Avoiding Sodom

I wonder and worry frequently whether Jewish literature and Jewish teachings have anything at all useful to say about the great issues facing our nation. The President and Congress are currently embroiled in, what for me anyhow, is a rather depressing negotiation on raising the national debt ceiling and working towards a more balanced federal budget.

The broad contours of the debate, as you all know, are how much and where to cut from the federal budget and how much and where to raise taxes. Republicans in Congress are adamantly opposed to any tax increases.

As I seek to think about this through a Jewish prism, I find myself asking to what extent does Judaism teach or advocate a self reliant society and to what extent does Judaism teach or advocate a society where we are all interrelated and interdependent?

Hillel in Pirke Avot/The Ethics of the Fathers asked, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me, if I am for myself alone, what am I?" Hillel clearly seeks to strike a balance between self, self reliance, and interdependence. This same text teaches, "He who says, what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours is a neutral character but some say this is the character of Sodom."

I cannot help but think about this last line. It haunts me--"this is the character of Sodom-"-- that city that had to be destroyed by God because of the evil within it. That city that was so far beyond redemption that it simply could not endure. In this reading, the evil was a city with no sense of responsibility of one for the other-- no sense of giving to the commonweal for the common good.

The very idea of living in a nation that takes care of its elderly, its disabled, its young, its orphans and widows inspires me. The very act of paying taxes in order to lift us all up is what makes us "one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

Our elected officials would need only read our nation's sacred texts through the prism of Jewish religious guidance in order to fashion a worthy public policy.

In honor of July 4th weekend

In honor of July 4 weekend, I dedicated my Shabbat remarks last week to that great American game of baseball—more pointedly—to A. Bartlett Giamatti’s wonderful essay “Self Knowledge” wherein he compares playing games and watching games to paradise, “All play aspires to the condition of paradise.” Giamatti invokes Milton as he so beautifully demonstrates that games are a momentary taste of what the Gods once offered us and what the imagined life of the Gods actually is.

When we enter a ballpark on a summer’s eve and first see the green field glowing under the lights, many of us know that this is where we are meant to be—even for a moment.

In my remarks last Shabbat, I compared Giamatti’s brief taste of paradise in the moment of the game with Peter Berger’s “sacred canopy” in his description of what religion offers. Religion invites the faithful into a sacred canopy to taste of a finite province of a different reality—an alternative world where life can be sacred, beliefs are noble, the good life counts for something lasting and the way we live really matters.

After services some one that was following my remarks closely asked about how we extend the sacred canopy and make it more durable—more than just a finite province. That is the challenge that modernity brings and that is the worthy goal of struggling to create sacred community. I will continue with these thoughts this coming Shabbat.