Rabbi Elliot J. Cosgrove
Rosh Hashanah 5779
(lightly edited)
There are people, explains the Talmud, who
koneh olamo b’sha·ah ehat
(Avodah Zarah 10b), who “acquire eternity in a moment,” and for Joseph
Welch, that moment occurred on June 9, 1954. The context was a post-war
America unnerved by fears of Communist influence and subversion. Seizing
on the popular mood, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy famously
brandished a list of supposed Communist agents within the federal
government and set into motion a crusade that would dominate American
politics for years to come. McCarthy’s panels and hearings spread far
beyond any single list of government employees, stigmatizing and
sanctioning thousands of law-abiding teachers, screenwriters,
housewives, lawyers, and other public citizens.
The combination of
McCarthy’s zeal, the complicity of men and women who condoned the
violations of civil liberties as an acceptable evil relative to the
perceived Communist threat, and the timidity of so many others who
either feared risking their own political or financial self-interest or
being perceived as soft on Communism, or both, provided an ample
platform for McCarthy’s crusade to take hold. As for the Senator
himself, even in the estimation of his own inner circle, it was
political opportunism more than ideological conviction that drove his
agenda. McCarthy was an ambitious, superlative-loving, bellicose showman
and provocateur who could pull on the levers of the public imagination,
and most of all, had mastered the media. As historian Jon Meacham
writes: “McCarthy needed the press and the press came to need McCarthy.”
(The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels)
Between 1950 and 1954, the number of TV sets in America quintupled from
five to twenty-six million and McCarthy’s crusade came to dominate the
rhythms of public consciousness.
By 1953 McCarthy’s sights had turned to the defense establishment, a
move that prompted a showdown with an Eisenhower administration and
Pentagon which would not countenance attacks on Army morale in the midst
of the Korean war. The public spectacle of the Army-McCarthy hearings
was carried live on television as the Army Counsel, a Boston lawyer
named Joseph Welch, withstood the bully tactics of McCarthy and Roy
Cohn, an ambitious young lawyer whose Jewishness, incidentally, served
to protect McCarthy from charges of anti-Semitism. On the thirtieth day
of the hearings – June 9, 1954 – the denouement arrived. McCarthy sought
to impugn a young lawyer on Welch’s own legal team as having ties to a
Communist organization. Famously, Welch responded “Until this moment,
Senator, I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”
When
McCarthy barreled forward, Welch stopped him, uttering the immortal
lines: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done
enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no
sense of decency?” Even Cohn signaled to McCarthy it was time to back
off and the session came to an end. It was at that moment that the tide
turned, and Welch entered the annals of history. His words, among other
factors, prompted McCarthy’s support to evaporate. The Senate, led by
the senior Senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush, voted in favor of
censure, with twenty-two of the Senate’s forty-four Republicans voting
to condemn McCarthy. Ignored by the press, ostracized by his party,
McCarthy was finished. A heavy drinker, he died of an inflamed liver
three years later at the age of forty-eight, a broken man.
Some people believe that ours is an unprecedented era – a dystopian
society, the likes of which we have never seen, worthy of a Philip Roth
alternate-history novel. Others point to past precedent, the McCarthy
era, the Japanese internment camps of WWII, the combustible events of
1968, the Sedition Act of 1918; our nation’s history does not lack for
the Longs, Lindberghs, Wallaces, and Coughlins and the movements they
represented. Some claim that our moment is an aberration that will soon
pass, while others contend that the last seventy years was the
aberration and our moment signals a return to the norm. Regardless of
your historic sensibility, whether you believe history repeats or merely
rhymes, the challenges of our age are self-evident: the toxic
discourse, the media feeding frenzy, the peddling of fear and
hate-mongering, the populist strain of nationalism, the attacks on our
institutions of democracy, the blurring of lines between dissent and
disloyalty, between truth and untruth. As we usher in this new year and
take the pulse of our country, we know that the diagnosis is poor, that
our fears far outweigh our hopes.
My concerns, to be clear, are not directed at just any one
individual. McCarthyism did not begin with McCarthy, and our present
challenges neither began with any one election nor for that matter will
they end at the conclusion of any given political cycle. There are
hyperboles and hatreds, here and abroad, emanating from all sides of the
political spectrum. I read the news and am reminded of Ghandi’s
response when asked what he thought of Western Civilization. “I think,”
he replied, “it would be a good idea.” But more to the point, in a
democratic society, be it here, in Europe, Israel, or anywhere, to
assign blame solely to any one person is to abdicate our
responsibilities as citizens – the voters, enablers, and bystanders who
make possible elected leadership.
To live in a democracy means that we
concede that the fault is not in the stars but in ourselves; our leaders
are symptoms, not causes. As Harry Truman once said, “We get the
government we deserve, and we deserve the government we get.” We are all
contributories – our actions and inactions calling us to account today.
Today my concerns are not directed at any one person, nor for that
matter at any one policy. My concern is more fundamental, as an
American, as a Jew, as a human being, and most of all, as a father of
four, saddened and distraught at raising children in an age of which it
can be asked
“Have you no sense of decency?” Ours is a vulgar age, with a
public square lacking in moral leadership. On our watch there has been a
degradation of discourse, in the value of truth, and in the belief in
the infinite worth of every human being. We suffer from a paucity of
decency, of acts of kindness, and most of all,
of holding fast to the
fundamental importance of being a mensch.
There are two – at least two – remarkable things about giving a
sermon about the importance of decency. First, that we live in a time
when to remind people to be a mensch may be understood to be a partisan
political act. Second is the very fact that such a sermon needs to be
given at all! “Rabbi,” I imagine someone here thinking, “for this you
went to rabbinical school? . . . To tell us to be kind? Today is Rosh
Hashanah; there are people here in this room but once a year. Tell them
to support Israel, teach them to light Shabbat candles, encourage them
to give to Jewish causes. With such a small window, is this really how
you want to allocate your leadership capital? To being decent?”
My answer, having stipulated that you should all support Israel,
light Shabbat candles, and give to Jewish causes, is yes, absolutely.
There is no more important message for you to hear this year. “What is
it that the Lord requires of you?” asks the prophet Micah, if not “to do
justice, love kindness, and walk humbly before the Lord?” This is the
calling of the day – to make manifest the goodness of humanity, to cause
decency – ours and that of others – to emerge.
If for no other reason, on this Rosh Hashanah, we need to be reminded
to be decent and kind because it is a message that is not being
championed with the frequency and volume that it demands. It is not just those
individuals who, for reasons of self-interest or political survival,
have, despite possessing the political or financial capital to make a
difference, chosen to remain on the sidelines. Let someone else do it,
they say, the markets are up, it is an election year, better to play it
safe.
But religious leadership, too, for a variety of reasons, has been
rendered mute.
The Catholic Church, we know, has their own tsuris
of late, diminishing their ability to elevate our nation’s moral
discourse. On the other side is the deafening silence or even outright
support from so many in the Evangelical community who have made a
utilitarian and ultimately Faustian bargain in abdicating their moral
pulpit in order to secure judicial appointments or other packages of
political benefits. Of these leaders, we are left to wonder, as one
ancient (sort of) Jew rhetorically asked: “What shall it profit a man,
if he shall gain the world and lose his soul?”
And lest we Jews make the mistake of misplaced schadenfreude or smug
self-congratulations, we too have our own fair share of moral reckoning
to do. No different than the Church, we have sins of commission and
omission for which we must answer. Jewish leadership has proven just as
capable of carrying out all the abuses of our #MeToo era and worse. But
it goes further. Far too many in the Jewish community, like the
Evangelicals themselves, have provided moral cover and absolution to
those individuals, no matter their indecencies and ethical lapses, as
long as they remain committed to the security of Israel.
Finally, and
perhaps most perniciously, is the emergent and increasingly audible riff
that Jews must make a choice between observance and ethics or, if you
like, survival and moral decency. That it is somehow untoward for a Jew
to champion deeds of kindness, to seek to mend the world and work to
improve our common humanity. It is an Orwellian hijacking of Judaism,
nothing short of a McCarthyism within our ranks, that if you are
committed to decency and humanity as a whole, then your commitment to
the Jewish future must be suspect. Such thinking is dangerous, and, no
different than for our Evangelical friends, risks the possibility of our
one day waking up to a Judaism and Jewish people that are no longer
worth defending.
It is wrong, morally and historically, to pit Jewish observance and
decency as antithetical to one another. It has never been “either/or”;
it has always been “both/and”! The High Holiday
mahzor
teaches that it is repentance, prayer, and tzedakah that avert the evil
decree, not Jewish law or Jewish defense. On Yom Kippur, the prophet
Isaiah makes clear that we have a commitment to observe the fast and
feed the poor. The nineteenth-century Lithuanian rabbi Israel Salanter
founded the Mussar movement in response to Jews of his own era who,
though they would never think of eating non-kosher food, would be
unscrupulous in their business practices. Mussar was a movement of
ethical renewal, driven by a desire to promote a life of both
mitzvot (Jewish observance) and
middot (character traits), such as
anavah (humility),
savlanut (patience),
tzedek (righteousness),
emet (truth),
nihuta (calmness), and
metinut (deliberation), among others. Each of these character traits is as important as any other aspect of our faith.
Mitzvot and
Middot,
Torah with
Derekh Eretz.
The story is told that once during the Days of Awe, Rabbi Salanter
encountered a pious Jew who was so engrossed in prayer that he failed to
greet Salanter, whereupon Salanter chided him: “Because you are so
pious, does that give you the right to deny me a simple ‘Good Morning’?”
One does not acquire middot overnight. Life is a constant battle between our good inclination (yetzer ha-tov) and our evil inclination (yetzer ha-ra).
It takes study, reflection, practice, and constant self-correction to
make sure our good inclination – in Lincoln’s words, our “better angels”
– carry the day.
We can all be more decent, we can all
perform acts of kindness. As Anne Frank famously wrote: “…no one need
wait a moment before making the world better.” The power of an act of
kindness, when it serves no ulterior purpose, is, in the words of a dear
friend, that it is a “net happiness aggregator.” Both the person doing
the kind deed and the person receiving the kind deed feel better for it.
It causes a ripple effect and virtuous cycle that knows no end. It
could be something momentous – like the sound of the shofar,
u-vashofar gadol yitaka, or it could be the still small voice of a quiet deed
kol d’mamah dakah yishama.
It is the hours I recall my mother willing to spend with a friend in
need. It is my memory as a child, of watching my father perform CPR on a
man in the parking lot of Dodger stadium. It is the bit of advice,
counsel, and maybe an introduction you give to a young man or woman
looking to get a foothold in this world. It is the act of tzedakah you
extend to help someone make ends meet or maybe even go to college.
Some sources argue that the highest form of kindness is when it is
done anonymously. We may be familiar with of the Talmudic tale of the
Lamed-vovniks,
the thirty-six people whose selfless deeds of kindness, performed in
anonymity, sustain this world. Myself, I believe there is a place for
both private and public acts of kindness – not because of the need for
recognition, but because conspicuous role models are also important.
These days people are wondering who will step up and lead by example.
Someone needs to be first, a someone who may be you. As Rabbi Salanter
taught: “. . . when there is much evil in the world, and people are in
great need of models of goodness, why would a truly righteous person
want to keep his acts of goodness hidden?” (Joseph Telushkin, A Code of Jewish Ethics: Vol. 2, p. 148).
Being decent is not necessarily easy. It takes strength and courage.
It is not just about being nice. It means doing things that make you and
your interests vulnerable. Decency is Senator John McCain in that 2008
town hall meeting grabbing the microphone away from that woman making
racist remarks. Decency is Senator Abraham Ribicoff going off-script in
order to stand up to the Mayor Daly machine at the 1968 Democratic
National Convention. Decency is the unprecedented move of Teddy
Roosevelt inviting Booker T. Washington for dinner at the White House no
matter the political cost. Decency is not only the refusal to gossip about
another, but the act of telling the gossiper that you want no part in
what they are doing and that it is wrong. It could be as simple as a
kind word or a gracious and undeserved act of forgiveness. It could also
be telling someone you love a truth that he or she needs to hear – not,
God forbid, to cause them hurt, but because better they hear it from
you – someone who loves them – than from someone who doesn’t.
Acts of
decency will not necessarily make you popular; they can be impossible
calls of judgement that force us to dig deep. Lest we forget, the
abiding image of these holidays is Abraham, who was asked to sacrifice
that which was dearest to him in order to serve the calling of the hour.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not
where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he
stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
Or, if you like, and a
bit closer to home: במקום שאין אנשים השתדל להיות איש, b’makom she-ein anashim, hishtadel lihiyot ish, “In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.”
Is it enough? If each of us in this room commits to acts of kindness,
small and large, mundane and extraordinary, anonymous and public, will
it turn the tide? I don’t know, and I can make no promises. But given
the state of play in our world today, it is as good a place to start as
any.
It was Rabbi Salanter who once wrote:
When I was a young man, I wanted to change the
world . . . Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is
myself . . . But I’ve come to recognize that if long ago I had started
with myself, then I could have made an impact on my family. And, my
family and I could have made an impact on our town. And that, in turn,
could have changed the country, and we could all indeed have changed the
world.
Friends, years from now our children and grandchildren and our
history books will ask what we did in this decisive hour. We have
arrived at synagogue today to dig deep, knowing that we are living
through history. We seek to be reminded not of who we are, but of who it
is we aspire to be, our best self, and we commit to being that person.
We commit to taking that commitment into our families, into our city and
into our world. Today, tomorrow, and the next day, in private and
public, to close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it
ought to be – and in so doing, to make this indecent world of ours a
little more decent.
https://pasyn.org/resources/sermons/sense-decency
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