“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident.” To undermine the concept of truth is to undermine the very foundation of our country. And the concept of truth is indeed being undermined. As Giuliani said of the Mueller investigation: “They may have a different version of the truth than we have.”
I’ll just bet they do. Instead of the self-evident truths of the Declaration, we now have the “truthiness” of Beltway spinmeisters.
On this High Holy Day, I ask: What does this mean for our country, and for us as Jewish citizens of our country?
Before I can address that question, there are some preliminaries that must be stated. This sermon will be, must be, political. It involves the governance of our Republic, and any discussion of government is unavoidably political. But it is not intended to be partisan. It is not about President Trump, or at least not only about President Trump, and that for two reasons. First, I do not suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. I do not automatically disagree with everything President Trump does because he does it. To the contrary. I applaud many of his policies, and have stated so publicly on repeated occasions. That is certainly true of many of his positions on Israel—as an aside I can say that three things I appreciate about President Trump are Nicki Haley, Nicki Haley, and Nicki Haley. And I appreciate further his leadership in increasing the military budget, and his insistence that freedom of religion be on a par with other freedoms. And I hasten to point out that I have been just as willing to praise the sitting Republican President for these positions as I have been willing to condemn his Democratic predecessor for the opposing positions. I remind you that I publicly condemned President Obama’s abstention at the UN late in his term as the greatest American betrayal of Israel in more than half a century.
So my remarks today are not about Democrat or Republican, not about liberal or conservative, not about left or right. They are about up or down, about the betterment of our country or its deterioration.
The second, and more important, reason that this sermon is not about President Trump alone is that he does not govern this country alone. He is merely the tip of the iceberg. There are 538 representatives and senators, and countless federal and state officials, and, in the end, there is…us. “We the people…” Everything that happens in this country happens in our name, and for this we have to take responsibility.
And what is happening in our country? Duplicity, hypocrisy, and coarse immorality on a level that few could have imagined. First, duplicity: By some estimates, the number of lies told by the President in the first two years of his term is approaching 5,000. There is even a new statistical science that measures the “dishonesty density” of presidential comments. Which, if you want to know, is increasing. When Guiliani said the President may have a different version of the truth, that may be the understatement of the year. The President imagines that he is permitted to lie all the time, but any error by a journalist discredits the entire profession of journalism. Like President Putin, President Trump claims that it is not he, but rather the reporters who lie. They are supposedly the “enemy of the people,” producing “fake news.” As I mentioned yesterday, it is ironic that both of these formulations were introduced by the Russian autocracy. (Timothy Snyder) And it is further ironic that a major source of President Trump’s popularity is the feeling that “he tells it like it is.” A misperception of staggering proportions.
Even if one agrees with every single policy the President pursues, how can one not see this as a danger to our future? His picture hangs in every first grade classroom in the country. What does that mean? When I was in first grade, I was told the story about George Washington, who couldn’t tell a lie. What story are the kids hearing today? What are they being taught to be? What values are they taught to emulate? And what will our country look like if that education succeeds? G-d help us.
But again I say, this isn’t just about the President. It’s about all of us. It’s about the pernicious and corrosive moral philosophy—if you can call it that—that “it’s only wrong when the other guy does it.” In other words, hypocrisy. Imagine if the Democrats passed a budget that added a trillion dollars to our national debt. The Republicans would be screaming bloody murder. And dollars to doughnuts, if Democrats regain control of Congress, we will immediately hear Republican rhetoric about “the crushing burden of debt” and how important it is to cut social programs.
But hypocrisy is a two way street. Democrats are just as bad as Republicans. For all of us who are protesting vociferously against the administration’s immigration policy, where were we when President Obama was earning the title of “Deporter in Chief?” For all of us who are repulsed by President Trump’s serial philandering, where were we when President Clinton was harassing a young intern? And how empty our defense—it was consensual!—sounds today in the #MeToo era, when the impact of power disparity on the very possibility of consent is obvious to all—or should be. And, of course, there’s always, “It all depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” a statement which is both a truth and a lie at the same time—quite a trick.
There was a time, not so long ago, that evangelical Christian leaders like Ralph Reed said things like, “we care about the conduct of our leaders, and we will not rest until we have leaders of good moral character.” But that was when Bill Clinton was President. Now Ralph Reed chairs the Trump religious advisory board. The son of Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell has said, and I quote, “Donald Trump lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught.” Really. And Bill Bennett, author of The Death of Outrage, now tells anti-Trump conservatives not to “put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.”
The Death of Outrage, indeed.
The left is always ready to decry “fascism,” intolerance, the squelching of free speech. But there is probably no more intolerant group in the United States than the politically correct, “woke,” thought police of the far left. Try being an open Zionist on campus, or a person with religious convictions that run contrary to the liberal value de jour, and you’ll find out. I remind you that the Obama administration actually went to court to force a group of Catholic nuns to pay for contraceptives for their employees. Seriously. When Trump supporters are violent, we go ballistic. When leftist antifa activists are violent, we change the channel.
Jonathan Bethune has written, “An ideologue is at least consistent in his belief in specific policies. A partisan openly supports his gang above all else. But a partisan ideologue is worse than both. He is a Machiavellian creature: a supporter of ‘ends justify the means’ approaches to pushing an agenda. The gang must be defended that the agenda might be defended, even when the gang violates core tenets of the agenda. Partisan ideologues are dishonest by nature. Worse still, they often cannot even tell when they are being dishonest.”
The truth is simply too far gone. We are left, here in America, saying of our leaders what we used to say of repressive dictators in third world countries “He may be an s.o.b., but he’s my s.o.b.” So low have we fallen.
Again, I want to make it clear that I am not espousing one particular policy over another. I don’t know whether we should raise or lower the capital gains tax. In fact, I wouldn’t know a capital gains tax if I tripped over it. I don’t know whether tariffs and trade wars are good policy or bad. There’s nothing I could say about these things that you couldn’t read in an op-ed in the Gladstone and Peapack Morning Gazette. I don’t purport to know how to solve the immigration issue.
But I’ll tell you what I do know. I know we are Americans, and Jews, and that’s supposed to stand for something. I know that there is a Statue in New York harbor, a statue that all my grandparents and many of yours sailed by with tears in their eyes. I know that inscribed on it are the words of a Jewish woman, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free…”
What that means is that, as Americans, and as Jews, we don’t stand at our borders and tell young girls afraid of being raped, “That’s not our problem.”
As Americans, and as Jews, we don’t look at women afraid of being beaten to death by abusive husbands and say, “Sorry, you’ll have to wait in line.”
As Americans, and as Jews, we don’t tear four year olds out of the hands of their mothers, keep them in detention, and then lose track of their parents’ whereabouts.
We’re Americans and Jews. We don’t do these things. Do we?
Do we?
Do we?
It takes a lot of chutzpah to collectively pull a brutal stunt like that, and then come into this sanctuary and ask G-d for mercy and understanding.
We’re Americans, founders of the first democracy on the planet. Here, in the very first paragraph of our Declaration of Independence, is the assertion, as Susan B. Anthony put it, “of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can ‘the consent of the governed’ be given if the right to vote be denied?” It is hard to imagine anything more un-American, more unpatriotic, more frankly treasonous, than preventing a U.S. citizen from voting. When we think back to the Civil Rights movement, we cannot help but feel revulsion at the Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised virtually the entire black population of the South. The visceral, genuinely American, response to any attempt to deprive someone of their right to vote is “lock and load.”
But today there are upwards of 10 million Americans prevented from voting by a bewildering array of voter suppression laws, voting roll purges, strategically limited polling stations, and so forth—and all of that before we even mention gerrymandering, which de facto neutralizes many million more votes. Why? Supposedly to prevent an entirely imaginary wave of voter fraud, cases of which run, perhaps, in the dozens nationally. The real reason, of course, is raw partisanship. The fact that most of these disenfranchised voters are black or Hispanic, and poor, and likely Democratic voters is irrelevant. We should feel the same way—furious—if it were the white suede shoe set at a country club in Millburn that were being deprived of the sacred right to vote.
At what point, my friends, at what point do we say, “Enough!” How low are we prepared to go before we rise up with one voice, regardless of political affiliation and say, “Enough!” Ours is meant to be a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Not “of some of the people by some of the people, for some of the people.” But that is precisely the direction of American political rhetoric today. And that should terrify us.
Consider Laura Ingraham’s poorly formulated but infinitely revealing comment that “The America we know and love doesn’t exist any more.” If you have any doubt about what she meant, I can clarify from personal experience. I went to college at what had been one of the WASP-iest schools in the country, Wesleyan University. Named after the founder of Methodist Christianity, John Wesley, you don’t get WASP-ier than that. During a visit home, I had occasion to meet the wife of the local Wesleyan alum who had interviewed me as a part of the admissions process. D.A.R. down to her perfectly manicured fingertips. After exchanging pleasantries, she commented that her husband had gone to Wesleyan when it was “the real Wesleyan.” “Oh,” I said, “before they admitted blacks and Jews?” “Yes, precisely,” she commented in an unwaveringly courteous tone.
Woody Allen could not have done it better.
If “the people” means “the real people,” “the real Americans” exactly how long do you think it will take until we Jews fall outside that privileged category? So far the President of the United States has described Mexican immigrants as murderers, drug-dealers, and rapists, Haitian immigrants as carriers of AIDS, and Nigerians as hut dwellers. He said Puerto Ricans unhappy with the response to Hurricane Maria were “politically motivated ingrates,” and called a Hispanic Miss Universe, “Miss Housekeeping.” He has mocked native Americans, Asians, Muslims and people with disabilities, while claiming that there were “some very fine people” among the white supremacists in Charlottesville a year ago. You, know, the ones that were chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
So when is it our turn?
Yes, it is true that we are more established now than we have ever been. So was Joseph in Egypt, and then a new Pharaoh arose, who knew not Joseph.
Who knew not Jared, either.
We should not be relying on our ability to surf ahead of a wave of ethnic slurs. Instead, we should rely on the assurance of George Washington, he who couldn’t tell a lie, concerning religious liberty, that “happily the Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
That’s the truth about America. It’s incumbent upon us to remember it, and to make sure our leadership remembers it. We have to take responsibility to make sure they take responsibility. Regardless of party or ideology, we need to call out the hypocrites, and perhaps even more important, call out those who tolerate the hypocrites. It’s incumbent upon us to assure that Washington’s principles be applied to religious matters but also, and critically, to issues of race and gender and ethnicity as well.
That’s the truth about America.
And with the help of G-d, we will begin to restore in our country, as we on this sacred day seek to restore in our souls, the purity and dignity of those truths that indeed, and mercifully, are self-evident.
Ken yehi ratzon.