Rabbi Eliyahu Stern: March 2006 Archives

Recently, The New York Times published an op-ed by Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, who expressed his indignation at HR 4437, an immigration bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in December that includes provisions for a 700-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and making it a felony to be in the U.S. without proper immigration documents. The cardinal argued:

"What the church supports is an overhaul of the immigration system so that legal status and legal channels for migration replace illegal status and illegal immigration. Creating legal structures for migration protects not only those who migrate but also our nation, by giving the government the ability to better identify who is in the country as well as to control who enters it...

Enforcement-only proposals like the Border Protection act take the country in the opposite direction. Increasing penalties, building more detention centers and erecting walls along our border with Mexico, as the act provides, will not solve the problem."

Instinctively, I agree with Cardinal Mahony's condemnation of the pending House legislation. While the legislation is not without merit--people are scared and perhaps a good old-fashioned fence might just work--nonetheless, the bill echoes the kind of shameless vote-pandering we saw in the Schiavo fiasco. The House bill is ultimately more hysterical than realistic or sober. It plays on the public's fear and distrust of the "other."

To be sure as it now stands there are a number of other other options being debated in the senate that are far more sober and nuanced, (see Esther Pan's analysis on the CFR website.)

As to the Jewish perspective on this immigration debate: as with so many subjects that are a matter of Jewish concern, it's not so simple and straightforward. First things first, however: There is no Jewish position on immigration. Nonetheless, there is a vast bodyl of Jewish wisdom regarding the issues of security and vulnerability that I think shed a great deal of light on the immigration issue.

At its heart, the immigration issue is a contest between two forces inherent in the human psyche--a desire for freedom and openness and the need to be secure and safe.

Jewish wisdom echoes the cardinal's claim that it is a divine imperative "to help people in need. It is our Gospel mandate, in which Christ instructs us to clothe the naked, feed the poor and welcome the stranger." The only difference between Jewish wisdom and the cardinal's is the manner through which that goal is achieved.

The cardinal's position highlights the beautiful universality of the Church, with its confident open posture. Sometimes such an approach is precisely the proper antidote to those spreading fear. Yet, at other times such an open posture can seem all too messianic and unreasonable in a irrational and sacrilegious world of suicide bombers and terrorists.

While there are Jewish sources that express the same openness voiced by the cardinal, for example, Lamentations 3:30, which says "offer his cheek to him that smites him," such ideas are balanced with the admonition "if one comes up to attack you get up before him and attack him."

While man's natural inclination is to defend himself and fence himself in, God and His otherness challenges us to move beyond our comfortable confines and reach out to other human beings, inviting them into our lives. As of now, the pending federal legislation to criminalize illegal aliens and those who help them highlights only the other side--that of fear and security. It fails to speak to the side of us that welcomes in the poor and sick and places abrahamic hospitality at the center of life.

Let's hope that the more magnanimous bipartisan proposal that emerged in the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday--the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act sponsored by senators Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and John McCain of Arizona--gains support. If not, it's time to go back to the drawing board.

To the chagrin of many of my friends, being ethical does not entail defenselessness. Power, like anything else, can be ethical; it must be ethical.

From a Jewish perspective, it's tempting to make powerlessness a pre-condition for ethics. Jewish liberals are fond of pointing to the biblical prophets' ability to speak ethical truth to power. As if truth and power are at opposite sides of the spectrum. They thrive on the prophets' persecution and their howling in the wind.

While I agree that there is a time for prophetic politics, what these Jews sometimes forget is that a) the prophets may have been right but usually ended up being ignored because their policies were simply way beyond peoples' present capacity, and b) if the kings (against whom the prophets railed) were themselves just and ethical, we would never have needed the prophets in the first place.

It's tempting to spend this post ranting and condemning Bush/Cheney, etc. (God knows how long we could do that.) But I would rather deal with the painful reality of the present, recognizing the ethical complexity of the situation. Arguing that we must jump ship from Iraq because this war is unethical is, simply put, far too simple to be the ethical solution to the problems we are facing.

The great 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once remarked, "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." Niebuhr coined the term "Christian realism" to describe his sober views about the nature of man, sin, and politics. More than anything else, Niebuhr realized the dangers of absolute political ideologies. Most notably, he spoke out against absolute pacifism and those who stood on what they thought was the moral high ground looking down on power and coercion as unethical.

While for Christains, Niebuhr's position was somewhat of a hidush (a new idea), for Jews spiritual realism was no new idea. The Bible is packed with ethical complexity. Nonetheless, Niebuhr's ideas greatly influenced theologians across the the spiritual spectrum. In Judaism, those such as Rabbi Irving Greenberg developed their own brand of post-Holocaust Niebuhrian Jewish realism, arguing that power and ethics can be compatible. The challenge of the modern age--what Greenberg calls the third millennium-- is to harness power for ethical means.

Which brings us to the question of the ethics of the war in Iraq and the broader war on terror. Was the President wrong in going after Saddam Hussein? As I wrote three years ago in an op-ed in the New York Jewish Week, probably. (I will spare you the myriad reasons why).

The war on terror will never be won by just attacking nation-states, especially those nation-states that have nothing to do with radical Islam (Iraq was a secular state!!). We should have attacked Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia well before we went anywhere near Iraq. But that is not what happened. As it now stands, we are three years into this mess with no exit plan in sight, and each day, human lives are being sapped. Iraq has been nothing but trouble and disappointment.

Nonetheless, now that we have gone in and torn apart the social fabric of the country, we can’t just walk out leaving Iraq to eat itself up alive. To use a biblical analogy, you can't take the people of Israel out of Eygpt and leave them to wither in the desert! To do so would make us guilty of nothing less than a hit and run. Responsibility and ethics go hand in hand. Imagine if God had washed his hands of the Jewish people after the sin of the golden calf.

We as a country must take the responsibility for finishing what we started. Simply put, Iraq is still incapable of functioning day-to-day. Whether we like it or not, we have an obligation to its citizens to be there an ensure day-to-day social and political stability.

Yes, it would be nice if we could just walk out of Iraq, forget about this whole episode, and go on trying to hunt down the real terrorists. What we forget, however, is that the act of hunting down to capture, kill, and coerce puts us in a most precarious and ethically risky situation. Almost always, when one lifts up one's fist, ethics, in some sense, are suspended. But that is how politics and power work.

Politics is a messy business that has no neutral ground. Every decision is a lesser of two evils. Still, at every moment there is a more ethical and less ethical option to choose from. While it is hard to say that staying in Iraq is ethical, leaving Iraq is unethical.

From the Iron Chef to Alice Waters, there is nothing more universal than food. Everyone eats. Everyone needs nourishment. If there is one thing that brings us all together it is the most basic instinct of all, hunger. Hey, what's more beautiful than imagining everyone breaking bread together?

And yet, Judaism says No, stop right there, you can't break bread with everyone and anyone you so choose.

Kashrut teaches people that we all have different tastes. Some people like their hot dogs with ketchup, others go for the mustard. OK. maybe its not exactly like that, but the point of kashrut is to let people know that while we all share a great deal in common, it's critical to remember that it is through difference that identity emerges.

To be sure, kashrut comes with a cost. It can become a magic wand for those who wish to further ghettoize Jews (like those rabbis who have nothing better to do than create more kashrut restrictions).

Does kashrut create a barrier between people and cultures? Sure it does.

Has it created too impenetrable a barrier? Maybe, but at its core, kashrut teaches just how important community is for identity.

As you might expect, contrary to "new-found scientific research," Jewish ritual circumcison--brit milah--is not and will not be going by the wayside anytime soon. The truth of the matter is that Jews have been circumcising their children long before science ever said it was negative or positive.

By the way, just to give some context, on this issue science has been about as wishy-washy as it stance on salmon (one day it's kosher, the next day treif.) So don't get me wrong when I say that I just don't think the scientific argument for or against Judaism's oldest and most sacred ritual is all that compelling.

Ultimatly, Jewish people will continue to practice this time-honored ritual for no other reason than they believe in it and that for most the scientific data are unconvincing. As Rabbi David Wolpe wrote in a recent book review for Beliefnet, circumcision "is a commitment that supersedes statistics and transcends the shifting medical fads of the moment."

Now on the other hand, the recent brouhaha surrounding one of brit milah's most controversial customs, metzizah be-peh, is a whole other story.

For the record, metzizah b'peh is a custom that requires the mohel, the person performing the circumcision, to suck the blood with his lips from the wound of the baby’s penis. I know--it's the kind of thing that brings new meaning to the word “cringe.”

While the vast majority of Orthodox Jews employ a more medically safe procedure using either a sterilized tube or a gauze pad to remove the blood, some in the ultra-Orthodox world still hold fast to this so-called “traditional” method. In recent months, the issue has gained national attention with the realization that some performing this act may be infecting newborns with the herpes virus.

The ritual is discussed in the Talmud Shabbat 133a . The rabbis explain that they instituted the practice in order to expedite the healing process. Actually, they required metzizah because they believed that medically it was beneficial to remove all the blood caused by the circumcision. The great irony, of course, is that today metzizah has become just the opposite. As the recent case of Rabbi Yitzhok Fisher, a mohel who transmitted neonatal herpes to three infants, demonstrates, metzizah b'peh is anything but beneficial; it’s a danger to any infant’s life.

What is missed, however, is that in some sense those who continue to practice metzizah b'peh might actually be breaking halakha (Jewish law). Yes, they have perfomed the required act, but have they fullfiled its purpose? No.

The question these communities need to ask themselves is does halakha have any meaning beyond turning us into God's robots? Is it just a formal system that discounts any notion of purpose or telos (even when the text explicitly says the law has a specific end and purpose as it does in the case of metzizah)? Or is halakha something greater, something that is fundamentally attached to our lives, something that seeks to cultivate a certain type of human being?

Don’t get me wrong: I believe wholeheartedly that a certain degree of legal formalism is critical for the upkeep of day-to-day Jewish life. Formalism creates security and continuity. But too much formalism leads to fetish--a privileging of means over ends, a denial of basic human dignity, and the ignoring of human emotion and ethical intuition. Ultimately, halakhic formalism can destroy the very moral and ethical fabric of Halakha. Simply put, it sucks the life out of Judaism.