I
remember it well. I am sure that some of
you do, too.
On July
20, 1969, late in the evening, there was nowhere else to be but in front of a
television screen, watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take humanity’s
first steps on the moon.
Somewhere in the Karol family photographic
archive are slides which my Dad took of our television that night of the images
that we were viewing with a sense of amazement, wonder, and pride.
Our nation – and humankind – had met the
challenges made by President John F. Kennedy in a speech on September 12, 1962
at Rice University: “We choose to go to the moon. We
choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because
they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to
organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that
challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to
postpone, and one which we intend to win….”
Perhaps it
was somewhat ironic that the President of the United States who made the call
to the Apollo astronauts at Tranquility Base was President Kennedy’s opponent
in the 1960 election, Richard Nixon.
For those of us who, maybe, didn’t like
President Nixon all that much, we knew that it was right and appropriate that
he make that longest long-distance call ever made between members of the human
family. I believe that record still
stands.
President Kennedy was right. The Gemini and Apollo programs did organize
and measure the best of our energies and skills. And, not only that, the world was united,
ever so briefly, in that time of Apollo 11’s triumph and, less than a year
later, in the trying moments when the world prayed that the expertise of
engineers and scientists would find a way to bring Apollo 13 crew members Jim
Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise safely home.
We still
relish those moments of unity when we encounter them.
The Torah portion this week portrays a
moment of unity among the Israelites, as they listened to Moses begin to
deliver his farewell speech, recounting all of their experiences over the
course of 40 years since their liberation from Egypt.
And I believe it is significant that within
the first 20 verses of his oratory, Moses explained the beginnings of the
system of justice created within the Israelite community. He told the people that, soon after they
left Egypt, he had said: “How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the
burden, and the bickering! Pick from each of your tribes representatives who
are wise, discerning, and experienced, and I will appoint them as your heads.’
You answered me and said, ‘What you propose to do is good.’ So I took your
tribal leaders, wise and experienced representatives, and appointed them heads
over you: chiefs of thousands, chiefs of hundreds, chiefs of fifties, and
chiefs of tens, and officials for your tribes. I charged your magistrates at
that time as follows, ‘Hear out your fellow Israelites, and decide justly
between anyone and a fellow Israelite or a stranger. You shall not be partial
in judgment: hear out low and high alike. Fear no one, for judgment is God's.
And any matter that is too difficult for you, you shall bring to me and I will
hear it.’”
Deciding justly meant showing impartiality
and fairness, and accepting the basic equality of all people, not just the
Israelites, but also the GER, the stranger who was living among them.
Deciding justly meant that, because judgment
came from God, no undue pressure from any person to influence decisions one way
or another would ever succeed.
Deciding justly meant being humble enough to
admit when a higher authority needed to be consulted.
This high standard for justice remains with
us today as an inspiration to seek that level of fairness among people in
nations and across borders, where there is, hopefully, mutual respect and acceptance of one another’s
humanity.
Mentioning President Nixon’s call to the
astronauts on the moon 49 years ago today as we read this portion from the
Torah raises yet another irony. The
misjudgments, mistakes and cover-up now known to us all as Watergate
demonstrated how our system of government could bring to justice individuals,
even leaders, who violated the law and the trust of the people. President Nixon resigned and was pardoned by
President Gerald Ford, which gave some measure of closure, but some people felt
it wasn’t enough. The David
Frost/Richard Nixon interviews several years later, in their own way, created a
context in which a semblance of an apology during those programs further
concluded that difficult time in our nation’s history.
We still do long to see shining examples of
fairness and justice today.
Unfortunately, instances illustrating an apparent lack of justice
surface all too often.
Early this week, a Conservative rabbi living
in Israel, Dov Haiyun, received a summons from an Ultra-Orthodox rabbinical
court in Haifa demanding that he explain his officiation at weddings in Israel
not approved by the rabbinate. Haiyun
was planning to participate in an event yesterday at the home of Israel’s
president, Reuven Rivlin. Yesterday,
local police came to Haiyun’s home, arrested him, and detained him for several
hours over his apparent “rogue” officiation at weddings in violation of a
statute passed in 2013 that outlawed such ceremonies.
For many years, non-Orthodox rabbis in Israel
have stood under the canopy with wedding couples who had been married in
another country beforehand, thus bearing legal proof of their union that did
suffice for the State of Israel’s civil standards for marriage. I know this first-hand. I performed such a ceremony south of Tel
Aviv ten years ago. It was an honor to
do so. Now, what I did that day would
be punishable with a sentence of up to 2 years in prison.
Rabbi Haiyun was detained for a good part of
the day yesterday until Israel’s attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, declared
that Haiyun be released. The rabbi did
make it to President Rivlin’s residence to teach as he had planned.
This was the first time that police had
enforced the law and arrested a rabbi who had performed so-called “unacceptable
wedding ceremonies.” The law itself constituted
a power-play by a sector of Israeli society that would like to see non-Orthodox
Judaism fail or disappear.
In this case, and in our own country, we are
seeing laws of all types that are being enforced – or not enforced – based on the
particulars of a situation. There are
people who are, in the words of Torah, on the “low” end of societal privilege
who are being arrested and detained. In
other cases, there are leaders on the “high” end of a communal and national hierarchy who are not being
held accountable for their actions.
You can come up with your own examples of who
does or does not benefit from selective enforcement.
The Torah still demands that we be fair to
citizens and strangers alike, and that we do what we can to resolve conflicts
in order to create a feeling of unity that can only serve to draw us together.
In his book, THE SOUL OF AMERICA, author
and historian Jon Meacham took a look back on our nation’s history to describe
how American citizens and leaders were able to act with integrity and
generosity even in the face of division and bigotry. Meacham quoted a speech given on Lincoln’s birthday
in 1905 by President Theodore Roosevelt, words that can still speak to us
today: “Our effort should be to secure to each man [or woman], whatever
his [or her] color, equality of opportunity, equality of treatment before the
law….Every generous impulse in us revolts at the thought of thrusting down instead
of helping up such a person. To deny anyone the fair treatment granted to
others no better than he/she is to commit a wrong upon him—a wrong sure to
react in the long run upon those guilty of such denial. The only safe principle
upon which Americans can act is that of “all people up,” not that of “some
people down.”
We can, as human beings, do great things
when we overcome our differences and find what can lead us forward
together. May that vision be a beacon
for us, and may we reach that goal, not because it is easy, but because it is
hard – but still very much within our grasp, with God’s help. 
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