Sermon for RH Morning Day 1-5768

Six years ago we knew right from wrong. Six years ago there was no doubt in our minds that we were right and they were wrong. Six years ago we had an unshakeable sense of moral certainty. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were barbaric and evil, designed to inflict the maximum amount of death and destruction and to harm the maximum amount of innocent human life. Whatever our national sins or failings may have been, we had done nothing to deserve that, on that we were clear. On that, we knew we were right.

As human beings, we intuitively know right from wrong. Primatologists have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in the social behavior of apes. Harvard biologist Marc Hauser who conducted research based on this idea proposed in his new book “Moral Minds” that people are born with a moral instinct hard-wired into their brains by evolution. He demonstrates as evidence of this the instant moral judgments we make in response to life-or-death situations. We are unable to come up with plausible rationalizations for our quick moral decisions because they are generated subconsciously. Dr. Hauser bases his theory on evolutionary biology, which explains these moral restraints on our behavior as skills required for societal living and have been reinforced by natural selection because of their survival value. To prove his point, Dr. Hauser presents the philosophical dilemma of the runaway trolley car.

Suppose you are standing on a bridge overlooking a trolley track and you see five people walking on the track up ahead. You hear a runaway trolley car fast approaching which will surely kill those five people. Beside you is a lever, which you can throw to switch the train to a sidetrack; one person is walking on that sidetrack. When asked if it is okay to throw that switch and save the five people even though one person will die, most people in Dr. Hauser’s study would say it is. Then Dr. Hauser had his subjects suppose that you could save the five people crossing the track by throwing down a heavy object into the path of the approaching trolley car but the only thing available to you is a person standing next to you. When asked if it would be okay to push that person off the bridge and save the five, most people said no although the number of lives saved and lives lost would be the same. Our hard wired moral programming forces us to see a difference between a foreseen harm of the train killing the person on the track and the intended harm of throwing a person off the bridge despite the fact that most people could not articulate why they saw the death of one to save five as okay in one instance and undeniably wrong in the other. Dr. Hauser uses this to demonstrate that our knowledge of right and wrong is inherently in our brains and that our parents and our teachers merely reinforce and shape that knowledge. We do not need a horrific event such as the attacks of 9-11 to teach us right from wrong. We do not need Torah or Talmud to teach us right from wrong, we know.
Knowledge without accompanying action is empty and useless. Knowledge of right and wrong without upholding right behavior and chiding wrong behavior is a disservice and a disgrace. In the Torah reading for Yom Kippur, Leviticus 19, we find clear instructions on how to practice right behavior and avoid the wrong. Honoring parents, observing the Sabbath, and caring for the poor, orphaned and widowed are just a few of the instructions found in this rich Torah text. Yet these are mitzvot which guide the individual and not necessarily society towards moral, righteous living; the more significant passage is found in verse 17 where the Torah teaches us “hocheach tocheah et achicha” you will surely rebuke your fellow and not bear sin on his account.

We who know right from wrong have an obligation to speak out against a wrong that is committed, not to do so would be a sin. Our rabbis state in the Talmud tractate Shabbat page 54b, “Anyone who is able to protest the wrongdoing of a member of his or her household and does not protest is held accountable for the wrongdoings of the members of his household, as well as the members of his community, his city and the entire world.” To paraphrase Rabbi Tarfon who said, “lo alecha ha-m’lacha ligmor” it is not up to us to reprove the entire world but we have to do our part.

Tokhekha, rebuking others when we see wrong committed, is a critical commandment; one whose fulfillment and practice has been lacking. Rava, a great Talmudic sage of the 4th century, argued that we must always rebuke wrongdoing even when confronting a person to whom we owe great respect such as parents, teachers, rabbis and even political leaders. He explained the double emphasis on tochecha in Leviticus 19 to teach us that we must rebuke under all circumstances. (Baba Metzia 31a) While the manner of rebuke may differ, tochecha remains our obligation all the same. Menachem ha-Meiri, a rabbi of 13th century France who wrote an extensive commentary on the Talmud taught that the greater the power of the rebuker, the greater his obligation to rebuke. He wrote in his commentary, “the king is punished for the wrongdoings of his people if he does not protest their actions and the people are punished for the wrongdoings of the king if they do not protest.” In a democracy such as ours, it is the people who have the greater power; therefore it is the people and their spokesmen who have the greater obligation to rebuke. Rabbi Menahem concludes, “the more powerful are more severely punished with regard to that which they should notice but choose instead to avert their eyes.”

In the second book of Samuel, chapter 11, an infamous incident is recorded. The Israelites are fighting a long protracted war against the Philistines. Yet in the midst of this justified war of self-defense where the death of soldiers is a foreseen and unavoidable tragedy, King David interjects intentional harm. David instructs his military chief of staff to put Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba whom David desires, in the front lines and thus assure his death. Although David would have liked it to appear that Uriah died as an unavoidable consequence of war, the prophet Nathan saw through that.

To fulfill his obligation of tochecha, Nathan tells David a story about a man who owned a lamb. The man loved the lamb and made it a pet giving it the finest of grass and food and water. Near this man lived a great noble with a huge palatial estate with plenty of sheep grazing all over his land. One day, this noble decides to entertain a very special guest. Rather than slaughtering one of the sheep from his estate, the noble takes his neighbor’s one beloved lamb, has it slaughtered and prepared for dinner with his guest. Upon hearing this story, David flies into a rage and says to Nathan, “The man who did this deserves to die!” To which Nathan replies, “atah ha-ish! You are that man!” Nathan the prophet becomes the voice of moral certainty, speaking truth to power and rebuking the king for his exceedingly wrong actions.

The prophet Nathan had moral clarity and clear vision; he knew right from wrong, he was not swept up in the culture of deception that surrounded the king instead he spoke truth to power and took the path of integrity and honesty by properly and forthrightly rebuking him. In today’s society, the people and the press should occupy that role yet the obligation of tochecha remains unfulfilled.

Bill Moyers, a journalist and ordained Baptist minister raised in Texas, who served as President Johnson’s press secretary at the height of the Vietnam War, produced and directed an investigative report within his long-running PBS series The Bill Moyers Journal. This scathing report entitled “Buying the War” first aired in April of this year. In it he revealed that the press or more precisely the media in general had been co-opted. Newspapers and the electronic media are both designed to serve the people, to speak truth to power, and to rebuke the moral inconsistencies. Bill Moyers reveals that not only did the mass media not point out what was wrong; they accepted the government’s claims as fact and promoted them essentially declaring what was wrong to be right. In the six months leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, nearly every media outlet be it electronic or written participated in this massive misinformation campaign. Intelligence that raised doubt on a Saddam Hussein – Bin Laden connection was suppressed and put on the back pages if at all. Information coming from the UN inspectors themselves that there were no weapons of mass destruction was ignored or ridiculed. Every major network and every major newspaper including CBS, The Washington Post and The New York Times abdicated their journalistic integrity. According to Bill Moyers, most of these network reporters and newspaper journalists were told by their higher ups that dissent is not only unpatriotic, it would be bad for business and they did not want to run the risk of being a liability to their business; that would lead to only one thing. Only Knight-Ridder newspapers were willing to stand up and say, “Wait a second, there is reliable information out there that things may not be as they seem, that maybe we do not need to invade Iraq and to do so would only bring more death and destruction.” But they were a small outfit; their voice was miniscule compared to CNN, the major networks, and the big city papers. Their voice was like that of the lone voice in the wilderness and not the righteous voice of rebuke. The voice of the media should have been like the voice of Nathan the Prophet holding up the mirror of truth and integrity to the government and forcing all of us to see right from wrong.

While it angers me to consider that over 3,000 American lives have been lost as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi lives because of this misguided military intervention against a sovereign nation that was not a threat to us, I am more concerned about seeing this repeated with its eastern neighbor. The current administration recently disclosed that it is considering naming elements of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Council as terrorist organizations. This would give us the right to attack an integral component of Iran’s government under the authority given the President by Congress after the 9-11 attacks. Much of the incentive for this coming policy declaration comes from the deadly attack on five US soldiers at the Iraqi Police Compound in Karbala this past January 20th. Every article and news report that I have seen either in print, on television or online has stated that Iran was behind that attack. I will not go into the details of the attack but although I was initially skeptical of the government officials stating the firm position of Iranian involvement; it seemed plausible and credible. But then I found one article in the August 6 issue of TIME magazine that gave me pause. The reporter Mark Kukis interviewed LT Nathan Diaz, the only officer to survive the attack in Karbala. LT Diaz witnessed the Iraqi security police trained by US forces do absolutely nothing to deter the attacking force. In every other confrontation, the Iraqi security police and the Americans fought together against the Shi’ite militias or other enemies yet that night, according to SFC Michael King, “No one twisted an ankle. No one jammed a thumb. No one lifted a finger. Nothing was done.” The Iraqi police chief al-Quraishy was deeply apologetic yet LT Diaz was considerably less than convinced of his sincerity. In this article, TIME magazine states that the Americans interviewed in the military investigation support the view that the Iraqi police were complicit in this attack either in advance of the ambush, during the fight or after when the attackers escaped but neither the US nor Iraqi authorities have brought any charges against the Iraqi police choosing instead to point the finger of accusation at the forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. I have yet to find another news report challenging the administrations assertion that Iran is to blame for this attack and that the Revolutionary Guard should be considered a terrorist organization; our lethal enemy. Are we seeing our media repeating the mistakes of 2003 refusing to challenge the government’s claim, to investigate the truth of the matter, to clearly state what is wrong and what is right? I hope not.

Honesty, integrity, and accountability are disappearing qualities in our society but let us not be mistaken; our government and our media are not the only carriers and purveyors of this malignant societal condition. Thirty-one years ago, I was very proud to be able to participate in a presidential election. I was also proud because I believed the person I was voting for to be a person of integrity, honesty and dependability. In fact, he even said so, “I will not lie to you. You can depend on it.” This past November, thirty years after he was elected as the first post-Watergate president by idealistic minded people like many of us on a platform of honesty and integrity, Jimmy Carter claimed, “everything in the book is completely accurate.” The book he referred to is of course his infamous anti-Israel and anti-Semitic diatribe entitled “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Accurate is usually understood to mean truthful or factual; his book is neither. He makes the false claims in his book that the US policy has always been that Israel should return to the pre Six Day War borders; untrue. On June 19, 1967, President Johnson called for a new set of secure and recognized borders different from the ones that existed before the Six Day War and every US president after that, Republican and Democrat, has reiterated that basic tenet of US foreign policy. Carter claims that there would be peace if Israel returns to those borders. Not only have all US presidents disagreed with that claim but so has the UN Security Council and to further demonstrate the fallaciousness of Carter’s statement, the Palestinian Liberation Organization whose charter calls for the complete annihilation of the State of Israel was founded in 1964, three years before the Six Day War and the conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There are many more factual distortions in this book written by the man who appeared to personify integrity but I will decline from enumerating them all. Many Jewish supporters of Jimmy Carter and members of the Carter Center resigned in light of this book. The Central Conference of American Rabbis cancelled its visit to the Carter Center that had been scheduled during their recent convention in Atlanta. But by far the most insightful protest and righteous rebuke came from Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.

Professor Dershowitz begins by saying that when he first met Jimmy Carter in 1976, he considered him a man of principle and integrity. For years, he retained that positive image of President Carter even when he disagreed with some of his actions or opinions. When he heard that Jimmy Carter had accepted a monetary reward from Sheik Zayed of Saudi Arabia and his Islamic think-tank even after Harvard University had returned money from the Zayed center because of its anti-Semitic history, Professor Dershowitz could not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with such dirty money. This Zayed Center has hosted speakers who called Jews the enemies of the nations and attributed the assassination of President Kennedy and the attacks of 9-11 to Israel. Carter called Sheik Zayed his personal friend when he received this monetary reward. It turns out this was not the only time that Carter took dirty money. BCCI, a bank controlled by the Saudi Royal family and heavily financed by Sheik Zayed, gave Carter money to bail out his failing family peanut business and help him establish his center. Carter accuses US politicians of being beholden to the Israeli side of the Middle East conflict if they are enriched by Jewish lobbyist money. If money determines political views as Carter insists Jewish money does, then Carter’s views on the Middle East are not based on personal although misguided conviction, they are influenced and dictated by the vast sums of dirty Saudi money that he has received. Professor Dershowitz concludes his article by saying, “It pains me to say this but I now believe there is no person in American public life who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it now turns out, is extraordinarily low.”
It would be one thing if his anti-Israel views were based on a strong personal conviction, which he truly believed and felt compelled to state not intending to harm anyone, but given the Arab money connection, it is clear that his statements are clearly not those of a passionate true believer but of a cold, calculated attempt to appease his financiers with no regard for the people he offended and harmed and the trust and faith in his integrity that he destroyed.

Our society is poorer today for the lack of integrity in public life. We are poorer today that there is no prophet Nathan to speak truth to power and say, “atah ha-ish,” You are the one guilty of this crime.” We are poorer today that there is no Emile Zola to stand up and say J’Accuse! The free press is an American right, a right guaranteed by our Constitution, a right we depend on. There are three branches in the Federal government that govern us, two we choose and one appointed, but it is the fourth estate, the press, that is supposed to speak to the people and for the people. It is the one considered to be far more important than all other branches of government. The press is to be accountable to no one save its readers; the press is the means of communication in a free society. If the press is constrained from challenging authority, from questioning integrity, from seriously and intensively investigating claims and statements, then is it truly free? If the news programming on major networks is now under the department of entertainment, then is it unbiased barebones reporting or is it spitting out what is popular, what is not confrontational, what is easy and therefore good for business rather than the factual, accurate truth. The reports of weapons of mass destruction should have been thoroughly examined and analyzed before we went to war. The Karbala incident must be thoroughly investigated and researched before we accuse Iran and use it as an excuse for military action against Tehran. And Jimmy Carter’s outrageous claims and financial ties to anti-Semitic Saudi oil money should be spread across the pages of our nation’s newspapers for it is a gross violation of the people’s trust. George Mason, one of our founding fathers and the author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, stated “the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.” Monarchies, theocracies, and dictatorships deny freedom to the press and in those countries the press is eager to write the truth and they have to go underground to get their message out but in this country where we have a free press, truth is conquered by entertainment.

We are our own worst enemy. We have censored ourselves. We have stifled our obligation for tochecha. We have closed our eyes and refused to acknowledge what we intuitively know to be wrong. Our is a government by the people, of the people and for the people and once we allow the press to be ruled by corporate issues of profit and loss and not by truth and honesty than we, our society, our government and our nation suffer immeasurably.

This is Rosh Hashanah, hayom harat olam, the day the world came into existence, the day our rabbis taught us that Adam and Eve committed their sin and were banished from the Garden. That day when our eyes were opened up and we knew the difference between good and evil was the day when the fantasy ended and civilization began. My friends, we are not in the Garden of Eden anymore. We have not been there for nearly six thousand years. We know right from wrong. We must use that inherent human quality. We must use our innate moral compass to chart the right course and pursue integrity and honesty from our public figures and ourselves. We must resist insincerity, immorality and deceit and insist on truth, honesty and integrity from our fellow human beings, our fellow congregants, our families and ourselves. And we must rebuke those who do not uphold these values. Our society will not long endure if we continue to ignore the basic human necessities of truth, honesty and integrity.

Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel, one of our greatest teachers who perished during the ill-fated Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire said, “The world is maintained by three things, by truth, by justice and by peace.” If you do not have truth, then you cannot have justice and without justice, there can be no peace. We are the government, we are the people, if we demand truth then we can pursue justice and if justice is truly served than we will achieve peace.

And let us say, Amen