A Call to Disarm

Once again, we would like to share with you the latest Jewish Standard op-ed by Adas Emuno President Lance Strate, published in the October 13th issue, and entitled, A Call to Disarm:



Let me begin with a thought that might sound like heresy to some citizens of the United States: The Second Amendment to our Constitution is not scripture.

Indeed, neither the Bill of Rights nor the US Constitution itself were handed down to us by God. Nor are they said to have been dictated from on high, or be the product of divine inspiration. Rather, they are the product of human beings, subject to human flaws and human error. And they are a product of a particular time and set of circumstances, some of which are no longer in effect, such as slavery, and some of which have changed radically, such as the likelihood of a solider being quartered in a private home, an infringement that is the subject of the Third Amendment.

The founders of our republic clearly were aware of their own limitations by including Article Five of our Constitution, which allows for the possibility of amending our governmental framework, and lists the procedures to be followed in order to propose and ratify a constitutional amendment.

Famously, new amendments have abolished slavery, granted voting rights to women, and lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Infamously, the 18th Amendment prohibited the manufacture, importing, transportation, and sale of alcohol in the United States. Thirteen years after it was established, this amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment, ending the period characterized by crime and violence known as Prohibition.

We the people can amend the US Constitution, and we can amend our amendments. In theory, we can amend our amendments to our amendments, and so on ad infinitum, but the important point is that amendments can be repealed. And I want to join the chorus of sane and concerned voices calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment.

Bret Stephens, in a recent New York Times op-ed arguing for repeal, concluded with the following: “The true foundation of American exceptionalism should be our capacity for moral and constitutional renewal, not our instinct for self-destruction” ("Repeal the Second Amendment").

Everybody knows that the Second Amendment is written in a torturous manner that makes it impossible to determine its precise meaning: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Historians tell us that the first clause is the main point, to guarantee the right of individual states to maintain their own armed forces, as a matter of collective defense. In part, the motivation had much to do with skepticism about maintaining a standing army on the federal level. The idea that the Second Amendment refers to individual rights is a later interpretation, with its roots in the aftermath of the Civil War, and largely a 20th century innovation.

The Second Amendment is not scripture, and therefore should not have to undergo talmudic exegesis, just so that it can serve as a pretext for preventing any and all regulation of firearms. The initials NRA do not stand for the National Rabbinic Association, so that organization does not have the moral or intellectual authority to dictate its interpretation of the amendment to the American citizenry.

And what about scripture itself? Of course, there were no firearms in the ancient world, but there are references to other weapons. Look at the famous words of the prophet Isaiah: “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,” in reference to warfare; in another Jewish context, the Christian Bible’s Gospel of Matthew has Jesus admonish one of his followers by saying: “all who take up the sword, will die by the sword.”

Of course, we would expect to find messages of nonviolence dominating the sacred texts of our nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage. And we might well wonder how it is that so many people of faith in our country can resist any efforts to reduce gun violence so zealously. In another New York Times op-ed, David Brooks argues that “guns are a proxy for larger issues,” for “a much larger conflict over values and identity” ("Guns and the Soul of America").

In other words, it’s the culture war, stupid.

And let us make no mistake about it. Resistance to gun safety legislation is linked to the populist movement that gave us the Trump presidency, it is linked to the alt-right, to white supremacy and neo-Nazi movements, to anti-immigration sentiment, to Islamophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism. It should be pretty clear which side we ought to be on.

If there is a passage in scripture that might be the ancient equivalent of the Second Amendment, it might be found in the Holiness Code in the Book of Leviticus, in the commandment “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” This suggests a right to self-defense that might translate to a right to bear arms. But it also implies a collective right to be safe and secure, the right implied by the prophet Micah, and alluded to by George Washington in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, that “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.”

Psalm 115 incorporates a polemic against idol worship, characterized as “the work of men’s hands,” concluding that “they that make them shall be like unto them, yea, everyone who trusts in them.” If people treat the Second Amendment as scripture, are they not in effect worshiping firearms as their idols? And consequently, doesn’t that transform them into instruments of violence, molded into the image of their molten gods, tools of their own invention?

This summer I published a book called Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition. One of my central arguments in that book is that our tools and technologies are never neutral, that they have inherent characteristics and tendencies that influence how they are used. Just as objects tend to roll down rather than up a hill, and stones are hard not soft, so guns are inherently designed as instruments of violence. This is a tendency, not an absolute. In some instances, the presence of guns may deter violence, it is true, but on the whole, the more guns in a situation, the greater the potential for violence, and the greater the frequency and harm of violent events.

⏣ ⏣ ⏣ ⏣ ⏣ ⏣ ⏣⏣ ⏣ ⏣ ⏣ ⏣ ⏣ ⏣

You may notice that I have made no reference to the specifics of the most recent mass shooting, and that is because the details do not matter. As of this writing, journalists covering the story are obsessed with the question of why it happened. In this instance, that question is proving to be harder to answer than usual. But in my view, the why is irrelevant. The why will always be different, individual, personal. Taking a media ecology approach, what matters is not why, but how. And the how remains consistent across the 131 mass shootings that have occurred over the past 50 years.

It’s the guns, stupid. It’s the firearms.

The answer to why often is some form of insanity, as if there were ever a sane reason to commit mass murder. But allowing for that, the same side of the culture war that defends the Second Amendment also opposes funding for research into the causes of gun violence, and funding for mental health in general, and funding for universal health care, which would aid the victims of gun violence. There is no moral equivalence between the two sides.

And while one side argues for the Second Amendment in absolute or near absolute terms, the other asks, you might say begs, for modest modifications that might not make more than a modicum of difference. Is there any wonder that the outcome is more of the same, over and over again?

It is time for a new abolition movement, one dedicated to the repeal of the Second Amendment, because that in turn would open the door to substantial Federal gun safety legislation. This is not a call for a prohibition on firearms, but rather to open the door for reasonable safety measures, so that we all can sit under our vines and fig trees, in our concert halls and movie theaters and night clubs and malls, and in baseball fields and schools and houses of worship, and in our streets and homes, and none shall make us afraid ever again.

The Shameless and the Shamed

The September 1st op-ed for the Jewish Standard, written by Adas Emuno president Lance Strate, is entitled The Shameless and the Shamed, and we share it here on our congregational blog, noting that the opinions expressed are not an official position of the congregation: 


Let’s play a game of word association. I’ll say a word and you say the first thing that comes into your mind. Ready?

The word is shameless.

If you answered Trump, then please feel free to continue reading. If not, then you may want to stop right here.

To be frank, I have no desire to bother trying to make a case for why Trump’s behavior ought to be described as shameless. If you can’t see it by now, then whatever proof I might muster won’t make a difference to you. I could easily fill this entire column with evidence, but it wouldn’t matter. And if I merely cited the most recent examples as of this writing, by the time it is published they’ll already be fading from awareness, displaced by newer instances.

In sum, I have no patience left for those who would deny a truth that is so very self-evident.

As I was writing this, the words “have you no shame, sir,” popped into my head, but a quick Google search showed that I had misremembered the quote. It was during the Army-McCarthy Senate hearings in 1954 that the chief consul for the U.S. Army, Joseph N. Welch, said to Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no decency?”

With those words, both the Republican senator from Wisconsin and the Communist witch hunt that bore his name—McCarthyism—were fatally shamed. Television played an instrumental role in this, because the hearings were broadcast on the ABC and Dumont networks. It also followed two See It Now exposés produced by the legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow.

McCarthy’s chief counsel, who was a key participant in the exchange that prompted Welch’s denunciation of McCarthy, was attorney Roy Cohn. Two decades later, Cohn would represent a young Donald Trump, and he became something of a mentor to the real estate developer. Cohn is also credited with introducing Trump to Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who gave us the scandal-ridden Fox News cable channel, whose claim to be “fair and balanced” also is delivered without shame.

The connection between Trump and McCarthy is not confined to scapegoating, but also extends to manipulation of the news media. The conservative historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin coined the term pseudo-event to describe news that is manufactured by journalists and publicists, rather than gathered based on real world occurrences. He argued that the introduction of steam-powered printing presses in the early 19th century made possible the publication of daily newspapers, but there were not enough actual events, train wrecks, hurricanes, elections, armed conflicts, to fill their pages. It therefore became necessary to create pseudo-events that would not have happened except for the presence of the news media, such as interviews, publicity stunts, press releases, press conferences, and leaks. This is what Boorstin wrote about McCarthy in his book The Image:

It is possible to build a political career almost entirely on pseudo-events. Such was that of the late Joseph R. McCarthy, Senator from Wisconsin from 1947-1957. His career might have been impossible without the elaborate, perpetually grinding machinery of ‘information.’… And he was a natural genius at creating reportable happenings that had an interestingly ambiguous relation to underlying reality. Richard Rovere, a reporter in Washington during McCarthy’s heyday recalls:

He knew how to get into the news even on those rate occasions when invention failed him and he had no unfacts to give out. For example, he invented the morning press conference called for the purpose of announcing an afternoon press conference. The reporters would come in—they were beginning, in this period, to respond to his summonses like Pavlov’s dogs at the clang of a bell—and McCarthy would say that he just wanted to give them the word that he expected to be ready with a shattering announcement later in the day, for use in the papers the following morning. This would gain him a headline in the afternoon papers: ‘New McCarthy Revelations Awaited in Capital.’ Afternoon would come, and if McCarthy had something, he would give it out, but often enough he had nothing, and this was a matter of slight concern. He would simply say that he wasn’t quite ready, that he was having difficulty in getting some of the ‘documents’ he needed or that a ‘witness’ was proving elusive. Morning headlines: ‘Delay Seen in McCarthy Case—Mystery Witness Being Sought’.

There is no denying that the reporters who covered McCarthy also were shameless in their pursuit of content, and the same can be said of the news media covering the 2016 election. Recall the comment CBS head Les Moonves made that February about the coverage that Trump was generating: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS…. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

Shameless pursuit of profit. Shameless self-promotion. Shameless exercise of power. The common denominator is clear.

But what does it mean to be shameless? The experience of shame comes from a concern over how others see us. We feel shame over something because we fear that it will cause others to think poorly of us. Adam and Eve were shamelessly unclothed until they ate the forbidden fruit, “and the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). This doesn’t mean that they had been blind, but rather that they had become ashamed in the sight of each other, and God.

We are not only ashamed of something, we are ashamed before someone. Someone whose opinion of us is important to us.

The Torah tells us that Adam and Eve felt shame because they were naked. It does not say that they felt guilt because they had eaten the fruit. Shame is a more basic, primal experience than guilt, based as it is on the fear of what others may think of us. Guilt is shame internalized. We can have a guilty conscience even if we have no fear of discovery. A guilty verdict is intended to be an objective statement about the defendant who is on trial, not about how others feel about that person. And guilt is separate from punishment. Shame signifies its own consequences—to be shamed before others.

Shame is about relationships. It is felt most acutely in regard to the people closest to us, but it also can extend to the larger entity known as the public. If you follow the HBO series Game of Thrones, you no doubt will recall from the season 5 finale how Cersei, then the Queen Mother, was forced to undergo a walk of atonement. She was stripped naked and led through the city, as crowds threw insults and garbage at her, and a priestess cried out repeatedly, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” And if you grew up in the United States, chances are you read National Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. That book’s title refers to the public shaming of its main character, Hester Prynne.

Television transforms the public of the city square and agora, as well as the reading public made possible by the printing press, into something at once broader and more diffuse. For more than two decades, investigative reporter Arnold Diaz gave us local news stories on WCBS-TV Channel 2 called Shame on You. (I still recall the jingle that preceded the segments: “Shame, shame, shame … shame on you!”)

More recently, social media have amplified both the process of shaming and our sensitivity to it, with many references to body-shaming, fat-shaming, and slut-shaming. Critics decry the decline of civility that leads to indiscriminate shaming on the one hand. But on the other, we have a desire to silence all forms of criticism, and that in turn leads to the accusation that any negative comment is a form of shaming.

We find ourselves in the midst of a series of shame wars.

Television shamed McCarthy, and more importantly, it shamed reporters so that they stopped covering him. The televised Watergate Senate hearings shamed Richard Nixon into resigning the presidency. But CNN’s and MSNBC’s unrelenting shaming of the president do not seem to have the same effect. Perhaps the contrary messages coming from Fox News and Trump’s Twitter feed—the president is notorious for blocking anyone who tweets anything negative about him—insulate him from any sense of shame.

Another possible explanation stems from Trump’s narcissism. Psychologists tell us that narcissism is a defense against powerful, at times nearly unbearable feelings of shame. Shame leads to blame, so that not only does a narcissistic person seek praise and approval, that person also responds in a highly defensive manner to any perceived criticism or slight.

Whatever the reason, a president who has no shame is a recipe for disaster. By way of contrast, consider the American remake of a British working class family TV series called Shameless. Our version, launched on the Showtime cable channel series in 2011, features a family living in extreme poverty, a family that is not working class but instead is part of an underclass. And while the subject of shame is not discussed much in the program, we recognize and even applaud the young family’s skirting of conventional legality and morality in their efforts to survive.

The fear of being shamed is a luxury they cannot afford.

Indeed, a sense of shame is directly proportional to honor, a somewhat archaic yet still significant notion, as well as status, something still very much with us. There is little or no shame possible for those on the lowest rungs of the social order, for example the beggar, while the greatest potential for shame is held by people of the highest status—once upon a time the aristocracy and nobility, today the rich and famous—anyone in a position of leadership at any time.

Honor served as a check against shameful behavior, preserving reputation and privilege, and therefore the leader’s legitimacy. For a person of honor, being dishonored requires that he or she must retreat from public life.

A leader without honor, a shameless leader, is a tyrant. And tyrants do not have a good track record in the United States.

When we talk about the shameless and the shamed, another word comes to our minds. It’s the Yiddish word for shame—shande. We speak of shande not just as individuals, but as a people. It’s the shame we feel collectively when one of our number behaves badly. And it is in this sense that I feel ashamed of our president.

Not guilt, because I didn’t vote for him, but shame as an American, before my friends and colleagues from other nations, shame before the rest of the world, and shame before history, posterity, the generations yet to come, and yes, before God.

In being shameless in his conduct, Trump has shamed all of us, and put our collective honor and status as a nation at risk.

It is a shande, plain and simple. And how shall we respond?

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Morning 5778

OUR COUNTRY

ROSH HASHANAH 5778

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

This summer a new chapter in an old debate erupted in the American Jewish community.

Rabbi David Wolpe of Temple Sinai in Los Angles, among the best known congregational rabbis in the country, published a column, Why I Keep Politics off the Pulpit. In it he says that he is "endlessly besieged by requests to take on this or that political or social issue." He remarks that, “with each new presidential administration the pressure grows greater." Rabbi Wolpe then explains why he avoids talking about politics from the pulpit. He concludes, “don’t tie your Torah to this week’s headlines. We are better, bigger and deeper than that.”

The reaction was fast and furious, in defense of Rabbi Wolpe and opposed to Rabbi Wolpe. The most talked about rebuttal was from Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, our movement. He begins, “There are few colleagues for whom I have more respect than Rabbi David Wolpe.… I count him as both a teacher and a friend. Which is why I was struck by… [his] recent op-ed… How could someone who is usually so right be so wrong on something so important?”

Rabbi Jacobs entitled his piece, A Politics Free Pulpit is an Empty Pulpit. He distinguishes between partisanship and politics. While maintaining that the former has no place in the pulpit, he argues that the latter is indispensable. According to Jacobs we have both the right and responsibility to speak out on the moral issues of our day. So whereas Wolpe claims that, “what you may not do, if you are intellectually honest, is say the Torah points in only one political direction,” Jacobs counters that “although once can certainly love Torah and follow different political paths, one cannot claim to be a lover of Torah and nor care about how our society treats those in need, the weak, the vulnerable, the stranger and the oppressed.”

Jacobs continues, “the Judaism that I believe in does not limit Torah lessons to the parchment of our… scrolls… The Judaism that I live compels me to use those lessons to understand the most urgent challenges we face." He goes on to quote Rabbi Stephen Wise, perhaps the most influential rabbi of the early 20th century, who said, “the pulpit of the synagogue is charged with the responsibility of… prophetic memories and prophetic aspirations… pledged to… truth- speaking under freedom… a most solemn and inescapable duty. I could not with self-respect remain silent.”

Indeed, we studied Rabbi Wise in our History of Reform Judaism course at our Shabbat morning Torah study this past year. In 1905 Wise turned down the most prestigious pulpit in the country, Temple Emanu-El of New York, over the issue of freedom of the pulpit. He wrote a scathing letter to the chairman of the synagogue board, the famed industrialist Louis Marshall: “Dear Sir: If your letter of December first be expressive of the thoughts of the trustees of Temple Emanu-el, I beg to say that no self-respecting minister of religion, in my opinion, could consider a call to a pulpit which, in the language of your communication, shall always be subject to, and under the control, of, the board of trustees.” Wise went on to establish the Free Synagogue of NY, and spoke out on the great issues of the day. In 1919 he took on the steel industry, siding with the striking workers. A group of prominent trustees and members connected to the industry were outraged. They withdrew their building pledges and many resigned. Wise later recalled that “the ideal of pulpit freedom was put to the test, and the ideal was sustained. But the [new] building was lost.”

I don’t think it is hard for you to guess where I stand on this debate. Stephen Wise is one of my heroes for the moral courage he showed in his generation, like Rabbi David Einhorn showed in his generation, when he spoke out so strongly against slavery and for abolition that he was forced to flee his pulpit in Baltimore. More recently another of my heroes, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel spoke out for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War, and so did my own rabbi Michael Robinson, in Croton-on-Hudson, NY.

All of them were inspired by the prophets of ancient Israel, who understood that religion and politics are inseparable; that ethics is the essence of piety, not ritual; that truth must confront power.

All of this is prelude to the point I make now. If what is happening in Washington now is the number one subject on my mind (and maybe yours); if what is happening to our country has been on my mind non-stop since November; if I cringe at the news night after night after night… how can I not talk about what is going on… from the pulpit, here at the High Holidays? Where do I begin?

I will take just one issue: healthcare. You will remember that is was the primary issue in the country… before Charlottesville.

National health insurance is considered a right, not a privilege, in first world countries around the world.

Here, the hard-won mandate to cover all in need, this summer’s debacle notwithstanding, is under constant threat of being repealed but not replaced.

Let’s not forget that at least 23 million Americans may yet lose their health care.

Let’s not forget that hundreds of thousands of the working poor may yet see their Medicaid program disappear.

Let’s not forget that hundreds of thousands of the elderly may yet see their Medicare program premiums skyrocket.

Let’s not forget that hundreds of thousands of the disabled may yet see their benefit slashed.

Many experts say that medical debt will surge. Untreated conditions will surge. Bankruptcy will surge. Extreme poverty will surge. The Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman calls the proposed repeal and the new budget lethal, and its effect, “apocalyptic.”

Paul Krugman puts it starkly: “Losing health care is a nightmare… tens of millions… [may] soon find themselves living this nightmare.”

What is happening? Who are we?

Look at what we have seen during and after this election.

I call this sad and cruel time, “the closing of the American heart.”

Make no mistake about it: the so called “America First” narrative is in reality an “America Divided” narrative.

As National Book Award Winner George Packer acerbically notes, “America First is the conviction that the country has lost its traditional identity because of contamination and weakness—the contamination of others, foreigners, immigrants, Muslims; the weakness of elites who have no allegiance to the country because they’ve been globalized.”

“This narrative,” Packer continues, “has contempt for democratic norms and liberal values, and it has an autocratic character. It personalizes power, routinizes corruption and destabilizes the very idea of objective truth.”

Is giving tax breaks to the rich while breaking the backs of the poor “America First”?

Is sowing fear among our immigrant population while quashing their entrepreneurial spirit “America First”?

Is blaming “both sides” for injustice while implying a repugnant moral equivalency between racists and those protesting racism “America First”?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

In American Covenant, his magisterial new study of civil religion in America, historian Philip Gorski notes how the Book of Exodus inspired our founding fathers. It speaks, of course, of the revolt against tyranny, the traverse of the wilderness, the making of a covenant, and the journey on to the Promised Land.

The Exodus saga inspired John Winthrop and Roger Williams. It inspired Benjamin Franklin, who wanted to depict Moses on the Great Seal of the United States. It inspired Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It inspired Martin Luther King Jr. It should inspire us anew.

At its heart and essence, the Torah is a prophetic narrative. All stand equal before God. All stand at the Mountain. All pledge loyalty to the covenant and to each other. As we will read on Yom Kippur, “You stand this day, all of you, before the Lord your God, your tribal heads, your elders and your officials, all the men of Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to water drawer, to enter into the covenant"(Deut. 29:9-10).

A true American Covenant ethic, in contrast to a pseudo America First manifesto, promotes unity, not division. It promotes equality, not inequity. It promotes compassion, not cruelty.

A true American Covenant ethic does not build walls, but opens gates. It is not a fortress but a beacon. It cares for the widow, the orphan, the poor and the stranger… because it feels commanded to do so.

A true American Covenant faces out, like Lady Liberty.

And in the words of Emma Lazurus’ famous poem at her base, “From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome.”

This is our country.

This is our Promised Land.

This is the place where we reject division and defamation.

This is the place where say no to collusion and confusion.

This is the place where we speak truth to power.

This is the place where we say, “Dissent is patriotic.”

This is the place where we say, “Hate has no home here.”

This is the place where we sing, “My country, tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.” 

This is our country!

Rabbi Schwartz's Rosh Hashanah Prayer 5778

ROSH HASHANAH PRAYER 5778

Rabbi Barry L. Schwartz

Eloheinu, velohei avotenu

Our God, God of all generations:

Help us to thoughtfully reflect on the year just past, and to courageously embrace this year, 5778, just born.

Let us begin by remembering what is so often forgotten in the glare of the news of the day: the pain of human suffering by war and terrorism; poverty and natural disaster continues to plague us in staggering numbers, often in lonely parts of the world.

A famine of epic dimension is quietly but devastatingly unfolding in Eastern Africa, wrought by nature but exacerbated by political strife.

Floods have killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

Yet the end of this Jewish year has slammed home the reality that none are free of the threat of natural calamity, and our hearts go out to all the sufferers of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma… and Hurricane Maria as we speak… and the Mexico earthquake the week before last, and the Mexico earthquake just yesterday.

Concerning the disasters entirely of our own hand⏤the images of desperate men, women and children trapped in the killing fields of Syria and Iraq continue to haunt us.

The images of refugees still streaming to Europe, and drowning in the sea while trying, continue to haunt us.

Let us not rest easy; as Jews, we know too well what it means when the gates are closed. 

Open the gates of compassion.

In the world of geo-politics our relations with North Korea, Iran, Russia and China remain troubled and dangerous.

In our beloved Israel we marked the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War knowing that the Occupation exacts a heavy toll and the path to peace is stalled.

Open the gates of peace.

Here at home this past year witnessed a momentous election. Xenophobic impulses troubled our election and now they trouble our national policy.

After Ferguson, after Staten Island, after Baltimore, after Charleston, after Dallas, after Baton Rouge… then came Charlottesville.

Open the gates of brotherhood.

This year since the election has witnessed stormy and vitriolic debate on health care and on immigration.

Open for us the gates of basic human kindness and understanding worthy of our great nation. Let us remember the famous declaration of our first president to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, Rhode Island that, “happily, the Government of the United States, [which] gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Our God, Source of all life and blessing, at this New Year of hope and possibility may we find common purpose to do Your will; to rise to our greatest potential; to reflect our creation in Your image… and to walk with You, forward, to peace and purpose.

Fear and Mostly Hope on the Fourth of July

Here is the latest op-ed, appearing in the June 30th issue of the Jewish Standard, written by Adas Emuno president Lance Strate, and entitled Fear and Mostly Hope on the Fourth of July:

It was the summer of 1974, I had just graduated high school and was looking forward to starting my first year of college in the fall, and I had been accepted into a special summer program called Torah Corps, sponsored by what was then known as the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, now the Union for Reform Judaism. It was an intensive learning experience for a small group of students, all of whom had just completed 10th, 11th, or 12th grade. Most of us were from the United States, but the group also included several students from Canada.

The program was held at a lodge in Littleton, New Hampshire, and I well recall how we all gathered around the lone television set available to us on the night of August 8 to watch President Richard Nixon deliver a speech to the nation. We knew that he was in trouble over the Watergate scandal, but it still came as a tremendous shock when he uttered the words, “I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.” We vocalized our sense of dismay at this unprecedented development collectively, through gasps and cries and the like. At least those of us who were Americans did so, in response to what we perceived to be a somber and tragic event. But in a somewhat irreverent manner, one of the Canadians started to say, “Yitgadal v’yitkadash…”

Reciting the first few words of our Mourner’s Kaddish did succeed in breaking some of the tension of the situation and injecting a note of humor. But many of us were not amused. There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, and this was a time to shed a tear, not for Nixon himself but for the way in which he had tarnished the institution of the presidency and tried to undermine the democratic process.

And yet, somehow, we survived Watergate and moved forward as a nation. Just as we had survived the assassination of John F. Kennedy 11 years earlier. Apart from the loss of idealism and proliferation of conspiracy theories, some commentators started to point to historical parallels between the United States, characterized at that time by the intensifying social and political unrest of the 1960s, and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This especially was the case after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 at the hands of a Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Sirhan, just two months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, James Earl Ray.

The decades that followed certainly were not free from scandal. Ronald Reagan gave us Iran-Contra and Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about the Monica Lewinsky affair, narrowly avoiding a conviction and removal from office. But neither event seemed to threaten the viability of the American republic as a whole, and in between we witnessed the sudden collapse of the Communist bloc, first in Eastern Europe and culminating with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The end of European Communism came about so quickly that it seemed almost unbelievable. We celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming of freedom and democracy to Russia, and presumably to the other former Soviet republics (prematurely in some cases). Some wondered what would happen to the United States without its one-time adversary serving as a foil and contrast. And some even wondered if the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union might be followed by an equally sudden collapse of the West at a later date.

But for the most part, we emitted a collective sigh of relief at what some philosophers referred to as the end of history, that is, the triumph of liberal democracy.

But we also live with a historical consciousness that has been rare in human history. As the late Elizabeth Eisenstein explained, the ready availability of books, pamphlets, and periodicals, made possible by the printing revolution that began in the 15th century, eventually resulted in widespread awareness of the chronology of calendar time. (Calendars also were produced by printing.) Especially starting in the 19th century, more and more people came to recognize and understand their place in world history. As limited as the historical knowledge of the average American may be, everyone learns about the years 1492 and 1776. And we study history in grade school, and learn about our Civil War, and other events such as the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the scandals associated with the Ulysses S. Grant administration, and the Teapot Dome scandal during Warren G. Harding’s presidency.

At a time when we are witnessing an unprecedented number of scandals and improprieties associated with the White House, and the election of Donald J. Trump has been described by some as an extinction level event for American democracy, history may offer some solace by reminding us that our republic has weathered many storms in the past. And on this Fourth of July, at a time when many of us fear for the future of our country, I think it only fitting to recall the fact that we have survived the legal, moral, and ethical failings of more than a few of our elected officials, and that we have done so while expanding civil liberties, human rights, and the rule of law.

Taking the long view of American history gives us cause to be optimistic. At the same time, taking the much longer view of Jewish history can provide a somewhat different perspective, as we have seen the great nations and empires of the past come and go over the millennia. We, the Jewish people, have seen the rise and fall of great powers, and from that deep historical consciousness we know that nothing in the temporal realm lasts forever, not even the American republic that we love so much. And so, we cannot so easily dismiss the possibility that the end is nigh. Or the understanding that we just don’t know when the end might come, or if it might come as suddenly as it did for the Communist bloc and the USSR.

Once, long ago, I attended a lecture given by a major scholar and intellectual, and during the question and answer session, he was asked if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future. His answer stuck with me, because it expresses my own sense of ambivalence. He said that on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays he was an optimist, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays he was a pessimist. Or was it the other way around?

Either way, for this Fourth of July, I think it only fitting to be an optimist, and to underscore the resilience of our republic. We have seen dark times in the past, and survived, and if we the people are willing and able, and with the help of divine providence, our great Enlightenment experiment will continue for generations to come.

May it be so.

On Being Weary and Wary of ‘Awareness’

As this is a very personal statement, I think it best to post my latest op-ed written for the Jewish Standard myself. It was published in their April 28th issue, the title of the piece is On Being Weary and Wary of ‘Awareness’ and it addresses an issue that particularly hits home here in Bergen County, and throughout Northern New Jersey, as we are ground zero for autism:

April is Autism Awareness Month. As we are close to the end of the month, chances are that you’ve already seen or heard that statement.

So let me ask you: Are you more aware of autism now than you were at the beginning of the month? And what do we mean by this vague thing we call “awareness” anyway?

I looked online and found a “Cause/Awareness Monthly Calendar,” which confirmed my suspicions that almost every month of the year has multiple causes assigned to it. April has six listings, including Parkinson’s Disease Awareness Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month. If there’s a cause out there that does not emphasize the goal of awareness, I have yet to come across it.

And yet I don’t see much in the way of assessment of this goal. How is awareness measured? Who measures it? How are the results distributed? I believe that awareness actually refers to attention, which is the basic currency of our electronically mediated environment. The primary question is: Is the cause in question getting enough attention from the news media, the entertainment media, and our social media? And secondarily, are the audiences and participants paying enough attention to these messages?

My daughter turned 21 this winter. When she was 2½ years old, she was diagnosed with autism. Looking back some 18 years ago, I know that what we call autism awareness was not very widespread, not even here in northern New Jersey, where there are the largest numbers and the greatest concentration of children with autism in the United States.

Back then, most estimates ranged from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 500 children with autism nationwide. Increased awareness coincided with increased incidence, and now the estimates range between 1 in 45 and 1 in 68. And given the higher numbers in our region, this means that chances are you know someone with autism, or someone with a family member who has autism.

As the numbers grew, autism advocates began to call it an epidemic. Specifically, they referred to the epidemic of childhood autism. And it was an epidemic that affected families from all walks of life, from every income bracket and socioeconomic status, as well as every race, ethnicity, and religion.

A major turning point in autism awareness came when a grandson of Bob Wright was diagnosed with autism. Wright was the CEO of NBC at the time, and he and his wife, the late Suzanne Wright, founded Autism Speaks in 2005. Through his influence, autism suddenly received much more attention in the news and entertainment media than it ever had before.

It is worth asking ourselves why social problems only receive attention when the rich, the famous, and the powerful are touched by them, when the problem is experienced by someone close to a media professional or politician. Of course we are grateful when someone with a public platform finally speaks out. But why do awareness and attention have to depend on a contemporary variation on noblesse oblige?

And again, what is “awareness” all about? It is certainly a far cry from understanding.

I recently spoke with a friend and colleague whose son, about 10 years older than my daughter, also has autism. And we talked about the fact that our children will never really grow up, be able to live independently, have their own place, hold a normal job, marry, or raise children. About how much they depend on us and continue to depend on us. And about how uncertain their future is as we grow older, grow less and less able to care for them, and eventually will become unable to provide them with a home and necessary supervision.

We talked about what will happen to them when we’re gone.

It is so very hard for us to watch the parents of typical children celebrate the usual rites of passage and talk with mixed feelings about becoming empty nesters, knowing that fate has something else in store for us. Our special needs children require so much more of their parents than typical children as they’re growing up, and their special needs do not magically disappear when they become adults. The pressure never lets up, and it never goes away.

Awareness? Feh! Let’s face it, if you don’t live it, you just don’t understand, just can’t understand, not really. Not fully. So forgive me if I find all this talk about awareness to be awfully shallow, promoting the illusion that something real is happening merely by calling attention to causes on our news, entertainment, and social media.

I remember when Ronald Reagan was elected president, budgets were cut, policies were changed, and all of a sudden we saw schizophrenic individuals who previously had been institutionalized winding up on the streets, homeless and helpless, unable to take care of themselves. It was a shonda, a national disgrace.

Now think this through with me. For the past two decades, we’ve been made aware that there is an epidemic of childhood autism, with numbers steadily increasing. And be aware that there is no cure for autism. So now, be aware that we are facing an epidemic of adults with autism. And let me ask you, are you aware of what is being done to deal with this ticking social time bomb?

Nothing.

Local school districts are required to provide people with autism with an appropriate education until they age out after their 21st birthdays. After that, services are limited, if any exist at all. And for all but the most severe and violent individuals, we parents will try our best to take care of our children for as long as we are physically and psychically able.

How much longer do you think that will be?

We could have begun to prepare for the problem when Barack Obama was elected president. He had the right outlook. But the economy had just crashed under George W. Bush, Obama understandably was preoccupied with recovery from recession and with affordable healthcare, and he was faced with an obstructionist Congress for most of his tenure. Now that we have a Republican president, House and Senate, our government is back to cutting social services, so I doubt we can expect any proactive measures in the near future.

No, in all probability nothing will happen until the time when the parents of adults with autism no longer are able to provide them with a home, and the streets again are flooded with homeless people helpless to take care of themselves. When that happens, in the not too distant future, awareness will become more than a matter of news reports, feel-good films and TV programs, and social media memes. Awareness will become a face-to- face reality, an embarrassment, a source of guilt for the more enlightened, a source of fear for others. And only then will the public demand action, and public officials respond in kind. That’s what happened with the schizophrenics on the streets back in the 1980s.

So what does awareness mean to you? I guess it means that you’re aware that it’s Autism Awareness Month. I guess that amounts to awareness of awareness. And maybe, maybe, if you’re really made aware, that can lead to being informed. Maybe.My guess is that how well informed you are about autism depends on how close you are to an actual person with autism. And even then, after all, being informed is a far cry from actual action.

So please forgive me for being weary and wary of awareness. But please be aware of what’s coming down the pike, and when it happens, be aware that you were warned about it. And be aware that it was a failure of understanding, compassion, and foresight, and above all political will, that caused the problem.

That is the kind of awareness that we need to get across right now, in this month of April.

A Lukewarm Resolution

In a series of posts, we have been sharing the story of the Sanctuary City Resolution proposed by the interfaith clergy of Leonia, and spearheaded by our own Rabbi Schwartz. Here they are in chronological order:

• Leonia Interfaith Sanctuary City Resolution
• A Lukewarm Welcoming
• On the Doorposts of Our House
• “For You Were Strangers in the Land of Egypt”
• A Gold Standard Resolution 
• Politics and Religion

In the end, the weaker proposal to declare Leonia a "welcoming community" was approved by the borough council, as reported in the March 6th issue of the North Jersey Record, in article by Michael W. Curley, Jr., entitled, Leonia Adopts 'Welcoming Communities' Resolution. Here now is how it begins:

The council adopted a resolution Monday night declaring the borough a "welcoming community," pledging to encourage police not to question a resident's immigrant status except if they are charged in a criminal offense.

The move comes after executive orders from President Donald Trump that target undocumented immigrants and seek to punish sanctuary cities by withholding federal funding. Last month, the borough first discussed the possibility of declaring sanctuary city status, spurred by a letter from a resident, and two weeks earlier agreed to vote on a "welcoming community" resolution, drafted by Mayor Judah Zeigler.

Some in the audience at the March 6 meeting urged the Borough Council to include "sanctuary city" in its language, with Rabbi Barry Schwartz of Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia suggesting the council use the term as a symbolic, if not legal, gesture. The resolution adopted did not use the term.

We are, of course, quite proud of our rabbi's moral and spiritual leadership on this issue. Even though the interfaith resolution he proposed was not approved, an important statement was made. 

The article continues:

Others, such as Marine veteran Richard Lundquist, urged council members not to declare the status, saying it would go against their oaths to uphold the Constitution and would violate federal law.

Zeigler said that while he believed the president's executive order would not stand up in court, he was not willing to gamble Leonia's tax dollars in a legal battle. He added that although the borough does not receive a lot of federal funding at the moment, it may need it in the future.

"We don't want to put ourselves in that kind of harm's way, but we should stand up and say that we cherish our diverse community, and we're committed to making sure that all who live here are welcome, feel safe and know that this is their home," he said.

Council President Maureen Davis said she had done research on the issue and Leonia's own practices, as head of the police committee, in preparation for the vote. She said it is current practice by the department not to ask immigration status except in the case of an indictable offense, citing then-Attorney General Anne Milgram's directive 2007-3, which advised police departments to ask only in that circumstance.

She said she wanted to put residents' minds at rest that the practice will not change unless the law changes. She added that Chief Thomas Rowe has advised that the borough not participate in the president's directive to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement deputize local law enforcement, even if grants are offered as incentive.

Before voting on the resolution, Councilman William Ziegler presented three amendments. The first was to include a paragraph saying that undocumented status is not a crime, and to substitute the term "undocumented" where the draft used "illegal"; the second, a paragraph endorsing the Leonia Police Department's current policy of not asking for immigration status except in the case of a criminal indictment; the third, a paragraph affirming that the borough is duty-bound to cooperate in criminal investigations and to share relevant information with local, state, county and federal authorities to keep the borough safe.

"I think that a symbolic reinforcement of the welcoming resolution and the amendments that I'm going to offer — did offer — are important, because they reinforce a value statement we need to make," he said. "I think they define and further clarify our conduct as a municipality consistent with our borough's values and our obligations."

Mayor Zeigler said he agreed in principle with the second suggested amendment, but recommended a change in language, as the police do not have a written policy but are following the attorney general's directive advising the practice. Councilman Ziegler accepted this modification.

The mayor objected to the first amendment, however, as undocumented status is a violation of federal law. Ziegler said he felt it was important to distinguish that undocumented status is not an indictable crime that would, by itself, warrant asking about undocumented status. After some discussion, Borough Attorney Brian Chewcaskie offered the distinction that while undocumented status is a violation of federal law, being of undocumented status is not a crime punishable with imprisonment, which Ziegler accepted.

Councilman Pasquale Fusco said he agreed with the mayor's suggestions, adding that the policy of the Leonia Police Department is one of support and the department should be commended for its behavior.

The resolution passed unanimously, with Councilman Greg Makroulakis absent from the meeting.

Of course, we all know that our congregation has always been a welcoming community, and one that is not afraid to take a stand when it comes to social justice!