The breakthrough opportunity and moment came for me in September 2015. There was a civil rights march in support of voting rights called “America’s Journey for Justice” organized by the NAACP and Reform Judaism. The objective was to lobby in Washington, DC for renewal of the Voting Rights Act. (It didn’t happen, of course.) The march started in Selma, Alabama and ended in Washington, DC. There were a few hardy souls who did the entire march. One of them was a Black Vietnam vet of my age who carried the flag all the way from Selma, who called himself “Middle Passage.” (If you don’t know that term, “Middle Passage,” click here to look it up.)

There’s Middle Passage on the left in the orange shirt and the NAACP white cowboy hat, carrying the flag. (I’m barely visible in the back.)

Embarrasingly, I had never heard the term “Middle Passage.” I had to look it up on Wikipedia and then learned much more about it from my first visit to the Museum of African-American History and Culture in DC. Even his name was an education for me.

I’ll return to Middle Passage at the end of this essay.

I marched with a few members of my shul led by my amazing Rabbi Amy Schwartzman, along with national and local NAACP members, including then-NAACP President Cornell Brooks. We tackled one eleven-mile segment, in three-mile installments, on a blazingly hot day north of Richmond, Virginia on the tarmac of US Route 1. (I had undergone back surgery a few months before, but trained specifically for this event.) We took turns carrying the Torah from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and handing it off to my Black and White fellow marchers. Try marching with a Torah in 90-degree heat someday.

I learned many things on that march, for example about mass incarceration, about cruel laws for minor offenses, like Virginia’s ridiculously low Grand Larceny Felony Threshold, leading to major prison terms especially for people of color, including children, and more. While I knew about “discrimination,” I learned that this word was but a mild euphemism for a systemic structure of injustice based on race and poverty. I met an AME minister who has become a lifelong friend as well as an NAACP member who introduced me to the organization and its mission. I continue to be an active NAACP member to this day.

That was three days before Rosh Hashanah. And on Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Schwartzman gave a sermon that no one in our congregation will ever forget. It was about White Privilege.

She said from the pulpit what had probably never before been said in a synagogue: When our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents came to this country, they became White. They. Became. White.

Well. Talk about Revelation. That hit me and many others between the eyeballs. And for many, it was not welcome news. In fact, a friend, a senior official at a major Jewish organization, said to me afterwards that “she has no right to make me feel guilty.” On Erev Rosh Hashanah, mind you. It was a watershed moment.

For me, that moment was transformative. I joined the NAACP and shortly afterward was elected Secretary of the Fairfax County, Virginia branch.

Then along came the Rev. Dr. William Barber and the Rev. Dr. Liz Theohardis and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.

It was a reincarnation of the Poor People’s Campaign begun by Dr. King fifty years earlier, shortly before his assassination, and which probably precipitated his assassination.

Why? Because Dr. King understood, after the victories of the Civil Rights movement, that there was more to the task of “bending the arc of the universe toward justice” than liberation for people of color. He understood that racism was just one systemic symptom of a warped social, economic, and political system.

All that deeply offended many people and threatened them and their way of life. It was not just about equal rights for African-Americans. It was about calling out how the White male power structure in this country pitted poor Whites against Black people, about the economic system that required it and the political and legal system that perpetuated it. On the day Dr. King was killed by an assassin’s bullet, the forces of reaction set in, just as they did after the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

This was effectively the end of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Shortly before his assassination, the movement split in two when he spoke against violence as a tool, diverging from his co-leader Stokeley Carmichael, who challenged the philosophy of nonviolence advocated by Dr. King and interracial alliances that had come to define the modern civil rights movement, called instead for “Black Power.” (For more information, click on these two links.) With Dr. King’s untimely death, the Black Power movement became a dominant trend. Many Jewish people who had participated actively in the civil rights movement, some of them giving their lives, felt deeply hurt and betrayed. The partnership between Blacks and Jews was broken for at least one generation.

As a Jew joining the modern Poor People’s Campaign fifty years later, I was strongly attracted to its message that poverty, and less so race, is the root of evil in American society and that it is a ”fusion movement” of White, Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Peoples; of people of all faiths and no faith; of poor people and wealthy people of conscience, all of whom are united around deep moral, faith-based principles. It holds that the injustices called out by Dr. King — systemic racism, poverty, militarism, false moral narratives of religious nationalism — are foundational to the ills of modern American society in a deeply intersectional way. It is committed to nonviolence, but it is also committed to action.

To me, these goals and values were and are fully consistent our Jewish tradition, and especially of progressive or Reform Judaism, which informs us that only through deeds of lovingkindness and justice, in addition to prayer and study, can we redeem ourselves and our world.

Through my membership, and even local leadership for a while, of the Poor People’s Campaign, I began to feel comfortable in a multiracial, multifaith environment, though it was not easy and I had to be extremely careful about my speech, my attitude, and my expectations. Anyone contemplating diving into the pool of racial justice should think about this and whether they’re ready for it. It’s a life-changing experience.

It seems now like a long journey, but in fact, it began in earnest only in 2015, with that sweltering march north of Richmond and Rabbi Schwartzman’s bold and transformational Rosh Hashanah sermon. I know it will never be complete. In the words of Pirke avot 2:21, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

Back to Middle Passage. He was a quiet man, an injured Vietnam vet who lost a brother in that unjust, immoral, and unnecessary war that was transformational for my generation, a kind man, a contemporary of mine, who had marched at the head of the procession nearly 1,000 miles from Alabama through the Deep South and to Northern Virginia. He proudly carried his beloved American flag the whole way. To me, he humanized the experience and the deep injustice of the particular brand of American racism in the most personal way.

Middle Passage never made it to DC. The day after I marched, he had a sudden, massive heart attack and tragically died on the blacktop of U.S. Route 1, in scorching heat, just short of Fredericksburg, Virginia, with his beloved American flag still in his hands.

May the memory of Middle Passage — both the man and the four hundred-year-old story of the forced voyage of millions of enslaved Africans to North America and the Caribbean, the four centuries of pain, suffering, and oppression it created, the false narratives about slavery and people of color, the doctrine of White supremacy and the enduring power structure it created — be a blessing to all humanity. zTz”l.

Shabbat shalom.

Our reading today, Sh’lach lecha (Numbers 13–15), tells the story of the spies Moses sent into Canaan to scout out the land and bring back reports about whether the Israelites could take it as their own as God had promised them. It would seem to be a straightforward story. The twelve spies came back and all but two of them reported that the residents and their cities were fearsome and that they, the spies, looked like grasshoppers at the feet of giants. Only two, Joshua and Caleb, counseled optimism, saying it was a land of “milk and honey,” meaning that it was agriculturally fertile and productive (think of cows and bees), and that the Israelites could conquer it. At hearing these reports, the people were terrified and wept about what would become of them.

What we are not reading today in this parasha is the next part, where God becomes angry that the ten spies dared to contradict his prophecy and that the people followed them. God decreed a terrible punishment: Of all those in the current generation, only Caleb and Joshua, the optimists, would be allowed to enter the Promised Land. All the others, including Moses, would die before that day. And this is why the Children of Israel had to spend the next thirty-plus years in the desert. All but two of them had to die first. It was God’s will.

Now let me tell you another story. There was a powerful leader who promised his people that they would also conquer a neighboring land, where their forefathers had lived and where the stories of their faith originated. He sent out spies. Most of them came back with reports that the plan was insane, that the people who lived there would resist and demolish the invaders. But a few of them, wishing to please the leader, said “no, it will be a cakewalk.” The leader decided that he would go with the optimistic reports and declared an invasion. It failed miserably. It demolished both the invaders and the land they tried to seize.

In this story, of course, the land is not Canaan, but Ukraine.

The parallels here are superficial but disturbing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not suggesting that the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites, who had suffered four hundred years of slavery and great deprivations and losses in the desert, can in any way be compared with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The circumstances were very different, and the results, too, were different. But still, the superficial parallelism of these two stories leaves us with some difficult questions.

Foremost among them is this: When is it appropriate, allowable, morally correct, and justifiable for one tribe or country to invade another, including the use of force? And if history is written by the victors, how can we know the truth that has been recorded in their annals, and not those of the vanquished?

One way to distinguish between moral and immoral seizure of land may be the means used. For example, well before God allowed them to enter Canaan, some of the Israelites mutinied, taking up arms and fighting bloody battles against the tribes occupying the land. It was a disaster. Only after cleansing themselves of a whole generation, the generation that had known Egypt and feared their future in another hostile land, were their children able to proceed.

(Parenthetically, here’s an interesting thought. When we say Kiddush and the words “Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim,´- in memory of the going out from Egypt — whose memory are we actually singing about? Is it the memory of those who actually went out, or the reconstructed memory of the next generations?)

Now, when it was finally time for the Israelites to enter the Promised Land, it is not reported whether they marched across the border in armed military formations, or as an ecstatic gaggle. The battle of Jericho was their first military engagement.

We do not know if there were any negotiations before the battle; probably not. What we believe about that battle, based on the annals of the victors as told in the book of Joshua, is that they marched around the city walls for six days making fearsome noise with trumpets and surrounded the city on the seventh, when the walls miraculously crumbled by Divine intervention, not human violence. God’s will.

But after that bloodless victory, as on other important occasions (see my drash on Pinchas), God commanded the Israelites to slaughter every living being in the city, including the farm animals, except for the family of the prostitute who had sheltered Israelite spies before the battle. This was also God’s will, as reported in the annals of the victors, in our own sacred texts.

Now, just wait a second. What are we, the generation of the grandchildren of the Holocaust, to make of the mass slaughter of innocents decreed by God on not one, but several occasions in our sacred narrative? Let’s go on.

Here, we moderns may well ask whether it was indeed God’s intervention that secured the great bloodless victory, or even more whether it was God’s will to commit the ensuing genocidal act, or whether, as historians seem to agree, it was all a made-up story of the later Judean Kingdom to justify the use of violence in its own affairs. In fact, there is no architectural evidence whatsoever of the event, which seems to live today only in the sands of memory.

Moving on. Eventually, after encountering armed resistance from the locals, the Israelites were able to settle peacefully in a piece of territory they could call their own. In part, this was because they were surrounded by weakened tribes often warring with themselves. When the powerful Philistines came along, that was a different matter, but according to legend it was settled with a slingshot and not a massacre.

These are all matters of Biblical and historical theory. But what troubles me about these stories, all of them, today, is what we see and hear taking place in the former Canaan, now the State of Israel and its Occupied Territories. These are some of the questions that trouble me today:

• Is it God’s will, as the new ultra-hardliners in the Israeli government — people who had been banned from previous governments for their advocacy of violence, would have us think — is it God’s will to deprive non-Jewish citizens, or perhaps more narrowly Muslims, of their civil and political rights?
• Is it God’s will to deny the right to live in Israel of people, like many in this congregation, who have embraced Judaism and love of Israel by choice by the authority of non-Orthodox Rabbis?
• Is it God’s will to eject Arabs from Israel entirely by redrawing its borders, as Israel’s new Foreign Minister has advocated, much as we do racist gerrymandering in this country?

Or, if these and other measures advocated by the new extremist right-wing government of Israel — which has given an entirely new meaning to the concept of Zionism — if these measures are not God’s will, what then are they? If they are concoctions of human will, wrapped up in the Divine presence, what can we say about them, and their motivation?

Returning to my earlier question: When is it moral, and when not, to wage war against another people, to take a land by violence, to deprive its residents of their rights as citizens and human beings, to oppress others in order to preserve one’s own privilege — not to mention committing genocide against an enemy? I offer a simple answer:

When the only justification for acts of violence and oppression by one people against another is God’s will, or in modern times the claims of one religion or ethnic group against another, there is no justification at all.

When its advocates, in the words of The Poet, say that “God’s on our side,” you can bet that God, like the Israelites in the desert, is weeping.

Ken y’hi ratzon.

June 8, 2023

This is the first installment of a longer essay that I have been writing in my head for about 20 years. Some parts are drawn from my recent book, From Pugwash to Putin: A Critical History of US-Soviet Scientific Cooperation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), which is currently being translated into…Chinese!! For a short synopsis of the book published in the AAAS journal Science & Diplomacy, which however omits the funny and shocking stories from my interviewees, click here.

I have a confession to make. I have been a “science diplomat.”

And I have very mixed feelings about it. Not only today, when the very notion of “science diplomacy” looks increasingly strange as scientists and their institutions around the world cut off ties with Russia, but throughout my forty-year career as a practitioner and manager, promoting scientific cooperation with the former Soviet Union and its successor states by managing and leading cooperative science programs in diverse roles in the public and private sectors.

I have always been troubled by the concept of “science diplomacy” ever since it made its debut some twenty or more years ago. From its beginning, which goes back even farther than that, it has been a morally loaded concept that has illuminated much and inspired many good deeds and projects, but that has also at times obscured the complex nature of international scientific cooperation. It has done much to get the US scientific community, in particular, more engaged in international science and more aware in general of the complex global context in which they work, but it has also tended to generate a sense of self-satisfaction in the community that simply being present on the soil of another country promotes some higher end than science itself. To a certain extent, the concept reflects the historically naïve and superficial nature of peculiarly American perspectives on the world around us, a mirror image of both our isolationist impulses and our messianic visions.

This essay has been cooking in my head for a long time. But today, the importance of unpacking the revered concept of “science diplomacy” has become underscored as never before by the savage invasion by Russia of Ukraine. Granted, this is an especially egregious event, but it is not sui generis. It begs the world scientific community to consider questions of our collective responsibilities, loyalty to our fellow scientists along with commitment to moral principle.

To those who object that moral principle has no role in science, I cannot provide an answer other than to ask, why did you choose this profession in the first place? Why do we place such a great value on the advancement of knowledge through rigorous research, adherence to method and standards of proof and falsification, to rational discourse? Those questions and more are more properly addressed in scholarly work on the philosophy and history of science, which this is not.

“Science knows no country”

A favorite saying in the scientific community is that “science has no borders” or “science does not know boundaries,” or some mixture of the two. I submit that this is more fiction than fact, more aspiration than the real state of affairs. It is a noble thought, but it is wrong.

It seems that it might have been Louis Pasteur who articulated the idea of science knowing no boundaries. And in so doing, he may also have laid bare the internal tensions and pitfalls of the concept.

According to Wikiquote, his biographer cites him as saying this:

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and it is the torch which illuminates the world.

But the quote directly continues to contradict its own premise:

Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

Well, here’s a conundrum. “Science knows no country, but…that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.” Let’s unpack that a bit farther.

What about the idea of the “nation” as distinct from “country”? Here, it is useful to consider the late 19th-century context in which Pasteur was writing. The idea of the “nation-state,” ushered in by the French Revolution, was still relatively young. Germany had only recently formed itself from a scattering of independent principalities into a geopolitical state with a distinct national identity. Elsewhere in Europe, unrest was seething against multinational empires, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, where nationalist resentment would ultimately light the fuse of world war.

It is not clear, though, the Pasteur was being so careful with his use of terms. They revealed a basic dichotomy and contradiction — between universalistic aspirations and national pride. He was, after all, a Frenchman.

More than that, he was a religious Frenchman, apparently. He has also been quoted as saying

(to be continued)

¹Gerson S. Sher, PhD is a retired civil servant and foundation executive who has devoted his career to the intersection of scientific cooperation, international affairs, and global security, primarily with the countries of the former Soviet Union. In the public sector, Gerson was Program Coordinator for U.S.-Soviet and East European Programs at the National Science Foundation, from which he is retired. He has also worked in several nonprofit organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, George Soros’s International Science Foundation (as Chief Operating Officer, on assignment from NSF), and the United States Industry Coalition, and he was asked by the NSF Director to serve as the founding president of the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (now CRDF Global).

Gerson’s publications include From Pugwash to Putin: A Critical History of US-Soviet Scientific Cooperation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019) and other books and articles on US-Soviet and post-Soviet scientific cooperation, Marxist intellectual history, and nuclear security and safety. He received a B.A. Russian Studies (summa cum laude) from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. In June 2008, Gerson was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Moscow Engineering-Physical Institute (now the Russian Federal Nuclear University), Russia’s premier university for educating nuclear scientists and engineers, in recognition of his career work to promote science and technology cooperation between the United States and Russia.

I. Pinchas: The Basic Story

The Torah reading Pinchas is one that has famously been extremely difficult for rabbis to address. Since I am not a Rabbi — only the father of one — I feel less constrained to discuss it without the usual delicate nuances.

The story of Pinchas is shocking and barbaric.

In short and blunt form, it goes like this: God gets angry at the Israelites for fornicating with women from the tribe of Midian. (Let’s remember, by the way, that Moses himself married a Midianite woman, Tziporah. Hold on to that thought.) God threatens to kill all the Israelites with a horrible plague if they persist. A guy named Pinchas finds an Israelite male with a Midianite female in the act and kills both of them with a spear.

Because Pinchas has committed this virtuous act — yes, virtuous, according to the story — God withholds the plague from the Israelites and for good measure commands that they kill all the Midianites. That’s usually called genocide.

Let’s pause here to briefly consider something very odd. In this story, no mention here is made of Tziporah, the Midianite wife of Moses, perhaps the most neglected woman in the Torah. In fact, by the time of this story, it seems that Moses had sent Tziporah back to her father Jethro (in Hebrew, Yitro), for reasons that are not quite clear.

The banishment of Tziporah, for whatever reason, is of great concern in light of this story about Pinchas, which culminates in a mass murder of her people. It is almost as if the Israelites were being willfully compelled to reject their heritage, to reject their own history and origins through a perverse test of loyalty. I wonder how Moses felt about all this. And what about Tziporah’s father Yitro, the priest of the Midianites, who according to an earlier Torah portion had joyfully acknowledged the God of the Hebrews as greater than all other gods? I imagine that he had a lot of second thoughts.

As for the murderer Pinchas, God rewards him by giving him a “covenant of peace” and decreeing that Pinchas and all his male descendants be given an eternal priesthood for atoning for the people of Israel. The fox is put in charge of the henhouse, as it were. Tribal killing is elevated to a place of sacred honor. That’s the story of Pinchas.

What’s wrong with this picture? Everything. Everything is wrong about it.

Today, we would have different words for Pinchas’s act. Lynching might be one of them. And we would have different words for Pinchas, surely not “priest.” “Racist” would be more like it.

But that would not be quite accurate. Because as Ta-Nehisi Coates [https://ta-nehisicoates.com/books/between-the-world-and-me/] has taught us, the very concept of race is a peculiarly American construct based on the need to justify the unjustifiable — four hundred years of slavery and brutal oppression, of treating human beings as property and worse than the lowest type of vermin.

II. “The Stranger” Redux²

Let’s just think about that for a moment: four hundred years of slavery and oppression.

Wait — Wasn’t it the children of Israel who were enslaved in Egypt for four hundred years?

And isn’t this why it says in Exodus 23:9, “And a stranger shalt thou not oppress; for you know the heart of a stranger, seeing that you were strangers in the land of Egypt”?

How easily we forget. How easily we forget this in the diaspora, and how easily we even forget it in the Land of Israel.

This principle is so important that it is repeated thirty-six times in the Torah in various forms and is often called “the Great Commandment.”

Progressive Jewish interpretations hold that the definition of “stranger” includes non-Jews. But this differs from Orthodox Jewish interpretations, which insist that the word “stranger” in this sense refers only to converts.

I find that interpretation unacceptable, because it conflicts with my modern, twentieth-century, American, progressive values.

This is all very personal to me because my own name, Gershom, literally means “a stranger in that land,” a stranger in a strange land, if you will. It was the name Moses gave to his first son, who was born in Egyptian captivity. Gershom, the son of Tziporah and Moses.

One thing I didn’t mention in my earlier essay is that the traditional, exclusionary Jewish understanding of the word “stranger” cannot possibly be true. Let us recall that this is how Moses named his own firstborn son. This clearly preceded chronologically the narrative in which the Great Commandment was rendered in the story of the Exodus from Egypt. And both Moses and his son did not practice the religion practiced in Egypt. I do not know if Moses was taught to revere the God Amon when he grew up, but by the time he married Tziporah he had experienced the revelation of the Burning Bush and accepted the dominion of the Hebrew God, Elohim.

So we may conclude that Moses’s son Gershom, the “stranger,” was also of a different faith than the Egyptians. Thus, the meaning of “stranger” in the Torah, having been preceded by Moses’s seminal use of the term, cannot possibly be restricted to converts or even those who have accepted the Noahic principles. And thus, the traditional Jewish interpretation, in which the Great Commandment applies only to how we treat Jews or converts, but not everyone, is not only wrong, but also self-serving and corrupt.

If this digression on the word “stranger” is not enough, I have gained another insight through the Torah reading for Yom Kippur (Deuteronomy Chapter 29), which I have the great honor this year of reading in my synagogue. Here we are presented with the basic, founding covenant between God and the Jewish people. It is a very moving passage. In defining to whom the covenant applies, God’s vision is unambiguous and overwhelming:

Ye are standing this day all of you before the LORD your God: your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your officers, even all the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives, and thy stranger that is in the midst of thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water, that thou shouldest enter into the covenant of the LORD thy God — and into His oath — which the LORD thy God maketh with thee this day; that He may establish thee this day unto Himself for a people, and that He may be unto thee a God, as He spoke unto thee, and as He swore unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath; but with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day.

Now, let’s look carefully at the text I have bolded. “And thy stranger that is in the midst of thy camp” (גרך אשר בקרוב מחניך). It’s pregnant with meaning and context, not all of it savory. First, it appears to refer to…slaves. The use of the genitive “thy” implies that these strangers are possessions, not independent people. Ugh.

But let’s also look at the grammatical structure of the phrase, “thy stranger that is in the midst of thy camp.” Here, the bolded section is an appositive phrase that defines the precedent word, “stranger.” It does not necessarily apply to all strangers, but only those who are in the midst of the Hebrews’ camp.

Much more to the point and conclusively, the prior precedent of Moses naming his son a “stranger” excludes the particularistic interpretation. To define the concept of “stranger,” as used my Moses and recorded in the sacred text, according to an interpretation grounded in the post-Exodus context is the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. And the real kicker is the categorical explanation of the Great Commandment given in the Torah: “Because you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.” As strangers in Egypt, the Hebrews — or at least most of them — did not accept the Egyptian faith; they were not converts. So, accordingly, the strangers in the Hebrews’ camp, as well as all strangers, wherever they may be located, need not have accepted the faith in Elohim in order to be treated exactly as the Great Commandment specifies. This could not be more clear, and the narrower interpretation more false and misleading.

We are all, therefore, strangers, whether from the standpoint of our relationship with others or their relationships with us.

And, I would argue, with ourselves.

III. Back to Pinchas, and its implications

All the painful contradictions brought out by the Pinchas narrative, the high principle and the unspeakable barbarity, are deeply embedded in the complicated and often contradictory legacy of Jewish values. We forget too often that the Israelites themselves were slaves, that WE are supposed to know the heart of the slave and stranger, that WE are supposed to empathize with them and to protect them.

Why? Because it is too painful? Or because this absolutely cardinal commandment requires us to disrupt all sorts of narratives, for example about being a “chosen people” and to focus obsessively on our own historical victories and tragedies at the expense of others who have suffered equally, or even worse?

Let’s be frank. The tribal, exclusive attitude toward the “stranger” — the idea that the Great Commandment does not apply literally to non-Jews though we ought instead to be gracious to them — this is not just a modern Orthodox interpretation. It is part of our deep heritage, part of the narratives about the people of Israel that we may choose to “forget” — to suppress.

(One symptom of this powerful urge to suppress unpleasant memories — Sigmund Freud wrote a lot about this! — is the traditional Jewish interpretation of our Torah reading, Pinchas. There are two palliative approaches. The first is simple: to argue that Pinchas did the right thing. That’s disgusting. Another way Rabbis dance around the Pinchas story is to switch to commenting on another story in the same Torah portion, the story about the daughters of Zelophehad, who had died without leaving a male heir. God, contrary to the rigidly patriarchal customs of the time, decreed that Zelophehad’s property should be evenly divided among the daughters, which should furthermore become the new practice. Certainly this was a defining moment, one which is rightly celebrated as being an important recognition of the dignity of women, if not a harbinger of women’s rights. But to dwell on this story instead of that of the murderous Pinchas, as I have heard some Jews, including clergy, suggest, is simply a cop-out. To be sure, each weekly Torah reading is rich with content and opportunity for interpretation; I am fond of saying that you can take any random Torah portion and make it into a social justice sermon. But to deliberately treat the story of Zelophehad’s daughters as a way to tiptoe around the vile deeds of Pinchas and God’s reward of them is simply dishonest and corrupt.)

To be sure, it is also understandable that the story is uncomfortable, because as long as Jews have lived in the diaspora — two thousand years, not even counting the Babylonian captivity — we have had ample reason to be distrustful of the stranger, be they Midianites (arguably part of the larger Mosaic family) or others. “In every age,” as we read every year at Pesach, there have been those who have sought to destroy us. Probably more like every other generation, in fact.

In the diaspora in particular, we have sought to keep ourselves apart, partly as a matter of self-preservation, through many of our customs, such as kashrut, the wearing of kippot and even fringes, and other ways. But when we choose to gloss over the suffering of others in our own despair, we betray our core values as Jews and as human beings.

Here’s a classic example: The basic prayer of Judaism, the Kaddish, ends traditionally with the plea that God give peace to “all Israel” — and it leaves it there. I’m among the very few in my large Reform congregation — perhaps the only one — who insist on adding to that the words, “v’al kol yoshvei tevel” — to all the inhabitants of the Earth. Rabbi Jeremy, kol ha-kavod, does that too in his services. But in a traditional congregation, it kind of makes you stand out when you go on mumbling after everyone else is done. And that’s just fine with me.

Ken y’hi ratzon.

Shabbat shalom.

_______________________________

Footnotes

¹Adapted from a d’var Torah presented at the online ______, 2021 Erev Shabbat Service of Rabbi Jeremy Sher’s Kanfot Ha’aretz. Rabbi Jeremy had invited me to talk about my personal Jewish journey as is his custom in his Shabbat services; that short section is at the end of this essay.

²I’ve written at length on his topic in another essay, A Stranger in a Strange Land. I | by Gerson Sher | Feb, 2021 | Medium. This discussion is an elaboration with more recent ruminations.

What has really disturbed me over the past few days is the way our whole national discussion of how we failed Afghanistan begins with 9/11. That is not correct. Maybe it takes a white-bearded and somewhat irreverent political historian to correct the record and go back farther. It starts with Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter— as well as Leonid Brezhnev. And it involves much more than how America failed Afghanistan and paid for it — for example, it includes the fall of the Soviet Union.

It is a story of hubris, of cold-blooded calculation based on a calculus of Cold War diplomatic thinking and anti-communism gone wild, of Western contempt for Islam and traditional Islamic societies, of the delusions of statesmen and generals, both smart ones and simpletons, of wishful thinking, of putting off tough decisions by indecisive political leaders. Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires, the joker in the deck of the Great Game, would once again confound mighty empires and bring the high low.

The story begins when, in 1978, the Soviets set up a client regime in Afghanistan. This was their last adventure in making Central Asia over in *their* image and it cost them dearly. Then, by 1979, their client communist regime was in trouble, threatened by the Islamist fundamentalist mujahideen. So, in December 1979, they invaded Afghanistan.

There is an interesting and very troubling side story here.¹ The Soviets, it turns out, were not keen on invading Afghanistan at all. In fact, according to none other than Carter’s national security adviser, the Cold Warrior par excellence Zbigniew Brzezinski, the United States tricked the Soviets into it by starting to fund and arm the Islamic militant mujahideen in July 1979, months before the Soviet invasion. Nineteen years later, Brzezinski boasted in an interview to the French journal Nouvel Observateur that this was a strategy he sold to Carter on the grounds it would destabilize the Soviet regime. Asked by the interviewer if he regretted that decision in retrospect, Brzezinski responded with his traditional arrogance and anti-communist obsession,

Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?…What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Yes, read that again.

The United States’ reaction was predictable. Here, just six years after the end of the Vietnam War, was another falling domino. (We always fight the last war.) Of course we immediately condemned the invasion, and for good measure President Carter canceled US participation in the 1980 Olympics, which were to be held in Moscow, and other nations followed suit. No Olympics. (Not such a bad precedent).

The United States, through the CIA, continued to fund and arm the mujahideen against the Soviet invaders. Oh, we had learned our lesson all right from Vietnam. We weren’t going to send American soldiers into an Asian war again — not then, at least. So instead, we conducted a proxy war. The heavily armed mujahideen eventually exhausted the Soviets, but not before the brutal Soviet occupation destroyed the entire traditional fabric of Afghan society. For the graphic details, read The Kite Runner.

By 1988, the Soviets were wasted and overrun. More than that, the combination of the impact of 15,000 Soviet dead soldiers — the greatest number of Soviet casualties since the Second World War — and the drain on the Soviet economy left the communist regime reeling. This, combined with a drastic fall in world oil prices (the Soviets were a major oil exporter), undermined the system’s very stability. Mikhail Gorbachev, who had come to the Soviet Politburo in the early 1980s as a hardliner and then became General Secretary after the deaths of two elderly former KGB heads who succeeded Brezhnev, understood that his country was in crisis and that change was imperative. So he pivoted to the role of reformist, introduced glasnost and perestroika, and the rest is history. He is rightly credited as having vastly and desperately overrated the ability of Soviet-style communism to reform and adapt (with apologies to my late mentor, Stephen F. Cohen), and the result was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Gorbachev also signed a treaty in 1988 with the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and agreed to withdraw its troops.

But that was just the beginning of the sorry story of Afghanistan. The fundamentalist mujahideen had become an awesome fighting force as well as a political force, not only in Afghanistan but also throughout the Muslim world. They became the source and center of Islamic fundamentalist activity and ideology, now known as “Islamism.” They attracted radicals and terrorists from other Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia. One of them was Osama Bin Laden.

And that, dear friends, set the stage for the tragedy of 9/11. By that time, under a new US president who spent his college years drunk in his fraternity house and who evaded military service in Vietnam by service in the National Guard (and who, unlike me, was AWOL for his drills but still managed to stay out of the brig), we had forgotten all the lessons of engaging in land wars in Asia. We were hyped, mad, and ready to fight. We were also, as the more recent saccharine saying goes, “all in this together.” There was a national consensus that we had to march to Afghanistan and rid the place of…Osama Bin Laden. As usual, we focused on a single individual, and not on a powerful historical movement, one, moreover, that we had a major responsibility for creating and strengthening.

So now we bemoan the fact that, well, we should have just killed Osama and then left. Wrong!! If we had killed Osama, there would have been others to take his place (and who did). We forgot all the lessons about guerilla warfare we had learned in Vietnam — if, indeed, our military leaders had learned anything at all. Osama was just one individual, a really evil-looking one at that, and if we killed him we’d solve the problem, right? No way.

We may compare Osama to the sacred dragon of Greek myth. When Cadmus killed the dragon, the story goes, he sowed the dragon’s teeth, which turned into new warriors. Of course, it took much longer to slay the dragon Osama. But the warriors appeared anyway — and they came from everywhere.

So we might see George W. Bush, he of the DKE frat house, seeking to play Cadmus to Osama’s dragon…except that while W. failed to slay the dragon, he sowed the dragon’s teeth anyway, like a mangled version of the innocent Johnny Appleseed. The teeth became warriors, and this time they rose up against the seed-sower. There is a time to sow, and a time to reap.

That was the beginning of the second chapter of the American tragedy in Afghanistan. We are now at its end. After twenty years, after grievous loss of life and treasure, we are now at the infuriating and humiliating end of our Afghanistan tragedy.

Everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else. [The next few paragraphs were significantly edited by the author — GSS.]

“Biden has blood on his hands,” we hear. Yes, sadly that is true. The unanticipated speed with which Afghanistan fell on his watch, contrary to his assurances, was anticipated by the CIA, but Biden, as a new president firmly committed to ending the US presence there, apparently ignored that assessment. And he surely could have started ferrying people out, including those still applying for visas, much earlier in the year. Additionally, though he publicly opposed Obama’s massive troop surge of 2009, he was unable to prevail in Barack Obama’s consultative decision-making style against the generals, who were sure that military might would win the day. For this, Obama bears responsibility for caving to the generals — as he did in Syria, as well. The great shame of all this is that this year’s debacle in Afghanistan is bound to have a profound impact on the next presidential election, just as the Ben Ghazi affair tarred Hillary Clinton, whether she deserved it or not.

What about the former guy? We don’t hear peep about his role in all this. Arguably, one of his more rational moves was to begin the withdrawal of American troops and even, perish the thought, negotiate with the Taliban (as Biden might have been well-advised to do, but surely he had no interest in replicating the former guy’s actions). True, as in so many other cases, he gullibly accepted their assurances that they would behave nicely, and, like those before him, including Obama, pusillanimously kicked the bucket to the next president.

But far more importantly, and this helps to exonerate Biden but not completely, Trump’s evil angel Stephen Miller, that misbegotten shame of the Jewish people, did everything he could, very successfully, to wreck the entire immigration system and block those brave Afghans who helped the US from getting visas. This resulting in the horrifying backlog facing Biden. It was a purely racist, nativist, anti-Muslim, white supremacist animus, as he has said, that drove him to it. I do not understand how this man can daven in a Jewish congregation, much less how others could allow him to do so. If there is evil personified in this world today, it is embodied in Stephen Miller. If there is a Hell, he will go there.

Bush…well, God bless, as he would say. If there is anyone with blood on his hands, it is he. His was the tragic decision to keep our troops in Afghanistan after the failed event to kill Bin Laden. His GWOT (“Global War on Terror”) became the sacred mantra not only of the hawks, but also the national consensus. This scion of privilege, in the role of American cowboy, doubled down on his mission of going after all the terrorists after he had ignominiously failed to get Bin Laden, but admitting defeat was not in his limited vocabulary.

Clinton? I don’t know, but let’s just say he was distracted by his crusade to make Russia over in our image, waging the racist (yup!) War on Drugs, as well as by young women in his office.

George H. W. Bush, let us recall, had headed the CIA that was funding and arming the mujahideen. And let’s not forget his sorry adventure of Operation Desert Storm, in which in which we stationed American troops in Muslim Kuwait (including women — anathema to fundamentalist Muslims, no doubt further radicalizing many, perhaps including the Saudi Osama Bin Laden). But to his credit, he refrained from going into Iraq. Dana Garvey described Bush’s posture perfectly: “Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.” He, at least, had the wisdom to refrain from vain temptation — and to have a good laugh at himself as well. I doubt that he wasted his Yale education as his son did.

Reagan? For sure; under his watch, H. W. armed the mujahideen while Ollie North was using money from our arms sales to Iran to arm the ultimately futile anti-communist resistance in Nicaragua. The hapless Jimmy Carter? Yes indeed; he deferred to the doctrinaire and forbidding Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski while bewailing the unfairness of life.

And what of the American people? We, who were so hyped by 9/11, so oblivious of that dark, distant place called Afghanistan, that we couldn’t think straight either, that we blissfully forgot all about the tragedy and lessons of Vietnam, that we just couldn’t rid ourselves of the mission to be the world’s policeman one last time, apprehend the perpetrator, and declare victory? Yes, we are to blame too. Moreover, having largely accepted the ill-fated war in Afghanistan, we bought into the idea of responding to terrorism with massive military force by allowing Bush to begin another war in Iraq. The real target of “shock and awe” was not Saddam Hussein or the Iraqi masses, who Dick Cheney believed would welcome us with open arms, but us. the American public, addicted to watching military violence on TV and to moral crusades against evildoers everywhere. And of course there were the politicians who authorized the Iraq war, notably including Hillary Clinton.

Who won? Nobody? Nope. The Taliban won, and they are hardly nobody. We may not have created them, but we empowered the mujahideen, from whose ranks the Taliban emerged, enabled them, funded them, and armed them — all in pursuit of an already discredited Cold War mindset.³ And now, thanks to our arrogant and deeply misguided adventure, they are the rulers of Afghanistan, more powerful than ever.

Perhaps we are chastened for the moment about foreign adventures, about the hubris of making over others in our image. Right now, our image isn’t that good, and our national politicians from the (Anti-)Republican Party are instead holding up Victor Orban and his autocratic rule in Hungary as the model to follow. But this too, we may hope, will pass. We may be sure, however, that in this world destabilized by climate change, polarization, and fundamentalist false narratives, there will be more uprisings, more crises, more disasters begging for our attention.

When indeed, as The Poet wrote, will we ever learn? Probably never.

The tragedy of Afghanistan is far from over. It is just beginning for Afghanistan’s women and for those who sought to help us, whom we persuaded that we were on the right side of history. (Today I doubt that there is really a right side of history at all. It is just history. If the arc of the universe bends toward justice, does that mean that the arc of history bends in the same direction? I don’t know.) There will be horror stories beyond imagining of their fate. Will we understand our role, our responsibility, in bringing this about? Maybe, for a while, for a generation perhaps. Each generation must discover and rediscover itself, in the world in which it lives.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.⁴

But just think for a moment, if you please, about the world-shattering impact that a relatively tiny, mountainous, inaccessible, highly traditional, religious country has had on world history. And of the arrogant folly of the high and mighty of our human race.

— — — — — — — —

¹This paragraph is based on a review essay by David Gibbs of the University of Arizona entitled, “Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect,” in the journal International Politics 37:233–246, June 2000. I am indebted to my colleague Marjorie Senechal for bringing it to my attention.

²Once again, here we focused on an individual villain, Saddam Hussein, without any understanding of what was going on in Iraq. Was Saddam Hussein, in the words we heard uttered so often in horror, killing “his own people” with chemical weapons? No way. He used them first again a foreign foe, Iran, and then against the Kurds, who were hardly “his people” at all. The very notion of an Iraqi “people” itself was without merit, since, first, Iraq was not (and is not) a nation-state and, second, the warfare engaged in by Saddam Hussein and others in Iraq was almost purely religiously and ethnically sectarian. The elder President Bush, like his son the president, viewed the “Middle East” and Northern Asia exclusively throuhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kite_Runnergh the lens of Western societies and the Wilsonian vision of a world of nation-states.

³There is also a theory that it was all about oil. At the outset, I do not think so, but I do not know enough one way or the other. On the basis of a little bit of research, it seems that oil was discovered in Afghanistan only in 2010. There was also a report just today that the Taliban has guaranteed the security of an oil pipeline crossing Afghanistan on its way from Turkmenistan to India; this is of even much more recent origin. Afghanistan in general is an extremely resource-poor country. In a way, its intense interest and focus in foreign affairs over the past 40 years has belied a strict materialist interpretation of history. Its main “asset” — or curse — instead, seems to have been “location, location, location” — bordering on some of the most volatile countries in the world, many of which have long been in conflict with each other.

⁴Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in ed. Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), 437.

I

Call me Gershom.

That’s my “Torah name,” my Hebrew name, given to me by my parents at birth. גרשום . “A stranger there.”

By custom, it should have been “Gershon” (גרשון), the Hebrew name of my maternal grandfather, Gustave. Gershon, which is a fairly common Hebrew name, was according to the Book of Genesis the eldest son of Levi, the son of Jacob and Leah, the founder of the tribe of the Levites, who later on became the assistants to the High Priests, the kohanim. But my family is not Levite. And my father knew that.

My father was a very learned man, steeped in history, both Jewish and secular. He also loved being intellectually clever and had a reasonably strong ego. (The apple does not fall far from the tree.) So he made a little joke. Instead of גרשון, he (and of course my mother) chose the name גרשום, the name given by Moses to his firstborn son. “A stranger there.” A “stranger in exile” is another way of interpreting it. In English, they adapted the name as “Gerson” so as to be distinguished from the more common “Gershon” and presumably to sound better in the Anglophone ear.

I have been stuck with that name ever since.

As a child I was known not as “Gerson” but as “Gerry” (with a hard “g”), which itself, in turn, was a highly unusual name. Nobody ever got it right. I was Jerry, Geery, Gary, anything but Gerry, except to my family and friends. I hated it. I also had a dim awareness as a young child of my given name, but it sounded even weirder than my nickname. So I went through my early life hating my name, which surely had some intangible impact on my psyche. But that’s another story.

As I got older, I began to understand at least the literal meaning of my Hebrew name, but probably didn’t think about it much until I was in college. For one thing, even more people there had never heard of the name “Gerry” pronounced with the hard “g” and invariably got it wrong. For another, I was beginning to understand what being a stranger actually meant.

As a public school student at Yale in 1965, I was in the first class in which public school graduates outnumbered private school kids, but not by much. It was a culture shock. I became friendly with a group of kids in my dorm from a private school but not one in the absolute first rank. They were not like the snobby kids from Andover and Exeter, and we have been friends ever since. But I was different. The culture of partying, drinking, and cavorting was alien to me (and to my private-school friends) but second nature, it seemed, for many of the prep-school kids. I became close friends and roommate with another public-school student who was also very much a stranger, from the South, who was revolted and I think ashamed of the racist culture in which he grew up, also finding himself also a fish out of water at Yale. We bonded and became lifelong friends as well.

Yet I did not yet feel like a stranger among “my own people,” the Jewish people. That moment came later.

It was in 1967, perhaps in the summer but more likely in November, when I was home for Thanksgiving, that I sat at the family dinner table for the traditional Erev Shabbat Friday night meal. As always, my father was at the head of the table, my mother at the other end, and across from me was my maternal grandmother, Sadie, the widow of Gustave after whom I was named. Sadie was a very tough lady. It would be entirely fair to call her a battle-axe. She had to be, in a way. Her husband Gustave died at the young age of 40 from kidney failure in 1933, leaving Sadie to bring up their only child, Rita. She was a loving mother — and grandmother — to be sure, but she was tough as nails. You didn’t disagree with Sadie and get away with it.

That night, talk at the table turned toward the 1967 “Six-Day War” in the Middle East, which had taken place in June. My grandmother stated categorically that all the lands taken from the Arabs in 1948 were acquired legally, under contract. I objected, saying that much land was taken by force. She then stared me straight in the eyes and said, “You’re an anti-Semite.”

That was when I knew I was indeed a stranger. A stranger to my own people.

A stranger is not intrinsically an enemy. A stranger is not intrinsically a threat. The stranger can become a threat in the eyes of the main group, however, when they question their assumptions, when they refuse to participate in their untruths and myths. And of course the stranger can easily be or become an enemy when they look different, when they are seen as a threat to the group’s security and position, when they worship in different ways, and more. I was a stranger of the first type, seemingly overnight.

But it did not happen overnight. From my father I inherited, or had cultivated and even browbeaten into me, an intellectual combativeness bordering on hubris — I freely admit it — that often resulted, whether I desired it or not, in being treated as a stranger. I took my Yale education very seriously and learned the skills of thinking critically, expressing myself fairly well, and challenging assumptions and values lurking below the surface.

At that Shabbat dinner, I had dared to contradict my grandmother, something even my father would not do, not on such a sensitive topic as Israel. I recall that as this transpired across the dinner table, he studied his dessert plate in uncharacteristic silence. He knew better but was not going to upset shalom ha-bayit (the peace of household) on Erev Shabbat. I think I was as shocked by Sadie’s reaction as she was shocked by my words. It was a pivotal moment for me. Whenever I think about my Jewish identity, this is the first image that comes to mind.

1967 was also a watershed year for the entire country, and in particular on college campuses. It was the time of the beginning of serious protests against the Vietnam War, as well as the time when the mores of campus life changed in deep ways. Women were a much more frequent sight in the dormitories of all-male schools, and I’m told, the reverse was true at all-women’s schools. Intoxication came increasingly from smoking as compared with drinking. Everything was up for grabs. Everything was being re-examined.

In my early college years, I continued to use the nickname, “Gerry.” That changed, I believe, at about this time. Perhaps I was consciously acquiring a new persona, “Gerson.” The stranger in that place. My childhood friends still call me Gerry and I tolerate it out of affection. My college friends switched eventually from Gerry to Gerson. Everyone else now knows me as Gerson.

In my last job, there was a horrible man who later became Board chair who was, frankly, a Georgia redneck who either never went to college or dropped out and was for a while a successful nuclear contractor. I knew I was in big trouble with him from the moment I saw him in my initial interview, which was a terror-filled experience because I was still pretty unstable after my most recent bout with severe depression. I overheard that his first words after hearing my name were, “What kind of name is that?” Well, we all know what that means. And I knew it too. My subsequent experience bore out those fears in spades. I can still hear him intoning my name in the most contemptuous, sneering, insidious manner, as he did throughout Board meetings and personal conversations — which I tried to avoid but sadly couldn’t. But it was a small comfort that I knew that aside from disliking me personally for who I was, his enmity came from a deeper place focusing on what I was.

But heck, that’s just my name.

The ancient Romans had a saying, “in nomen est omen.” A person’s name, it says, is a sign — of the person’s destiny. Is that really so strange? It was the custom among East European Jews — and doubtless of people all over the world — to name children, in some cases, in special ways so as to endow them with magical properties. A sick child might get the name “Chaya” (“life”) as my grandmother did; she was “Chana” but after a childhood illness, she became “Chana Chaya.” In other cases, the name “Alter” (“other”) was given so as to confuse the Evil Eye and keep it away.

According to Wikipedia, there is a term of recent origin, “nominative determinism,” which is “the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names.” This theory has its roots in Jungian psychology. But of course it goes much deeper than that. How we name things — and that we name them at all — is a fundamental characteristic of human existence with deep philosophical and theological meaning. That I should have gravitated toward my name, toward the omen, then, is not that unusual. Though if it had been John or Joe or Alex, I doubt I would have given it a second thought.

II

What is a stranger? Who is a stranger?

Here’s what Merriam-Webster says:

The dictionary definition is clear enough. But this just scratches the surface.

Let’s first look at scripture for guidance. Scripture, after all, helps to define our moral view of the world, our sense of ethics, of right and wrong. And in Jewish scripture, in particular — I use those words deliberately — the jury is out.

The Torah tells us thirty-six times, in one formulation or another, that we are to care for the stranger — the “ger” (גר). The first part of my Hebrew name — גרשום.

My personal favorite scripture, Leviticus 19:33–34, part of what is often called the “Holiness Code”. It puts it this way, focusing on the principle of justice and the very roots of Jewish identity:

“And if a stranger (“ger”) sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”

Unlike many other of the thirty-six formulations of the Great Commandment, this one is given special prominence, punctuated with the Divine exclamation mark: “I am the LORD your God.”

A few verses earlier in this passage, we find the famous words common to both the Jewish and Christian faiths: וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). I am told that in the traditional Jewish interpretation, the word for “neighbor” used here, רע, is more intimate than גר (“stranger”), so in this discussion, we’ll focus on the the stranger and not the neighbor.

Be that as it may, it would appear that there is not universal agreement on this interpretation of רע “neighbor”. There’s a very interesting essay in The Forward (“Neighbor, Fellow or Friend?”) that argues that on this subject, “Judaism and Christianity on the whole parted ways.” The author, Philologos, writes:

The word re’a in biblical Hebrew (the form re’akha has added to it the second-person singular possessive ending — kha) can mean “friend,” “neighbor” or “fellow man…” Whereas Christianity romantically followed Jesus and Paul in insisting that “Ve-ahavta le-re’akha kamokha” means we should love everyone, such love being a surer guide to conduct than a dutiful cleaving to legal precepts, Judaism pragmatically retorted that it was hard enough to love one’s friends and that sticking to the moral commandments was all that could be reasonably demanded in regard to the rest of the world.

I would add that the traditional Jewish distinction about loving “x” — be it a neighbor or a stranger — is suspect. In both cases we are told to love “x” as yourself. But in the case of the stranger, the Torah adds, “because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” In other words, in the case of the stranger, a direct connection is made with the formative experience of the Jewish people, and thus with the identity of the subject of the statement as a Jew. Thus, one might conclude that something else is up with the traditional Jewish interpretation that the “neighbor” version of this commandment is more proximate than the “stranger” version — perhaps, retrospectively, to differentiate a “Jewish” version from the more universalistic formulation of Jesus? Oh well.

So, we’ll elide past the discussion about “neighbor” and stick with the concept of the “stranger” that is to be treated as “the home-born among you.” There’s a lot to unpack here.

Who is this stranger? The root of the word “sojourns” (yigur — יגור) is actually the same as the one used in the same passage for “stranger” (ger — גר). Thus, a stranger is a sojourner. A sojourner is a traveler, one who may settle for a while and move on. That’s all the Torah says about this person. So if this “stranger” refers to anyone who wanders into the camp and moves on — just as the proto-Jews did in Egypt — then the passage must mean that Jews are obliged to treat all people — at least the people in the camp — regardless of religion or other characteristic, as “the home-born” among us.

How does this work out in a country like Israel, which sees itself as a “Jewish state” and confers special rights and privileges on Jews that are not available to other residents? There is a vigorous debate about this that is familiar to those much more learned in Torah and Talmud than I, but which I will risk taking the liberty of summarizing without citations in my own words.

Conventional Jewish interpretations of these texts have traditionally held that the word “stranger” applied to proselytes — people who joined the community and willingly adopted its religion and practices — in other words, converts. This definition, in its narrowest form, which one can find on the most fundamentalist Jewish websites, absolves one of responsibility to treat non-Jews in the same way as fellow Jews. But if that’s what is actually meant in the Torah, then why would it go to such pains to make it a Prime Directive punctuated with the Divine exclamation mark, “I am the LORD your God”? Are we really being instructed with such Divine authority to do what which comes naturally anyway, to care for one’s own and not for others? To say that we exclude the stranger in our midst who is not a convert/proselyte or close to becoming one from our code of behavior is far too harsh and surely not worth the effort of being repeated thirty-six times in our most sacred writings.

Accordingly, in such interpretations, one comes across other texts, Talmudic or otherwise, suggesting that we are to treat people who are not members of the Jewish community-at-large with some manner of fairness as well — for example, according to the Noahic code. These are kluges, but necessary kluges to help assuage the consciousness of good Jewish folk whose moral sensibilities are in need of placating. But in its essence, this interpretation is narrow, exclusionary, and particularistic. It is tribal justice, not universal justice. Tribal love, not universal love. A Jewish carpenter a couple of thousands of years ago was one of undoubtedly many who found the tribal interpretation unacceptable.

Thus, while there may be clever ways of softening the edges of this interpretation of the word “ger” through contorted rhetoric, in its basic form, this definition of “stranger” makes it clear that our fundamental moral obligations are not universal, but only particular — to fellow Jews. This understanding of what it is to be a “stranger” is also convenient for a strict modern Zionist interpretation consistent with the new Basic Law of Israel passed in 2018, in which Jews have a legally sanctioned privileged status that is denied to others. Indeed, the new Basic Law, formally defining Israel as a Jewish Nation-State, reserves the right of self-determination in Israel to the “Jewish people” alone, relegating others to the status of being treated “with dignity.” This is the logical conclusion of the traditional, particularistic interpretation of the Great Commandment and specifically the critical word “ger” — stranger — when applied to legal norms in a political entity — a state.

In contrast, progressive Jewish interpretations hold that the word “stranger” pertains to anyone in the midst of the community, regardless of their faith, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In this view, the injunction to treat the stranger as “home-born” means to treat the stranger as a full citizen with equal dignity, equal privileges, and equal rights.

Now, it might be pointed out by the advocates of the tribal view that the Torah passage under discussion refers only to “sojourners” rather than everyone. So okay, let’s continue to split hairs. Where Jews are a majority population, we might consider it charitable to extend our good graces to our non-Jewish neighbors. But what happens when the neighbors or strangers live not in the midst of Jews, but when Jews live in the midst of strangers and neighbors of other faiths — where they are the minority, as they are in the worldwide Diaspora? How does it work out for Diaspora Jews to treat only each other with the full weight of Torah principles, but not others?

Badly. From the time they left the Levant in about 300 AD and wandered throughout Europe and elsewhere, it worked out very badly indeed.

Next, what does it mean to treat the stranger as “home-born” among you? Does that mean that the sojourner who wanders into your camp temporarily must be treated as a full citizen, with full rights and responsibilities under law?

Here, we must consider the historical setting of the times. At the time depicted in Leviticus, the concept of citizenship did not exist. In ancient Rome and Greece, citizenship was accorded to only to certain classes of people — male, wealthy property owners. It was not until the French Revolution that the notion of national citizenship appeared — that by being a member of a “nation” (however defined), one is entitled to certain rights and responsibilities. Thus, we may well surmise that a “strict constructionist” view of Leviticus 19:33–34 would hold that the stranger need not be treated with the full rights and responsibilities of those with full membership in the larger community, in this case, the Hebrews.

But over the course of centuries, new concepts emerged. The French Revolution initially granted full citizenship only to men and even allowed, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that “social distinctions” could be “founded on the common good” — as defined, presumably, by the “citizens.” The American Revolution granted full citizenship to all males, but instituted neat tricks to limit the political rights of some males, most notably by defining slaves as three-fifths of a person in terms of calculating the voting power of states, and of course excluding women.

Not until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868), was it established in the United States that any person “home-born” in this country automatically acquired the status of full citizenship. Yet we have sharp differences about the “sojourner” and the extent to which, and process by which, the stranger/sojourner can become a full citizen.

Israel, on the other hand, is not a “birthright country” in the same sense. Citizenship by virtue of birth (jus soli) is not automatic; it must be applied for. It does not extend to people born, for example, in militarily occupied territories unless they are Jewish by ancestry or other approved rite.

So it is clear that in different societies, in different countries, at different times, the words “home-born” can mean different things. I would submit, however, that for Jews living in the United States, where the meaning of “home-born” is very clear (though the process for others of obtaining citizenship is not), it is entirely reasonable to say that the Torah obliges us to ensure that all strangers, whether sojourners or not, are treated with exactly the same principles of justice as those with full citizenship by virtue of birth.

In countries where there is not full and automatic birthright citizenship, the stranger may or may not be accorded such rights. Where they are not, where it is a matter of political choice left up to the “citizens,” things tend to end badly. In the most extreme form, apartheid is the most perfect manifestation of this principle.

This long discussion has presented a framework — one that I find useful, anyway — for understanding two very different Jewish interpretations of the Great Commandment. On the one hand, there is the “traditional” one, which emphasizes fine distinctions, all of which in one way or another tend to undermine a universalistic interpretation of the commandment. Let’s call that one the “strict constructionist” interpretation. On the other, there is a “loose constructionist” interpretation, which takes into account changes in social mores and political systems, which acknowledges that Jews may live in minority or majority status in the modern world, and which supports a more universalistic interpretation and obligation of the Great Commandment. It should be no surprise that I associate with the latter.

That is why the “progressive” interpretation of these commandments, codified in America by Reform Judaism, is suitable for modern times. (By saying this, I am not claiming that my “loose constructionist” understanding is fully consistent in all particulars as the “official” Reform Jewish one.) For adherents of this view, one has an obligation not only to ensure equal treatment under law for all, but also to reach out to others of different faiths, colors, origins, and status who suffer from being denied such treatment on account of these characteristics and to support them in their quest for justice, for we “were strangers in the land of Egypt” [emphasis added]. These few words are so powerful.

So we might then conclude that the view of Jews in majority-Jewish societies about the treatment of the neighbor and that of Jews in minority-Jewish societies is fundamentally different and at odds. And I think that would be correct. We American Jews often hear the condescending words that because we do not live in Israel, we cannot understand, or cannot even comment, on conditions and politics in Israel. Even many Reform Jews in America embrace this point of view. To me, this deprecating view of criticism of Israel by American (and other non-Israeli Jews) is unacceptable.

Forget, for a moment, that it is true that we American Jews do not live in fear of extermination by surrounding countries (but recently have become quite aware that our democracy is under attack by the enemy from within), or that American Jews’ financial support is existentially essential for the State of Israel. (Or maybe, after all, it’s not.) Just think about the core Jewish values. We must acknowledge that our values, even within the same faith tradition, may diverge based on circumstance (as they have in many other religions). Are they both “Jewish” as defined in the Torah? This question is unanswerable because it is the wrong question, because ultimately it is based on faith, sentiment, fear, and historical experience as well as the vagaries of daily life.

It’s no surprise that I adhere to the second interpretation and consider the first one revolting and blasphemous, primitive and tribal, and no different in principle than any other doctrine of exclusion and oppression.

I won’t get into interpretations of how the injunction about the stranger or neighbor are treated in other faiths, though my reference to the Jewish carpenter is suggestive that, opposed to the particularistic traditional Jewish take on the issue of the stranger/neighbor, there may also exist universalistic interpretations. But at least historically and traditionally, such interpretations seem to have required the establishment of new belief systems in new religions, which in turn, as is the way of the world, have themselves run into trouble on this account.

Unless we are all universally tolerant, universally open to each other and universally accepting of each other, the faith-based point of view of “strangeness,” at least in Judaism, is wrought with problems, though I continue to adhere to the Reform Jewish interpretation as the morally correct one. For we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Strangers in exile. Not a majority population, but a minority and very persecuted population.

Strangers in a strange land. A band of strangers who are obliged by our God to treat other strangers as “the home-born among us.”

III

Let’s now consider a secular, philosophical discussion of the concept of being a stranger. Here, there are many options from which to choose. The two that I have studied most closely are those of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx. Again, this is my gloss, and with Kant I will admit that I am a lot rustier than with Marx. I will thus treat Kant lightly and Marx in more depth.

First, a fleeting reference to the Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber, of whom my knowledge is admittedly superficial. But it’s important to acknowledge his work in this context. Buber, in my understanding, sees the critical existential issue as being the duality of “I-Thou.” This is a universalistic frame of reference. “Thou” is anyone at all, not just “neighbors” or even more distant members of the community. It is a phenomenological perspective, in the tradition of Husserl and others, in which the “Thou” is in principle unknowable and can easily become “the Other,” a potential threat to the “I.”

This “I-Thou” framework has become often used in discussions recently of racism, in which the problem of race is cast as a manifestation of the existential, universal problem of dealing with “the Other.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but for me, it just scratches the surface. It puts interaction with people of other races and classes on the same footing as with your cousin or even your spouse. In my experience, it is again a consciousness-assuaging kluge, nowadays allowing White folks to grasp their fear of Black folks through the premise of a universalistic duality of existence in all circumstances. This is good, insofar as it at least allows one to acknowledge the fear and perceived antagonism in racial and class relationships. That is progress. But it is not progress enough.

Going more deeply, it was Immanuel Kant, staring out of his window at the clock-tower in Kőnigsburg (now Kaliningrad, one of the few cities in the Russian Federation retaining the name of a Bolshevik leader), who formulated the phenomenological premise in what I believe to be its purest “modern” form. Kant differentiated between the noumenon, that which we as sentient beings perceive through our experience, and the phenomenon, the internal essence of that which is perceived, the “thing in itself.”

The phenomenon is in principle unknowable; all we can “know” is subject to our experience, which imperfectly grasps that which we perceive. It is intrinsically, necessarily, strange — always has been, and always will be. Kant’s framework is the basis of phenomenology, but one that does not differentiate between people and things. Everything that is not noumenon is phenomenon, whether we speak of people, rocks, or even ideas (or pipes). Later philosophers, such as Husserl and Buber, elaborated this phenomenological perspective by focusing on both the subject and object as sentient beings, so now we have two subjects who imperfectly perceive each other. Much modern psychology, such as that of Karl Jung I believe, is also based on this premise.

Going back to Kant: From his phenomenology, Kant proceeded to develop a rigidly universalistic moral philosophy, which is summarized in his famous Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Kant further developed this injunction into a philosophy of law — a political philosophy — that endorsed the notion of a “republic” in which equal laws and equal rights would be accorded to all. This was an emerging concept of his day. It was beginning to spread across Europe. The French Revolution was brewing, and in North America a republic had already been created. It is one of the values by which we live today and consider very natural. At the time Kant wrote, however, they were practically seditious. There were other philosophical frameworks that led to the same recommendation, but without the phenomenological framework. I’ve focused on Kant to set the stage for the next discussion.

I will add, however, that to my mind the Categorical Imperative is indeed the most perfect guide for moral behavior. It is not merely the Golden Rule, whether in its positive (do unto others as you would have them do unto you, ascribed to Jesus) or negative (refrain from doing to others that which you would not have them do unto you, ascribed to Hillel) forms, because it eliminates personal preferences from the proposition. It says, imagine if everyone acted that way; would it come out well or badly? It requires one not only to understand how one would feel about being treated in this or that way, but to reason about how the action would affect all people if directed at them. Moreover, the Categorical Imperative does not require insertion of divine command or agency to underwrite morality; instead, it requires what Kant called “practical reason” — rational consideration of the likely consequences of actions — something of which believers and non-believers alike are (presumably) capable. At least, that’s what Kant thought.

Looking back at the previous chapter, let’s return briefly to the discussion of how one treats the stranger in light of the Categorical Imperative. In Leviticus 19:33–34 we are obliged by commandment to treat the stranger as the home-born among us. The strength of this commandment is rooted in the fact that our origin as a “people” was in a society where we were the strangers and where we experienced the blunt end of the stick; as it says in Exodus 23:9, “And a stranger shalt thou not oppress; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The Kantian Categorical Imperative reframes this proposition in the following way, using not faith and commandment, but “practical reason”: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Thus for Kant, it is reason and free will, not fear of Divine punishment, that compel us, or ought to compel us, to care for the stranger — lest others not care for us when it’s our turn.

But there’s a serious problem even with the Categorical Imperative. A fascinating recent op-ed in The New York Times (remarkable for its depth and apparent lack of association with current events — or maybe not?) by philosopher Crispin Sartwell explores the proposition that “Humans Are Animals. Let’s Get Over It.” From earliest times, philosophers have sought to distinguish between we humans — with the capability of reason — from animals. “[I]f we truly believed we were so much better than squirrels,” he asks, “why have we spent thousands of years driving home the point?” Kant was solidly in this age-old tradition, writing in his Critique of Practical Reason, “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality.” But in this statement, he had it exactly backwards, and in contradiction with his own basic premises. First, the proposition that humans essentially differ with animals is itself a premise, not a conclusion. And when Kant uses the word “reveals,” he even seems to violate his own fundamental distinction between the unknowable (for humans) noumenon and the phenomenon, which is knowable through “practical reason.” (This would have made a great paper in my graduate course on Kant and Hobbes; alas, a missed opportunity.) The language of revelation is not that of the human limitations of knowing; only through revelation, one might say in other words, can we actually penetrate the veil of the unknowable. That is the basis of all faith and all religion. For shame, Immanuel Kant.

But this leads to another troublesome question: If in fact we humans are also animals, which we pretty commonly accept nowadays, are other beasts also capable of “practical reason”? In other words, are they capable of linking actions to consequences? We may certainly presume that they do. A tool-making chimp clearly does. And even the ants who build a hill or the bees who pamper their queen at least instinctively perform purposeful acts.

I make no claim to being a philosopher, except in the sense of the young Marx (we’ll get to him next), who mused, in his only reflections on what communist society — the ultimate transcendence of class society, of the division of labor, of the alienation of creators from the objects of their creation —would be like, that one could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (The German Ideology). But somehow this essay has led me there.

One more thing — about Kant and Hobbes. You could hardly imagine two more opposite philosophers. Kant, who believed in the human capability to behave morally, and Hobbes, who was skeptical at best about that. But in a final reference to Sartwell’s excellent op-ed (an op-ed, mind you!), he quotes from Hobbes’s Leviathan: “‘The savage people in many places of America,’ writes Thomas Hobbes in ‘Leviathan,’ responding to the charge that human beings have never lived in a state of nature, ‘have no government at all, and live in this brutish manner.’” Think about it. Try to put aside the offensive reference to First Peoples, and think about the mind-set of certain “savage people in many places in America” and their view of government.

Next up: My favorite philosopher, Karl Marx. The “young Karl Marx.”

IV

Skipping over Hegel, a major omission to be sure, let us proceed directly to Karl Marx, who famously boasted that he had “turned Hegel on his head.” As far as I know, Marx never referred to Kant by name, but the vestiges of the phenomenological framework remained in his early philosophical writings, but with an important twist — the concept of “estrangement.” In this discussion of Marx’s ideas, particularly his early philosophical foundations, I will go into more detail, not only because I am familiar with these texts, but also because this is a “revisionist” interpretation of Marx which, I believe, is more authentic, deeper, and far more provocative than his later writings.

The critical idea here is “estrangement” — the process of becoming strange. For Marx (as for Hegel), everything was process. It is not a static world of things and people that are eternally and existentially separate, but one in which things become separate, evolve, change, and transform into other things.

Back to 1967 and the spirit of those times. “Alienation” was the word of the day. Everyone was alienated. That is how socially aware students around me, at any rate, expressed their discontent. The word was floating around in the popular literature too, based on the work of Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and others, that you could buy in cheap Penguin editions. I had heard that it was an important concept in Marxism too. But what was it, this alienation?

In my junior year at Yale, in the spring semester (first half of 1968), I took a great Soviet history course given by a guest professor, Wolfgang Leonhard. Leonhard was a most interesting man. Trained as a Stalinist communist in Russia as a child and teenager, he entered Berlin in 1945 along with Walter Ulbricht to lead the East German Communist Party (the Socialist Unity Party of Germany). Leonhard was the party’s Second Secretary, in which, in the Stalinist system, he was responsible for ideology — Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology, to be precise. He took his job very seriously, and he took his philosophy very seriously, too. Because he genuinely believed that the communist utopia was around the corner, he became horrified at what he saw happening in East Germany under the new communist regime. It was “anything but.”

Leonhard was well informed about what was going on in other communist countries in Eastern Europe, including Tito’s renunciation of Stalinism in 1947 and his break with the Soviet Union. Tito not only broke with Stalinist foreign policy; he did so on the basis of a theoretical critique of Stalinism as inconsistent with the idealistic vision of a communist society. Here, for Leonhard, was a way for him to continue to be a Marxist and a communist but to reject the reality of the Stalinist system under in which he had been indoctrinated and which he now realized was a fraud. He became so disillusioned and indeed alienated from that system that he fled — fled — to Yugoslavia in 1949.

So it was that in the Spring of 1968, when alienated students were rioting in Paris and occupying buildings at Columbia University, after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., I decided to ask Leonhard about this “alienation” thing as a part of Marxism. He became very animated and said,

“Ah! You must read the journal Praxis!”, with the German guttural “r.” I had no idea what he was talking about, so he explained that in Yugoslavia there was an important group of philosophers who grounded their work in Marx’s theory of alienation and who were using it as a tool to go so far as to criticize their own government for not living up to Marx’s vision. I knew that the Yugoslav government had criticized Soviet Stalinism, but now I was hearing that the same process was replicating within Yugoslavia, still based on Marx’s ideas, and that it was part and parcel of a larger body of thinking in other countries as well.

This was the kind of ambiguity within ambiguity that has always fascinated me. I had not yet read Marcuse or Merleau-Ponty but had a passing familiarity with Fromm and I wanted to learn more. More than that, this conversation changed my life.

V.

Google the word “alienation” and you’ll immediately find multiple references to “Marx’s theory of alienation.” It was his singular contribution to ontology (I freely and no doubt incorrectly use the term), and it all revolved around strangeness. In his early writings, which were in German, he talked about Entfremdung (estrangement). The process of becoming strange. (I would argue that the process of becoming strange is subtly different than the process of becoming alien. An implication of “alien” is almost hostility, whereas “strange” is just that — strange but without any kind of value judgment.) Marx also used the term Entäusserung — externalization — which is not interchangeable with either of the above; it is an objective process that does not depend at all on the perception of the “subject.”

The important thing here is to keep in mind that no matter what you call it, for Marx the philosopher, the process of things becoming externalized — strange, estranged, alien, and even hostile to the creator — is the central problem of all human existence, and the act of creation is the essential human characteristic. This is the core of the Marxian dialectic, Marx’s earth-bound inversion of Hegel’s abstract dialectic of ideas, the engine which for Marx drives human history.

(It is popularly thought that Marx spoke of “iron laws of history,” but I do not believe that is correct. It is true that some of his followers, particularly the Russian revolutionary Georgi Plekhanov used the term, but Plekhanov and others, including Lenin and Stalin, did this and much other violence to Marx’s thought. The notion of “iron laws” was floating around in the nineteenth century and the only instance, to my knowledge, Marx referred to them was in criticizing Ferdinand LaSalle’s “iron law of wages.” Marx was not so simple as to believe in predestination.)

While Marx’s predecessors, such as Kant, thought of the dichotomy between the human subject and the external world in a static form, where (for example, in Kant) it was just a fact that on the one hand there’s the sentient being perceiving the world, and on the other there’s that mysterious and unknowable “thing in itself,” for Marx these were two sides of the same coin, and points in a process that is a dynamic continuum. Marx particularly focused on the act of human labor — more accurately, of human creation.

When I create a tool or a book or an idea, I do so with purpose and an image of how it might look, function, and be an expression of my being. But from the moment of creation, that which I create becomes a separate entity. This is the process of “objectification” or externalization (I am not sure that Marx used these words interchangeably). Down the road, the tool might also be used by someone else (perhaps I intended it that way) for someone else’s purposes, not mine. The book may serve someone else as a footstool, and the idea might be misunderstood and corrupted by others. But what’s immediately important is that at the very moment of creation, it acquires an existence independent of me. Objectification.

Further, when that tool or book or idea is picked up by others, it has the potential of being completely disassociated from me. To others, it simply becomes a thing, devoid of my conception of it, my ideas for it, my love of it, my expression of self. This process of an object I produce becoming a completely independent thing is reification. If I make a lot of these things, they can be marketed by someone else, who may or may not adequately recognize my contribution by giving me the full benefit of recognition or equal value. (I’m skipping over the entire issue of the creation of money, which itself is a thing.)

In fact, that’s the usual way it works out in society, because in addition to a bunch of creators sitting around, there emerge social structures for the maintenance of order, in which some are uniquely given the legitimate right to compel others to behave in certain ways. And as it usually works out, the former people (the rulers) have more privileges than others, including the ability to set rules setting aside some of the proceeds of their subjects’ labor for their own needs as rulers. And so it goes. Economic power and political power become mutually reinforcing. This inevitably creates grumbling in the ranks, so the rulers have special people who create narratives that serve the purpose of justifying the rulers’ privileges, and they persuade the masses to buy into them in many clever ways. In their fully developed form, these narratives are called “ideologies.” And sometimes, religions.

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (Karl Marx, The German Ideology).

It can be argued that Marx’s philosophical framework was itself a product of 19th-century capitalist society and the role of the worker in it. Certainly, that is true. It is hard to imagine, for example, Marx’s theory of alienated labor and the marketization of the products of labor as arising in the Neolithic age, or even later, for example, in feudalism. In fact, in The German Ideology (1845–1846), Marx provided a detailed account (from his vantage point, of course), of the evolution of the man-society relationship (I use the term “man” because Marx used it, not because I prefer it) under succeeding forms of economic-social organization (which he called “the mode of production”) and its characteristic tools (“the means of production”). That in fact these forms were not always and everywhere unilinear is not particularly relevant here, because he was, indeed, a creature of his times and place in Europe.

So, if Marx’s philosophical framework was defined or influenced by its times, does that invalidate it as a means of understanding the human condition in general, or society today? No, I don’t think so. For one thing, capitalist society is alive and well today, with all the forms of oppression that troubled Marx, and more. He did not consider the role of information technology because it did not exist.

Much more seriously, he failed to account for the role of race and other forms of class oppression, a key drawback that was carried on by his disciples, but then again, the society in which he lived was not multi-racial. To be sure, he had opinions about Jews — he himself was of Jewish lineage — but he framed Jews in the form of their economic-social role in a much-misunderstood and maligned early essay, “On the Jewish Question.” Here, I believe that his central point was not that Jews were intrinsically evil or racially different, but that they were both tools of, and objects of, an oppression that was part and parcel of the capitalist society of his day. My takeaway from that essay — although he did use offensive terms about Jews — was a notion that was spreading throughout Europe in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Code: The Jews will not be free until all men are free. That is as true today as it was then, and not only for Jews.

What I really like about Karl Marx and his attitude toward social theory, despite his grumpiness, carbuncles, and bad temper, was his self-awareness of the limits of his theories and the extent to which they were vulnerable to misunderstanding and corruption. This was almost totally absent in his disciples, including, importantly, his partner, Frederick Engels (as well as Plekhanov and others, as mentioned above). In 1882 Marx famously said, “Moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.”

By the same token, where I really find fault with Marx were his serious lapses — one could argue, lasting almost 40 years — in speaking out against corruption of his theory by more simplistic thinkers — such as Engels (after all, Marx depended on Engels, the son of an English industrial magnate, for his income) and Russian revolutionaries such as Plekhanov. Perhaps these were not lapses at all, but instead vanity and complicity. It took the Yugoslavs, a half-century after his death, to turn ideological Marxism (Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism) on its head, as Marx had done to Hegel, and employ it as a methodical critique of what purported to be communist society.

This is all my personal take on how Marx laid out his theory of human existence and history in his early work — its strengths and its weaknesses. It may not meet the rigorous tests of all Marx scholars, but as a one-time Marx scholar myself, this is the thought path that has helped me grasp his historical and political theory that he developed as a young man.

And it all revolves around the concept of becoming strange.

VI.

“It’s not easy being green.”

Kermit knew whereof he spoke. He was strange. Being green in a world where everyone else is, say, purple (my apologies to those who love the color purple), is a challenge, because the natural consensus among the purple people is that it’s normal to be purple but that if there’s someone who is green, that person is obviously not normal.

This profound observation leads right into a discussion about race, but I’m not going there right now — although it might not look that way.

When you’re green and you look at the purple world, you see things that other people don’t see or really notice. You question why purple should be normal while green is not. You might notice that green people are treated very differently across the board just because they’re green, while the purple people don’t seem to notice that or care. You might wonder about their motives: Do they see you as a threat just because you look different, or because they suspect that you resent being treated differently? Nice green Kermit? Do they think you’re inferior and will never succeed in a purple society?

I use this example for a reason. While it obviously pertains to the injustice of racial oppression, it also pertains to the injustice of all class oppression. When we differentiate any group of people or things by their ascriptive characteristics and put them in special categories, we put them in classes. The characteristics may be skin color, economic status, economic role (worker or manager), religion, or so much more. Again, “as it usually works out,” these differentiations tend to reinforce each other, because in the real world, it all comes down to power and privilege.

Marx and many other social theorists understood that the tendency of most people — especially people in power but also those beholden to the people in power — is to see the world in “purple” terms. It’s too threatening or painful to do otherwise. Most people willingly go along with the purple narrative, and some narratives even stranger than that. It’s not easy to be green — so much easier to be purple or at least pretend you are.

So we’re back to ideology, the ruling ideas of the ruling class. The “false narratives” of every age.

Marx started out his intellectual career not as the foe of 19th-century capitalism, but as an intellectual brawler. He was constantly issuing lengthy, verbose, contentious diatribes against his contemporaries, in particular the Young Hegelians who were trying to ground Hegel’s detached dialectic of ideas in the real world but who, in Marx’s view, were just hopeless utopians who had no understanding of history. In the process, he developed a theory and world view in which everything — literally, every thing — had to be examined with a skeptical, inquiring, open, critical mind. He reserved special priority for the ideas of his age and of his contemporaries who were similarly challenging them but, in Marx’s view, not critically enough.

In 1843, the young Karl Marx wrote a letter to his friend Arnold Ruge railing against what he (rightly) saw as the half-hearted political reforms of the day. Among much else, he wrote the following to Ruge:

Now philosophy has become worldly, and the most incontrovertible evidence of this is that the philosophical consciousness has been drawn, not only externally but also internally, into the stress of battle. But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present — I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.

The attentive (critical) reader will immediately note that Marx might have done better by keeping to his own advice and avoiding “the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions” in his later years, but I’ll leave that hanging because while it is an interesting point, it is not directly relevant to this discussion.

Here’s the “thing”: Since estrangement — the process of becoming strange — is at the core of our human existence, we must constantly uncover and demystify the strangeness in our world if we are ever to make it a little bit less strange and more human.

Let me try to put this in more conventional words. If we wish to be truly conscious of the world around us and of ourselves, we must be prepared to subject it — and ourselves — to unrelenting questioning, never to accept received truth, always to compare intentions with results, and trust that only in this way can we build a better future for ourselves and those who come after.

“Moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.”

It’s not easy being green.

VII

There is nothing more alienating, no form of alienation more terrifying and more lethal, than alienation from one’s self.

For Marx, alienation from one’s self meant alienation from one’s own human essence, the essence of the whole person, the creator, the pre-division of labor “man for all seasons” (not his phrase, of course), the truly free human being. While Marx suffered from painful carbuncles and from the angst of the working class, and while he battled with those who disagreed with him and had contempt for his acolytes who he believed misunderstood his work, it is hard to imagine Marx having had crises of conscience or confidence and, I believe, unknown as to whether he suffered from any form of mental illness.

For those who do have biological tendencies toward depression, either unipolar or bipolar, or those who have suffered depression through grief or other misfortune, the sense of separation from how we normally see ourselves and alienation from our own personality, the awful awareness of being a complete stranger to our own selves is literally the most severe existential crisis.

This form of alienation is harder still on those around the depressed person, the beloved family and friends, because they are seeing before their eyes a person who looks the same as the one they know but acts very differently and seems unshakeable in the clothing of their new personality.

I will not dwell on this, but there is one important point I would like to make here that is actually relevant to the discussion about Karl Marx and his worldview, in particular about false narratives (ideology).

In the 1990s, when SSRI medications made their first appearance, there was book called Listening to Prozac by a psychiatrist named Peter D. Kramer. It became an instant non-fiction best-seller. As I had just started taking Prozac and was finding it unusually helpful, I bought the book and started reading it. At first, I liked the book a lot, because it validated my own experience of sensing a change in personality in myself, for the better. Then, as I read farther, it dawned on me that Kramer was saying that this wasn’t a good thing, this medication-based personality change. He seemed to be arguing that relying on medication to change one’s personality for the better — specifically, for relief from depression — was a crutch, an artificial and superficial remedy, a weak excuse of a substitute for the hard work of therapy and self-awareness needed for true healing. By that time I had had enough painful exposure through personal experience to this debate within psychiatry and therapy, and had regained enough self-awareness, to recognize that this book was not my friend. I put it down and eventually threw it in the garbage.

Obviously, Dr. Kramer had either never been depressed or was one of the lucky few who in the days before really effective psychotropic medicines was lucky enough to emerge from it without medication. The latter experience could explain his heated opposition to drugs; if I could do it, then you can too. But even more likely, regardless of the foregoing, was that he was mounting a vigorous defense of traditional psychiatry, especially “talk” psychiatry, in which as a practitioner he additionally had a vested interest in preserving, not to mention pocketing a whole lot of money from a pop psychiatry book written at just the right time.

Listening to Prozac did a great disservice to those suffering from mental disability of all kinds, to their families, and to Kramer’s own profession. It’s fine to hold differing views of the effectiveness of one method of psychiatry over another; it’s quite another to advocate against effective alternative treatments because, well, they are effective, and to make a lot of money by doing it.

I’ll acknowledge that I did not read Listening to Prozac to the end and that I may have missed nuances about the importance of treating mental illness through a combination of medication and therapy. I am sure that I was not alone in reading to the end of the book — who does? — because Kramer’s categorical statements in the beginning were quite enough for me. And by the same token, they were no doubt quite enough for other readers, including those who agreed with Kramer’s apparent crusade against medication, or at least against SSRIs.

It would have been instantly clear to Karl Marx, had he included the practice of psychiatry (which had not yet been invented) in the “ruthless criticism of everything that exists,” that the good Dr. Kramer was noisily and vigorously promoting an ideology that he clearly understood was threatening his worldview, his profession as he understood it, and his livelihood. Furthermore, as with ideologies in general, it resulted in the benefit of the few as against the misery of many, and in essence it was the exercise of an instrument of power. As all ideologies, it incorporated elements of truth with other elements of self-serving myth. And in the end, I believe, it failed gloriously.

SSRIs — Prozac and then Zoloft — have been a life-saving medication for millions of people suffering from depression. Granted, they are not the whole answer. For one thing, different types of depression respond better to other, newer medications. In my case, it was typically a cocktail of medications — complemented, importantly, by therapy, specifically Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — that helped to return me to my whole personality, and not only that, but to “improve” it through deeper self-awareness and changing unproductive habits of thought. But as my therapist once wisely remarked, “Gerson, before this therapy can help, you’ve got to get your meds straight.”

Not surprisingly, the moment when I truly felt that I had returned to my full self was the moment I “retired.” What “retired” meant in practice was that the small, peculiar nonprofit I was running (or helping to run, depending on when you looked), was driven out of existence by the funder. I was 65 and, through the generosity of previous generations and a federal pension, in no urgent need of further full-time employment. In particular, it ended my unfortunate stream of conflicts with boards of directors of any kind. I was free, like Marx’s man of communist society (the only time he ever wrote about it), to be a hunter in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, and a philosopher after dinner. (Also a pianist after going fishing.) The division of labor no longer had any meaning for me. Wage labor was a thing of the past. I was free to create things — objects and ideas — without the risk of adversarial reification and their becoming menacing, oppressive monsters. This was the third element of my recovery from depression which has lasted solidly to this day.

I did, in fact, listen to Prozac. I listened to it and through it, heard echoes of the self from which biology and circumstance had alienated me. Though I watched myself through a fog and often feeling like a stranger, the recognition of that stranger as myself was one of the biggest breakthroughs of my life.

VIII

Who wants to hear all this stuff? This whining and complaining about the travails of being green, this constant carping criticism, this self-pity, this skeptical and negative world view in which everyone walks around in a self-delusional fog? Not many people, not for long. It’s better left to the pages of inert magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker that you can pick up and put down whenever you want and impress people that you have read them. Given the choice, most people would much rather spend their leisure time talking about their grandchildren or the weather, or watching a sitcom, than hearing a rant about the Protestant Ethic or the false theology of Milton Friedman.

I can’t blame them.

But let’s continue.

IX

I’ve written two books, forty years apart. Both have the words “criticism” or “critical” in the subtitle. Whatever time-bound observations Marx made about the society in which he lived, what has survived in social theory is the concept of critical social theory. We find it especially in Europe, with the works of French philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and especially in the Frankfurt School. We find it in North America too, in the works of Marcuse, Fromm, Maslow (I think), and others, including some thinkers (but far too few) in my own “discipline” of political science (where I am not up to speed so will not name names). Much modern sociology and social psychology has a critical perspective. But what is it, this critical method? Why did I dare use it so presumptuously in the title of my latest book?

(The book has now been translated into Chinese. I still can’t get over it! So funny.)

Let me approach this question not by trying to bluster on about critical social theory in general. My only really deep exposure to this area was to a group of Yugoslav philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s who employed the Marxist critical perspective to criticize their own society and government. Instead, I will talk about what I know best, my recent book, From Pugwash to Putin: A Critical History of US-Russia Scientific Cooperation.

From the beginning, I felt that my including the word “critical” in that title was somewhat preposterous. This was not because I didn’t wish to be critical of one thing or another, because I had criticisms to make about a lot of things, but because it suggested a deeper, disciplined method, the similarity of which I had no idea how closely or distantly it resembled genuine critical social theory. I do not read much, I confess, and I read academic papers even less, though my favorite genre is critical history, both non-fiction (e.g., Barbara Tuchman) and fictional (Umberto Ecco).

Early in the process of writing, it dawned on me that I knew a lot of the actors in the subject area of the book, both from the United States and the former Soviet Union, and knew them well enough to ask them to talk with me. Not being a trained survey researcher, I didn’t quite know how to go about this, but I sensed that if I asked the same questions of everyone it would help. Moreover, I wanted to encourage folks to talk more deeply about their experience than just about the science, and I sensed that there were wonderful stories to be told, as well as a meta-story. And stories by their nature are made up of expectations, successes and failures, and outcomes.

So I developed four simple questions: How did you get involved, and what were you thinking? How did it go? Looking back on it, how do you evaluate your initial expectations? What are your favorite stories?

As I began the actual interviews, I quickly realized that a pattern was emerging. Expectations were not always commensurate with outcomes. Sometimes the subjects (interviewees) were self-aware of that, sometimes not. Then I realized that the meta-story begging to be told was about the meta-expectations and -outcomes, that is, the stated as well as unstated intentions behind the policies behind the collaborative structures and programs developed by the sponsors (governmental and nongovernmental) and their actual outcomes. Additionally, just as the nature of US-Soviet and post-Soviet relations was one that evolved and changed, so did the intentions, and indeed they were to a certain extent influenced by those external changes.

This perspective grew on me inductively as I had more and more interviews and delved more deeply into the history of US-Former Soviet Union scientific cooperation, wove the testimony of some of my interviewees into that narrative (in the first part of the book), and reflected on my own experience. To be sure, my experience was not that of others in similar positions and programs, and undoubtedly the outcomes of other programs than those in the basic sciences differed as well. But I knew only the story I experienced and writing a comprehensive, multi-volume work of similar depth was way beyond my capabilities or interest.

What really troubled me when I got to the end was the answer to the question I love the most: “So what?” It’s the question that too few programs of any kind ask continuously of themselves. I had a sense of the “so what?” but no objective measures. My approach leaned heavily on the subjective perspectives of the participants, including myself. Moreover, the conventional way of assessing the outcomes of basic research is to analyze the publication and citation data, the bibliometrics, but because Soviet scientists tended not to publish in the international scientific literature for many reasons, this approach was simply not available. Today, it is possible to at least look at post-Soviet bibliometric data, which by the way is not very impressive, but that is another matter. I would guess that if scientists were able to publish internationally in the Soviet period, it would look very different and reflect much better on the actual quality and volume of the Soviet scientific enterprise.

So what to do with all this subjectivity in the absence of objective measures? And how do you measure the outcomes of nonscientific goals, such as promoting US foreign policy? I could think of only one way: Do it subjectively and fess up to the shortcoming that it’s only subjective. So I did, for better or worse. I outrageously issued a “report card” on goals vs. outcomes, with a column for effort, assigned grades from A to F, and put it in the manuscript. Fortunately, the publisher (Indiana University Press) thought that was a bit over the top and not deep enough and suggested that I summarize the findings in prose, which came out much better.

I am very pleased with the book. It is controversial, and even some of the interviewees probably disagree strongly with one or another conclusion (I can think of a particular very senior diplomat whose views I criticized, though I hope respectfully). Some of my science-administrator colleagues will disagree on some points, including those in my home agency, the National Science Foundation.

The first pre-publication review I got panned the book totally. It was poorly written, “unreadable,” lacked a central argument (that criticism was repeated by another more favorable reviewer, with merit), was an “insider account” (which it was), and so on. This reviewer was a very senior academic authority in the history and philosophy of science. It was immediately clear that, despite the merits of some of his criticisms, his main problem is that I was not writing in the idiom of the history and philosophy of science, under which rubric the prospective publisher was considering the manuscript. I found the review offensive but didn’t take it personally, and actually had a good chuckle at it, because that wasn’t what I was trying to do, and because it was in fact extremely readable. That it was an “inside story” with many individual inside stories was, in my view, the stupidest criticism of all, unless you take into account the idiom of academic works on the history and philosophy of sciences. That said, one of the most popular and well-regarded works in that field lately have been books like Galileo’s Daughter and Longitude, which are both wonderful storybooks as well as important contributions to the history of science.

My recent book is not the only one on US-former Soviet Union scientific cooperation, nor the only one with critical comments. It does happen to be the only one with a historical account of the full range of cooperative and assistance programs after 1991. But what I will say is that while it indeed lacked a stated central argument, it did employ a critical method of looking at the subject, and ended up being rather highly critical of some of the results. It may not always have been totally fair, and certainly not totally objective, and I accept that.

It’s not easy being green.

X

Let’s go back a few sections and return to the feeling of being a stranger among my own people.

First of all, what’s a “people”? Is it a tribe, a racial group, a religious group, a genetic group, a group of citizens of the same nation-state, a social or economic class? It’s all of the above — and, I would argue, none of the above. It’s a metaphor. It’s a term we commonly use for a group of individuals who feel bound together by a sense of deep commonality, a natural commonality — a commonality that includes the group’s members and excludes others. Think about it. All people are people. What then, is the meaning of “my people”? If all people are people, then what does it mean to say “my people”? Indeed, what part of speech is the word “my”? Is it a determiner, an adjective, an interjection, or a pronoun? Again, it’s all of the above, depending on the context. While we use the phrase “my people” freely, myself included, it is in fact a highly questionable formulation open to different interpretation and misinterpretation, and to some extent a pure contradiction in terms, unless you accept the abhorrent notion of the ownership of people. What we really mean is, “the group of persons with whom I associate” or something along those lines.

There are those who argue that “Jew” is a racial category. These people are generally of light complexion and Eastern European origin. This particular interpretation is particularly offensive, because it usually goes hand in hand with some notion, conscious or not, of inherent superiority, at least in some areas. To me it is as abhorrent as any form of racism, no matter who is excluded from the community of Jews.

And again, just as with “people,” it depends on what you mean — in this case, by the word “Jew.” Does that refer to a Jew by birth or a Jew by choice, a halachic Jew or a nonobserver, a shulgoer or a totally secular person, a believer or a nonbeliever? I have my ideas and others have theirs. This isn’t the place to resolve the matter, because in that level of detail, looking at the full range of those questions, it’s probably unresolvable.

There is the interesting case of Avrum Burg, a veteran Israeli politician and former Speaker of the Knesset, who has announced that he has separated himself from the Jewish community because the word “Jew” has become debased and corrupted by modern Zionism, the form of Zionism (which he claims itself is a corruption) expressed in the new Basic Law of Israel. That makes sense, in my view, only if one conflates being Jewish with being Zionist, which is precisely what the new Zionists do, as well as mainline American Judaism at least used to tend to do. I do consider myself Jewish, very much so, but not Zionist, not in the modern sense as defined by Israeli law.

As for defining “Jew” by belief in God, that, too, is a spurious notion. What is “God”? Can we, in fact, “know” “what” “is” “God”? Does not knowing simply mean that you are an “atheist,” a person without “God”? Is atheism itself a belief system, one which includes some and excludes others? (Richard Dawkins seems to think so.)

My belief, briefly, is that “God” is a metaphor, created by humans out of a need for the expectation of reward or punishment for good behavior, meaning that behavior which (1) meets the Categorical Imperative and (2) is essential for the survival of the species. In that sense, “God” is an instrument of control as well, to be used and manipulated by those who by whatever social consensus have the legitimate power to coerce obedience by others. Marx voiced that interpretation when he called religion “the opiate of the masses.” Sometimes it surely is just that. But where he was right more broadly was to argue that even “God” was created by human beings to satisfy a deeply felt need.

The conception of “God” as an external being or force acting independently of the subject of action — the human being — is one of an externalized, alien force. But that is not the only possible meaning. The idea that “God” is within each of us is one that I accept, in the sense of that to which one ought to strive. A fiction, but a convenient and perhaps necessary fiction. Trouble, but good trouble.

There are various scriptural definitions of “God” in the Jewish tradition. The one used in worship is the thirteen-fold description of the attributes of God: compassion, mercy, forgiver, and all the rest. Those are qualities, but not a definition. And what’s a “definition”? Something that defines, something that limits, something that makes something else a thing. That is why, surely, even the name of “God” in the Jewish tradition is considered intrinsically unpronounceable. It is unpronounceable because “God” is not a thing, because if “God” were a thing, then “God” would be subject to all the vagaries of things, including creation and destruction, appropriation, ownership, alienation, and all the rest in our vale of tears.

The Jewish scripture about “God” that appeals most to me is the one that defies definition: אהיה אשר אהיה. This is variously translated as “I am what I am,” “I will be what I will be,” or “I am what I will be.” This is all a matter of choice, but choice matters. The first variant, to me, is static and defining. The second is closer to the mark, and the third obviously, is what I like the best. “I am” in the processing of becoming.

Becoming what? Well, before we become that which we will become, we do not know what that will be. We may have a sense of it, but we cannot know it. In other words, it is strange.

I’ve gone very far afield of my subject here, which is what it means to be a stranger to the Jewish people. Let’s go back there.

I’ve always found the genetic argument both abhorrent and fascinating. Abhorrent, because of the implications, for some, of different abilities, including mental acuity among others. This goes much deeper than most of us are willing to admit, just as the resistance to the notion that the overwhelming majority of American Jews are White.

On the other hand, Jews have genes and transmit them from one generation to the next. That’s a fact. But the fact is, first, that they’re not all the same genes; second, that modern microbiology has established that environment does have an influence on inherited characteristics; and third, that environment certainly includes circumstances of social privilege or lack thereof as well as other factors.

What are the actual genetics? This turns out to be really interesting. There are scientific studies suggesting that the kohanim come from an identifiable genetic stock. It is also a fact that Jews in general have different genetic origins. That makes sense, because the ancient Hebrews themselves, being wanderers, surely came from different places and different genetic groups. What united them, according to tradition, was common experience and common belief. The subsequent history of Jews varies considerably, including the potential genetic “bottleneck” in 14th-century Lithuania-Poland surmised by Arthur Koestler that greatly restricted the genetic diversity of European Jews at the time — but not of Babylonian Jews, North African Jews, and perhaps Caucasian Jews (i.e., Jews from the Caucasus). To say that all Jews share certain genetic characteristics that make them a separate “race” is highly problematic, as is the concept of “race” itself. Let’s rule that one out. We don’t need to rely on a willfully ignorant and tendentious use of genetics — eugenics, basically — to understand who and what is Jewish.

I’ve looked into my own genetic history and it’s fascinating. On the paternal side, going back hundreds of generations (with mutations), I am in the Y-DNA haplotype called “E-P177.” Its origin was northwest Ethiopia — probably in the vicinity of modern-day Gondar, which incidentally was the home of the modern-day falashas (Ethiopian Jews). It is related to another E group that is present in one-quarter of Ashkenazi Jews. In general, E haplotypes are the most common paternal genetic heritage of African-American males.

This E group was also composed of wanderers. In this case, it’s clear that they wandered across northern or central Africa at the time of the Bantu agricultural expansion, ending up in West Africa — where many of them, 3,000 or so years later, were later forced onto slave ships bound for the New World. Perhaps my little band of E-P177s took another route, north, up the Nile River, ending up building pyramids and whatnot for the Pharaohs, mingling with the Hebrews from Mesopotamia and other assorted folks. Then, if the Biblical Exodus actually occurred or even not, perhaps they wandered across the Sinai with other former slaves who escaped Egypt and ended up in the Levant, branching out eventually from there to other places — including the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. This is speculation, but the genes are not.

Checking through publicly available genetic databases, I’ve found that I am not the only White male with an E haplotype, not even the only White Jewish male. Complexions can change. My nose is a bit broad, like my father’s nose and his father’s nose. So what? Does that make me African-American? My father-in-law used to say facetiously that he was “Egyptian-American.” Maybe so! No, I am white, and I am White. That’s how it all worked out.

And I am a Jew.

For me, what that means is something very specific. It’s not the genes, and it’s not the blood. It’s not even the accident of birth. For me, it is a matter of conscious self-identification, not biological or historical accident. I have a choice to associate with other faith traditions — Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, animalist, pagan, Wiccan, atheist, or more. I choose to associate with the Jewish faith tradition because that is what my parents did, their parents, and their parents, to the hundredth generation. Also, the Jewish value system — at least as it’s interpreted today in the progressive wing of Judaism, the most predominant in the United States — most appeals to my values and sense of modernity. That does not mean that I love the song “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof — in fact, I have very mixed feelings about Fiddler and “Tradition” — but that tradition is a powerful motivator when all else fails.

Asking yourself, “What would my great-great-grandparent think of my decision?” at least makes you think twice before taking an action. And “Why do I say this or that in communal worship, why do I praise this or that moral value or attribute, while I don’t always do it in reality?” The words of communal worship, though they change with time, are deeply important. Words are symbols, just like names or idols or concepts of Divinity. But beyond embracing the unattainable and the ineffable, which we as humans cannot do, words are our most common ways of approximating it and sharing it with others. (I won’t get into psychedelics because, again, I’ve never experienced it and don’t even like being tipsy.)

With tongue in cheek, I categorize myself as a “Jewish Marxist atheist.” I’ve gone into the Jewish and Marxist part. The atheist part is that I simply do not accept the concept of a Prime Mover or of a Presence that is separate from human beings. That there are forces in the universe that operate on us and through us is certainly right, and that we should hold ideal behavior in reverence as a constant goal is certainly good, but that there is some thing that started it all or governs it all is, to me, totally unnecessary. It is not necessary that there was a beginning or will be an end. Those are beliefs, an expression of our finiteness, our own mortality. Of course, it’s patently true that there are always beginnings and end to various phases and forms and the like, but A Beginning and The End just don’t make any sense to me.

What matters to me, and what matters most in Judaism, are my actions, right here and right now. That is why I’m a Jew and why others can be Jews without all the blood mythology, genetic material, and so on. And by the way, we can be and are both Jews and other things as well. If we are not, then we are the one-dimensional beings described by Marcuse, always being the same thing and never striving toward or becoming something else, always sitting around and not creating some thing new, feeling uncomfortable with anything strange just because it’s strange, whether it’s food or people or ideas.

The Jew is a stranger. The “Hebrew” is by definition a wanderer, a stranger. The Jew, whether by circumstance and birth, or by choice, of light or dark complexion, in Israel or in the Diaspora, is a stranger. That awareness of being a stranger is perhaps our most important characteristic.

Accordingly, the words that define my Jewish identity are those of the Holiness Code in Leviticus 19:33–34:

“And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”

And in Exodus 23:9:

“And a stranger shalt thou not oppress; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Do we Jews always act as if we “know the heart of a stranger”? In the country in which we live, or in the State of Israel, which has actually ruled the stranger out of full citizenship? I’ll just leave that one hanging.

Coming back to the beginning of this section, what does it mean, then, to feel sometimes that I am a stranger among my own people?

It feels like being Jewish.

XI

This essay has been very personal, very much about me. Being strange. Being critical. Being green.

But it’s not just about me. It’s about all of us, or so I would believe.

In this essay, I’ve discussed in my amateur way a few different philosophical perspectives on strangeness and the human condition. Each provides special insights, and each has its drawbacks. If one had to choose — as many do, either consciously or unconsciously — which one would you pick? Which one would I pick? To some extent it’s a matter of personal preference; in other ways it’s an intellectual decision; and yet in others we are influenced by the world around us, our upbringing, the kind of society in which we live our lives and experience the world.

It might be inferred from my extensive and sympathetic words in this essay about Marx that I prefer the Marxist (or “Marxian”) perspective. Yes and no. One thing I very much like about it, about his early writing in particular, is the emphasis on the act of human creativity and the process of what happens next, on critical thinking as essential to understanding the world and acting in it, and on a holistic, systemic view of society — the way we live in its broadest sense and its relationship with the world of ideas.

There are drawbacks in Marx, too, for sure. One is a tendency of Marxist thought to be uncritical of itself (a foible it shares with just about every other system of thought ever known); another is its tendency to underestimate the power of ethnic identification and racism as independent forces, even though they may be subsumed under “false consciousness,” which they are but so much more. Marxist thought also seems to have the tendency to attract more simplistic interpretations by those dedicated to action and to turn into an instrument of oppression. This capacity of easily being turned on its head is not unique to Marxism, which itself was the result of Marx turning Hegel’s philosophy on its head. Indeed, another very interesting characteristic of Marxism is its ability to serve as a critique of socio-political systems created in its own name.

The faith-based perspective is also appealing in many ways. In establishing immutable principles for right conduct, it serves a useful function. As a reminder of the continuity of these principles over many generations, it can be a powerful motivator. But the faith perspective’s deep flaws are, first, its ostensible aspiration to universality but its tendency instead to be particular and exclusionary; and secondly, is its unparalleled capacity to become institutionalized and employed as a means of oppression and persecution. Some see Marxism, what I would call corrupted Marxism, as a subset of religion, and not without reason. But religion, at least those Western religions with which I am most familiar, are notoriously subject to these flaws. One might distinguish here between faith and spirituality, but for the vast majority of humanity, the way spirituality is manifested is through faith and faith-based institutions. This is a major drawback of the faith perspective.

I haven’t talked much here about existentialism, but I do not find it personally helpful. I cannot accept that existence is meaningless, for one reason: When we act as human beings, we do so with meaning, with intention. Thus, my existence is meaningful — literally, it is full of the meaning I give to it through my actions, through their intentions and consequences — even if, say, the entire universe cannot necessarily be said to be meaningful. My existence, the constant negative entropy I exert to remain in existence, is meaningful. To insist that life, therefore, is without meaning is to throw up one’s hands and despair of taking any action whatsoever, in any circumstance, whether it be an act of of caring for oneself, caring for one another, of learning, of discussing, or even of writing excellent plays about the futility of it all. Waiting for Godot is great theater and very thought-provoking, but its impact on me is its own self-refutation.

Then there is the phenomenological perspective, of which I’ve sketched out two variants, the Kantian and what in my philosophical ignorance I would call the “interpersonal” perspective. (I really must do more reading of these philosophers but I don’t know if I have the patience.) These appeal to me because, in fact, while I can “know” a tree or a person by recognizing it, I cannot “know” that tree or person in the deepest sense because I am not it. At the root of this dichotomy is ambiguity and uncertainty, which suits my preferences well. It is also the way things work at the most fundamental level, as we now “know” thanks to quantum mechanics. Indeed one might think of the notion that we can know “the other” as Newtonian because we can be pretty certain about its behavior, while the phenomenological perspective is more compatible with the quantum perspective, where even knowing is full of uncertainty. Would that there were a “field theory” of human existence to tie it all together. Alas, there is not.

What attracts me most about Kant’s philosophy, as I’ve said above, is the Categorical Imperative. Marx was probably not happy with that idea, because it is independent of time, place, and circumstance. The Categorical Imperative is closer to the commandments I’ve cited in the Jewish Holiness Code, but the problem there is that the Holiness Code contains other commandments that are not capable of being universalized and in fact are very particularly products of their day and its mores — and in some cases, completely repugnant.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative is based not on “pure reason,” the subject’s ability to “know” the object, but on “practical reason,” the ability of a rational being to act according to principles. Since that’s about the limit of what I can do, I find “practical reason” defined in this way to be a very appealing concept. It’s about the ability to understand that actions have consequences, but much more, because through the Categorical Imperative it demands that we try to understand the impact of those consequences on others in all cases, at all times. Since I have not studied Buber or others, I assume that the “interpersonal” variants of phenomenology have similar outcomes, but that’s just a WAG.

Still, there’s something else about the Marxist perspective, in the earliest writings of Karl Marx, that I find extremely attractive and important, and a link with Jewish belief and lore. It’s about the act of creation. In defining creativity as the essential human attribute and objectification as a more or less inevitable consequence, to be followed by alienation of the thing from its creator and even acquiring its own oppressive power against the creator, there is a presumption of wholeness, the breaking of wholeness through human action, and the striving to restore the initial wholeness — that is, the “synthesis” of the Hegelian dialectic and, for Marx, liberation, the overcoming of oppression and even the division of labor, the universal restoration of human dignity to all. This sense of striving toward restoring wholeness seems lacking in the rigidly logical Kantian perspective. It leaves with me the image of an AI robot logically calculating consequences and then acting according to a lifeless, rigid conclusion. That’s not how we live, or how we should want to live.

The fracturing of wholeness and the striving toward its restoration is what is called in the Jewish tradition תקון עולם (“Tikkun olam”), the repairing of the world. It’s based on the legend that in the beginning, God contracted the world to enable the act of creation, placing the Divine light in vessels that became corrupted in some way and shattered. Our task in the world, according to this legend, is to repair the shattered vessels and thus return it to its wholeness. I recently came across a very similar narrative in an Eastern religion, I think it was Hinduism, and I’ve seen videos of African-American Christians performing exactly this symbolic ritual. There are references to it in the Mishnah and it was more fully developed in Kabballah in the 17th century by the mystical Rabbi, Isaac Luria.

In Judaism there have been several interpretations of the legend of the broken vessels. In modern Judaism there are basically two schools of thought. The Orthodox interpretation is literal: restoring wholeness refers to eliminating idolatry, referring to Avram/Abraham’s act of smashing idols. This, while superficially appealing, makes no sense: Why, indeed, would those who defined themselves by rejecting idolatry wish to make restoring those idols to wholeness as their life’s work? Some might even argue that this seeming contradiction is in fact natural to fundamentalist believers who are so obsessed with the idols of rigid tradition that they mistake them for true worship.

The more common interpretation of the legend, embraced by progressive Judaism, is figurative, based on the mystical legend: that we are obliged to restore the wholeness of the world through acts of charity, compassion, forgiveness, lovingkindness, and justice — the very qualities of the Divine that we recite (repeating them three times, just to be sure) on the most sacred occasions. More than anything else, I believe it is this principle of תקון עולם and the solid commitment to it of Reform Judaism, that continues to draw me in toward the Jewish faith tradition as interpreted in this way.

But if our duty in this world is to restore its shattered wholeness, then what are we doing but striving to overcome its strangeness, striving to overcome our own strangeness and our particularism, striving toward the universality of the universe, ourselves included in it? And in doing this, must we not also apprehend its strangeness and our strangeness in order to act? To see the world through a critical lens? Through the lens of strangeness?

It’s a constant struggle.

It’s not easy being green.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Here’s something that happened just yesterday.

During my last visit to Kyiv (December 2015), I interviewed ten senior Ukrainian scientists and others. One of the scientists, a prominent astronomer and member of the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences, Yaroslav Yatskiv, subsequently invited me to be on the Editorial Board of his popular science Ukrainian-language magazine, Svitohlyad. I had known Yaroslav for many years and was quite honored to be invited, even though my role on the Editorial Board was to be more symbolic than operational. Since then, Yaroslav has periodically sent me copies of Svitohlyad in the mail. It is always a secret thrill to go to the last page and to see “Г. Шер” among the list of the Editorial Board.

Yesterday, I received a new package of Svitohlyad issues in the mail from Yaroslav. Humorously, the package came in a plastic wrapper from the U.S. Post Office apologizing that it had been damaged in transit The “damage” was simply that it had been opened. They didn’t even bother to tape it shut again. Clearly, Svitohlyad is a suspect publication!

And that reminds me of another story. While I was in college, being a Russian Studies major, I had taken out a subscription to Izvestiya so I could study modern, official Russian. One summer (1967), I joined an excellent program at Indiana University in which we spent five weeks studying Russian in Indiana, and then another five weeks traveling around the Soviet Union. That included my first visit to Kyiv, for about three-four days.

When I got home, my father told me that he had been contacted by the Postmaster of my home town, Teaneck, New Jersey (near New York City). The Postmaster and he were friends. The Postmaster said to him with concern, “Phil, I need you to come down to the Post Office and see something.” So my dad went to the Teaneck Post Office and the Postmaster opened up a safe (a secure vault). In there was a huge pile of thin brown envelopes addressed to me, each with a red-ink stamp from the U.S. Department of Justice saying that the contents were subversive publications from a hostile country. There must have been about thirty or forty of them. My dad laughed and explained what they were and why I was receiving them. I think the Postmaster had a laugh too, though he was obviously worried that his Post Office might have been an object of suspicion by the Justice Department and the FBI.

I continued to receive Izvestiya for the next two years, though I changed the address to my mailbox at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. I don’t think that the FBI took much notice of what went to the Yale Post Office, since Yale was a known haven of leftist intellectuals and subversive students. And from my Russian teacher, I learned the important phrase:

В Правде нет известий, а в Известии нет правды. (In Pravda there is no news [the literal meaning of the word izvestiya is “news”], and in Izvestiya there is no truth [pravda]).

But in Svitohlyad, even though I can read it only with difficulty, aside from seeing my name listed in Ukrainian, the good news is that science in Ukraine is still a broad object of broad interest, even though, in Ukraine’s war economy, it is struggling, along with everything else.

Drash on Parashat Vayikra

March 17, 2018

Gerson S. Sher

Today’s Torah reading, Vayikra, marks the beginning of the third book of the Torah, which in the Greek tradition we call Leviticus — “the book of the Levites” — and which in Jewish tradition is known as “Torah kohanim” — literally, “the law of the priests.” On its face, it is no more lively reading than the U.S. Federal Code. That is certainly true of today’s parasha, in which we read about the grain sacrifice, or the “mincha.” Here, we are treated to an interminable number of detailed instructions about animal and grain sacrifice as it relates to various offenses, both civil and moral. It all seems so remote to us nowadays, so archaic, so charming, so bloody — and so irrelevant.

But in fact, here we have the keys to an initial understanding of the Jewish approach to justice. For each type of offense, down to the most minute distinction, there is to be a carefully calibrated procedure of sacrifice, described down to the most microscopic, gory detail. The obvious lesson here is that we are not allowed to impose similarly harsh punishments for dissimilarly serious crimes. Hold onto that thought; we’ll come back to it later.

There are a few disturbing things about the way the text itself goes about defining crime and punishment. First, it distinguishes up front among acts committed by three different classes of persons: the Priests, the King, and the people. Today, however, we hold that all people are subject to the same laws and the same punishments. At least, that is our belief, if not always our practice.

Curiously, too, the text refers almost exclusively to violations which the violator acknowledges — or in other words, to which the violator confesses. Acknowledgment of guilt, the prescribed animal sacrifice, and where applicable, restitution, are adequate and suitable remediable measures, according to these passages.

We are left to wonder, however, what happens if the Priests or other clergy are found guilty of an offense — let’s say, sexual abuse — and refuse to acknowledge the offense, or if the King either does not acknowledge an offense or is not even aware that an act he has committed is a serious offense, if so judged by others: Can they just gut a goat and move on?

What seems completely irrelevant about these passages is that they prescribe a system in which animal sacrifice is sufficient to expiate most crimes, and most sins — at least those to which we admit. Today, we do not practice sacrifice. Or do we? For today, the sacrifices we demand are of a different kind — the sacrifice of one’s freedom, not to mention one’s life. One also wonders whether here, we have come full circle — perhaps, a curious inversion of the Akedah — from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice, and then back again, from animals to humans.

Let me talk briefly now about three different types of justice that are discussed nowadays in the literature on criminal justice: Retributive Justice, Restorative Justice, and Transformative Justice.

Retributive Justice is what we have been talking about so far today. It is also the most common conception of justice — crime and punishment. Its focus is the individual who committed the act and what consequences that person should suffer.

Restorative Justice is something we hear about less often. We have Restorative Justice when the offender physically meets with the victim and seeks not only forgiveness, but also reconciliation, and when the offender, having served their debt to society, is helped to rejoin society as a full citizen. This is more much challenging than Retributive Justice, and much less practiced.

Finally, the most challenging of all, is Transformative Justice. In Transformative Justice, society seeks to address the root causes of criminal behavior, what it is that drives people to commit criminal acts — be it poverty, racial and religious oppression, political exclusion, homelessness, and other deeply rooted social ills. While these and other evils do not account for all crime, much less excuse it, we ignore them at our peril.

Let me put some meat on the bones of this framework by applying these thoughts to an issue that we don’t often think about in our privileged community, and to what, in my view, we can do individually and together to address it.

The issue is mass incarceration.

Did you know that while the United States accounts for 4.4% of the world’s population, it accounts for 22% of all prisoners worldwide?

In other words, that the prison population of the United States per capita is nearly eight times the global average?

And did you know that while up until the late 1960s there were some 200,000 to 400,000 incarcerated Americans, afterwards that number shot up rapidly to nearly two and a half million today, a more than ten-fold increase?

Now, when there is such a massive jump in the order of magnitude of any phenomenon, there must be a special cause. It cannot be the case than ten times as many people turned bad almost overnight.

All the literature on the subject points to one major cause in this rise: the so-called “War on Drugs.”

Now, we know, from video-recorded testimony from none other than John Ehrlichman, that the Nixon Administration’s “War on Drugs” was nothing more than a lie, a fabricated pretext, to target their main perceived political enemies: the “hippies” and the Blacks. These were his words — “a lie” — not mine. Yet this war based on a lie — certainly not our only one — not only continued, but it grew, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, each of which seemingly strove to outdo its predecessor in their zealous protection of the Nation from certain types of drugs.

This was truly a nonpartisan issue: President Bill Clinton outdid even Ronald Reagan on the War on Drugs and he authored the “three strikes and you’re out” rule, and the African-American community will never forget it.

Today, we more or less take the War on Drugs for granted, as a part of the landscape. It is not. It is in fact a political declaration of war on racial and other minorities, as it has always been. It is Retributive Justice implemented regressively and unequally, rather than progressively and proportionately, as our tradition requires. And, as we know, it does nothing to address the real problems of drug addiction in this country, which go on unchecked.

As we have seen from today’s Torah reading, Judaism demands that “the punishment fits the crime” in a strictly, painstakingly proportionate manner. But Federal drug laws, along with mandatory minimum sentences that have recently been reinstated by the Department of Justice, have blatantly violated these precepts.

For example, the amount of cocaine by weight that triggers a mandatory sentence for possession is eighteen times less for crack than for powder. And before 2010, the ratio was a hundred to one. It doesn’t take much to figure out that these punishments are not only massively disproportionate, but also that they target very different demographic groups in our country. And if you happen to belong to the demographic that uses cocaine, not only are you allowed to possess far more cocaine, and not only is the punishment less harsh if you are convicted, but you are also more likely to be able to afford a good attorney who can get you off the hook entirely.

Here’s another example of injustice in the service of mass incarceration. In Virginia, when an individual is convicted of stealing anything of a value of more than five hundred dollars, she automatically becomes a felon for life, permanently losing the right to vote. Until this year, the level was $200, tied for the lowest in the Nation with New Jersey. In Maryland and DC, it’s a thousand dollars, and in many other states, double that amount. While the increase in Virginia was laudable on the surface, in practice it was tied to other measures that compensated by making other minor offenses more punitive. And by the way, most states allow ex-felons to vote either automatically or after a short process.

What can we do? Well, for one thing, we can demand from our elected officials to do better. And we can elect legislators and others who commit to doing better and we can vote out the rascals who perpetuate this brand of immoral injustice year after year. We can also advocate on a nonpartisan basis for better laws through our communities, including our houses of worship — as we are doing at Rodef Shalom through the “Eighteen in ‘18” initiative.

Let me turn next to Restorative Justice. The shocking treatment of ex-felons in this country — two-thirds of whom return to incarceration, often willingly, because of the challenges they face after release — is a shameful reminder that we have a long way to go in this respect. And while it affects members of every ethnic group, it overwhelmingly affects People of Color, especially in our area, and it is in fact part and parcel of the legacy of slavery in the United States.

If you have any doubts about this, consider the following statistics. One in three African-American males will be incarcerated at some point in their lives. One in seventeen White males will suffer the same fate. And we have already seen that 2.5 million Americans are in incarceration — about seven-tenths of one percent. Not much, right?

Now imagine, if you will, the following picture. Imagine that everyone shows up at Temple Rodef Shalom on Erev Rosh Hashanah. Assuming that males make up roughly 49% of our population, and considering that there are precisely 5,697 men, women, and children in our TRS sacred community, that means that if our congregants were representative of the national average, ten of the adult males you would see, plus or minus one, would actually be in prison; while if it were an African-American population, a staggering nine hundred thirty of the males, give or take, regardless of age, will be incarcerated at some point in their lives. How many TRS members have actually been incarcerated? You can probably count them on the fingers of one hand. If you have any doubt about the concept of “White Privilege,” which Rabbi Schwartzman discussed in her Erev Rosh Hashanah sermon three years ago, consider these numbers. We are indeed blessed, but in part by nothing more than the color of our skin.

Returning to the lot of ex-felons: Employment, mental health treatment, and housing are at the top of the list of challenges so overwhelming for returning citizens that a prison cell with three meals a day is more attractive than the life of a free person. And the costs to society, in terms of maintaining the most massive prison system in the world, the perpetuation of the cycle of crime, and the loss of these individuals’ productive power, are staggering.

At Temple Rodef Shalom, we are partnering to address this issue with community organizations in Fairfax County that work night and day on it, with the Fairfax County NAACP, and with other local houses of worship — including a nearby African-American church. Later this Spring, there will be a Job Fair for “returning citizens” — the polite code for ex-felons recently released from incarceration — to help them make contacts with local employers and to pool other community resources to provide support. As this project matures, we will be reaching out to this congregation to solicit your participation in the many ways, indirect and direct, that we as individuals can help. I hope that many will step up to meet the challenge.

Finally, there is Transformative Justice. This is the most challenging task of all. In this discussion, it means looking at the deepest causes of the blight of mass incarceration in America, in all its historical, economic, political, legal, social, and moral dimensions. And it asks the question: Why is a country that prides itself on being the most free society in the world also the country that surpasses all others, including tyrannical dictatorships, in the number of incarcerated individuals?

As a study just released by the Eisenhower Foundation points out, fifty years after the Kerner Commission report on the links between pervasive poverty and racism in America, the same patterns persist. Now, people will differ about the approaches to be taken, but if we refrain from taking them at all, we are no more than accomplices in allowing and enabling this cancer to consume us, our country’s resources, and our most precious resource: our people. Yes, accomplices.

A movement that I have recently joined that aspires to address these root causes of injustice in our society, including mass incarceration, is the Poor People’s Campaign, headed by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, who keynoted last December’s URJ Biennial. The campaign will involve forty days of direct action beginning in mid-May, including acts of civil disobedience, that will target a broad range of issues around poverty and inequity throughout the country. I will be the first to acknowledge that there may be better approaches, but this is one that has not been tried in earnest since the great victories of the Civil Rights movement, and it deserves — and it will get — our attention.

We read in Pirke Avot that “the day is short, the labor vast, the toilers idle, the reward great, and the Master of the house is insistent.”[1] And we also learn that “you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”[2]

Again — we are not free to desist from it.

For, in my view, if we desist from it, not only will we fail to carry out our Jewish obligations, but, in freeing ourselves from this work, we will also be less free.

Let us vow to ourselves this day, this sacred Shabbat, that while the work of combating injustice in this world will never be done, we will not allow ourselves to fail to engage in it actively in whatever way we can, large or small, and that we will do so in accordance with our Jewish tradition and teachings of fairness and righteous conduct.

Ken y’hi ratzon

May it be God’s will

© Gerson S. Sher, 2018

[1] Avot 2:20.

[2] Avot 2:21,