whom you knew, or whom you might have known if not for the Shoah.

How many candles we could light. If we wanted to recite the names of every Jew who was lost and began today and did not stop, we would be here until the start of next spring.  We honor the memory of six million Jews and millions more – Roma, LGBTQ+, disabled, political opponents of the Nazi regime. We weep for every person who lost a life, and we weep for those who survived but lost loved ones, or whose body or soul was wounded forever by those who acted and those who stood by. 

As Jews we are grateful for you who have come to sit with us and around us as we grieve. Because alas, even our mourning has become contentious. We Jews have been told this year by too many that we cannot simply mourn our dead. That we cannot share the names and faces of our dead and our captives. That our pain is not significant enough. Among the many shattering things about last October 7 is that survivors of the Shoah had to go through it or see it, in Israel and here. So it is precious to have not just our own Jewish place but a public place, where we can mourn.

This year the charge of genocide is being directed against us. Jews in Israel are not engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people. Jews here are not supporting a genocide against Palestinians.

I am an educator and a member of the state Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education, so for those who say something else than what I jsut said and want to talk about it I offer myself to listen, to hear the pain of others and not just hear it but acknowledge it and the mourning and anger with it, and also to explain why I just said that the death and terrible suffering in Gaza is not genocide. If you need to have that conversation, or know someone who maybe does, if you have a young person in your life for instance, please come get my number or share it.

We often ask ourselves as Jews how much to devote our energies to the safety of Jews everywhere and to anti-Semitism, which has increased in all directions, and how much to work as allies to other groups who experience bias and intolerance and more, and need us with them. There is yet another part: As Jews we have to deal with the racism and Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias within us.

I have them, in ways I know and in ways I continue to discover. We have people within our Jewish collective who are powerful who dehumanize Arabs and who do not hide their wish actually to  remove Palestinians from their communities in many parts of the Land of Israel. We have to take responsibility for that. We have to live with the knowledge that in our hands are the lives, dignity, and freedom of another people. Not in our hands only, to be quite sure -- but still, much of it in our hands.

We have been insistent that the people of this country learn to see anti-Semitism is not just its overt forms but its most subtle forms, not just its physical forms but also its ideological ones. We have achieved support for that at the highest levels of American society and government. We have succeeded in passing a law in New Hampshire that every young person explore these things, even if they know not a single Jew personally, just because they are American. How could we not ask the same kind of thing of ourselves.

We have set a high standard for observation and nuance. We cannot be the one group not in the kinds of conversations everyone is having, with that level of nuance, even though we are in such pain and it is so hard.

Nor should we want to be. Looking at ourselves, doing our teshuvah, is not a reward to terrorists. It has absolutely nothing to do with them. It is on the contrary about who we see when we look at ourselves with the glorious third eye that sees us as the Divine sees us. It is how we know after the Shoah that we are still here. It is how we know, after everything, who, we, still, are.

We came here tonight for hope, in the story of people who were here for us when that took tremendous courage. We have heard a story that makes us less lonely as Jews, and it’s a story that might inspire us to be more courageous ourselves. This is an evening to see glimmers and sparks and beacons, not only in the past. To feel love and understanding across difference in this very room.

And we came here tonight to remember, to light candles because flame is both destruction and light. Let us light these candles, and bring to light again the beloved souls we are remembering here.

 

Tentative Torah For the Week's Parasha and Week of Protests

Some meandering and very rough notes about the opening of this week’s Torah reading, Leviticus 16, somehow sort of in light of week’s events at Columbia University and other places.

 

The chapter appears to be just the description by the Divine to Moshe and Aharon (Moses and Aaron) of an elaborate ritual for Yom Kippur, the annual Jewish high holy day of “atonement” – cleansing, resetting. This year, I’m thinking that it’s hinting at a conversation between the Divine and Moshe about his brother Aharon, who is not there at the moment. The conversation is about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing.

 

Some scholars view this conversation as the center of the Torah itself. It references the Holy of Holies, which is in the very center of the traveling community of Israel in the wilderness.

 

“The Divine said to Moshe – after the death of two of Aharon’s sons, in their coming near in the presence of the Divine, and they died. The Divine said to Moshe: Speak to Aharon your brother, that he not come just anytime the Holy Place inside the curtain, facing the Cleansing-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover that is on the ark, and die – for in a cloud I am seen over the Cleanings-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover. This is how Aharon should come to the Holy Place…. And atone/cleanse/reset for himself and for his household…”

 

And then more, about atonement/cleansing/resetting/ransoming for the entire people, through offerings and a scapegoat and an encounter in a cloud in the Holy of Holies.

 

1. Nadav and Avihu

 

In the first verse, the Torah is already wrestling with itself. The two sons had names, so why are they hidden here? Nadav and Avihu were their names. They died in a fire that came out from the Divine presence, when the two of them brought some kind of unauthorized fire offering. So that’s a reason to hide them. But then the verse shifts, softens -- unauthorized, “strange” fire is reported here as “coming close to the Divine.” And the Torah just mentions that they died, as a thing that happened without pronouncing judgment. It happened and it seems to be how Aharon is marking time right now, or how Moshe is, or how the Divine is.

 

If you want to say Nadav and Avihu were punished, you could say they wouldn’t tolerate holiness by any kind of methodical system. They had waited through seven days of an elaborate ritual of dressing up and waiting inside, to become priests. As soon as that was over, they just came the way they decided was right. You could say they wanted a short cut to absolutes, to truth. They didn’t trust authority, not their father’s or the Divine’s. They were protesters against the system. They were individualists masquerading as brave rebels. They broke from their tribe and family, from a long collective process of inquiry into truth and value and holiness, and fell into groundthink, an echo chamber of two.

 

Or you could Nadav and Avihu were right, but the Torah has no room for them, or the system can’t figure out how to assimiliate them. They were on a different plane, one which just couldn’t coexist with the world of method and system. The Torah doesn’t say in the chapter where they died that they sinned. The “strange fire” of many translations is probably too harsh and wrong for the Hebrew “zarah”; “unauthorized” is more precise. So maybe their story isn’t about punishment at all? Nadav and Avihu were just completely absorbed, in every sense, figuratively and literally. And still we can’t build a bridge from the Torah to them, on this way of seeing it. And to those they left behind, the matter was never resolved, and no one understood who they were or what they had done.

 

2. Aharon and his two sons

 

I never noticed this before this week: the Divine is worried that Aharon will go back to the place where his sons died, and if so he would also die. He might go at the wrong time, or he might go not prepared in the authorized way.

 

None of them had been priests for long. But Aharon was the quintessential system guy. He had to be, after he had improvised in the Golden Calf situation and look at the chaos and carnage and death that ensued. Aharon was at the top of the careful pursuit of holiness, the absolute, and truth – with his carefully designed garments, and the step-by-step processes of shepherding people through their offerings whenever they felt whole, or guilty, or joyful. Aharon would be the one to make judgments, first by oracle and eventually by the book of Torah.

 

But even so Aharon couldn’t suppress the improvisational, says the midrash. Doing his compulsory figure-eights, Aharon had the cultivated calm and metronomic pace to listen to people. And when they hurt he wanted to help them find peace within, or reconciliation between.

 

From time to time, could it be that Aharon was jealous of his two sons? Wished he could dispense with the time-consuming processes and inquiries, and go straight to the absolute? Is that the ground he wanted to go back to, at the Holy Place – to experience himself as they did for a once and only time? Did he need go there to reassure himself that this was him, and that was them, so he could reground himself? Or did he ever doubt his own way? If he did, who else could the Divine possibly find, to model the best of the priestly way and not just the prophetic?

 

Or maybe Aharon would go to the Holy Place simply to weep at the site of his loss, which was or wasn't connected to anything Nadav and Avihu did or represented in relation to him or anything. And the Divine was worried the people might never get him back from there, or never get him back intact.

 

3. The Divine and Aharon

 

How to talk to Aharon about this? How to protect him from searing pain, from being retraumatized by the Holy Place itself? How to shield him from a complexity he might never emerge from?

 

But also, how could even the Divine know when Aharon was healed enough, clear enough, to play his essential role? Which was to help the nation take responsibility, be accountable in a global way, for all it had done over a year’s time. It was Aharon the priest, not Moshe the teacher, whom the Divine designated to shepherd them through. It was Aharon the Divine wanted to train for this, even after Aharon had made the Golden Calf.

 

I have sometimes thought that Aharon’s priestly life was the Divine’s way of guarding him from ever making another public pronouncement in front of an idol that *This* is your god, O Israel. Literally from now on his every word and move would be scripted. But for some reason, that’s not the Aharon I’m seeing this year in this text. The Divine wants the father of Nadav and Avihu to be the one who comes to their meeting together in the Holy of Holies, to be the one person who will speak out loud the Divine name.

 

4. The Divine and Moshe

 

So the Divine went to Moshe with this dilemma.

 

Usually when the Divine has a charge that involves Aharon, the Divine speaks to them together. Not always, but mostly. Here, it stays for the time being between the Divine and Moshe.

 

Let me tell you what I have in mind, which the people need soon, and we need Aharon to guide them through. Maybe if I tell you, Moshe, you can tell him? Or you’ll know when he will be able to take this on?

 

Could we possibly say that the Divine “felt better” unburdening from this load, even if it would be a charge, a command whose execution we don’t hear much about?

 

Usually the Torah records that Moshe passed along what was spoken to him by the Divine, and then the Torah reports who followed through on the matter. In this chapter, it’s only sort of. We hear at the very end that someone did what the Divine had charged Moshe, but you almost miss it. We don’t know if “he did what the Divine had charged” means that Moshe talked to Aharon, or that Aharon performed the ritual.

 

Usually we don’t think of the Divine and Moshe as having conversations of consoling, of reflection. Moshe is the insistent one, the resistant one, the impatient one, the one who has an answer back or pushes the Divine to do something or do the opposite of what was just announced. Who just demands that the imperatives of absolute truths and methodical systems be reconciled – and you, Divine, make that so now! Usually the Divine relies on Aharon to slow things down and soften the edges, or make the dilemmas less painful.

 

On very rare occasions, it has to be Moshe. In this chapter, Moshe just listens to the Divine, listens absolutely, like no other time. And I have to think Moshe sobs in worry for his brother, for the Divine, for the people who need both the Divine and Aharon. Sobs for himself, for being Moshe and not Aharon. For not being able to meet these needs of the people himself.

 

And the Divine will not forget this, and will one day teach Moshe how to be like Aharon. But not yet.

 

5. Aharon and the people

 

It’s not like there haven’t been “sin offerings” until this point. Somehow it hasn’t been enough.

 

They need from time to time a broader accountability, for their year as a nation. Not just when they realize or find out they’ve done wrong – that’s what the “sin offerings” were for. They need to be made, forced, to ask themselves on an annual basis what have we done wrong, and give real answers and not just formulaic ones.

 

Even if they are in pain and in mourning, they need this periodic accountability. Nadav and Avihu were their loss too. Their trauma. It happened in their Holy Place.

 

Aharon will have to be the one to lead them through this new Yom Kippur, this day of cleansing/resetting/ransoming themselves back. Partly because Moshe is too harsh. The teacher is always grading. Partly because Aharon is the master of both systematic method and peaceful reconciliation.

And because when Aharon shows the people how to do this, from within his own pains and questions and anger and uncertainties, they will say: If he can, if he must, then we must, and we can.

 

Aharon will show them that you start with yourself, and your family. Before he can engage the people in confession, he must reflect on himself, on Nadav and Avihu, on everyone who is left. He will confess what he can, and what he doesn’t know is a sin or not he will at least offer up out loud as a report, to say that he knows.

 

Then he will speak on behalf of the people. Atonement is a word muddying the matter. There is a dimension of confession and acknowledgement, and then there is the Kippur, the cleaning/resetting and possibly ransoming back of one’s own soul and the national soul.

 

Interlude – Two Goats

 

The Mishnah says the two goats have to be identical in every way. The one that will carry off all the people’s wrongs to a far-away, sealed-off place no one can get to – and the one whose blood Aharon will take with him into the Most Holy Place.

 

Our worst acts and our ideals, sometimes they flow from place that are twinned within us. A quantum entanglement. (Or maybe just a cliché.)

 

6. Aharon and the Divine, or: Two Cherubs, or: Us Now

 

In the Most Holy Place it is crowded and it is lonely.

 

I have often thought of this part of Yom Kippur, where Aharon disappears into a cloud and meets the Shechinah, right by the ark with the deposit of the Divine words, as a calm retreat. A place he can see the most things, and hear spoken the special sounds of the Divine name, a word reserved and protected from the ways the world barnacles onto even our best most powerful words. How peaceful, how whole in this place.

 

This year I wonder about the lonely part. How will the Divine and Aharon be together? Will the two cherubs, which in the midrash embrace when the people as a whole are reconciled – will they be a comforting metaphor, especially to Aharon, or a cruel reminder of the separations he feels? Or of Nadav and Avihu who came toward this place and are no more – tragically, or because of their choices?

 

From Tali Adler this year, I think for the first time that Aharon and the Divine speak to each other. It’s not just Aharon, speaking the Name. About the Golden Calf, and what happened; about Nadav and Avihu, and who they were and what they did and what happened to them, and how everyone was affected. Aharon and the Divine have the best and most difficult conversation, about the year past and the losses and the wrongs and the world. Just like our midrash says that revelation at Mt. Sinai took as long as each person needed – a spiritual case of special relativity – so too Aharon and the Divine speak. From their perspective it takes as long as they need, maybe infinitely long, even if to the outside it seems to be over in a few minutes.

 

They have the conversations we all need – about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing. I wish the Torah would have told us more how to do that.

 

I believe Aharon emerges more cleansed, and restored, and healed. Through his acknowledgements, of his own faults and those of the people. And then all of the people through him are cleansed and restored and healed. They feel better and they are better, in every sense of the word. I believe this because I believe Moshe doesn’t tell Aharon to do all of this until Aharon is ready. (I wish the Torah had told us more about when Aharon was ready.) I believe this because I believe it’s possible to be ready.

 

Not just back then, but for us too.