Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Rosh Hashana, 1995

by Harold M. Schulweis

Let's talk politics! Or do we argue that politics and Judaism have nothing to do with each other? Does Judaism have any bearing on our political sensibilities, or do we leave political conscience to the Christian Coalition and content ourselves by venting our anger at Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and Ralph Reed? Do we fulfill our political responsibility simply by demonizing the Christian Coalition?

And where is the Jewish coalition? Where is the Jewish voice heard in the social and moral policies in the land in which we live? Or do we cede such matters to partisan political parties? Cleanse it from the sacred precincts of the synagogue.

There are voices who ask, “What has spirituality to do with politics?” After all, the Synagogue is a place of prayer. What does the liturgical life of a Jew have to do with his political life? Jewish piety should be concerned with ritual life, with the study of Torah, with the practice of Sabbath and festivals, prayers and kashruth, and synagogue attendance. There is a proper division between the sanctuary and the polling booth, between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the profane.

“Stick to your last, Rabbi. Teach Torah. Teach rabbinic tradition. Tend to your own vineyard.”

But I do. And as I search the Bible, the prophets, the writings, the Talmud, there is one thing about Jewish tradition that is abundantly clear. In Judaism, you cannot segregate God. There is no mechitzah between heaven and earth. In the Torah, there is no wall of separation between sanctuary and society; no boundaries between morality and polity. Here rationalists and mystics alike agree there is no place devoid of God. So rabbinic tradition declares that whenever you pray in an enclosed area, there must be a window open to the world. Pray with your eyes onto the market place. There is in Judaism no separation between stars and bread. No Jewish prophet ever declared, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's.”

The Jewish prophets are not concerned with the celestial universe of angels, or of paradise or of hell. The prophets are passionately concerned with power and powerlessness: about the widow, the orphan, the corruption of judges, the oppression of rulers, swindlers in business transactions, public and private deceit.

The Jewish prophet is political. The Jewish prophet is engaged in a constant struggle against spiritual isolationism, against those who would use the temple as a hideout, as an escape from the world of weights and scales, against those who put their trust in the security of the sanctuary, against the hypocrites who shout, “Heychal Adonai, heychal Adonai, heychal Adonai”—”This is the sanctuary of the Lord, this is the sanctuary of the Lord, this is the sanctuary of the Lord.” Here behind the Temple walls we are safe. Here we can declare a moral holiday. Here we can burn incense and sacrifice rams and bring wine oblations and camouflage the dust and deceit of the marketplace.

The prophets taunt moral segregation. “Hear this you who trample upon the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end...you who deal deceitfully with false balance and buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals. Will you steal, murder, swear falsely, oppress the weak and stand before Me in My sanctuary and cry “nitzalnu–we are saved, we are saved”?

The prophet is political and God is preeminently political. The God of Judaism is not a Creator who has resigned from the world, an absentee Landlord. God is not only the God of nature; God is the Lord of history. God is preeminently political.

Here is how the Bible defines God (Deuteronomy 10:18): “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow and loves the stranger in giving him food and raiment. Therefore, you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

There can be no apartheid between the spiritual and the political life. Far from being strange bedfellows, Judaism and the political conscience are united in a holy covenant. There is a moral covenant between God and Israel. With these words do we bind the leather thongs of the tefillin around our fingers each morning. God says to us: “I betroth you unto Me, through righteousness, justice, lovingkindness and mercy.”

Judaism and political conscience are covenantal bed-fellows.

But now the question deepens. Is Judaism liberal or conservative? Does Judaism condone capitalism or socialism? Does Judaism protect the propertied or defend the poor? Is Judaism inherently liberal or conservative? Is God a republican, a democrat or a libertarian? or is He like Ross Perot and Colin Powell – undeclared.

Last month I sent you in the mail two advertisements published in the New York Times, one with the banner “Mazel Tov Newt,” that argues that the Republican contract reflects “the eternal values of Judaism.” The advertisement was signed by rabbis and laymen. Alongside, I included a later advertisement, this one protesting the conservative one, and listing other rabbis and laymen claiming that “the core political commitment” of Judaism is inherently liberal and that the contract contradicts the covenant.

I sent you that literature for a reason: to illustrate that both equations of Judaism with liberalism or Judaism with conservatism are equally misleading. They manipulate the integrity of Judaism so as to canonize their parochial, partisan political positions. They engage in “gerrymandering” of the Torah by carving up the Bible and the tradition into quote-bites favorable to their politics.

Does Judaism defend the poor? Of course. Deuteronomy 15:4, “There shall be no poor among you.” But equally Leviticus 19:15 asserts: “You shall not favor the poor nor show deference to the rich but you shall judge your kinsmen fairly.”

The synagogue has a sacred opportunity to rescue the integrity of the Jewish tradition from political split thinking, where things are assigned column left or column right. The Synagogue can introduce a measure of spiritual wholeness into the schizoidal politics that splits issues and candidates into bleeding heart Democrats or sclerotic Republicans.

“A neo-Conservative,” Irving Kristol writes, “is a liberal who has been mugged,” and the liberal retorts with his own joke widely circulated in this political year: A seriously ill person is asked by his surgeon, “Which would you prefer? A heart transplant from a healthy young 25 year old being, or an octogenarian republican?” The answer “Of course I'll take the heart of the old republican, because I KNOW FOR SURE IT HAS NEVER BEEN USED.”

So the caricatures persist: “Anyone under the age of 30 who is not a liberal has no heart. Anyone above the age 30 who is not a conservative has no brains.” Nonsense. Which political party and which chronological age has a monopoly on mind and who on the emotions?

When I urge the synagogue to place social and political concerns onto the Jewish agenda, I mean that a serious synagogue such as ours can help rescue political discourse from the polarizing mentality of “Crossfire” or “The Capital Gang,” in which Michael Kingsley is pitted against John Sununu, and Bob Novak screams at Mark Shields, a meretricious contest whose victory goes to the most voluble, volatile and voracious. That's not dialogue, that's not political thinking, that's not discourse. That is F.C.C. licensing of libel and slander.

One reaction to partisan polarization is to stay away from the polls: Just don't vote, “a plague on both your houses.” But that cynicism throws the precious baby of social concern out with the dirty water of vulgarized political partisanship. Isolation from the issues of social policy signals to young and old that the synagogue has nothing to say about the way we govern our citizens.

Jewish conscience and the political life are inextricably bound. It does not mean that Judaism or the synagogue can tell you how to decide about NAFTA or GATT, or the closing of military bases, or the forms that affirmative action should take or whether how Medicare is to saved and how taxes should be lowered or raised, or how the budget is to be reduced.

No Jewish book and no Jewish sacred text will tell you what political, economic, or military means should be used. Torah is not a book of political strategies or economic means. But Torah is a book of social ends.

Judaism does not have a party platform. But it provides a spiritual and moral foundation for political decisions. Judaism is a way of thinking, a way of hearing that offers moral perspective on living.

Let me put it personally. How do I as a religious Jew take my political stance? As a Jew I hear with a third ear. Beneath the liberal-conservative rhetoric on contract and covenant, family values and entitlement and the role of government and of society, I hear with a unique Jewish historical and theological ear the depths of a more basic controversy with theological roots.

Let me illustrate. At the turn of the century, there emerged in the western world a deeply influential political philosophy called “Social Darwinism.” At its head were celebrated philosophers, Herbert Spencer in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States. They were called Social Darwinists because they usedDarwin's evolutionary theory of “natural selection” and “the survival of the fittest” to justify their political philosophy.

Herbert Spencer, in his Social Statics (published in 1897 not long after Darwin's Descent of Man in 1871), argued that government ought not to interfere with human society. Learn from the ways of nature. In nature the weak, the afflicted, those of low ability are naturally weeded out and should be. Spencer and Sumner argued, “Come on and open your eyes to the wisdom of nature” –

What happens to a sow who has a runt in its litter? She eats it.
What happens to a mutational baby chick? The mother hen pecks it to death.
What happens to wolves who go on a hunt? The injured and slow among them are soon abandoned.

But what do we do? We do our utmost to check the natural process of elimination with artificial governmental intervention. To quote Darwin's Descent of Man, “We build asylums for the imbeciles, the maimed, the sick; we institute poor laws, our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” Thomas Malthus, in his essay on population, disapproved of the relief for the poor because war, disease and poverty are natural antidotes to the rapid explosion of the population. When you tamper by governmental interference with the laws of nature, with “the survival of the fittest” and “natural selection,” you drain our economy, exhaust our energy and you are left with an effete, decadent civilization.

The Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer, offers a case history of Margaret, “a gutter child,” supported by welfare. Margaret proves to be “a prolific mother of a prolific race.” Margaret herself, ignorant, indolent, incompetent was supported by public welfare. And the records of the court of New York show that two hundred of Margaret's descendants were idiots, imbeciles, drunkards, lunatics, paupers, prostitutes. And so Spencer concludes, “Was it kindness or cruelty which generation after generation enabled these to multiply and become an increasing curse to the society around us?” Society's so called altruism only increases positive misery and prevents positive happiness. We would all be better off if Margaret died. Why keep her alive?

Now, the truth of this interpretation of Darwin I leave to you. Whether it is fair to Darwin, many scholars will deny. But right or wrong, I hear with my Jewish third ear. For me the underlying issue is not statistical, not biological, but theological. It has to do with a Jewish way of understanding and responding to nature, human nature and social character. All around us today, in different guises, we witness the resurrected theology of Spencer and Sumner. Social Darwinism reborn–a resurgence of thinking rooted in the belief that the survival of the fittest should be applied to our social relations and social policy; that the losers of society should “sink or swim.”

Much older than Social Darwinism, with my third Jewish ear I hear an echo of a major Biblical controversy. It is the ancient Jewish struggle against pagan pantheism. Against the paganism that equates might with right, against the paganism that worships the power of nature. Might is right. That power theology the Bible calls IDOLATRY. Idolatry deifies nature. Whatever nature does, nature gets and should get. Pantheism means nature is God and God is nature. And the idolatry of paganism declares “IMITATE NATURE.”

Don't we Jews believe in nature?

Of course, the Jewish tradition recognizes nature as God's creation. That is what Rosh Hashanah is all about, the celebration of the creation of nature. But our tradition has insisted that while nature comes from God, nature is not God. Nature is morally neutral. Nature is morally indifferent to earthquake, tornado, hurricane, monsoon. Nature is amoral. The strong devour the weak. You see it in every documentary on nature: in the contest of the lions and the lambs, the leopards and the antelopes, the venomous scorpion and the fleeing deer.

Of course Judaism recognizes the instinctual behavior of men and women, of lust and of aggressiveness and inquisitiveness. But Judaism does not sanctify natural impulse. It places control, constraints, limits on our animal passions

Of course Judaism recognizes that the human being is created along with the animals of Genesis, tigers, lions and vultures. But Judaism insists that we are more than animals. We are more than beasts. We are more than fangs and claws and teeth. We are more than biology. We are human beings. We are not created to imitate nature. We are created to imitate God.

“Survival of the fittest”? Who is the most fit: the bully, the tyrant, the mailed fist, those with the sharpest teeth, the hardest nails, the longest elbows? Judaism repudiates that fitness. The Jewish and moral spiritual revolution declares we humans are mandated to emulate God. “As God clothes the naked – clothe the naked, as God visits the sick – visit the sick, as God buries the dead – bury the dead, as God comforts the mourners – comfort the mourners.” The Jewish model to be imitated by human beings is the God of compassion, not nature – “Red in tooth and claw.” –

Survival? Survival without compassion is suicidal. Survival without compassion is murder and compassion is the soul of Judaism. Rachmonis is derived from the Hebrew word, “rechem” – which means womb, the life blood of civilization. In Greek the “womb” is called “hystera,” the root of hysteria: In Hebrew, the womb is called “compassion.”

All around me human beings are afflicted. Millions of lives are lived in fear and trembling. Something is demanded of me! Hunger is real. So we fast to remind ourselves. What am I, who am I? The Jewish answer to that search for my identity? The Jewish answer is tshuvah: response.

I respond, therefore I am. I am moved, therefore I am. I care, therefore I am. As a Jew I must not remain immobilized. Carved in the marrow of my Jewish bones is the ethical demand, “You shall not stand on your brothers' blood.” I cannot turn aside, avert my eyes. I cannot throw the weak to the wolves and declare “That is the will of nature.”

This is not liberalism or Libertarian or Conservativism. This is the soul of Jewish mentschlicheitism – this is the heart of Jewish theology, the soul of Jewish belief.

What does Jewish theology have to do with political life? What does the Jewish thought have to do with politics? What you believe makes all the difference in the world. Beliefs have consequences. Ideas have consequences. Theories about nature have consequences. Let me illustrate.

I mentioned William Graham Sumner, one of the most influential of American Social Darwinists in the late 19th century. In the name of social sciences a hundred years ago, he and other intellectuals agitated for closing the gates of immigration to America. These intellectuals proclaimed that the new immigrants who were coming here from Italy, Hungary and Russia did not come with the old Anglo-Saxon frontier virtues of native stock. They did not have the qualities of those we wanted. One hundred years ago,they argued that the wave of new immigrants were polluting society. Most notably the Jews. Listen to the sounds: Jews come as “beaten men from beaten breeds...moral cripples, their souls warped and dwarfed by iron circumstances...too cowardly to engage in violent crimes they concentrate on shrewdness.” Only the natural selective breeding of individuals will protect a nation's good racial traits and prevent a nation's collapse. In the early part of the 20th century, Sir Frances Galton and other geneticists warned against “the mongrelization of America.” They all had academic titles. But we were not born yesterday. We Jews have learned from the scientists with Ph.Ds who experimented on innocent men, women, and children. Science without conscience is not culture. Science without conscience is murder.

My Jewish antenna picks up today's talk of the Bell curve of eugenics, the foreboding insinuations that identify races and nationalities that are genetically inferior. I have heard those voices before. I carry millennial memories in my bones. As a Jew I was not born yesterday.

When today I hear the denigration of the new wave of immigrants in the 90's, that they bring with them crimes, violence, the worst features of society; when I hear the myth of the golden past, “How come they can't be like our immigrant grandparents and parents?” …. Hold on. My third ear arrests me. Did I forget? Did we forget what was said about our fathers and mothers? The report of the New York Police Commissioner, Theodore Bingham, announced in the “North American Review of Criminality” that half the crimes in New Yorkwere committed by Russian Jewish immigrants. Listen to the Commissioner Bingham (1908): “Jews are fire bugs, burglars, pick pockets and robbers when they had the courage.” “The most expert of all street thieves are the Hebrew boys under sixteen.” Police Commissioner Bingham was not alone. High officials joined in his declaration, that “the Jewish propensity for criminality” required the formation of a special detective force. All the ghosts of Fagin and Shylock took on human apparitions of immigrants.

The Reverend A. E. Patton, a respected Protestant leader, summarized the national revulsion toward the huddled wretched masses. “For a real American to visit Ellis Island and look upon the Jewish hordes, ignorant of all patriotism, vermin-infested, stealthy and furtive in manner, too lazy to enter into real labor, too cowardly to face frontier life, too lazy to work, too filthy to adopt ideals of cleanliness from the start...” These leaders, officials in high places were not speaking about Hispanics or Puerto Ricans or Haitians or African Americans, they were speaking about us, our people.

When I hear in the land today the mounting chorus of xenophobia, left, right, center – the fear and hatred of the stranger – from all sides spouting that these new immigrant people come to our shores drain our money, increase our taxes, fill our streets with crime; that they are unassimilable, that they do not speak our language, my third ear resonates.

How about my Zayde and Bubbe? I think about my Yiddish speaking, unassimilable bubbe and zayde from Tchechenova and Nashelsk who came to these shores at the turn of the century and on Rivington and Houston streets, and in Brooklyn and Bronx for the rest of their lives only talked Yiddish. For years, I insisted to the teacher of P.S. 89 that my first name was Hershele.

Listen with your third ear. In 1890, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge sponsored a bill to exclude all males over sixteen unable to read or write English, “in the language of their native or resident country.” The target was Jews like zayde and bubbe, whose principle dialect was Yiddish, who read and wrote in Yiddish. But Yiddish clearly was not “the language of their native or resident country.”

“Remember the immigrant, for you were immigrants on Ellis Island.”

And when I see Haitians or Cubans turned back in their vessels of refuge I say, “Good – who needs them.” Then my Jewish memory bites me. Did I forget that in 1939, a bipartisan proposal by Republican, Edith Rogers, and Democrat, Robert Wagner, sought to permit 20,000 refugee children to enter the United States on a two year plan in 1939? The bill provided that the children would be cared for by private agencies or individuals. Not a single child would become a ward of the public. Who could possibly find it in his heart to refuse to rescue children in 1939? In 1939, the bipartisan Wagner-Rogers bill, Republican and Democrat, was defeated in the Senate Immigration Committee. The arguments were the same as we hear today. Labor was opposed to it, nativists were opposed to it, politicians who read the polls were opposed to it. Have I so soon forgotten? Have I grown so deaf to the parallels? Have I grown so blind to the analogies? to the horrifying similarities from my own blood and flesh.

When I hear and see on talk shows and in newspapers the mounting sentiment against the immigrant, I can't get out of my head the 930 Jewish passengers on the boat from the hellish harbor of Hamburg Germany to the haven of Havana. I can't get out of my head the magnificent anti-Nazi German Gustaf Schroder, the captain of the St. Louis, who treated his passengers as honored guests and who when his boat with its passengers was denied entry into Havana deliberately steamed his ship off the Florida coast of the United States hoping for rescue, only to be escorted by the US Coast Guard, forced to leave American territorial waters and to return to the crematories of Europe. The passengers aboard the St. Louis formed a committee to prevent suicide.

I listen with my third ear. Even during the Second World War, only 10 percent of those who could have legally been admitted as refugees to the United States, were admitted. 78 percent of Americans in the polls refused to allow refugees to enter. Xenophobia, fear of the stranger, resonates in my Jewish ears.

And it's not directed against illegal immigration. That's a smoke screen. Today in Congress an unprecedented number of immigration-related bills calling for all kinds of restrictions to deny social services and educational opportunities to immigrants legally residing in the US – and more than 85% of newcomers reside in theUS legally.

Do I have to resort to the argument that, according to the Urban Institute, immigrants and refugees pay $30 billion dollars a year more in taxes than they consume in services? So it's profitable, OK. People are running for their lives. Today Congress ponders a proposal to cut refugees numbers from 110,000 to 50,000. As Rep. Howard Berman said: “If this law had been in place in the 1930's my mother would have gone to the concentration camp.” Where would my parents be?

You ask how does Jewish faith and Jewish experience affect my political life? It does not tell me how to vote or even for which proposition to vote but it won't let me forget the moral factors that I must consider beyond those of economic self-interest. Judaism, Jewish history is my moral gadfly. It forms my conscience. It informs my soul before I vote and remains with me after the vote. After the vote!

For the day after the vote, Jewish conscience stays on and whispers in my third ear, “Now that you have done what you have done, and for good reasons as well, what now?” Sure, it is important to limit immigration. Sure, it is important not to practice reverse discrimination. Sure, it is important not to have quotas. Sure, it is important to build more prisons and to have more policemen. But after I pull the lever am I exempted from political responsibility?

What do I say about the submerged community? Should I practice toward them a so called benign neglect; do I mean to create a permanent underclass in our society? Sure I'm for workforce. Poor mothers with children under age of 5 should be back to work! And who will take care of children cut off aid to families with dependent children? But both George Will and Pat Moynihan give up the image of children sleeping and freezing on subway grates! Yesterday the Senate voted to give the Pentagon $7.5 billion more than the Pentagon requested. Who speaks for the poor?

Infant deaths among African Americans are twice as high among African Americans as the white race. Maternal deaths are three times as high among African Americans as among Whites. Do I turn now to the wisdom of the Social Darwinists and turn women and children back to the dark laws of the jungle? Let Margaret die, her and her children too. Do I act like the sow, the chicken, the wolf?

Why should I give them food stamps and breakfasts for school children? Why should we give them free breakfasts? Where is the responsibility of their parents? Should we feed their children and create a paternalistic culture of dependence?

Then with my third ear I hear the testimony of a staff member from the Minnesota Food Share Program who tried to explain the problem of hunger to an elementary school class. He asks the kids, “How many of you had eaten breakfast that morning.” When only a few of them raised their hands, he continued, “How many of you skipped breakfast this morning because you don't like breakfast?” Lots of hands went up. Then, “How many of you skipped breakfast because you didn't have time for it?” Many other hands went up. “How many of you skipped breakfast because your family just doesn't usually eat breakfast?” A few more hands were raised. He noticed a small boy in the middle of the classroom whose hand had never gone up. He thought that the boy hadn't understood his questions. So he asked him, “And why, son, didn't you eat breakfast this morning?” And the boy replied, “It wasn't my turn.”

Too bad, son. But not out of my taxes. The issue is not the “L” or “C” word, it's the “R” word. Not liberal or conservative but “rachmones.” In Yiddish and Hebrew, “rachmones,” compassion. The prayer we will recite at Yizkor addresses God as “El Moleh Rachamin.” Jewish compassion is not an aesthetic feeling. Jewish compassion means to act, it means to intervene in nature, it means to transform the jungle of civilization.

A word to the young, so that you will understand the resonances in the Jewish third ear. Let me speak to the youngest among you, to my children and grandchildren who did not know your immigrant ancestors or the Depression. Our immigrant grandparents may not have spoken English when they came to these shores, yet they brought with them a legacy of social institutions dating back to Mishnaic and medieval times, organizations with Hebrew names: societies to protect the poor, societies for free burial, homes for the aged, charities to clothe the naked, to provide for women who need support to get married, charities to provide matzah and wine for the poor for Passover, homes that cared for orphans and societies that buried the indigent without charge. And that was accepted as the duty and responsibility of the entire society. That was intervention by community.

They spoke broken English and with Yiddish dialects. But with what a moral literacy they spoke!

Whether Jews vote for one party or another is truly not my concern. I am concerned with the moral legacy of my ancestors. I am concerned with the health of the Jewish heart. I fear the petrification of the compassionate society that threatens to grind down our Jewish sensibility. I fear the so-called “political realism” that dries the tear ducts and thickens the heart. Children, you were Bar/Bat Mitvah, don't forget your Haftorah: it came from the prophets, those non-partisan disturbers of social indifference, those spiritual politicians who knew that to believe in God is to care about God's special children: the poor, the homeless, the widow, the stranger.

Children, don't forget your Haftorah – not the trope, but the soul. The true goal is not to learn the Haftorah by heart. It is to take the Haftorah to heart. The heart of Judaism is the heart. The prophet, the greatest and most unique spiritual hero Judaism has produced, speaks of “hardness of heart,” “stubbornness of heart,” “stiffness of heart,” “the uncircumcision of heart.”

Children, what I fear is not the “others” outside us. I fear the enemy within. I fear that we will grow accustomed to placards of the hungry, and jobless, that we learn cleverly to avert our eyes, and shrewdly speed up our cars so that we are not forced to see them at the intersection.

I fear that we learn how deftly to step over the homeless bodies on the street so that we do not trip. I fear that we will see more emergency rooms shut down, more clinics shut down and rationalize with calculative intelligence the balance of budget. What I fear is we will cut the budget out of the hides of the powerless.

Children, be smart but not cruel – the brain is vital but don't let it kill the heart.

Children, better be accused of having a bleeding heart than having a frozen soul. Children, don't let the jungle take over. “Seek justice, undo oppression. Defend the fatherless. Plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). God bless us and our children with strong and good hearts.

* This document, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced without the written permission of the author.