The "Orthodox and Liberal" Post I've been meaning to write

The Israeli TV series "Serugim" about single religious people in Jerusalem will always have a special place in my heart. For one thing, watching episodes online from an apartment in San Antonio, Texas helped me make up my mind to try living in Israel. But more importantly, it was one of a very few artistic self-representations by modern Orthodox people, and in a lot of ways for me it hit the nail on the head. It told the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves, and one of the most meaningful presentations came in the first episode.

In the last part of the episode, a lead character goes from a warm and full synagogue to an intimate Shabbat dinner with friends, and ends the night at home in his apartment alone, taking a magazine to sit on the floor in the dark hallway so he can read by the only light that's on - in the bathroom. This scene has stuck out in my mind for years because first of all, it's incredibly accurate and the kind of thing that only happens to Sabbath-observant people. But I think one reason it has stayed with me is because it speaks to something deeper. (Long lead-in for what's supposed to be a political blog post, no?)

Sitting in a dark hallway to read by the light of the bathroom because you won't turn on the lights is a distinct and profound portrayal of something significant that can be pretty hard to represent. The character in that show does something difficult as a matter of principal and commitment. I want to hold up that example as the right frame of reference when talking about Orthodox Judaism and liberal politics.

The reason I think it's so important to set the stage in this way is because there's something that really tears at me about most attempts to address the relationship between religious Jews and American politics (this article for example). Too often the subtext or message of discussions of "the problem" of being observant and liberal (or liberal people being observant) ((or observant people being liberal)) is that the author sort of anchors on there being a right answer, or focuses on the "complaint" part of the struggle these people experience. That posture of conflict seems like the natural one, because if that tension weren't there, you wouldn't be reading an article about it. But the problem is starting from the tension or conflict as if it were resolvable or as if writing about it were part of the resolution does particular violence to part of the very nature of the thing it talks about. For many of us, being religious is about commitment and principle, and so focusing on "the tension" or "the conflict" among more than one set of commitments rather than the commonality or strength of those commitments sort of undermines the point of the whole thing!

God created the Universe and wrote the Torah and gave it to the Jewish people. And sometimes what that means for us is joining together with a hundred people at warm and uplifting kabbalat Shabbat, and sometimes that means sitting on the floor in the hallway in your own apartment reading by the light of the bathroom.

Learning from the life of John Sidney McCain

One remarkable feature of the life of Senator McCain that stands out from among thousands and thousands of heros and statesmen whose lives I've studied at one point or another is the tremendous ability to overcome or improve on previous shortcomings. Three examples come to mind.

As a young person, he was somewhat reckless and rebellious and it seems clear that if his father and grandfather had not been high-ranking officers, he would not have had the opportunity to go to Annapolis or become a pilot. In the course of events, he became a prisoner of war and underwent severe torture when the opportunity to use the ties of privilege could have saved him. Senator McCain wrote about this period quite a bit and I haven't read those books, but it is easy to imagine that being presented with real adversity actually changed him from playboy to the scion of a great tradition of service and sacrifice.

In the years after he came back from captivity, he had a wife and young children and it is well-known that they had significant marital difficulties and divorced. Now overcoming this kind of trauma would be understandably hard on any couple, but his first wife has described that time saying, "John was 40 but he wanted to act like he was 25 again." Normally I wouldn't want to go around talking about anyone else's personal lives, but the reason I bring all this up is to observe that not only did McCain remarry and raise a second family, the children from his first marriage seem to have a good relationship with him, his second wife and their children, and he and his wife adopted a Bangladeshi orphan with a cleft palate in 1991, which is just about the most loving thing that I think a person can do. His second wife and their children also had a husband and father who suffered great trauma, but what was different? One has to imagine that he found a way to change.

As a young senator, McCain was involved in a scandal about helping a wealthy donor in which he was cleared of wrongdoing, but it gave rise to the appearance of impropriety. He could have stuck by the line that he was cleared and been done with it, but instead he spent the next fifteen years with anyone and everyone to advance the cause of campaign finance reform. His collaborator Sen. Russ Feingold wrote a very fine remembrance of their work together, which I recommend reading.

"The evil that men do lives after them.
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar."

Don't take what I'm writing here to be a support for or indictment of any position or person in common discussion. I'm aiming for something deeper. The things that matter most for the next 30 or 40 years are being born today, but are not apparent to any more than a few, so what really matters is not how we respond to what's in front of us today but how we prepare for what we can't really anticipate. This capacity to grow, to overcome and to change would be one thing we can all find to emulate in the life of Senator McCain.