Friday, July 20, 2018

"Because it is hard" - D'var Torah - Parashat Devarim (Deuteronomy 1:11-18) - July 20, 2018


    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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