Feb 20 2009 - MISHPATEEM: THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW VERSES CHAOS

So maybe you’ve come, at least in part, to hear about the details of this gig I did this past week. It went down like this: I’m sitting in our condo in Dillon on Shabbat afternoon and I get a call on my cell phone from Mayor Hickenlooper’s coordinator of events. Her name is Susan. She tells me that the Mayor wants to nominate me to the White House to give the invocation at the Presidential Stimulus Bill Signing event on Tuesday. I open my Day Timer and see that Ziva and I have a long standing meeting with our accountant to do our taxes. I tell Susan that I may not be able to accommodate depending on the timing of the event. I think I remember telling her that I’d get back to her. I then called Ziva who was out with cousin, Ruthie, who is visiting from Israel. Ziva nearly jumped through the phone, and the next thing I knew, I was calling Sue back and canceling my appointment with our accountant.

With this as a back drop, I did the invocation. But I have had many thoughts since Tuesday and they aren’t the positives I stressed in my invocation.

Good people, America is in trouble. America has led the world into this trouble. And if truth be told, we all better pray that Barack Obama and his administration can help lead us out of this banking, home deflation, mortgage, Bernard Madoff, Wall Street - CEO hubris, economic down turn we are in and as we plunge deeper. At one point---I think it was the S & L Crisis or may be the Technology Bubble Burst---my financial adviser and friend, Glenn, said, “after every downturn, you can expect there to be a house cleaning and re-regulating where the crooks, frauds, sleaze artists and just plain no-good-niks got loose.” But this time, Glenn’s observations notwithstanding, we are in a crisis that is far, far worse; and the need jumps up in our faces to ask how we did we even get here? This question will lead us to where our real problems began.

I am not really asking about the details of the housing mortgage debacle whose billons upon billions of assets literally have disappeared into the far corners of bank losses the world over and have cripple our largest banking institutions so badly that no one can figure out how deep the loss chasm actually goes. I am not asking about the schemes that Bernie Madoff and now Allen Stanford implemented and played out over decades, or about the many too many people, institutions and other brokers and their clients who got as badly burned as they did, to what may turn out to be as much as trillions of dollars.

The question I am really asking is what has gone wrong in the fabric of the American system, psyche, and soul that has led us to these dire times where so many in our country and around the globe are losing their jobs, their homes, and their hopes?

Our Torah portion this week is Mishpateem, Judgments. Here Moses reels out any number of commandments, laws, and ordinances to help shape Israelite society there in the desert and beyond. There are laws which deal with all kinds of circumstances from kidnapping, to what to do to a child that strikes his parents, to the goring ox and the damages that it incurs for its owner. We all recognize that every / single / law acts to limit the freedoms of the members of the covenanted society. You having to pay a penalty for the actions of your ox means that you have to sacrifice your time being watchful of its behavior. You can’t just let it go about destroying things, running amok through a camp, field, or town.

But the true significance of this law isn’t so much the restrictions it imposes or the penalties which apply when the law is broken. It is the spirit of the concept which under girds and lies behind the law itself. It is the essential message that I am trying to get at which is now blatantly ignored by the robber barren, banking CEOs, national political figures, and general leadership throughout this country. It is this that I’m after: you have a duty to the common good, the common weal, and to the society in which you live to work for the betterment of not just yourself but of every member of the community in which you live! It is a God commanded duty. And if you don’t believe in God, then call it a citizen’s duty born of being a covenantal part of this constituted nation.

I understood from some of your emails to me that my appearance on television during the Presidential event was apportioned to a small box on the screen whose bigger subject was Arod’s talk about his naiveté in his steroid use. Now it isn’t because I am all that hung up on myself that I say to you that I believe that there is something deeply, deeply flawed in America where one of the channels thinks that an athlete’s chemical abuse of himself is more important than broadcasting the opening prayer of such an historical occasion as took place here in this city on Tuesday. I mean, how many baseball players have now come forward to admit that they are either cheats or liars? And is this news? Aren’t the values of our media systems warped and disgusting? And doesn’t this juxtaposition of views on the same screen capture the very message, albeit in a supremely negative way, of the very spirit of Torah that I am trying to explicate? What an example for our children the whole scenario sets, both in terms of what is important in the country and of focusing in on this destructive behavior. Salaciousness and tabloid journalism…ooo…look and see how the mighty ones are falling…don’t we all just eat it up? Shame on us. Shame on us for spending one second on Arod, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and that ilk. The American dream like that ox, run amok!

But this attitude of “I have to get mine” and “I need to be the Donald of my industry and I can give myself bonuses that break the company and all those who work for me has pervaded our country. This thought that I am entitled to work outside the lines I know—I know---to be ethical no matter how many and whom it may hurt defines the spirit that we have thus far seen in the 21st century…and it’s killing this country. And it will kill our future and our children’s future. I’m not talking here about monetary deficits. I’m talking about a national values deficit. It’s killing us and it’s darned close to killing the American dream for us all, banker and rag picker alike.

There is a message far more important than hope that this President and this Congress and this Judiciary need to get at, embody, and enact. It is that you are a citizen of the United States of America and you have a duty to behave accordingly to help promote, defend, and enhance the nation…or, at the least, choose the appropriate patch of it you claim that includes neighbors...lots of neighbors.

If the bank CEOs of Wall Street have the arrogance to try, as they’ve just been recorded doing, to create work-arounds to the limits on their bonuses, (think of it. After all the damage they’ve done, they still aren’t getting it!) if Congress who often themselves are the recipients of massive campaign donations from these cads and their lobbyists, doesn’t have the courage to reign in these peculiar creatures whose greed and devil-may-care loans sunk the housing industry, their own bank bottom lines and the dreams of the average, middle class citizens; then we can all expect more and more and more of the same. We need to turn both them and our own selves around. Now that the ox is almost out of the barn, we need to demand something more from this administration than gentle reminders and bail outs. And we need to turn ourselves around if we begin to excuse this dearth of values and integrity in our own selves. (Remember, it is tax time. Going to report it all appropriately this year when you have a trillion or more reasons not to?)

Yes, it all starts with you and me. It is the clergy person who remembers his or her calling, and teaches children, staunchly being an exemplar of holiness rather than a molester. And it is his or her superior who never, never, never allows a known predator to continue in ministerial robes. It is the government employee who knows it isn’t proper to take his government car home at night or who inflates his travel voucher. It is the contractor who finishes the job and doesn’t skip town with the money. It is the tax assessor who plays it fair with every home assessment she does, the inspector who refuses to take bribes, the teacher who has the courage to fail the child rather than to pass him along to the next grade but at the same time gives that child as much encouragement and help as he can afford. It is the food product producer who will put public health and safety beyond the profits of his factory. It is the banker who, in the words of a Wall Street Journal reporter that I heard on Scott Simon’s show on NPR last weekend, will cease using his bank and the car company CEO who will stop using his company as their personal ATMs…and, might you believe this?, actually donate many of their millions to some food banks to help their fellow Americans, suffering harder times than they could ever possibly dream of! It is that attitude of responsibility, of I am my brother’s keeper that will bring us out of this crisis, not the obstructionist politics which puts America last on its list of priorities.

America needs a course in true religion, not in lip service. America needs a basic course in civics. Americans need to look long and hard at our ethics. And the more money we make in our take home pay, the more we should be looking at those values by which we claim to live.

Torah provides specific laws to regulate many of life’s potential quandaries. But it isn’t the specifics that we Reform Jews need to concentrate on. It is the spirit of fair play, righteous living and caring for and about one’s society whose clear tone we need to hear and implement in our own lives and in all of our relationships. If no one else in America remembers the standards of our forbearers, then we must model it ourselves. We had better get back to some basics pretty quickly because that barn door’s open and all hell is about to break loose if we don’t.