Winning the Budget Battle in Congress

 Read the message from Heather Cox Richardson to understand why the budget battle in Congress is crucial to all of us, today and for years to come. Read this message to make sense of what the House of Representatives did and didn't do on February 25, and to be encouraged.

 

Generally, I don't like military metaphors for politics. In this situation, however, it's important to see how any one battle is part of a longer war against fascism in this country. Small victories add up. Even narrow defeats can make eventual victory more likely.

 

Where do we stand today? I would point out:

 

1. The bill passed in the House of Representatives is not a U.S. government budget, not even a draft budget, but a "framework," the general picture of what a budget should look like. (Call it the concept of a budget!)

 

2. Even on that general level, yesterday "The vote was 217-215, with a single Republican and all Democrats opposed, and the outcome was in jeopardy until the gavel." One member of each party was absent. (Source: AP article by Lisa Mascaro, Kevin Freking and Matt Brown).

 

3. That means the Republicans cannot afford to lose even a couple of votes in the House throughout the rest of the long, drawn-out budget process if they are going to pass an actual bill. And when it comes to cuts that affect their own districts, some Representatives are going to balk. Some of the more ideologically populist reps may vote against massive giveaways to the rich.

 

4. Bottom line: Democrats in Congress are in a good starting position to delay or halt destructive cuts and giveaways entirely AND to demand concessions that will serve the rest of us--if they stay united and strategic.

 

So, please call your Congressperson and urge them to do just that!

 

 

“Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I am attacking.” -Ferdinand Foch

A Reading List for the Resistance

As we take a deep breath before the would-be dictator Trump and his plutocratic appointees take office in January, one way we can prepare is by reading and thinking. Here are some books I am finding helpful right now.

For some inspirational examples from the past--

The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It, by Cory Brettschneider. Emphasis on the words "people" and "citizens." That's us!

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall, Hugo Martínez (Illustrations). Listen to Black women.

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, by Thomas E. Ricks. It wasn't just a dream: it was strategy, training, and discipline.

For how to apply those lessons to the present-- 

This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century, by Mark and Paul Engler. How to make our long-term community organizing support the protest movements of the moment, and vice versa. Read this to be prepared for highs and lows and periods when it feels like nothing's happening and we might have wasted our time--but if we use the quiet times wisely, we come back stronger.

For some tools we can use--

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath. Because we've got to get better at getting our message across!

I'll be adding to this list as I go along. Your suggestions would be welcome!

I also have reading lists on prison and incarceration (which more of us may face in the years ahead), and on the way people have been deprived of decent housing, and on racism, antisemitism, sexism and homophobia, and on the history of capitalism (which may be giving way to fascism in the U.S. but has always been a fertile ground for repressive actions). If any of those are your particular interest, let me know.

Give yourself time and space to learn and to think...but please, do not think that learning and thinking will be enough by themselves. The ancient rabbis posed the question, "Which is more important, thought or action?" Their answer: "Thought is more important, when it leads to action." Be ready, please, to move between the two.

Such a time as this: November 2024/ Heshvan 5785

In light of the Torah portions and the elections in the past couple of weeks, it seems to me we have three biblical models we could follow.

Some of us, like Noah, will build an ark. We will try to save our family and the animals we love.

Some of us, like Abram and Sarai, will leave the country, our birthplace and the home of our ancestors, and go to a land we hope is more promising.

But some of us, like Abraham and Sarah  (the people that Abram and Sarai became when they found their mission in the world) will open our tent doors and welcome guests. We will feed them (and when necessary, house them). We will listen to what they have to say. And when we hear that our neighbors are being destroyed, we will not remain silent but protest, even to God. Even against God. We will save what we can and who we can.

And who knows, maybe (like Esther in the book we will read on Purim), maybe we have come to our positions in the U.S. for such a time as this?

What we do, who we are, and the High Holy Days

 

Both last year and this year, in the month of Elul leading up to the High Holy Days, I have read Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg's On Repentance and Repair. At the end of 5783, I read it on my own, and this year, as we approached the close of 5784, I re-read it with a group led by Rabbi Eliana Jacobowitz at Temple B'nai Brith in Somerville. (Yes, it's worth reading and re-reading!) 

The book builds on Maimonides' teachings about teshuvah (the repentance and returning to the right path that is the focus of the High Holy Day season). Rabbi Ruttenberg stresses certain aspects of those teachings that she thinks that we, in Christian-dominated American society, may be in danger of forgetting: 

• that acknowledgment, amends, and apology by the perpetrator are the central issue--not forgiveness by the victim--and 
• that true teshuvah involves self-transformation so that if we found ourselves in the same situation again, we would not repeat our mistakes. We would act differently.

On one point, Ruttenberg (and, I think, most of us) would disagree with Maimonides. He states that if the perpetrator does true teshuvah and asks the person he has hurt to forgive him, and the victim repeatedly refuses, then the victim takes the sin on themselves. All of us in the TBB reading group recoiled at this. We are too familiar (and Ruttenberg gives examples of) cases where the harm was so deep and permanent that the sin is unforgivable. We have seen too many cases of victim-blaming (especially by men, of women they have hurt) to want to fall into that trap again.

To be fair, Maimonides is aware of such examples. It's clear he's talking about an extreme and extraordinary occurrence. Still, given our respect for his scholarship and thoughtfulness, I asked Rabbi Eliana: why does he bring it up at all? What makes it important to him to say that being unforgiving can sometimes be a sin in itself? She taught me that he is imagining a case in which the victim is now in a position of power. Refusing to forgive when the offender has truly repented can ruin their lives and their reputation, even lead them to desperation and suicide. It's that abuse of power, she explained, that motivates Maimonides to address this rare case.

I was satisfied. In Jewish learning, we do not have to agree with a conclusion in order to ask how the person stating it arrived at that conclusion, and to learn something from the person with whom we disagree. (See the ongoing debates between the schools of Hillel and Shammai.) The abuse of power is an issue I have been paying attention to for at least fifty years, and I honor Maimonides for being sensitive to it, even if I cannot go where we goes with that train of thought.

Teshuvah, virtue, love

I was reminded of this discussion just today, when I listened to Rabbi Shai Held discuss Maimonides on teshuvah, but with a different emphasis. Rabbi Held wants us to hear Maimonides--and, I think, God!--speaking to us in two different voices at the same time. He calls them the prophetic voice and the pastoral voice. The prophetic voice wants us to pay attention to how far we are from acting righteously all the time. The pastoral voice wants us to be encouraged to believe that we can and will do better.

Not only do, but be. Rabbi Held thinks of Maimonides as the principal Jewish advocate of virtue ethics, the idea that we want not only to do the right things, but for the right reasons, in the right spirit. (A Jewish school of thought that sounds a lot like virtue ethics is mussar.)  

He puts repentance and repair in the context of our relationship with God, which as he says in his recent book that I am also perusing this month of Elul is about love. Following God's commandments is important, but so is recognizing God's love for us and trying to live up to it--in part, by how we treat other people.

Held reminds us that if teshuvah is about trying to correct our actions and also transform ourselves, the High Holy Days are only the beginning of the process. Having a new beginning every year is vital, but every single day, we should be engaged in self-examination, acknowledgment of where we have gone wrong, making things right with people and with God, and changing our lives. It's a tall order, but it's a Jewish way to live.

Shanah tovah to all my readers, and if I have injured you in the past year, or week, or day, I hope you will lovingly bring it to my attention so I can do better by you, starting now.

Law and Love

Can we obey commands we don't understand? And if we do, is it a loss of independence, or is it a sign of love? 

What is a chok?

The Torah portion we read on this past Shabbat, Parshat Bechukotai, begins like this:

אִם־בְּחֻקֹּתַ֖י תֵּלֵ֑כוּ וְאֶת־מִצְוֺתַ֣י תִּשְׁמְר֔וּ וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם אֹתָֽם׃

If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, 

 

The word for "commandments" is mitzvot, and Jews are pretty familiar with the concept of a mitzvah. The word for "laws" is chukot, and that is not so familiar. What is a chok? And why is it such a challenge to follow the chukot (more often pluralized as chukim)?

We often see this word in Torah in combination, chukim u' mishpatim : "laws and judgments." Judgments are based on principles of justice, and they are logically justified when we understand the situation. As Rabbi Menachem Leibtag states, however, "a CHOK can be logical, but it doesn't have to be!" It is binding, and lasting, whether or not a reason is given, or can be deduced. We have to follow it whether or not there is a reason or not. Because God said so.

"Because God said so"? What kind of reason is that?

For some thinkers, notably Soren Kierkegaard, obeying God's commandments when they don't make any sense is the most meritorious thing we can do. It shows a higher level of faith than carrying out instructions that make rational sense. Faith is much more of a Christian or Muslim thing than a Jewish one, however, and even those Jewish thinkers who stress faith also value applying human reason to our texts. In fact, their faith requires that they do so!

And let's be real: we are living in the 21st century. We have inherited the modern understanding that using one's intelligence is a good thing, a necessary thing, part of being a dignified and independent human being. Irrationality can be seen as threatening: a gateway to fascism. Unquestioning obedience can be seen as a throwback to a premodern age. 

Even the main body of our parshah, the tochecha or warning about what happens when we don't obey, can sound dictatorial--or like a parent threatening a child with consequences. "Because I said so"? As the Jewish people, and as adults, haven't we outgrown messages like this? Why should we even study the chukim in Parshat Be'chukotai?

I suppose it depends on our understanding of what a parent is like.

My parents taught me to question

In 2024. the yahrzeit, or anniversary of death, for my father, Mel Fischman was the week before this parshah was read. My mother's birthday will be the following week, and Faye Fischman would have been 90 years old. 

My parents were the generation that demanded reasons for everything. They were a puzzle to their hard-working immigrant parents, who may not have been able to keep from working on Shabbat--they were poor, and they had to make a living--but they knew that's what they were supposed to do. They kept kosher. They hosted the Passover Seder. And their children said to them, "If you can't explain it, we're not going to do it."

Still, my parents had very strong Jewish identities, including the Jewish cultural emphasis on education. They sent us to Hebrew school beginning around age nine or ten. Just as, when we got home from secular school in the afternoon, they asked, "Okay, kids, what did you learn today?", so did they ask the same question about Hebrew school. We learned together that some questions about Judaism do have logical answers! We began adding practices that made sense to us: first home rituals like getting together without fail for Friday dinner, then synagogue...which ultimately led to my being at Temple B'nai Brith and giving this d'var torah!

A God of Love

My parents taught me to question everything, even if they sometimes chafed at being the ones we interrogated. I think God does that too.

You might laugh. You might think Dennis is projecting Mel and Faye onto God, in some kind of Freudian sense. I admit the possibility. But I think it's the reverse. Mel and Faye learned what it mean to be a good parent from Judaism. They learned that questioning is a central part of the Jewish tradition, and they passed that value onto us.

Because of that, when my parents said, "Do it because I said so," it was so exceptional that I heard it in the context of all the times they had encouraged me to question. When they said, "Do this right now," I trusted that they understood my situation, and that they had my good in mind. Sure, like any adolescent I rebelled in major ways, and I used their authorization to question everything as my license to decide and act independently. When I did obey them, however, it was an act of love. And remembering the times when I obeyed them helps keep their love alive, even when they are no longer an imminent presence in my life.

Remembering God's "Because I said so," the chukim, can do the same, if we allow it. It can remind us of times in our biography, or periods in our communal history, when God seemed like a member of the household, and when we could trust God to remember us for good. We need those reminders.

In some ways, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, the Velveteen Rabbi, says it better than I can. As she paraphrases Parshat Bechukotai in her poem "Either/Or," in 70 Faces: Torah Poems:

If you will follow my laws

and observe my commandments

I will grant you rain in its season

you will eat your fill

I will live in your midst.

I will untie your tangles.

Where there is rye bread

there will always be pastrami.

You and your mother will remain

on good terms, no matter what.

But if you do not obey

if you break my laws and spurn my rules

if you break my covenant

I will set my face against you

I will shatter all your glory.

I will leave your boat becalmed.

You will never find 

a good parking space again.

You will poison the skies

and your fields will not feed you.

I can be infinitely more hostile

than you, but I won't be.

In the end you'll realize

I was here all along,

waiting for you.