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Topics in this digest: Second
Day Rosh Hashanah 5765
Jewish Values and the Election
By Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Like members of any profession, rabbis shmooze and talk shop. Not
surprisingly, one of the things we talk about is what we are going to talk
about in our high holiday sermons. When I shared with some of my
colleagues that I was planning to talk about Jewish values and the
election, some of them thought I was nuts. Forget it, they said. Keep
politics off the bimah. One of my colleagues, Rabbi Alan Lew, senior
rabbi of the largest Conservative synagogue in San Francisco, was almost
fired for talking about politics in one of his High Holiday sermons last
year.
My colleagues opposed to mixing politics and the bimah told me there’s
nothing to gain. All you’ll do is alienate people. I disagree. Torah
has something to say about every issue you can think of. For thousands of
years Judaism’s greatest minds have struggled with how to apply the
teachings of the Torah to the practical issues of life. I would say a
rabbi who doesn’t try to bring the values of Torah to the Jewish
electorate is shirking his duty to help Jews use Torah as a lens through
which to view and understand real issues facing us in the real world.
Torah is not something that should be closeted away, brought out only once
a week for ritual purposes, and forgotten the rest of the time. It’s our
guide to how to live a good life and make good decisions – like the
decision to vote.
Many people are disgusted with this election. They’re tired of the
mud-slinging, the character assassination, the misleading political ads,
the failure of both parties to focus on real issues instead of Vietnam-era
ancient history. Some people are asking “Is it OK if we just sit this one
out?”
A recent editorial in the Toledo Blade said that is exactly the purpose of
the negative ads. When a campaign publishes negative information about the
opposition, they don’t expect it will make people vote for their
candidate.
The campaign managers don’t expect a Bush ad slamming Kerry to convince
anyone to vote for Bush—but it might convince someone who would otherwise
support Kerry to stay home. And vice verse. Research indicates that this
ugly approach is effective. Otherwise they wouldn’t use it.
But even if you’re disgusted with the whole process and negative ads,
you’re still obligated to vote. In the Talmud we are taught that “A
ruler is not to be appointed unless the community is first consulted.” And
elections are the way we do this.
Many people don’t vote because they think their vote doesn’t matter. How
quickly we forget. In 2000, the election of the president of the United
States came down to 537 votes in a single county in Florida. What more
does it take to make the point that every vote counts?
Furthermore, the people in this room right now could determine who the
next President of the United States is. You may think I’m exaggerating,
but I’m not.
We all know how important Ohio is in this election. It’s so important
that it seems like one or the other of the candidates is here pretty much
full-time now. And this PART of Ohio is especially important. The Toledo
media market is ranked in the top three in the NATION in terms of spending
on presidential campaign advertising. The candidates wouldn’t be spending
such a huge percent of their budgets to get our attention here in Toledo
if
we weren’t vitally important to their success.
Additionally, we Jews may be the voting bloc that decides this election!
The majority of Jews traditionally vote Democratic, but the percentages of
Jewish Republican voters have ranged in recent years from a high of 40%,
for Ronald Regan in 1980, to a low of 19% for George Bush in 2000 – when
he was running against a Democratic ticket that included a Jew – Joe
Lieberman – for the first time.
The Washington Post quoted Jewish lobbyist Nathan Diament as saying, “If
you swing the Jewish vote 10 percent in Ohio, that could give you Ohio.”
And Ohio clearly could be the state that decides who will sit in the Oval
Office for the next four years.
Let me lay some Jewish guilt on you: If the election doesn’t turn out the
way you want and you didn’t even vote –how will you live with yourself for
the next four years?! How will you sleep at night knowing you could have
made the difference?!
And if you’re not even registered! Oy! What are you waiting for? You’ve
got until noon on October 2nd. Registering to vote is simple. You can
register at any BMV office, any public library, any public school, or by
mail. I registered at the library a few days ago: I left my house at
8:19pm, and I was back home, registered in Ohio, at 8:29. If you can’t
spare the ten minutes to go to the library, we have voter registration
forms in the lobby – don’t fill them out today – it’s a holiday! But fill
it out after Shabbat and mail it in and do your duty as a citizen – and a
Jew.
And when you vote – be an educated voter.
The Jewish tradition insists that we evaluate issues carefully and
consider both sides. When the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court,
considered capital cases, they would declare a mistrial if no one
presented arguments in favor of acquittal.
So how do we educate ourselves? The most direct method is to look at the
party platforms.
But once you know how the parties stand on the issues, how do you decide
between them? I’d like to suggest that one way to decide is to apply
Jewish values. Each party has positions that seem to be in accord with
Jewish values, and some that contradict them. This is where your job
becomes more difficult, because it’s not simply a matter of accounting:
you can’t just make up a spreadsheet and tick off the columns, one for the
Republicans, one for the Democrats, and then vote based on the tally on
the
bottom. Some issues are clearly more important than others, so each item
will have to be weighted.
That weighting will be different for each person. For example, if you’re
of retirement age, Social Security and Medicare may be more urgent for you
personally than if you’re a college student, for example. If you have a
child in the military, as I did until recently, you have a highly personal
stake in the progress of the War in Iraq.
But I’d like to suggest a hierarchy of specifically JEWISH values to take
into account. First among these is pikuach nefesh docheh et hakol, saving
lives overrules everything else. In the Torah it says that the
commandments are given to us that we should chai b’hem, live by them.
Rambam explains this means not “die by them,” and therefore if we have to
violate a commandment to save a life, we not only can, we should.
Thus, for example, no matter how strongly you feel about gay marriage, pro
or con, in terms of importance when applying Jewish values that issue
ranks
below issues of life and death.
While I would love to present Jewish teachings on all the issues in both
platforms, I can’t do that. We would be here until Yom Kippur. What I
would like to share with you this morning are some teachings on issues
that are important, and where there are clear differences between
Democratic and Republican platforms.
One such issue concerns the Patriot Act, which was passed in the wake of
9/11 to give law enforcement authorities more tools to use in fighting
terrorism—to make it harder for terrorists to hide, to make it easier to
track them down. Nothing is “free,” however, and the cost of the Patriot
Act is some erosion in our civil liberties. As the ACLU puts it, “Many
parts of this sweeping legislation take away checks on law enforcement and
threaten the very rights and freedoms that we are struggling to protect.
For example, without a warrant and without probable cause, the FBI now has
the power to access your most private medical records, your library
records, and your student records... and can prevent anyone from telling
you it was done.”
John Kerry favors modifying the Patriot Act. He has been very critical of
how John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, has used the powers granted by
the
act. George Bush has praised the Patriot Act as leading to arrests and
favors extending it and expanding it.
There are Jewish values on both sides of this argument. The Jewish
tradition recognizes the importance of privacy. As described by Rabbis
Elliot Dorff and Elie Spitz in a teshuva they wrote on privacy of email in
the workplace, “Privacy is necessary for human dignity. The loss of
privacy
entails the fear that others will misjudge us and even harm us by using
fragments of information taken out of context. Confidence in privacy
furthermore enables creativity to flourish, for when privacy is assured,
nonconformist people feel sufficiently safe and protected from
interference to experiment. In addition, privacy is a prerequisite for
the bond of friendship, which includes sharing confidential feelings and
vulnerabilities. A free and tolerant society needs an assurance of
privacy, because each person has secrets that concern weaknesses that we
dare not reveal to a competitive world, dreams that others may ridicule,
past deeds that bear no relevance to present conduct or desires that a
judgmental and hypocritical public may condemn.”
On the other side, however, if we have to sacrifice some of our privacy so
that innocent lives won’t be lost to terrorism, saving lives takes
precedence over privacy, and in fact over almost anything else.
From a Jewish perspective then, the real question about the Patriot Act
becomes one of efficacy. If it is effective, and it does lead to a
reduction in loss of innocent life, there would be no objection. If,
however, there are other ways of accomplishing the same goal without
infringing people’s rights to privacy, those other methods should be used.
When it comes to security issues, for some Jews there’s one issue which is
just as important, maybe even more important, than how domestic security
is
handled. And that’s the security of Israel.
The platform statements of both parties are very pro-Israel. They both
support a two-state solution, and they both state that the borders of a
two-state solution would NOT follow the 1949 armistice line. It’s
interesting that neither one says anything about the 1967 cease-fire line,
the so-called “Green Line”.
Both parties’ platforms are committed to Israel’s security. The
Republicans explicitly support Sharon’s disengagement plan and call for
pressure on the UN and International Red Cross to stop their prejudice
against Israel. The Democratic platform explicitly states Jerusalem
should not be divided. It’s not part of the platform document, but Kerry
has stated that he would be much more active in peace negotiations between
Israel and the Palestinians than the current Administration. With both
platforms being very pro-Israel, the 64,000 shekel question is, who will
deliver?
Talk – or platform ink – is cheap. Both parties say that Jerusalem is the
capital of Israel – however despite President Bush’s express campaign
promises in 2000 that he would move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to
Jerusalem he has failed to do so. (To be fair, the prior Democratic
administration also made such promises and failed to live up to them.) My
three-year-old daughter Devorah was born in Jerusalem, and on her U.S.
passport, the line for “country” is left blank – the US State Department
doesn’t even recognize Jerusalem as a CITY in Israel!
And closely related to the issue of Israel is the issue of Iraq. But I
decided NOT to talk about Iraq this morning because there’s no real
difference between the two parties in terms of plans for moving forward.
Everyone wants the troops home as soon as possible and to see a
functioning democracy in Iraq. The Jewish values won’t help you decide
between the parties since they say largely the same thing. Whether or not
the war was a good idea in the first place is academic.
Some of the most emotional issues in the party platforms are social issues
where there are clear differences between the parties: gay marriage, gun
control, and abortion.
The gay marriage issue is very controversial in Jewish circles these days.
At present, the official policy of the Conservative movement is not to
ordain openly gay clergy. The movement does not officially condone same
sex commitment ceremonies, although there are individual rabbis who will
officiate at such ceremonies. The whole matter is being reviewed by the
movement’s Law Committee. I will save a discussion on this controversial
topic for another time, as the issues involved are complicated.
On gun control, the Democratic platform favors more gun control; the
Republican platform is opposed to expanding gun control. The Jewish
perspective would again be driven by pikuach nefesh considerations: if
banning weapons like assault rifles would save lives, if licensing guns
would save lives, those measures would be compatible with Jewish values.
If they interfere with a person’s ability to defend himself, and they do
not save lives, they would be contrary to Jewish values. The argument
from a Jewish perspective again becomes one focused on efficacy: do the
laws accomplish what they are supposed to accomplish?
Both candidates are avoiding talking about abortion because it’s such an
emotionally-charged issue. But there are real differences between the
parties. The Democrats favor a woman having the right to choose an
abortion, even if she can’t afford to pay for it. The Democrats also
support embryonic stem cell research. The Republicans oppose abortion,
and instead prefer to promote adoption and abstinence. The Republican
platform also proposes a “human life” amendment to the Constitution which
would include unborn children as persons and thus could lead to a federal
ban on abortion, and the Republicans generally do NOT support embryonic
stem cell research.
Even though one survey shows that 74% of American Jews consider themselves
“pro-choice,” Judaism does not condone abortion in all cases.
The Jewish understanding of life is that it’s something we come into
gradually—and we go out of gradually. Hence, for the first 40 days after
conception the embryo is considered like “mere water;” hence there would
not be a Jewish objection to a “morning after pill” or an early
first-trimester abortion. After 40 days—which is just about the time the
embryo becomes a fetus—the fetus is considered to be an extension of the
woman. Under Jewish law a person is not allowed to harm herself, and this
prohibition would be extended to the fetus. Abortion after the first six
weeks would only be permitted in case of a threat to the health of the
mother. Some rabbis are lenient about considering the mental health of
the mother valid grounds for abortion, others are not.
As embryos are not considered human life, and stem cell research holds out
the promise of saving human lives, most halachic authorities would support
embryonic stem cell research.
The environment is another area where there are clear differences between
the Democrats and the Republicans. Kerry favors raising gas mileage
standards, Bush is opposed. Kerry favors a modified version of the Kyoto
agreement, Bush is totally opposed to Kyoto. Kerry favors more
conservation land, Bush favors private ownership.
There are two Jewish values in tension with each other when it comes to
environmental issues. On the one hand, in the Torah God tells Adam that
he has dominion over the land. This seems to imply that the world is ours
to do what we want with it. On the other hand, there is a principle called
bal taschit, do not destroy, which limits what we can do. We are not
allowed to be wasteful and engage in wanton destruction. Even in a time
of war we’re not allowed to cut down fruit-bearing trees unless it is
specifically to save a life. Excessive pollution clearly violates the
prohibition of bal taschit. The world is not really ours, it is God’s,
and we are stewards charged with taking good care of God’s creation.
The other major issues in the campaign are ones that deal with the
domestic economy—jobs, taxes, welfare policies. If I were to try and
address all of them, we would never get to lunch today. So instead I will
share an overall perspective, a Jewish way of looking at the world.
The secular legal system is focused on rights. You have the right to do
what you want, unless it interferes with my right to do what I want. This
is the underlying rationale for the laws that our elected officials pass.
The Jewish perspective is more focused on responsibilities than on rights.
You have a responsibility to take care of poor people. You have a
responsibility to give to charity. You have a responsibility to be a fair
vendor, and not engage in practices like misleading advertising. You have
a responsibility to pay your employees a fair wage, and pay them on time.
Universal education—the idea that all children should be able to get an
education—goes back to the Jews, to Shimon ben Shetach, brother of Queen
Alexandra, the only good queen to rule over Israel. Judaism supports both
a poll tax—where everybody pays SOMETHING—and progressive taxation, where
the rich pay more. The betterment of society is more important than the
happiness of one individual.
Both candidates claim to have a vision which will lead to a better
society. Putting aside for a moment the differences on positions, another
question we need to ask is “who will make a better President?” Who has the
right personal characteristics to lead in these difficult times? The Torah
gives us advice on the sort of person we should appoint as a leader. The
Torah says "You shall provide out of all the people, able men, who fear
God, men of truth, disdaining unjust gain, and place them over [the
people]" (Exodus 18:21). It is likewise written, "Take from each of your
tribes, wise men, with understanding and full of knowledge, and I will
make them your leaders" (Deut. 1:13).
The current negative campaigning on both sides, unfortunately, does not
help us in understanding the character of the candidates. The bulk of
both campaigns these days seems to be centered on lashon hara, on gossip
or slander regarding the other candidate—not so much on the character of
the party’s own candidate.
And the relevant question is each man’s character today—not what he did 35
years ago. I certainly would not want a congregation to decide on my
fitness to serve as their rabbi based on things I did when I was in the
Army 30 years ago! I would say the same thing is true of George Bush and
John Kerry. And that cuts both for the good and the bad. It doesn’t
matter if Kerry was a war hero—what’s more important is whether he was a
hero during his 20 years in the Senate. A similar logic applies to George
Bush—what he did,or didn’t do, when he was a young man in the Air National
Guard is less important than what he’s done in the last four years.
George Bush and John Kerry represent two very different visions for
America. You have a responsibility as a citizen and a responsibility as a
Jew to let your voice be heard. Your vote matters. 1,000,000 American
Jews don’t vote because they aren’t registered. Don’t you be one of them!
Whoever you vote for on November 2nd, may your choice be guided by the
light of Torah. May God help whoever is elected to be our next President
to lead us wisely to a time of peace and prosperity.
Amen.
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