Dr. Sagit Arbel-Alon, an obstetrician and oncological gynecologist at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, is also a poet, and she is haunted by the truth that life may be long but time is short. She wrote:

“I read (somewhere) that it’s important to live each day

As though it’s the last of my life,

So I got up early and left

For work, went shopping,

Folded laundry,

Emptied a dishwasher,

Collected feelings for a poem,

Sliced a salad for dinner,

Showered, told another

Bedtime story,

Said good night,

Gave a kiss.”

The signature prayer of Rosh Hashanah is Unetaneh Tokef, and it includes the following language emphasizing the temporal nature of our lives:

“Our origin is dust, and dust is our end. Each of us is a shattered urn, grass that must wither, a flower that will fade, a shadow moving on, a cloud passing by, a particle of dust floating on the wind, a dream soon forgotten.”  

We have so little time, you and I, and so this season calls upon us most especially to ask ourselves whether we are using the time we have well.

What we choose to do with the time we have tells us who we are, what we care most about, who and what we value. 

Would we go on as we always thought to do?

Stay close to home?

Show more of our love to our life-partners and spouses, children, and grandchildren?

Be with friends?

Support good and just causes?

Travel?

Commune with the natural world?

Write books?

Read for fun?

Teach?

Create paintings?

Sing and compose songs?

Dance?

Cook and bake?

Eat dark chocolate?

Carpe diem, u-l’shanah tovah u-m’tukah l’kul’chem!

For many years I have collected quotations written by people who lived from antiquity to modernity who addressed all manner of ideas. I offer the following on the theme of life’s meaning with the hope that some are meaningful to you now, during these extraordinary times and for this upcoming High Holiday season:   

“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” -Eckhart Tolle (b. 1948)

“The best part of life is not just surviving, but thriving with passion and compassion and humor and style and generosity and kindness.” -Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

“Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.” -Alice Childress (1916-1994)

“Life is short. Be swift to love. Make haste to be kind.” -Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881)

“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.” -William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

“Live a balanced life. Learn some and think some, and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.” -Robert Lee Fulghum (b. 1937)

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common – this is my symphony.” -William Henry Channing  (1810-1884)

“People get better because they want to get better, and need to get better – they feel the obligation to get better. And you take from anyone and from anywhere. Turn nothing down, unless an idiot is babbling at you. I took advice from everyone, and what you see before you is the result of will and study and imitation and desire. I was born only with the desire, but showing up and driving everyone stark raving mad with questions made me good. And I am good. I worked at it.” -Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003)

 “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

“Life must be understood backwards…[but] lived forwards.” – Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” -Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” -William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

“Life is too short to drink bad wine or finish books I don’t like.” -Susan Kelly (b. ?)

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” –Crowfoot, Isapo-Muxika (1830-1890)

“There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don`t expect you to save the world, I do think it`s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.” -Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni Jr. (b. 1943)

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” -Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“The purpose of life is not to be happy; but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.” -Leo Calvin Rosten (1908-1997)

“There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.” -Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972)

“We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or die together as fools.” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

“Everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way….” -Victor Frankl (1905-1997)

May this New Year 5783 be one of good health, growth, renewal, and fulfillment for us all, peace and safety for the Jewish people here, throughout the Jewish Diaspora, in the Land of Israel, and for all peoples of the earth.

L’shanah tovah tikateivu v’tichateimu.

Far too often, when I served as a congregational rabbi and was called to officiate at a funeral and meet with the family of the deceased, someone was missing from the inner circle of close relatives and friends—a brother, sister, child, or longtime friend. They were absent not because they were unavailable, but because some serious breach occurred long before, and the parties never forgave one another nor reconciled.

All of us will be hurt, sometimes deeply by those close to us. Knowing this, our task is to determine how we will cope when we or one of our dear ones are victimized, and what we will have to do to arrive at a place of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is among the most difficult emotional, psychological, and spiritual challenges we ever face. Our inability and/or unwillingness to forgive has a profound negative impact on our well-being and overall health. But if we can find our way to forgiveness, we can not only restore relationships but relieve our deepest hurts.

As I have thought about how to forgive (a central theme during this period leading to and including the High Holidays), how to reach the place inside us that allows us to lay down the burdens that come with being wronged, I have gleaned six truths about the nature of forgiveness: 

1. Forgiveness is a step-by-step process and not a single event. True forgiveness does not paper over what happened to us in a superficial way, nor does it suppress or ignore our pain. It cannot be hurried, and it comes only when we are able to honor the grief and sense of betrayal that are part of us and our past, without letting them take over our lives in the present.

2. Forgiveness requires a courageous act of will. It is not about forgetting or pardoning, condoning, falsely reconciling, or appeasing an aggressor or wrong-doer. Forgiving takes fortitude, which is why Gandhi taught: “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

3. Forgiveness requires us to believe in our basic goodness. It needs to be anchored in the belief that we are all “nobly born” by virtue of being created “b’tzelem Elohim – in the Divine image,” and that we have an innate capacity for wisdom, purity, goodness, and love. Our noble birth means that we aspire to do better, even when we are hurt and justifiably filled with the desire to seek vengeance.

4. Forgiveness frees us. When we hold onto our anger and resentment, we bind ourselves to the person who hurt us, and if we say “I will never forgive him/her,” we consign ourselves to a prison in which we are both the jailer and the prisoner. Consider this dialogue between two former prisoners of war:

“Have you forgiven your captors yet?”

“No! Never!”

“Well, they still have you in prison, don’t they?”

When asked if he could ever forgive the Chinese for their military occupation of Tibet and the systematic destruction of Tibetan monasteries and culture, the Dalai Lama replied, “They have already taken my country. Why should I let them have my mind, too?”

Forgiveness does not depend on anyone except us – it is unilateral. It doesn’t require the other person to apologize or ask to be forgiven. It doesn’t even require the other person to be alive or aware of our decision to forgive. Forgiveness is ultimately simple – it means releasing ourselves from the pain inflicted upon us in the past and letting it go in the present.

5. Before we can forgive others, we have to feel fully the injury we sustained, to grieve as if we suffered the death of a loved one, and then reconstitute our lives after an appropriate period of mourning. This is perhaps the most difficult challenge of all, because so many of us have allowed the hurt, grief, fear, resentment, and rage to pile up over time, one negative emotion sitting on top of another, each adding density to our negative feelings, a black hole of intensifying negativity that sucks the life out of everyone around us.

Many people wrongly assume that we should simply move on without the necessary emotional work. Negative emotions, however, do not really go anywhere. To make forgiveness possible, we need to strive to understand how the hurt fits into the rest of our lives, how it changed us and our world view, and how it closed our hearts.

The goal of forgiveness is a reshaped life, and if we come to it late, forgiveness can reshape death as well. We will know that the process of forgiveness has been effective and we are different when we can recall those who hurt us and nevertheless want to wish them well.

6. Forgiveness does not re-write our history, but it allows us to re-write the story of our history. Our willingness to change, and then to see the world through a more positive lens, resets the compass of the heart so we can reclaim our larger self, our larger consciousness, our larger capacity for loving-kindness. It allows us to open our hearts to others, and it frees us from the debilitating fear of being hurt again.

When we forgive we heal the hurts we do not deserve. By forgiving, we reverse the flow of our history. We are released from the pain born in the past but which poisoned our present. 

This blog appears in my book Why Judaism Matters – Letters of a Liberal Rabbi to his Children and the Millennial Generation with an Afterword by Daniel and David Rosove (Nashville: Jewish Lights Publishing, a division of Turner Publishing, 2017) 106–113. It is available on Amazon.

This blog also is posted at The Times of Israel –  https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/forgiveness-is-about-letting-go/

The process of Teshuvah/Repentance was regarded so highly by the rabbis of the midrashic tradition (400-1200 CE) that they characterized it as one of the seven wonders that preceded the creation of the universe itself (Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 39b).

Teshuvah is a progressive force in human life that challenges us to break from our negative and destructive habitual patterns, behaviors and addictions that cause inner and social turmoil, dysfunction, disunity, and disharmony.

Effecting Teshuvah (a central theme in this month of Elul preceding the High Holidays), as essential as it is to the advancement of our lives and the restoration of our relationships, to our personal and interpersonal growth, and to change, is neither simple nor quickly accomplished. Teshuvah requires much time, strong intention, and consistent effort, as well as the virtues of patience, perseverance, humility, and courage. It even requires our willingness to experience suffering and despair because when we acknowledge and understand on a deep level what we did to ourselves and to others and why we behaved so destructively, we confront ourselves and our deepest motivations (see my last blog on The Rider and the Elephant). If we succeed, however, we can eventually restore what was broken in our lives, return us to those we love and care most about, renew our connection with Jewish tradition and the Jewish people, enable us to more fully intuit Oneness amongst humankind and in the natural world, and by doing all of that be renewed and refreshed, and feel more joyful, optimistic, and hopeful about ourselves, our community, our people, and the world.

“Teshuvah is a manifestation of the divine in each human being… Teshuvah means “turning about,” “turning to,” “response” [based on the Hebrew root – shin-vav-bet – return to God, to Judaism, return to community, return to family, return to “self”… Teshuvah reaches beyond personal configurations – it is possible for someone to return who “was never there” – with no memories of a Jewish way of life…Judaism isn’t personal but a historical heritage… Teshuvah is a return to one’s own paradigm, to the prototype of the Jewish person…The act of Teshuvah is a severance of the chain of cause and effect in which one wrong follows inevitably upon another…The thrust of Teshuvah is to break through the ordinary limits of the self…The significance of the past can only be changed at a higher level of Teshuvah – called Tikun – Tikun Hanefesh – Tikun Olam (lit. repair of one’s life and repair of the world)…The highest level of Teshuvah is reached when the change and correction penetrate the very essence of the sins once committed and create the condition in which a person’s transgressions become one’s merits.” -Gleaned from “Repentance” by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (1937-2020)

“One of the foundations of penitence, in human thought, is a person’s recognition of responsibility for one’s actions, which derives from a belief in humankind’s free will. This is also the substance of the confession that is part of the commandment of penitence, in which the person acknowledges that no other cause is to be blamed for one’s misdeed and its consequences but the person alone.” -Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935)

“For transgressions between one person and another, such as injury, cursing, stealing, and similar offenses, a person is never forgiven until that person gives the other what is owed, and pacifies that other person.” –Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1138-1204), Mishnah Torah, Laws of Repentance 2:2

“What is complete Teshuvah? When one comes upon a situation in which one once transgressed, and it is possible to do so again, but the person refrains and doesn’t transgress on account of one’s repentance.” -Maimonides, Ibid 2:1

“Rabbi Eliezer said, “Repent one day before your death.” His disciples asked him, “Does then one know on what day we will die?” “All the more reason one should repent today, lest we die tomorrow.” -Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 53a (6^th century CE)

“One’s perspective is enlarged through penitence…All that seemed deficient, all that seemed ugly in the past, turns out to be full of majesty and grandeur as a phase of the greatness achieved through the progress of penitence… Moreover, it is necessary to identify the good that is embodied in the depth of evil and to strengthen it – with the very force wherewith one recoils from evil. Thus will penitence serve as a force for good that literally transforms all the wrongdoings into virtues.” -Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook

“Open the door of repentance only the width of the eye of a needle and God will open it wide enough for carriages and wagons to pass through.” -Song of Songs Rabbah 5 (7^th century CE)

“Rabbi Abbahu said, “In the place where penitents stand, even the wholly righteous cannot stand.” -Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 34b

”What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.” –The Dhammapada, sayings of the Buddha, 500 B.C.E.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” –William Shakespeare, Hamlet – Act 2 Scene 2

Are the Buddha and Shakespeare right? Are we humans really capable of being “mind over matter?” Is nurture more powerful than nature? Can we think, do, react, and be anything we decide to be? Is it really that simple and easy to define ourselves and turn our lives around by deciding to do so? These are some of the questions we Jews ask during the month of Elul leading to the Yamim Noraim, Days of Awe.

None of this effort to create and/or recreate ourselves is simple according to Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business. He writes that the conscious reasoning part of our brains has only limited control over what we think, feel, decide, do, and become. (See his books “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom” and “The Righteous Mind – Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”)

The challenge before us, Haidt says, is that the mind is divided into two parts that often conflict with each other. We are like “Riders on the backs of Elephants.” Our conscious and rational mind (i.e. the Rider) has only limited control over what our gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions and intuitions beneath (the Elephant) compel us to do. The Rider is like the press agent for the President (the Elephant). The press agent (the Rider) rationalizes and spins whatever the President (the Elephant) says and does.

The Elephant and Rider each has its own “intelligence,” and when the two intelligences work together they merge into a special kind of confluence of heart, mind, spirit, and action, thus embodying an integrated self. However, our Elephant and Rider don’t always work together, and when they don’t we feel fragmented, dysfunctional, and often frustrated and stuck.

This month of Elul leading to the High Holidays is when Jews prepare to break from ingrained negative and self-destructive habits that keep us from change, growth, and a more integrated self. We call that process Teshuvah (lit. turning, returning, or repentance). The goal of Teshuvah is for us to restore integrity and dignity to our lives, to become our best selves, to bring us closer to the people we love, to our families and friends, to our colleagues, fellow workers and community, to our people, to Jewish tradition and Torah, and to the pursuit of goodness and godliness. The Teshuvah process assists us in making amends, apologizing for wrongs we committed, seeking forgiveness from others we’ve wronged, and making a commitment not repeat those actions, behaviors, and deeds that caused a breach.

Jewish tradition calls us especially in this season to look beyond our material needs and focus upon our emotional, ethical, and spiritual lives, on that which elevates us to be a “little less than the gods” (“Vat’chas’rei-hu m’at mei-elohim…”Psalms 8:5 – Robert Alter translation).

Haidt reminds us that when the Rider and Elephant are at cross-purposes we need to retrain the Elephant; but that is never easy nor is it an immediate “fix.” He explains that our Elephant is wired to patterns long-ago established when we were young. It seems to us at times however, that it doesn’t really matter what our conscious minds, the power of reason, and the good yetzer (inclination) tell us we ought to do, for our Elephant is overly powerful and our Rider has little sway or control.

So Haidt urges the Rider to clarify the path towards greater integration of the self and then talk to the Elephant into reconditioning the Elephant’s gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions whenever they are out of whack with the Rider’s higher ethical, rational, and spiritual aspirations, purposes, and goals.

Was Shakespeare right, then, that “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so?”

I respond this way. We will not be successful in the process of Teshuvah if we insist that the Rider has the final word. Rather, the Rider’s role is to redirect the Elephant’s emotional, psychological, and intuitive impulses carefully and deliberately. There are at least three means to do this:

• Meditation – Quiet the mind and detach from whatever drives us towards dysfunctional and destructive behaviors;
• Cognitive therapy – Explore our deeper motivations, unconscious innate impulses, and hidden agendas thereby bringing them to consciousness, and then “unpack” that baggage we carry around with us (often without realizing we are doing so), the hurtful memories from childhood and early adult life that conditioned us to think and believe that the world works in a specific way and that we have little to no control over it. The Jewish Musar movement addresses all these challenges;
• Biochemical support – I am not a psychiatrist, but I believe in biochemical medical intervention and support when trained professionals determine it to be efficacious and necessary to attain greater calm in our lives and the ability to make necessary positive changes. Those who think that biochemical therapy might be helpful ought to consult with qualified mental health professionals.

Each of these three strategies has its place, and working together they can be efficacious in helping us draw together our Rider and Elephant into a systemic, unified, integrated, productive, positive, and confluent organism.

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor is helpful because it accurately describes how the Elephant operates from a powerful subterranean unconscious mishmash of forces and what the Rider does and is capable of doing. Given the Elephant’s size and weight, however, it is likely that we may only be able to move forward slowly on one day and to find ourselves slipping backwards two steps to our former dysfunctional default position on the next. What is necessary is for us to retrain ourselves patiently and with perseverance, virtues themselves in the process of effecting Teshuvah. As we are successful, our sense of hopeful optimism likely will return.

I agree that life is what we deem it to be. We humans are, after all, proactive beings. We need not be victims of our non-rational and irrational forces. We have agency to effect change and growth in our lives. We have only to want to do so as the necessary first step.

Happy riding, and may we all experience a productive Elul!

This post also appears at The Times of Israel – see https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-rider-and-the-elephant-how-much-control-over-our-lives-do-we-really-have/

Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism, by my friend, Rick Wartzman, is set to be published November 15. Walmart is America’s biggest private employer, and is often under scrutiny for its labor practices.

The book has received stellar reviews, one from Evan Osnos, a New Yorker staff writer:

“Rick Wartzman proves, once again, why he is America’s most compelling historian of corporate culture. Still Broke is fair-minded, exacting, and brutally clear that achieving humane wages for front-line workers will take more than good intentions. This should be required reading for every CEO, union leader, and politician in America.”

Rick Wartzman is head of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society at the Drucker Institute, a part of Claremont Graduate University. His commentary for Fast Company was recognized by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing with its Best in Business award for 2018. He has also written for Fortune, Time, Businessweek, and many other publications. His books include The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Current Interest and named one of the best books of 2017 by strategy+business; Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and a PEN USA Literary Award; and The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (with Mark Arax), which won a California Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

How America’s biggest company began taking better care of its workers–and why such efforts will never be enough.

Fifteen years ago, Walmart was the most controversial company in America. By offering incredibly low prices, it had come to dominate the retail landscape. But with this dominance came a suite of ethical concerns. Walmart was accused of wiping out of mom-and-pop businesses across the country; ruthlessly pressuring suppliers to cut costs, even if it meant closing up U.S. factories and moving production overseas; and, above all, not taking adequate care of its own employees, who were paid so little that many wound up on public assistance.
 
Today, while Walmart remains America’s largest employer, the picture is very different. It has become an environmental leader among businesses, and has taken many other steps to use its immense scale to have a positive social impact. Most notably, its starting wage has risen from $7.25 to $12, and employee benefits have improved. With internal and external threats to its business looming, the company began to change directions in 2005—a transformation that accelerated in 2014, with the arrival of CEO Doug McMillon. By undertaking such large-scale change without a legal mandate to do so, Walmart has joined a number of major corporations that say they are dedicated to practicing a new, socially conscious form of capitalism.

In Still Broke, Wartzman goes inside the company’s transformation, showing in novelistic detail how the company has gotten to where it is. Yet he also asks a critical question: is it enough?

With a still-simmering public debate around the minimum wage and widespread movements by workers demanding better treatment, how far will $12 an hour go in today’s economy? Or even $15? Or Walmart’s average wage, which now hovers above $17—but, even so, doesn’t pencil out to so much as $32,000 a year for a full-time worker?
 
In the richest nation on earth, how did the bar get set so low? How did America find itself relying on an army of low-wage workers without ever acknowledging their most basic needs? And if Walmart’s brand of change is the best we have, how can we ever expect to build a healthy society?

With unparalleled access to the key executives and change-makers at Walmart, Still Broke does more than document a remarkable business makeover. It interrogates the role of business in American life, and asks what the future of our economy and country can be—and whose job it is to make it.

If you haven’t pre-ordered Still Broke, I encourage you to do so here – Just click here

That accusation has circulated about Trump ever since the 2016 election campaign. President Biden suggested as much last week in his fiery (and true) Independence Hall speech. Most scholars of fascism, however, do not regard Trump as a fascist, nor do they characterize the conditions of the United States in 2022 with Italy in 1921 and Germany in 1932. So, if Trump is not a fascist, what is he?  

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of Italian and history, at New York University said:

“Trump certainly uses fascist tactics, from holding rallies to refresh the leader-follower bond to creating a “tribe” (MAGA hats, rituals like chanting “lock them up,” etc.) to unleashing a volume of propaganda without precedent by an American president. Yet the political cultures that form him and his close supporters are not fascist, but reflect a broader authoritarian history.“

Jason Brownlee, professor of government, at the University of Texas at Austin said:

“Trump is a celebrity-turned-right-wing politician. He acts as a consummate demagogue, fabulist, and ultranationalist, and he appears to have a strong inclination for nepotism and kleptocracy. His efforts to use the presidency to finance his lifestyle and enrich his family resemble the schemes of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.“

Trump does not quite fit the definition of a fascist according to all 8 scholars interviewed for an article published by Vox (“Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in” by Dylan Mathews on October 23, 2020. See – https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21521958/what-is-fascism-signs-donald-trump).

Though he doesn’t fit the definition of a fascist does not mean he is not a clear and present danger to American democracy, as President Biden claimed, or a criminal as the DOJ, courts in NY, Georgia, and Florida must determine.

I wrote about AIPAC and its decision to fund insurrectionists and against democracy in a brief piece that I posted on this blog in March of this year.

EVOLVE: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations, the newsletter of Reconstructing Judaism, solicited an op-ed from me on the impact that AIPAC is having on elections.

You can read it here – https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/aipac-has-stepped-way-over-the-line/

The following comes from the “pen” of Heather Cox Richardson, Ph.D., an American historian, professor of history at Boston College, and an author of six books. She writes a daily column on American politics and history that I read religiously. Her column that she posted today (August 28, 2022) suggests that history has a habit of repeating itself, mostly because bullies appear in every generation and every era and they are all essentially the same – cowards:

In a speech Thursday night, President Joe Biden called out today’s MAGA Republicans for threatening “our personal rights and economic security…. They’re a threat to our very democracy.” When he referred to them as “semi-fascists,” he drew headlines, some of them disapproving.

A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee called the comment “despicable,” although Republicans have called Democrats “socialists” now for so long it passes as normal discourse. Just this week, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) called Democrats “radical left-wing lunatics, laptop liberals, and Marxist misfits.”

Biden’s calling out of today’s radical Republicans mirrors the moment on June 21, 1856, when Representative Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts, a member of the newly formed Republican Party, stood up in Congress to announce that northerners were willing to take to the battlefield to defend their way of life against the southerners who were trying to destroy it. Less than a month before, Burlingame’s Massachusetts colleague Senator Charles Sumner had been brutally beaten by a southern representative for disparaging slavery, and Burlingame was sick and tired of buying sectional peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough. The North was superior to the South in its morality, loyalty to the government, fidelity to the Constitution, and economy, and northerners were willing to defend their system, if necessary, with guns.

Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. He was willing to accept a battle, Burlingame explained, because what was at stake was the future of the nation. His speech invited a challenge to a duel.

Southerners championed their region as the one that had correctly developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South, a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.

At long last, the attack on Sumner inspired Burlingame to speak up for the North. The southern system was not superior, he thundered; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.

Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system?

For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with education, morality, economic growth, and respect for government.

Burlingame had deliberately provoked the lawmaker who had beaten Sumner, Preston Brooks of South Carolina, and unable to resist any provocation, Brooks had challenged Burlingame to a duel. Brooks assumed all Yankees were cowards and figured that Burlingame would decline in embarrassment. But instead, Burlingame accepted with enthusiasm, choosing rifles as the dueling weapons. Burlingame, it turned out, was an expert marksman.

Burlingame also chose to duel in Canada, giving Brooks the opportunity to back out on the grounds that he felt unsafe traveling through the North after his beating of Sumner made him a hated man. The negotiations for the duel went on for months, but the duel never took place. Instead, Brooks, known as “Bully” Brooks, lost face as a man who was unwilling to risk his safety to avenge his honor, while Burlingame showed that northerners were eager to fight.

Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southerners by calling them out for what they were, and northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call.

President Biden’s Twitter account has recently been taken over by new White House’s Deputy Director of Platforms Megan Coyne, who garnered attention when she ran the official New Jersey Twitter account with attitude, and it seems as if the administration is taking the new saltiness out for a spin. “All the talk about the deficit from the same folks that gave an unpaid-for $2 trillion tax cut to the wealthy and big corporations. It makes you laugh,” the account said tonight. “Under my Administration, the deficit is on track to come down by more than $1 trillion this year.”

The author of the 1990 novel, The Devil’s Advocate, Andrew Neiderman, was a guest this week on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber (August 22, 2022). Neiderman’s book was made into a movie in 1997 starring Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves. During the filming, the stage and film star Helen Miren, the wife of the film’s director Taylor Hackford, told Neiderman that she regarded his book as a morality play in which the characters embodied the personification of absolutes.

The book and film are about an aspiring Florida defense lawyer named Kevin Lomax (played by Keanu Reeves) who accepts a high-powered position at a New York law firm headed by the legal shark John Milton (played by Al Pacino). Neiderman explored how ambition, temptation, vanity, and the pursuit of power can compromise one’s conscience and ultimately be one’s undoing. He explained on The Beat that what he wrote more than thirty years ago presaged what is happening across America today:

“Milton (Pacino) is the personification of evil and Kevin (Reeves) is the personification of every man in his quest for success and wealth. Over time, good and evil, the standard of behavior has changed. … Winning has become the new good and losing has become the new evil. If you accept that, if you live that life, if you think winning is IT, then all the sisters and brothers come along with it, like hypocrisy, denying the facts, refusing to believe things in front of you, distorting, lying – Trump is said to have lied more than 30,000 times in his four years as President – that is the new standard that we are fighting against. If we accept that, if winning and losing are the new good and evil, then everything else is okay. It’s okay to be a hypocrite. It’s okay to lie. It’s okay to look at a fact and say it’s not there because what I want the most is to win. The best examples are the two Supreme Court Justices who lied to Congress saying they wouldn’t overrule Roe v Wade, and then when they could, they did it; and it’s okay. Nobody is asking for them to be removed from the Supreme Court. They lied to win.”  

Lying, cheating, hypocrisy, distorting and fabricating facts, denial of the truth, denigrating, humiliating, and delegitimizing opponents, saying anything and everything to win power, increase wealth, and become the top alpha-dog, all these are corruptions of the best of America’s tradition of secular religion, culture, and values that emphasize humility, industriousness, honesty, integrity, compassion, generosity, tolerance, and appreciation of the “other.”

Those who embody the corrupted self-centered “morality” did not invent it in the last number of years. Remember the 1987 film Wall Street starring Michael Douglas, a barracuda stock-broker who proclaimed that “Greed is good!” Contemporary practitioners merely capitalized on the worst of the human condition, emphasizing the yetzer ha-ra (“the evil inclination”), monetized and weaponized it, accelerated it, and over time, facilitated its spread into politics, government, business, the media, and in other arenas.

The current malignancies that are metastasizing throughout our culture raise a fundamental question for us all – “What is a successful life?” Our response tells us who we are, what we value, and that to which we aspire.

Here are two quotations that resonate with me:

“Those people are a success who have lived well, laughed often, and loved much; / Who have gained the respect of intelligent people and the love of children; / Who have filled their niche and accomplished their task; / Who leave the world better than they found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; / Who never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; / Who looked for the best in others and gave the best they had.” –Bessie Anderson Stanley (1879 – 1952)

“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.” –Viktor Frankl (1905-1997)