What Is At Stake This November 3 – Jewish Views
Sunday morning begins with the 8 am news programs and is followed by a zoom with my daughter and her partner. Using a new book, Judaism’s Life-Changing Ideas, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom), we engage in open and stimulating conversation on the Torah portion.
In his introduction, Sacks asserts that Judaism is a “dazzlingly original way of thinking about life,” and uses an example from the American Declaration of Independence:
“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 rights are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Sacks states that “these truths” were far from “self-evident,” saying, “they would have sounded absurd to Plato and Aristotle, both of whom believed that not all men were created equal and therefore did not have equal rights.”
These ideas were only “self-evident” to the founding fathers because they were brought up in a culture that had internalized the Hebrew Bible and the revolutionary idea that each individual, regardless of color, culture, class or creed, was created, “B’Tzelem Elohim” -in the “IMAGE OF GOD.” Obviously, with slavery in force, this idea did not relate to “all” people and was just aspirational until the Emancipation almost 100 years later.
Ideas, though, can change the world because they change us. Humankind faces a choice in every generation between the “idea of power and the power of ideas.” Ideas can be transformative because they change the way we feel, which can change the way we act, which changes the person we become.
We faced this choice between the “idea of power” and the “power of ideas” on November 3. Our country is at a crossroads, and whatever position you hold, I hope you have voted your conscience and have your vote reflect your values and moral behavior.
This week's New York Times presented 15 columnists’ essays explaining what we have lost over the past four years. Most of these essays reflect deeply held Judeo-Christian values, the foundational ideas of western democracy.
Rabbi Sacks #2 Life-Changing Idea was about the ‘dignity of difference.’ After the flood, God instructed Noah and all humanity to think not only of ourselves but of the “other” as made in God’s image. This is the only way to save ourselves from violence and self-destruction, Sacks explained. The challenge is: "Can I see God’s image in one who is not in my image – whose color, class, culture or creed is different than mine?"
From the beginning of time, people feared others who were not like them. This was a source of violence for as long as humans have been on the earth. The stranger, the foreigner, the outsider, is almost always seen as a threat. The Bible is a corrective to these fears and teaches repeatedly to “Love our neighbor as we love ourselves,” and to take care of the stranger/foreigner who comes to dwell among us.
Rabbi Sacks teaches in his Life-Changing Idea, “Next time you meet someone radically unlike you, try seeing difference not as a threat but as an enlarging, possibility-creating gift.”
My friends, I love our country and believe it stands for tolerance, kindness, caring for others, and has the potential of unlimited possibilities for the betterment of ALL our citizens.
We have lost our way. Our democracy, based on “Life-Changing” universal truths and ideas, has been abused. America must be a place that provides a better future for all of its citizens and continues to be an inspiration for the rest of the world. Let us bring back these and other time-honored values as we cast our votes.
I conclude with a “Prayer for the Coming Days” by my New York colleague Rabbi Jonathan Kliger:
- May we each exercise our right and responsibility to vote in this year’s election, as voting is the sacred duty of all citizens in a democratic nation.
- May we find within ourselves a calm center, a refuge from the unrelenting anxiety and anger that storms around us.
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May we treat everyone we encounter with graciousness and care, even when we disagree. May we do our best to banish contempt, for even as contempt demeans others, it also poisons our own hearts.
- May we stand up boldly for our principles.
- And may we remember and embody the words of President Abraham Lincoln as he closed his first inaugural address to a nation on the brink of civil war:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory…will yet swell…when again touched, as surely they will be, by the Better Angels of our Nature.”
And let us all say: AMEN.
Rabbi Toba August
