Listening to Dr. Deborah Birx and the other former officials of the CDC on CNN this past Sunday evening (March 28), their failure of leadership vis a vis the Coronavirus was stunning.

There were a number of justifications they might have considered in their staying in their positions when they knew the serious nature of the virus, as Trump knew in March as he revealed in his confessions to The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. They may have thought they could do good in an administration concerned only about its political survival and well-being; or, they may have thought that by challenging wrong-headed and dangerous policies internally but staying quiet while Trump and his spokespeople deliberately, consistently, and relentlessly lied to the public about the true nature of the crisis; or, they may have wanted to keep their jobs and hold onto power thereby avoiding angering a mob-boss President who valued loyalty to him and everything he said above all else. None of these reasons, however, rises to the level of ethical justifiability.

Yes, at last they acknowledged publicly the failure of the Trump administration’s policies. Dr. Birx admitted that beyond the first 100,000 American deaths (that were unavoidable, she said), every one of the next 450,000 deaths was unnecessary had Trump and his administration taken the lead, as President Biden is now doing, to set and advocate national emergency health standards, invoke and activate the War Powers Act to release government funds and retool American government and industry to do what is necessary to fight the virus, and then to lead a campaign to persuade the entire nation to join together on behalf of everyone’s best interests and thereby limit the death, pain and suffering.

Their staying quiet, refusing to speak out, not rallying responsible parties in government and health-care to do what was right on behalf of the American people, not resisting the bullying President and his henchmen, and failing to resign their positions if necessary, were contrary to everything I know about Judeo-Christian moral tradition.

The Talmud (circa 500 CE) set the ethical standard of how to cope with obvious wrong-doing this way: “One who is able to protest against a wrong that is being done in his/her family, his/her city, his/her nation or the world and doesn’t do so is held accountable for that wrong being done.” (Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 54b)

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel echoed that position when he said famously: “…morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

Former President Trump, Trump administration officials, Republican politicians (congressional leaders, governors, mayors, and city council members), and some Democrats too, and former CDC officials who followed Trump’s lead all are guilty of “standing by while others bleed” (Leviticus 19:16).

We so obviously lacked courageous moral leadership this past year. Thankfully, we have a new President, responsible leadership in Congress and many states and cities, health-care officials throughout the country, and many religious and civic leaders who are our modern examples of “profiles in courage.” They deserve our thanks.

In most of our lifetimes, we’ve never had a year like the one that just passed. Some of us sadly and tragically lost loved ones and friends. All of us, if we’re conscious, feared that we’d become sick ourselves. We’ve empathized with the pain of others, acquaintances and strangers alike. And we’ve worried about the political, cultural, psychological, and spiritual threats to American society, Israeli society, and nations around the world.

Despite all that, Pesach comes each spring to augur renewal and remind us of Judaism’s core values, ideals, and activist thrusts, that we aren’t passive to fate and that we can choose to chart our lives anew.

As we prepare to sit down (arguably in smaller gatherings this year as we did last year) to celebrate the most observed of all Jewish holidays, we’ll perform the rituals, read the Haggadah, eat the Seder foods, tell the Exodus story, contemplate the readings and Midrashim, be uplifted by poetry, and open our hearts in song. The Seder is also an opportunity for us all to talk with each other and ask hard questions about the meaning of the events we’ve suffered this past year as we place them into the larger context not only of our lives but of Jewish and human history. That’s what we Jews have always done, year after year, generation after generation.

When people are asked what brings us the most meaning in our lives, so often we begin with our family and friends. The lucky among us include also our work and avocations. And then there’s Jewish tradition and faith that have the capacity to ground us as individuals and as a people, as activists for human dignity and agents for change in an imperfect world.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote what I believe ought to be asked by every Jew especially this year during this season of questioning:

“We should not ask ourselves what we want from life. We should ask ourselves, what does life want from us? There is a difference between the call from within and the call from outside: it is the difference between ambitions and vocation. The former comes from the self, the latter from something outside and larger than the self. Victor Frankl explained it, ‘Being human is always directed, and pointing, to something or someone other than oneself: to a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter, a cause to serve or a person to love.’ He called this self-transcendence and said that one achieves this ‘not by concerning him/herself with self-actualization, but by forgetting oneself and giving oneself, overlooking oneself and focusing outward.’ … The relentless first-person singular, the ‘I,’ falls silent and we become aware that we are not the center of the universe. There is a reality outside. That is a moment of transformation … seeing a situation from outside the distortion field of our own wants and desires. … That ability to step back and see oneself from the outside is what makes us moral agents, capable of understanding that we have duties, obligations, and responsibilities to others. Morality is the capacity to care for others. It is a journey beyond the self.”

May this Passover season be for you and those you love, for our people here, around the world and in Israel, and for all humankind, a year of peace and wholeness, justice and compassion, healing, transcendence, and joy.

Hag Pesach Sameach – Happy Passover.

This past week, a poll published by the Geneva Institute indicated that a majority of Israelis support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (representing 65 or 66 Knesset mandates) but many of these Israeli voters have chosen parties against a two-state solution because they want so badly to defeat PM Netanyahu.

For more, see my blog at The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-clash-of-narratives-and-rights-thoughts-before-the-israeli-election/

After listening to Fresh Air’s interview with Deborah Feldman this week (aired March 15, 2021), the author of the acclaimed memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (Simon & Shuster, 2012) that became the basis of the film by that name starring the award-winning Israeli actress Shira Haas, I was so intrigued by Feldman’s story that I found a longer interview she conducted with the Dutch-born writer Arnon Grunberg in 2017. I was captivated by both conversations, especially as we approach Pesach, our season celebrating the Exodus from Egypt, the redemption of the Jewish people, and our renewal as a community and as individuals.

Deborah (age 36) grew up in the extremist and reactionary Satmar Hasidic sect in Williamsburg, New York. The Satmar community was founded by Holocaust survivors raised to believe that Hitler’s extermination of the Jews was God’s punishment for European Jewish assimilation.

Deborah is bright and articulate, fluent in Yiddish (her first language), English (which she learned by reading English literature on her own and in college after leaving the Satmar community) and German (close to Yiddish that she learned in Berlin). She speaks the three languages without a discernible accent in any of them.

She discusses without restraint her disturbed childhood, her beloved Grandmother “Bubbie,” a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen who raised her and saved her from a mentally ill father and a mother who abandoned her, her failed arranged-marriage, the long process to escape with her son from the toxic reach of the Satmars that sought to destroy her and corrupt her son’s innocence, and her search for her identity as a German national living in her adopted city of Berlin.

Ironically, in Berlin she found the city welcoming to refugees, respectful of human rights, open about Germany’s culpability for the Shoah, and filled with bookstores. She loved books early on in her life and sneaked into libraries to read. Literature became the font of her inspiration towards self-determination.  

Deborah met her ex-husband when she was 17 years old through a match-maker, saw him twice before her wedding, and married him seven months later. He was such a stranger that she didn’t remember his face until they met again at the hupah on her wedding night. During the seven interim months, she was trained to be a dutiful wife, learned the traditions required of Satmar women, and was taught that sex was a necessary religious duty to produce children and rebuild a devastated community. Her grandmother, quoting their rabbi, explained that women cut their hair the day after their weddings to demonstrate to God that they are stringently observant enough so the Almighty won’t punish the Jews again with another Holocaust.

When she escaped with her son to Berlin, the Satmar community prayed for her death and hoped to dance on her grave. They charged that she moved to Germany and became a Nazi to destroy what was left of the Jews.

Deborah now doesn’t want to be identified as a Jew, though she freely speaks about her origins, and considers herself a humanist. She explained that in order to live in a free society she needed to liberate herself from past trauma, “from the inner and outer limits of the program” with which she was raised, to identify as a human being and to empathize with every person regardless of background. A political and social leftist, she has little patience for identity politics that she believes damages society. She argued that people ought to emphasize our universal human identity first; everything else is second. Germany, she says, is the opposite of the melting pot – where everyone can be free to be uniquely themselves without social pressure, obligation, or restraints.

Deborah’s career as a young writer was meteoric. A literary agent read her blog after she left the Satmar community and approached her to publish her book Unorthodox. At the age of 23 she was a complete unknown but ended up in an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC’s The View.

Her second book is called Exodus: A Memoir which she published two years later. It focuses on her life after Satmar as a single mother, an independent woman, and a religious refugee.  

It took courage to break from everyone and everything she knew in the Satmar community. She missed especially her grandmother, but senility was taking her Bubbie’s mind away so Deborah began mourning before her grandmother’s actual death.

Deborah’s story, similar she says to women who escape from other restricted oppressive and abusive religious communities, isn’t unique. She may be right, but hers is an extraordinary story nevertheless.

For the discussion with Arnon Grunberg see – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbKvcTZqNA0

My favorite season of the year is now upon us – Springtime, nature’s way of reminding us that rebirth and renewal are ever within and around us, that there’s a continuum between the physical and the metaphysical, the world and the implicate order of things, the immanent and transcendent.

In Judaism, there’s a blessing for every occasion, and here are a few for this season:

Upon seeing the large-scale wonders of nature: Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu, Melech ha-olam, osei ma-asei v’reishit – Praised are You Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, Maker of the works of creation.

Upon seeing the small-scale wonders of nature: Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu, Melech ha-olam, she-kacha lo b’olamo – Praised are You Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, that such as these are in God’s world.

Upon seeing trees blossoming for the first time in the year: Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu, Melech ha-olam, she-lo chised b’olamo davar, u-vara vo b’riyot tovot v’ilanot tovim l’hanot vahem b’nai adam – Praised are You Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, Who has withheld nothing from God’s world and has created beautiful creatures and trees for humankind to enjoy.

Upon seeing flowers and herbs: Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, borei is’vei v’samim – Praised are You Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, Who creates fragrant flowers and herbs.

I offer you a few poems that may enhance your Seders in the celebration of springtime and renewal: 

“Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away / for, lo, the winter’s past, and the rain is gone; / the flowers appear on earth; / the time of singing is come, / and the voice of the turtle dove is heard; / the fig tree brings forth her green figs, / and the vines in blossom bring forth their fragrance. / Arise, my love, my fair one, come away.” Song of Songs 2:10-13

“What I need is the dandelion in the spring. / The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. / The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. / That it can be good again.” ―Suzanne Collins

“Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars / Something good will come out of all things yet / And it will be golden and eternal just like that / There’s no need to say another word.” ―Jack Kerouac

“The sun just touched the morning; / The morning, happy thing, / Supposed that he had come to dwell, / And life would be all spring.” ―Emily Dickinson

“’Is the spring coming?’ he said. ‘What’s it like?’ / It is the sun shining on the rain / and the rain falling on the sunshine, / and things pushing up and working under the earth.”―Frances Hodgson Burnett

“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” ―Mark Twain

“The snow has not yet left the earth, but spring is already asking to enter your heart. If you have ever recovered from a serious illness, you will be familiar with the blessed state when you are in a delicious state of anticipation, and are liable to smile without any obvious reason. Evidently that is what nature is experiencing just now. The ground is cold, mud and snow squelches under foot, but how cheerful, gentle and inviting everything is! The air is so clear and transparent that if you were to climb to the top of the pigeon loft or the bell tower, you feel you might actually see the whole universe from end to end. The sun is shining brightly, and its playful, beaming rays are bathing in the puddles along with the sparrows. The river is swelling and darkening; it has already woken up and very soon will begin to roar. The trees are bare, but they are already living and breathing.” ―Anton Chekhov

Happy Springtime!

Hag Pesach Sameach!

A two-state solution continues to command the support of a majority of Israelis, the equivalent of 65 or 66 seats in the 120-seat Knesset,  but only 20.5 percent of Israeli voters consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict an important electoral issue, according to a new poll commissioned by the Geneva Initiative one week before the 4^th election in 2 years.

For details, see – https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-poll-israeli-leftists-backing-right-wing-parties-to-oust-netanyahu-1.9622279

My friend, Rabbi Ammi Hirsch, Senior Rabbi of the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan, has written a powerful and eloquent op-ed challenge in The Jerusalem Post to Israel’s political leadership and American Jewish mainstream organizational leadership to take a public stand against the Haredi political parties and Israel’s Chief Rabbinate that are corrupting Jewish values, Israeli democracy, religious pluralism in the State of Israel, and the unity of the Jewish people worldwide.

Rabbi Hirsch mentions a pivotal trip he led to Israel when he served as the Director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America (ARZA) in the late 1990s. I was one of about 15 North American Reform rabbis who accompanied him on that journey.

He is right – we met late into the night with Prime Minister Netanyahu to urge him not to change the Law of Return that was being challenged the next day in a bill to be introduced into the Knesset by the Haredi ultra-Orthodox parties and Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. The bill would have excluded Jews converted by Reform and Conservative Rabbis abroad from the Law of Return. Netanyahu wouldn’t let us go from that meeting because he understood then how important was the bond between the vast majority of the American Jewish community with the State of Israel. He used persuasion and intimidation to get us to stand down and remain quiet the next day. We and the international leadership of the Reform and Conservative movements held our position of opposition to the change in the Law of Return, and in the end we won that battle.

The decision last week by Israel’s High Court to accept the conversions performed in Israel by Reform and Conservative Rabbis for the purpose of the Law of Return and Israeli citizenship is another important victory in this relentless battle against the corrupting influence of Jewish values, Israeli democracy, and religious pluralism by the Haredi parties and Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.

Rabbi Hirsch wonders where is much of the American Jewish organizational leadership on this issue who have remained silent since the court’s decision. Except for the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructing Judaism movements, J Street and a few other progressive Jewish organizations, we have heard nothing, especially from established American Jewish organizational leadership.

See Rabbi Hirsch’s op-ed here for a more complete discussion: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/we-must-stop-enabling-haredi-domination-of-religion-and-state-opinion-661729

I try and have always tried to understand the thinking of people with whom I disagree, not only because I learn something when I do, but because I don’t claim nor have I ever claimed to be the sole possessor of truth and moral goodness.

But, in the last few years I’ve utterly failed to understand the thinking and morality of the vast majority of Republican leaders (with a few exceptions) and their supporters relative to the immoral, autocratic, and destructive leadership of their party and standard bearer.

My inability to understand continues. I don’t get why not a single Republican lawmaker in the House or Senate voted ‘yes’ on the historic and necessary relief package signed today by President Biden.

Given the historic health crisis caused by the pandemic, the tragic death of more than a half a million of our fellow citizens, the sickening of millions more, the consequential economic hardship, small business failures, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and homelessness, the greater economic pressure on states and cities, on schools and hospitals – I don’t get it. How can these Republicans justify failing to act on behalf of their fellow citizens?

They say the bill is way too big – but they had no problem giving a $2 trillion tax cut to the wealthiest 1% in 2017 or in supporting the first $2 trillion relief package when they held the Senate and presidency.

Is their renewed concern really about growing the national debt? Or is it sour grapes that in the last 4 years because of the moral turpitude and political incompetence of their leadership they lost the House, Senate, and presidency? Or is it because they are suddenly opposed to big government now that the Democrats are in control? Or is it that they’re terrified of their extremist and bigoted base and being primaried in the coming elections?

I don’t know the reasons.

Thank goodness the Democrats are now in control. I’m grateful that by passing this relief bill they have done the right thing, and I look forward to their continuing to do the right thing on such important issues as infrastructure, climate, racial justice, immigration, and voting rights.

May they have the wisdom and fortitude to carry on.

The Forverts has released a Yiddish rendition of folksinger Woody Guthrie’s classic song, “This Land is Your Land.”

The music video, which features an international group of Yiddish singers and klezmer musicians, was produced by punk-klezmer musician Daniel Kahn.

While a Yiddish version of “This Land is Your Land” may at first seem far afield from the “dust-bowl troubadour’s” life and work, Guthrie, who was not Jewish, actually had deep personal and artistic connections to Yiddish and Jewish culture. His mother-in-law was the acclaimed Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt and the two often performed their works for each other.

Thanks to Letty Cottin Pogrebin who posted it in her frequent newsletters.

https://forward.com/yiddish/464504/watch-the-forverts-premieres-yiddish-version-of-woody-guthries-classic/