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Yasher Koach

Here is the draft of my D'var Torah for tomorrow, when we read Parashat Ki Tisa and the story of the Golden Calf.

When someone has an honor to the Torah, we say to them: Yasher koach. This is a Yiddish-y inflection for yishar kochacha. Koach is strength and there are two views of what yishar kochacha means. Yishar kochacha or yishar kochaych, addressing a male or a female. It might mean “May your strength be straight.” From Yashar, which means straight in an ethical sense and also a geographical sense. If you ask directions in Israel, the most likely response is Yashar Yashar, sometimes Yashar Yashar ad hasof which means go straight until you can’t go straight anymore.

Or this might be from an Aramaic root that also means strength – “May your strength continue to be strong.” There’s also a debate about the vowels, whether it’s yishar kochacha or y’yasher koachacha, meaning “May the Divine make your strength straight.”

The custom is to say to someone yishar kochacha, yishar kochaych, and the person replies Baruch tih’yeh, may you be blessed, or brucha tih’yi. A person who has been close to the Torah has a strength, which hopefully can bestow a blessing. That in the same family as kissing the Torah.

Yasher koach is the Ashkenazi form of the custom, and the Sefardi form is Chazak u'varuch, "be strong and blessed", or Chazak ve-ematz, "be strong and courageous," and I like to reply in the Sefardi form gam Baruch tih’yeh, "Also may you be blessed." If you haven’t watched the comedian Modi talk about the difference between Sefardim and Ashkenazim on yasher koach vs. chazak ve-ematz, here it is on YouTube.

That’s the custom, but where does yasher koach come from?

You’ll never believe. The earliest reference to this phrase is in the Talmud Bavli (Shabbat 87a), where Resh Lakish said when Moshe smashed the tablets, the luchot habrit, God said: yasher koach. Which in Talmudic context clearly means, “Attaboy.” Well played, good job.” 

Resh Lakish notices something in the words but obviously it’s going to be more than the words. When God tells Moshe to make two new luchot, God says: I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, al haluchot harishonim, which you broke apart, asher shibarta (Exodus 34:1). On the surface level that sounds a bit passive-aggressive, so Resh Lakish hears asher shibarta as yishar koach she-shibarta. "Good for you for breaking them."

That’s really strange, that the thing we choose to say when someone is closest to the Torah originated in the act of destroying the two tablets.

And in fact Rashi’s final comment on the entire Torah, on the Torah’s eulogy for Moshe in the final verses we read on Simchat Torah, Rashi says that up there as one of the most important wonders that Moshe did for the Israelites was when he broke the tablets. (Credit to Rabbi Uzi Weingarten for this source.)

There is another early reference, which I got via Rabbi Tzvi Sinensky. It’s in a midrash (Shmot Rabbah 1:32) from probably a bit after Resh Lakish’s time in the Talmud. When Moshe runs away to Midyan and he chases away the shepherds that were menacing Yitro’s daughters, the midrash says that the women said to him: Yishar kochacha for saving us. And Moshe said: Actually it’s the Egyptian taskmaster I killed who saved you. That’s why the text has the daughters telling their father, according to the Torah: An Egyptian man saved us from the shepherds – meaning that the series of events that led to Moshe saving us started with that Egyptian man, who was beating a Hebrew slave.

Both of these yasher koach’s are paradoxical. Paradoxical sources for strength that we make a callback to, when we acknowledge someone who has been to the Torah or led us in a ritual or taught us Torah. Breaking the tablets could be a good thing. Another terrible brokenness that happened in Egypt, a beating followed by a killing, leads to a yasher koach.

And both of these moments, in Midyan and with the tablets, are moments of spiritual challenge and physical strength.

So what all is going on here? With broken and strong?

I know a lot of us feel that our moment now is spiritually challenging and also in our muscles and in our breathing and our heartrate. So part of strengthening our strength and straightening it is in attention to our bodies. Our hearts are pushing us so hard, to walk straight toward our solidarities and toward our principles. There isn’t a separation between what we think and know, and our emotions which are very physical things. And sometimes the burst of a push we can make reaches a limit, which the Torah represents as Moshe holding the tablets and then dropping or breaking them, or saving a life but violently and driving off the shepherds and then sitting in thirst, expended.

There is a lovely midrash about the breaking of the luchot that says that when Moshe first lifted up the tablets, even though they were big solid stones, they were light because of the letters that God had written, which had a heavenly gravity to them. Look at our Torah scrolls, where the words are written from a line etched above them in the parchment, as if they are rising up and not descending. So all the words on the luchot make them light.

When Moshe saw the calf, this midrash says that God took all the writing off the tablets and suddenly they became heavy again like regular stone. So Moshe couldn’t hold them anymore, and he dropped them and they broke. But this midrash says the erasing was actually an act of compassion. Seeing how far the people were from the covenant written on the luchot, God decided to temporarily hide the evidence, to take away all the terms so the whole people couldn’t be held guilty. Which would have been too much for Moshe. So this was actually a chesed for Moshe, a way to give Moshe time to catch his breath. And Moshe got it – instead of trying to hold onto the tablets right at that moment, when they weren’t working, he let himself drop them.

And God said yishar koach sheshibarta, good for you for breaking them, and soon we will be ready and write again and figure this out.

That’s the moment we need a yasher koach, a broken moment when we’re promised that the strength we felt before but not this moment, will return and increase and let us walk straight again.

Yasher koach is a reminder that the Torah itself knows us when we feel broken, because of the time of the calf, when he world around the Torah was so broken and the Jewish people was so broken that Torah itself had to be temporarily broken. The tablets were restored, and came to strengthen us in actual battle and in spirit.

It's good to know that the Torah knows some of the topsy-turvy-ness that we associate this time of year with the Megillah.

Yasher koach is a reminder that every certainty we have, everything that makes us ache today, is actually a revision of some original, a second version of the covenant. Because there is no value that came into the world pure, that hasn’t had a crisis where it broke and needed to be renewed or updated or made more complete. Not freedom, not equality, not Am Yisrael, not Tzelem Elohim. And that will continue. It feels sometimes like the world is broken today in a way it hasn’t before, but that’s not true. Over and over the tablets are broken or we have to let them go, and yasher koach, we mourn and then we engrave again, and it’s the only way we straighten our strength and our path.

And all of this is in our minds and in our bodies. Broken and strong are spiritual and physical. So when you come up to the Torah, make a point to hold onto it. Or when the Torah comes near you, or when it is held up in the air – feel your arm as you reach for it. And then we can say to you, Yishar kochachem. When you are strong may your strength be made straight, and when you are flagging, may you be strengthened.

Recommended Links of Mine for Purim This Year

Here in one place are links to the pieces I've done related to Purim and our contemporary world that I think are particularly worth a look or listen this year. For reading, listening, or watching.

Introducing Adar Conversations: Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy (read and video)

Getting to Mi Yode'a ("Who Knows") -- Moral Clarity in a Topsy-Turvy World (video and podcast; courtesy of Valley Beit Midrash)

Responding to Antisemitism After October 7, With Esther As a Guide (video) -- with Rabbi Dr. Karen Reiss Medwed

Purim: The Buddy Film! (read and video)

Antisemitism, Our Security and Our Souls: Wisdom From the Book of Esther (read)

Tov! Podcast About Judaism and "The Good Place": Chapter 24 -- Mask, Costume, True Self (video and podcast -- with Rabbi Ilana Schachter and Cantor Daniella Risman

All the videos as one YouTube playlist

Antisemitism, Our Security and Our Souls -- Wisdom From the Book of Esther

This was Dvar Torah for Shabbat Zachor last weekend, March 8, 2025.

Last year at this time, I coined a term for a brand-new approach to wellbeing. I called it EIST, for “Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy.” The big idea is that the Purim story is the best mirror in entire Tanakh, the whole Bible, for Jews like us.

Like us, the Jews of the Megillah are described as living in a vast and diverse world, all across the 127 provinces of the Persian Empire ruled by King Achasheverosh. Like us, the Jews of the Megillah were living in a world of material abundance, at least for some; and like us, the Jews of the Megillah, at least some of them, had two names, a Hebrew name and a Persian name.

Like our world, the world of the Jews in the Megillah has a random quality, where fate is a throw of lots; and the Megillah world is a morally topsy-turvy world in all kinds of ways, represented also as a tipsy world with all these drinking parties around King Achashverosh.

And like our world, inherent in the Megillah world is what we would today call antisemitism. It came to the surface easily, as ideas which could be spoken in the halls of power and converted into violence all over society.

The Megillah holds up a mirror to our world and then shows us a way out of it. That’s what Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy would be: the mirror we need to see things in and around us clearly, and the wisdom and practices to help us walk through and hopefully emerge strong and well.

The part of it I want to talk about this Shabbat is about antisemitism. This is Shabbat Zachor, and we have read in the Torah and the Haftarah about this people Amalek who are thought to be the most incorrigible enemies of the Jewish people, because they are the most ruthless people imaginable. Haman in the Megillah is their descendant. These are difficult readings, but rather than bury them it’s better for us to face them.

My question for today on Shabbat Zachor is not whether there is antisemitism around us, because there is. And it’s not whether there is more of it than a couple years ago, because there is. Or even whether it’s worse on the anti-Israel left or the white nationalist right, because both are far more active and in the open than they were ten years ago.

My question is about who we are as we perceive and experience antisemitism, directly in our lives or as we read and see film of it in our world. Will we continue to be the Jews we know we ought to be? Will we perceive hate in so many directions that we can’t look at ourselves in the mirror anymore, because we are too busy looking over our shoulders?

Every single day I get an email from the Anti-Defamation League titled “Campus Crisis Alert.” It has a little red siren icon next to the sender in my inbox, so it stands out from my other emails. It doesn’t matter what happened that day on what particular campus – I get a “Campus Crisis Alert.” It doesn’t matter if the content of the email contains mostly good news, about actions taken by Jewish students or university administrations! It’s still called “Campus Crisis Alert.”

I think the ADL is an incredibly important organization and yet I find the daily crisis alert alarming, for a different reason than they do. I have my own campus insider, my daughter at Barnard, and this week was a particularly bad one there. Talk about not knowing the difference between Blessed is Mordechai and Cursed is Haman – the material handed out at sit-ins that obstructed classes and barricaded a dean in her office is actual Hamas material. There was a crisis there this week and I’m not sure it’s resolved.

Yet even there, not every week is a crisis of antisemitism, and I know this from my insider. The hostages are a crisis. Antisemitism is a problem. There are groups invested in maintaining the crisis feeling, within the Jewish community and within our American politics. But as Jodi Rudoren, the editor-in-chief of The Forward, wrote this week -- when you’re in a crisis you can’t think straight, and when you say you’re always in a crisis you excuse yourself from ever having to think.

So what do Esther and Mordechai teach us, who were absolutely in a crisis of antisemitism? What’s the Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy we need?

The most important single moment in the Megillah is in Chapter 4, when Esther is first learning about what everyone else already knows about, the decree of genocide that Haman has persuaded King Achashverosh to issue. Esther first pleads powerlessness – I cannot go to the king, if you are not called and you go that’s sure death, and he has not called me for thirty days.

Mordechai sends a message back to her:

“If you keep silent, yes silent in this time,
spaciousness and rescue will come to the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will disappear.
And who knows if for a time like this you have arrived at royal power.”

כִּ֣י אִם־הַחֲרֵ֣שׁ תַּחֲרִ֘ישִׁי֮ בָּעֵ֣ת הַזֹּאת֒ רֶ֣וַח וְהַצָּלָ֞ה יַעֲמ֤וֹד לַיְּהוּדִים֙ מִמָּק֣וֹם אַחֵ֔ר וְאַ֥תְּ וּבֵית־אָבִ֖יךְ תֹּאבֵ֑דוּ וּמִ֣י יוֹדֵ֔עַ אִם־לְעֵ֣ת כָּזֹ֔את הִגַּ֖עַתְּ לַמַּלְכֽוּת׃

Obviously Mordechai is giving Esther a charge to stand up for her people, for us the Jews. But it’s a very nuanced charge.

Mordechai says to Esther: You have to speak, because right now the Jews do not know what to say about what is going on. All we are doing is wailing and crying out, or speaking without clarity. Someone needs to give better words to this moment, and someone needs to starting guiding us and giving us something constructive to do.

It needs to be you, Esther, because it needs to be someone who is powerful and not powerless. And you are actually powerful, even though you think your power is tenuous. And who knows, maybe the purpose of your power is not simply what I Mordechai originally thought when I sent you in this direction. It’s not that you have status, that you’re my insider. Your power as a Jew is important for the rest of us to see, so we will not feel as vulnerable as we currently think we are.

Mordechai says: If you do not define what this moment requires and what it means, someone else will. One way or another this Haman decree is going to be thwarted. But if you do not stand up, someone who is not you Esther with your moral voice, probably someone not even Jewish – someone else is going to come and rescue us. And then they will say we owe it all to them, to some outsider, and we will be beholden to their truth forever.

And if that happens you and the legacy you are part of will disappear; the moral heights you had in reach will mean nothing.

Mordechai says to Esther: It’s a matter of revach v’hatzala. Hatzala means rescue, so physical safety. Revach is spelled like ruach – spirit. What’s at stake, Esther, is not only our safety but our souls, our neshamas. You can help us not only survive but keep our hearts intact.

And Esther responds in remarkable ways. Last year my colleague Rabbi Karen Reiss Medwed taught me that Esther starts to realize that she has all these servant-girls who revere her as queen. To them she is absolutely the queen, a person of power and stature, and she can ask them to do things for her.

Esther tells Mordechai to direct the Jews to take three days and focus and fast. Fast for me, she says, tzumu alai. She asks them to concentrate on her, to take their minds off the enemies for a time and instead put their attention on her – what she is all about, what she will do and how she will guide them. She is reminding them that even this crisis isn’t a tomorrow crisis; the edict will take months to play out. We don’t need a solution tomorrow, though we do need one. But if we don’t figure it out right this second all is not lost.

After three days she takes what seems like a risk, but it all dissolves when the king sees her. The text says that Esther has the quality of chein, that she is a catalyst for the grace and graciousness in everyone who meets her. It was there the moment the king’s servants first met her, and it’s why the king chose her even though he’s too much of a buffoon to remember until she invites herself back.

I like to think that from there, everyone sees Esther in a high profile summit with the king and Haman -- and the Jews realize that she is okay, not just safe but in control. And they are able to exhale, and think.

When the king finally takes her side and our side, the Jews of the empire absolutely had to stand up in self-defense. But Esther worries that the Jews are learning the wrong lesson – that the only answer to Haman’s violent plan is violence; that the problem isn’t just Haman and his circle but an entire empire of people who may be ready to carry out his plan. So Esther sends a letter to the Jews of the entire empire and instructs them: We will remember Haman’s plan, and we will remember what I did and how we all stood up for each other.

And as we do it, as we retell a story with violence, we will send gifts to each other, mishloach manot, and we will take care of those in need among us, matanot la’evyonim. We will be what we want the world to be at the exact moment we are remembering when the world was not.

We will tell not only about Haman – we will tell about us, on our terms. We will tell that a Jew is someone who does not bow down to any human, that a Jew is someone who looks out for the life of the king and the welfare of the kingdom.

That’s the way out. That’s what the EIST therapist would say to us.

Esther and Mordechai lived in a world something like ours, and actually in a crisis time. The antisemitism we face in the U.S. is not a crisis like that which threatens our very existence. It’s instead a problem, a real one and a big one. And part of solving problems, and being able to strategize, is to protect who you are, the best of who you are.

That includes not letting your enemies define you, or give them control over your consciousness, your rhythm, your daily life.

So in addition to advocating for ourselves and pushing back on the falsehoods, some of what we need to do right now is to refocus ourselves on mitzvot and to see ourselves, each of us, as people of mitzvot – to love our own Jewish neshamas.

We have to be good to each other even more, Jew to Jew, at a time when not everyone is good to us.

We have to be excellent friends to other groups who are also going through things now, loyal allies. We are not the only ones with problems. Esther at the end of the story was not just a Jewish heroine, but queen of the whole empire. We have to remind ourselves of our own power and to use it for good.

We have to continue to keep faith about America and its ideals, its promise, its pluralism, even when that faith seems like a leap of faith. We have to believe in an American Jewish future that is a good one. We cannot give those things away, because then our fears will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some of us have to be willing to be uncomfortable. To see ourselves as strong enough to go and talk to people or in places we worry we will be attacked. It’s what I have been doing. You might be surprised by what happens in some of those places.

There are many people doing all of these things in the Jewish community now, and so many of them are the college students, especially on the campuses where it’s hardest. They are so inspiring.

As Mordechai says to Esther, Mi yode’a – who knows if this is why we are the Jews here today at this particular time, during this generation of challenge for American Jews and for Jews everywhere.

When it comes to antisemitism especially since October 7, Revach v’hatzala yaa’amod la’Yehudim – we need security and our souls, both at the same time. Esther and Mordechai showed us how we could secure ourselves and even make our souls larger in the process. That’s the Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy we have all been looking for.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Purim Sameach.

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.

Gratitude for Being Together in This Country

These are my words from this past Tuesday's Thanksgiving service with the Nashua Area Interfaith Council. Thank you to Pilgrim Congregational Church for hosting us this year!

Let me start my reflection on gratitude for being together in this country with a story about Wolf Landsman, Clarence Stetson, and Eva Castillo. It’s possible I have told this story in an interfaith council setting before, and if so then I am telling it again!

Thanks to my sister Ellen, the family genealogist, I know that in 1893 just a few days after July 4^th, my great-grandfather Wolf Landsman came to the city court in Utica, New York, or as it is known in my family, the Garden of Eden. Grandpa Landsman as my dad calls him was 21, and he had been in this country for only three years. At the courthouse he declared his intent to become a citizen of the United States and renounced all allegiance to his previous sovereign, the czar of Russa. That could not have been a hard thing to do; to be a Jew in the czar’s empire was terrible, and over a few decades about forty percent sought refuge and new possibilities in the United States. The hard thing for Wolf Landsman to do would have been to do write his intentions on a form in English.

So the document Ellen found is completed in the beautiful handwriting of Clarence Stetson, a court clerk. Plus my great-grandfather’s X for a signature. What I know about Mr. Stetson is that he and his family were for at least 80 years and may still be part of the legal, governmental, and civic leadership of Utica. I want to picture him with a fancy hat, but I have no evidence he is related to those Stetsons.

Some Stetson in a recent generation was leader of an architectural design firm working in the city; travel through downtown Utica and its classic buildings will remind you a lot of our own Nashua.

My favorite part of the document is the one place where I am pretty sure there was no way to quite bridge the communication gap between Grandpa Landsman and Mr. Stetson. In the otherwise meticulous penmanship of Mr. Stetson there is the name of the Russian town where my great-grandfather was born. I think all Mr. Stetson could hear was something like Grvkimustck, so it looks like he fudged it. It looks like letters on the form, but I think it’s just a clever piece of art that looks like letters. I’d ask my sister the researcher to make out the city name, but I like my version of the story better.

Two years ago, 129 years later to the month from the date of this document, I talked about this part of my family’s origins in America at an immigration-related gathering of storytelling and affirmation here in Nashua. When I arrived, with my tightly crafted three-minute intro, I learned that everything during the evening would be interpreted into Spanish and from Spanish to English, in real time, so we should speak accordingly with pauses etc. Thank you to the amazing Eva Castillo.

The upshot of which is that the story of my traditional Jewish great-grandfather was told not just in English by a rabbi -- but in a New England, Unitarian Universalist Church, in Spanish.

That is why I am grateful to be together in this country.

In Hebrew the root-word for gratitude is unlike most words in that it has really only a single letter, rather than three. The letter is dalet ד, which makes the sound D as in Judaic and means a door. I have been thinking about why gratitude is a door, whether it’s about opening and going in or opening and going out. Perhaps this is about emerging from one’s own space into the vastness of America, the chaos that could drown out one’s presence and voice, and yet still being found and heard. Perhaps this is about going inside, to a place not only one’s own but a welcoming home that could be any of ours, and sitting around a table for conversation about ultimate issues among many voices, reaching for a highest common denominator, in a conversation made possible in a space like this that is just right.

As the great rabbi Forrest Gump said: I think maybe it’s both... happening at the same time.

Even, or especially, when we strain to make sense of the words between us, to find a handwriting to represent the histories we are passing back and forth. As we translate our thoughts into one another’s languages. Or even when we can’t quite bridge the communication gap, and all we can do together is write the simplest mark, to indicate that one tried to speak and one tried to hear and we got this far so far.

And that is why this, inside this door, this dalet, is America. This is America. We shall repeat that and repeat that, enact it and enact it, because it is true and it will be true. For that -- for you -- I am thankful.

What I Wish President Biden Had Put More at the Center

I am pretty sure that from very soon after President Biden was inaugurated, I wrote and/or said that he had one essential mission, one which he was uniquely situated to do. To bring to bear his basic decency and his long experience with so many different types of people and groups in our society, and to bring people back to an American center. Not a set of policy compromises, or an unattainable moderate politics. Just to get to people who had become disillusioned about whether national generosity and decency and education matter, who were doubting the American exceptionalism that makes a country work with tremendous diversity of origins and religions and views about the role of government. To show all those people that they could talk to him and he could listen to them, and that they could talk and listen to each other.

I argued that he should do this not for policy goals, though that might be nice. But to detox the political rhetoric and to enlarge somewhat a political ”center” where people remain divided ideologically but recognize each other as committed Americans who win and lose elections and policy decisions.

We needed President Biden to travel the country in this way from day one in office, because no one else was or has been able to do it. To find partners in communities where most people did not vote for him. Not people who think he and his party are evil threats to their way of life, or who believe that nonwhite immigrants are the paradigm of every threat imaginable to life and prosperity. I mean the people who leaned away from him and the Democrats recently, or who have always been more conservative but still wanted to believe in most of their fellow citizens and a community among the different.

I don’t know how much President Biden could have succeeded. It wouldn’t have yielded him any short-term political benefit. It might well have given us a different Republican president in 2025, one without the hateful and brutal rhetoric and intentions – a President Haley or Rubio.

Yet how could President Biden have thought that this was such a distant second to his policy goals or his use of his initial legislative majorities?. How could he have thought that he was the last candidate standing, in the 2020 primaries and the general election, for any reason other than his unique persona and this mission? He certainly wasn’t nominated or elected because of his total record or his unique policy menu in 2020. He was elected to be not-Trump not in policy terms but civic terms.

Why didn’t he do it? Oh, why?

Maybe he wasn’t physically up to it. Maybe he thought that just being not-Trump, not dominating everything in the media, would leave room for other kinds of air to come in on its own. Maybe he believed what Democrats always believe and is never true in the short-term, that policy achievements even on a massive scale would change people’s feelings.

I don’t know and I don’t especially care. I suppose the signs were even in his inaugural address, where he just asserted the decency of Americans, labeled a fringe and called them a small fringe, and left it at that. He should have instead announced a plan to put himself personally on the line to make his American vision real and visible and palpable.

So this is why I will feel that President Biden has some historic fail on his record, a fail that matters.

I say this with extra regret because I do think that Joe Biden is also the most menschy president of my lifetime. I expect that less and less of presidents, and also need that less and less. I have for a while made myself stop falling in love with presidents. I think there’s a minimum threshold of decency we need in a president, it doesn’t have to be the kind we would want in a friend, and the extra can be traded for effectiveness in other areas. I don’t equate personal goodness with political virtue. But in my lifetime (I was born during the Johnson administration), I don’t think there is anyone who has held the office who was a better human being than Joe Biden has been overall through his time in public life. Obviously there are some terrible blots on this, particularly Anita Hill. Yet to use a cliché, his love not just for America but for Americans are powerful. If you want to get a glimpse into how Joe Biden the man has never waned, take a listen to him on Anderson Cooper’s podcast about grief.

I am not one who puts the uniting above the policies, which have direct effects on wellbeing and life. (There was an essay by Michael Walzer in early 2017 that I think articulated the proper relationship between those two things just right.) I just think there was so much more President Biden could have done early in his term especially, to reconstruct some “center” even within the policy horizon he set for himself. He didn’t, and here we are.

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.

After the Election: Take Love Seriously. Give Love Wildly.

 

This was my Dvar Torah last Shabbat, November 9, the first Shabbat after Election Day 2024.

First I want to say that the operation of a democracy is awe-inspiring. To experience a day when 300-million-plus people bring something of moral significance to a crescendo all at once. To contemplate what goes into that, philosophically and logistically. Which is why we are honoring today the people who have been closest to that process, as candidates and at the polls and in campaigns – and thank you to everyone who voted or brought a young person with you as you voted.

It has been an exhausting week. It has been an exhausting campaign, an exhausting thirteen months.

Also an exhausting pandemic and an exhausting decade. But right now, just an exhausting week. Regardless of how you assess the results, all or some of them. Which is why I am not going to tell you today how the Torah solves everything on our minds – like how you are feeling or how you think about other people who voted differently or what to do next. There’s no Torah insight that only suddenly became apparent this week, that we couldn’t have learned until now. Next Shabbat, I will speak toward those bigger pictures, but today I hope I can offer you something both more modest and more fundamental. Maybe soothing, maybe even useful, regardless of where you’re at right now.

There is a classic psychology study from 2008 by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh, in which participants were given a description of another person, and asked to make judgments based on that information about whether that person was generous or warm, or the opposite. Or in which they were given a short task and then had the opportunity to take a small reward for themselves or give something to another person. But the experiment actually began when the participant arrived and was met by a research assistant juggling a clipboard and papers and a drink, who then asked the participant to hold their drink for a moment. Sometimes, the drink was a warm coffee, and sometimes an iced coffee. Then the assistant took the drink back and escorted the subject to the research room.

And in this particular study, the subjects who held the warm drink were more likely to rate the person they read a packet about as a warm person, a generous person. Or to choose to give something away rather than take a small reward for themselves. Other things controlled, the very same person was judged more generously or more harshly based on this external physical factor, the warm or cold drink. Other things equal, a participant in this study was likely to be more generous or more selfish, if they had been primed by warmth or cold.

My point is that our recent time has been like this. Not warm, but so cold, and so hot. Even beyond our awareness, our minds and our hearts are affected in ways we don’t even realize, by the touch of something that is at the same time physical and emotional and spiritual. As much as we are trying to live warmly and judge warmly, we are all being handed scalding after scalding after scalding cup of coffee.

We have to notice that. And it’s what any of us can and ought to do something about starting from now –  whether you are more pleased or more disturbed by the results of the election, whether you are right now hopeful or despairing, whether you are thinking about what to do next or nowhere near ready for that. To put it negatively, what we need to address are the brutal and hateful words and calls. Everywhere around us. That brutality is the hot cup of coffee probably each of us has held to the point that it penetrates into our minds and our hearts.

Or to put it more positively: An antidote, even just for today, is love. It’s ahavah and chesed. It is simply, simply love. It is the practice of love. 

Love is the warm cup we have to hand each other, over and over and over.

At a few of our interfaith gatherings this week, Rev. Allison Palm, president of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council and minister for the Unitarian Universalist Church, shared this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, called “Because”:

So I can’t save the world—
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust. I want to invite compassion
into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

Rev. Palm said to a few of us the other day that this love isn’t just that we should be kinder. Which certainly isn’t a bad thing. But more than that: To take love seriously./To give love wildly.

We know that kind of love right here, where love is saying Amen to everyone’s prayer, as if it were the most important prayer you yourself could say, even though you don’t know exactly what it is.

Love could be toward the people we are fearful for right now – the promise we make, even if it’s just right now to ourselves, that we will really follow through and love them, be there for them and speak up for them.

Love could be to stretch toward someone in our community or our society who baffles us, even if it’s just to appreciate their face or the beautiful sound of their voice when they speak about what matters to them.

Love must be toward yourself, so you can rest, have Shabbat, recharge for important things, or let yourself experience joy for no ulterior purpose at all.

Love is feeling that you are loved -- loved by the Divine; loved by someone else, perhaps in a church or a mosque somewhere, someone who is imagining you, appreciating your face or the beautiful sound of your voice when you speak about what matters most to you.

…practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.

…To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

And whenever we are angry and frustrated and outraged, we can be serious about love, by reminding ourselves that we only feel those things because we love. And it’s only the love behind the anger and frustration that will ever make a difference.

So whether you are trying to take a stand or whether you are simply sad, today just love. Give love wildly. 

Detoxing our environment of the ugliness and the brutality of tone will not by itself eliminate our divisions; nothing can. Nor will it miraculously reveal new public policies we have not found yet that everyone will rally behind, and the brutality will recede into small corners. But it is the thing that is always possible, even right now.

And at least in here, every Shabbat, we can be together in love. As we juggle our prayerbooks and our handouts, our plates at Kiddush, we hand each other the warm cup of coffee. The warm cider, the cocoa, that helps us see the world as our hearts want to see it – full of warmth, full of generosity. Give it to each other, again and again and again. If we do that here, we will be better able to do that outside as well. 

So:

…today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. 

To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

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.