Driving down I-95 in Northern Maryland this past
Monday, I was reflecting on what had surely been one of the best weekends of my
life. It mostly consisted of partying
and praying, but there was also a little 2 ½ hour ceremony during which my
daughter Hannah and 13 of her classmates were ordained as rabbis. It was the culmination of five years of
post-graduate schooling and a whole lot of soul searching. Believe me, I was proud of Hannah’s entire
class. It thrills me that these freshly
minted Reconstructionist rabbis are being thrust into the world to reinvigorate
Judaism and become a “light unto the nations. “
Driving my jalopy with “Spinoza” license plates, I
was feeling my oats. I had just passed
the beautiful Susquehanna River and Cal Ripken’s baseball stadium in Aberdeen,
Maryland and was looking forward to going to a retirement party for one of the
jewels of the U.S. Department of Justice (and one of my beloved mentors), Joyce
Branda. Life was good. So I asked my wife’s permission to indulge one
of my guilty pleasures – listening to right-wing talk radio with her in the
car. To my surprise, she said yes.
Strangely, though, we couldn’t find any suitable
stations – at least not until we crossed the Baltimore Harbor. That’s when we began to hear WMAL, the
powerful DC station that has graced us with such luminaries as Rush Limbaugh,
Mark Levin and, in this case, Chris Plante.
My wife’s patience lasted all of five minutes. During that time, Plante hurled just about
every insult imaginable at Democrats and liberals. You would have thought he was talking about
cockroaches, except that Democrats and liberals are people, or at least I tell
myself that we are. That afternoon, I sounded
less like a person than a laughing hyena.
That’s the only way I can cope with programs like Plante’s – by laughing
hysterically at the sheer idiocy of his hate speech, speech directed at folks
like me and everything I hold dear. I
feel compelled to listen to Plante because I need to know what America thinks,
and Plante, Limbaugh, Levin and Company are the rabbis to roughly one third of
this country.
By Wednesday morning, I was back to the rhythm of a
normal workweek as the highs of last weekend had begun to fade. Listening to the morning news, I was shocked
to learn about a different form of hate speech.
This time, the speaker communicated not with words but with
bullets. He opened fire on a group of
Republican Congressmen and staffers who were targeted solely because of their
political views. It was reminiscent of
the January 2011 attack in Tucson, except that this week’s shooting involved a
so-called “progressive” hunting down conservatives. Immediately, my fellow liberals tended to
write off the shooting simply as the product of mental illness – a lone lunatic
running amuck. But for me, that excuse is overly glib. We’re dealing now with an ever-deepening
internal conflict in America that is reaching dangerous levels. Not only are we seeing its outgrowth in politically-motivated
homicides but also in terms of policies that reflect utter contempt for large
swaths of Americans. Think about it –
how else can we explain why Senators are holding secret meetings to determine
how to strip millions of Americans of healthcare insurance if they didn’t think
their political base holds the uninsured (i.e., working class Americans) in complete
disregard?
Yesterday, the New York Times led with an article
entitled “Partisan Relations Sink from Cold to Deep Freeze: Democrats and
Republicans Have Lowest Regard of Each Other in Decades.” The article featured a graph showing that
Democrats’ attitudes about Republicans has largely paralleled Republicans’
attitudes about Democrats throughout the period from 1980 to the present. The graph also showed that while those
numbers had dropped gradually from 1980 to 2000, they’ve dropped precipitously
ever since. Less than a quarter of us now
view the “other” favorably – down from 40 percent at the turn of the
millennium. Whoever coined the motto “e
pluribus unum” is surely turning in his grave.
After the terrible shooting in Alexandria, there has
been talk of the need for unity. I’m
not feeling it though. I think this
nation is hopelessly polarized at the moment.
I see things getting worse before they get better. But last weekend, I did see the antidote –
on that stage in suburban Philadelphia, where the 14 graduates of the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College Class of 5777 were assembled. There, in that tiny class, I saw white
people, black people, men, women, openly gay, openly straight, openly
trans. I saw the faces of love, not of
hatred. Of hope, not of fear. Of anonymity, not of celebrity. Of self-effacing service, not of
grandstanding hubris. Of singing and
praying, not shouting and demeaning.
I had a vision in which humble, hard-working and
committed people like the RRC Class of 5777 stopped deferring to the
politicians and media personalities who have collectively driven our national
car into the ditch. In my vision, these
young men and women would then take responsibility for identifying leaders from
their own generation who wouldn’t suck up to the Chris Plantes or the Rush
Limbaughs – or, for that matter, to the snide, liberal analogues who similarly
spew hate from the other side of the aisle.
They will take to heart the Jewish precept that “lashon hara” -- speech
that is disparaging, even if true – is truly evil and difficult to forgive. They will, in short, teach my fellow Baby
Boomers that it is time to back off and let a gentler, smarter and more humane
generation lead us out of the wilderness.
As the Class of 5777 can tell you, our Biblical
ancestors wandered in that wilderness for 40 years and never did enter the
Promised Land. Sadly, it has been nearly
40 years since 1980 – when we started turning our political rivals into true
enemies. My sense is that things are
going to get worse before they get better.
But maybe, just maybe, in a few years, the spirit of the Class of 5777
will turn things around. At least that’s
my dream.
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