The Rainbow as Response to Corruption
1 Heshvan 5772 / 29 October 2011
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg
A man parks his car in front of the main entrance of the Capitol Building in Washington. Immediately, a member of the security team goes after him yelling: “Sir! Sir! You can’t park here! All the congressmen are about to come out!” The man replies: “Don’t worry. My car has a good alarm.”
Does everybody know there’s an election coming up? Does anyone care? It might be that in Maryland, and particularly in Baltimore, some of the results are a foregone conclusion. And, of course, non-congressional election years historically draw little interest and low turnout, though we know that local elections are critical! But I suspect that there’s something else going on, something larger and more troubling. I don’t have to tell you about discontent or disillusionment with politics and politicians. Whether the Occupiers, the Tea Partiers or everyone in between, it seems that the one thing most Americans can agree on is that we’re fed up. I’m from Chicago where if we didn’t invent political corruption, we certainly perfected it. I lived through Blagojevich and Roland Burris. I remember the infamous “midnight raid” when Mayor Daley sent a team of bulldozers, under cover of dark, into a small airport he wanted demolished. The morning light revealed giant “X’s” plowed into the runways. In Baltimore, too, this seems like a quiet year. No one has resigned or been indicted lately. How sad that, though I don’t believe it’s true, there’s a perception that this is the exception, not the rule. But, lest anyone think that corruption is a new phenomenon, think again. In fact, we need look no further than this week’s parasha.
Vatishachet ha’aretz lifnei HaElohim, “The earth became corrupt before God …” (Gen. 6:11).
What is God’s response to this widespread corruption? As our Bar Mitzvah explained, it is to start over. God gathers the one decent family, has them build an ark to save themselves and many animals, and then destroys all remaining life on planet Earth.
But, hashchatah, corruption, doesn’t end with the flood. Human beings find new ways to abuse their enemies or their loved ones, new methods of misusing power or misappropriating funds. Indeed, already in the Torah there is a sense that politics can be inherently corrupting. In Deuteronomy (17:14-20) the people are cautioned that should they set a king over themselves, he must behave with fairness, moderation and humility. He must not keep too many horses, amass too much wealth or collect too many wives. Moreover, the king is to keep a copy of the Torah itself with him as he sits upon the throne, using its wisdom to guide his decisions. There is an apparent awareness of power’s corrupting tendency, a problem as common in antiquity as it is in our day. It’s not surprising, then, that when the Jewish people come to Shmuel ha’Navi, Samuel the Prophet, and demand that he appoint a king, Shmuel cautions them about the dangers of the monarchy: “The king will draft your sons into his army. He will seize your choice fields, vineyards, and olive groves and he will take a tenth of your flocks” (I Sam. 8:10-18). And Shmuel’s own family was not immune to political corruption. When he appoints his sons Yoel and Aviyah as judges, the verse tells us “they were bent on gain, accepted bribes, and subverted justice” (I Sam. 8:3). This becomes the impetus for the people’s monarchic ambitions: they were forced to choose between the corrupt leadership of the moment and the potential abuses of a new regime. Sound familiar?
When faced with these kinds of choices, it’s easy to despair. But, we humans, we Jews, do not have the luxury of simply starting over. There’s no magic button to reboot the world as we would a video game. For us, “game over” means game over. We must confront this world, including its deception and injustice, with other means. Consider the sheva mitzvot b’nai Noach, the 7 Noahide laws named for the hero of this week’s parasha. These are the commandments which apply not just to Jews, but to all of humanity. The first of these mitzvot is dinin, translated as “law,” but understood by Nachmanides to indicate a system to deal with fraud, wages, damages, bodily injuries, loans, sales and commercial dealings. In other words: civil law. Governance is at the heart of what it is to live in a functional, let alone just, society.
But, long before our sages attempted to articulate the content and import of these Noahide laws, Noah himself witnessed a great miracle. I speak not of the prophetic encounter, the opening of the floodgates or the salvation of Noah’s own family. Rather, I’m talking about the moment immediately following the flood. God says: “I have set My bow in the clouds, and it shall serve as a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth” (Gen. 9:13).
As scholars explain, the bow, in Near-Eastern mythology, was understood to be the god’s weapon of choice. Here, as occurs so often in our tradition, we have the sacred recontextualization of an ancient practice. The Kadosh Baruch Hu, the one God of the Universe takes the bow, choice weapon of war, and lays it down, declaring a truce if you will, an eternal covenant with humanity against such widespread destruction. In the Torah’s words (8:21), “…the Lord said to Himself: ‘Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the inclinations of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.’” Two things are worth noting in this verse. First, though God has said that no such destruction will come from heaven, we humans may still have this capacity – in an age of climate change or rogue states like Iran seeking nuclear weapons, we know that man-made cataclysm is not beyond the realm of possibility.
The second point is connected with the first, God will spare future generations not because those generations will be without hashchatah, without corruption, but because God recognizes that the capacity to do evil is simply part of our makeup. But pay close attention to the verse, “the inclinations of man’s mind are evil from his youth.” Not from birth. In the great nature/nurture debate, God, creator of the natural world, chooses nurture. The Jewish take is that bad behavior is learned in childhood. The obligation of a just society is to teach young people that justice derives from good and fair governance. The covenant of Noah, then, is didactic, revealing the pitfalls, but also the great potential, of human leadership.
And what could be more educational than the rainbow? Children love rainbows. Our old condo in Chicago had these lead-glass windows which would refract the morning’s light and our kids would run around the living room trying the grab the colors. I’m guessing that few of us have thought of the bow in the Noah story as a divine weapon of war. The rainbow evokes feelings of freedom, beauty and grandeur. Think about it: who doesn’t feel like a kid again on a rainy fall day, when the clouds have broken and the sun teases out a palette of colors, stretching them across the sky? Rainbows are a glimpse of the divine; a part of us thinks “if the light of heaven can be refracted into such a magnificent array, perhaps we too can discover the secrets in that light.” It is a sign of promise, a symbol of hope in a broken world. In giving us the rainbow, God has provided us a weapon against despair.
But, despair is what so many of us feel when election season rolls around. When faced, year after year, with candidates who are often uninspiring, sometimes contemptible, how do we choose? Our tradition demands more of us than to reach for a point just beyond the lowest common denominator. We’re supposed to reach for the sky. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote “A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.”
The issue of despair is dealt with in our legal texts as well. For example, the Talmud (Bava Metzia) discusses the issue of lost and found objects. Let’s say that you lost a $20.00 bill. There are no specific markings on the bill that would reveal you to be the money’s owner. After a day or so, having retraced your steps, you decide that there is no way you will come to recover the bill. You despair of your ownership of that $20.00. This is called ye’ush, and once you have become mitya’esh, the object is reclassified as hefker, ownerless property and the lucky soul who stumbles upon the bill may keep it. The same is true in the political process. When we despair, when we do ye’ush with regard to an election by not voting or perhaps even by casting a protest vote, we relinquish our hold on the electoral process, rendering the election hefker, ownerless.
But this is something we cannot afford to do. The mitzvah of dinin, first of all universal laws, demands our commitment to a just and ordered society. And though it is not perfect, I would suggest to you that democracy, our republic, is a pretty darned good system. But it only works if the citizens of this country, each one of us, see it as our responsibility, more than our right, to cast a vote. Hillel said, Im ain ani li mi li, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” God put down the bow, but we are still capable of destroying the world – not likely in one fell swoop, but in countless moments of apathy or indifference or even despair. Perhaps certain government officials are corrupt because they did not have the right kind of guidance in their youth, it’s hard to say. Butdemocracies as a whole are corrupted because of what Heschel calls the “sin of indifference.” We should find a way to reclaim our ownership of the democratic process. Rabbi Hanina, the great Mishnaic sage, teaches us (Pirkei Avot 3:2): “Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for fear of it, people would swallow one another alive.” For the religious person, anarchy is no solution and despair is simply not an option.
Two things to keep in mind as you walk into your polling place on November 8th and on future election days. First, oftentimes, the choices aren’t as bad as they seem. We have a tendency to view political corruption as endemic, even pathological, a disease to which all politicians are pre-disposed. This is not the case. Certainly it is true that power corrupts. However, as we challenge ourselves not to give in to despair, this also means that we should try to have a little faith in our fellow human beings. God has laid down the great bow in the sky. No longer pointed at earth, it is now pointed at the heavens. This is not just an act of conciliation on God’s part; it is also a profound act of faith in humanity. If God has faith in us, not to draw back that bow string, not to litter the Universe with the basest of human potential, should we not have faith in one another? Most politicians, I think, run for office because they want to make a difference, because they want to change our city, our state or our country for the better. And some get lost along the way.
Which brings me to my second point: representative democracy doesn’t end the minute you walk out of the ballot booth. It is not only the responsibility of those elected to office to curb the tide of corruption in politics. I often advise wedding couples: don’t focus too much on the wedding itself and forget about the marriage. There is more to politics than Election Day. We must find a way to take active possession of the process, to lobby and advocate for sound decisions. I don’t have to tell you how to do this. You know how. We should simply remind ourselves that the phone calls, the meetings, the letters do make a difference.
This is the blessing of democracy – here and in Israel. When Shmuel the prophet warned the Jewish people about the dangers of having a king, he wasn’t simply criticizing human leadership. The problem with kings is that too much power is consolidated in the hands of one person. As Jews, we know that only one being has the capacity to hold such power, and to wield it with compassion, wisdom and grace. As Americans, too, we learned that lesson when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence and bid farewell to the monarchy of King George. But our country, if it is to remain dedicated to the ideals of that revolutionary document, must have strong and just leadership. It is our responsibility, each one of us, to make sure that we have good choices. And it is our responsibility, each one of us, to hold our candidates and elected officials accountable.
Like Bar/Bat Mitzvah, voting is an activity that signifies coming-of-age. Remember the first time you stepped behind that curtain, punched your ballot, perhaps put on one of those cheesy “I voted” buttons or stickers? Remember how you, that person who stepped back into the sunlight, were somehow changed, more grown-up? At its best, voting is much like the rainbow, bringing together two aspects of ourselves: the wary and rightfully skeptical adult who understands the potential for corruption, but will not yield to despair and the child who, filled with wonder and promise, gazes up at the sky and dreams of a world rededicated to the best of human potential.