THE WISE AND THE HONEST - AND THEIR OPPOSITES
"A problem cannot be solved by the same level of acumen that created it." - Albert Einstein
"The best argument against democracy is five minutes in the company of the average voter."
- Winston Churchill
"Saying everyone is special is the same thing as saying no one is." - The Incredibles
"All the people are holy, every one of them. Why do you exalt yourself above them?" - Korach
The Scriptures use the word "fool" nearly two hundred times: over two hundred if you count the word "folly," which is a contracted form of "foolery." Why do we hesitate to use it as well in situations for which it is appropriate? William Bennett wrote "The Death of Outrage" a few years ago, pointing out that our present society is losing the ability to tolerate the idea some ideas or deeds other than murder are, or should be, endemically intolerable.
Has the concept of stupidity somehow become off-limits? In hope of offering clarity rather than flattery during the season in which we read year-by-year one of the most evil examples of political-religious use of flattery (in the Torah passage on the rebellion of Korakh) - I hope to offer the following ideas to foment health within reach of my words and my arms.
This is an unpublished sermon in essay format. I gave a different sermon this year on Parashat Korakh, because it was our shul's Hebrew School graduation service, and I did not want the students and their visiting families to hear so challenging a set of ideas when they were trying to celebrate the children's achievements. Still - I want to get these ideas on Korakh out there.
It has been my experience that stupid people do not appreciate being stupid, being known to be stupid, or suffering the effects of their own stupidity. This, Scripture states this directly as well. (Prov. 19:3)
Stupid people are often angry at God for making them stupid, angry at the world for noticing they are stupid, and angry at smart people for not being stupid. My congregants have often heard me say, "Stupidity and ignorance are not benign quantities." That is not a 'p.c.' comment - but it is an accurate one. Politicians play to these emotions by crafting messages that speak of "the ingenuity of the American people," the "enduring wisdom of the American people" - and ignore the wisdom of Winston Churchill's observation quoted above. That is how one gets elected using - you guessed it - flattery reliant upon the stupidity of stupid people.
Religious flock-building often falls prey to the same temptation.
Sermons, speeches, classes, and purchasable recordings tell ordinary (or less-than-ordinary) people their faith now makes them all extraordinary, their faith now makes them better qualified to give advice upon matters than non-religious people who have studied those same matters for decades, that their faith now enables them to add two plus two and get something other than four, that their faith gives them a pass on the tribulations of living in this world.
You can gather a fairly large following saying things like these.
If you take pictures of the crowd, you can use them to sell the idea "God is 'with'" your work. It is a formula that works - flattery has always worked on a certain sector of the populace. You can "focus on the positive side of the Bible" and fill a large stadium with acolytes - and when disaster hits some people's individual lives, you can cut them loose by telling them, "This faith is about joy," or "You of little faith," or other messages conveying the idea that the disease they or their loved one has, the reversal that has hit them, the evil done to them - any or all of these are somehow their fault due to their own sinfulness or lack of faith. This tactic gets the preacher, the congregation, the faith - and God - off the hook; and strands the hapless unfortunate with disaster for which no one who promised safety is anywhere near to take responsibility. Abraham Lincoln once said, "We dare not promise what we ought not, lest we be called upon to deliver that which we cannot." Well said - and in religious congregation-building, often unheeded.
The current Messianic "conference season" brings into high relief the dilemma that a room full of dancing idiots and a room full of dancing Nobel laureates look pretty much the same from enough of a distance.
Size as represented in publishable publicity photographs is really proof of little. Filling rooms with people of unspecific qualities, and then taking pictures of the "crowds" as "evidence" of God's "blessing" on the work has about as much meaning as showing people pictures of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies as "proof" God was "with" Adolf Hitler. Anyone who has seen Leni von Riefenstahl's landmark propaganda film for the Nazi party, Triumph des Willens knows the power of such images; but image-power does not equal truth.
The Messianic Movement's leadership integrity hit a new low point at a conference in which Pat Robertson, the founder of CBN was speaking. Robertson remarked to one of his Messianic Jewish hosts that he "had no idea the Messianic Movement was this big!" because the room was overflowing with more than two thousand attendees. The Messianic leader eagerly affirmed this to Robertson, and then referred to this moment in a letter to Messianic rabbis to validate his association's increasing habit of getting big-time Christian leaders to speak at Messianic Jewish conferences.
However - it was virtually all a lie.
The room Pat Robertson saw overflowing was not filled with Messianics: it was mostly full of Christians from the local countryside who had come into the conference that one evening for the sole purpose of seeing and hearing the famous Robertson speak.
It is one thing to lie to oneself. It is quite another to "lie for God" - when God defines Himself as "the Spirit of Truth," and states directly, "All liars go into the lake of fire prepared for the Devil and his angels." If I may paraphrase David Lean's Dryden in Lawrence of Arabia: "A man who lies has merely misplaced the truth: but a man who lies to himself has forgotten where he put it."
Limited people who cannot face their limitations try to find someone or some way to lie about them to others and themselves. The Israeli Zionist Movement faced the truth in 1949 that they needed better people in order to become the presence in the world Israel needed to become. People who did not fit the description made by Histadrut represenative and poet, Leah Goldberg, who said in their conference, "This people is ugly, morally unstable, and hard to love."
What remedy was needed by them - and in our era and work, by our Movement?
American revolutionary, George Washington, offer us an amplified version of Isaiah 60:10 - "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest may be drawn." It is the wise and the honest I am interested in serving. I would rather lead and teach one hundred such people than ten thousand of other qualities to whom I would have to lie to retain their good will.
I do not begrudge anyone their limitations: I have too many of my own.
But I would not offer myself as a surgeon to anyone: I am no surgeon. I would not offer myself as a good choice for a basketball team: I am no basketball player. I do not begrudge surgeons or basketball players their gifts or their skills. People who do not possess the gifts of scholarship or leadership should stop seeking flatterers who will tell them merely what they want to hear: and people building spiritual communities should offer people truth --- not false offers of immunity, power and standing they do not deserve and can never possess, or magical talismans re-cast as a quasi-Scriptural juju called, "faith." For accuracy's sake, let me say here the word "faith" (emunáh) in Scripture is more often than not, better translated as "faithfulness" - meaning the person's fidelity to what is known to be true: not some mystical talisman that enables people to do a Biblical version of magic, or get high in a morally-acceptable way called "being filled with the Spirit." Being filled with the Spirit in Scripture does not fill people with intoxicating spiritistic euphoria: it usually fills them with power to do good works or face off with evil. "The joy of the Lord" mentioned in Nehemiah 8:10 is not a feeling of joy in the person: it is God's "khedvah" - His level of pleasedness (sic) with His people's process of return to their moral and spiritual destiny.
To return to our central issue: saying "everyone is special" is the lie Korach told his followers to get them to rebel against those who were speaking the truth. Why? The truth did not elevate them ... and it led to a hard place, not an easy one. As a modern secular example: the entitlement mentality in some of today's communities of entitlement is disgusting to those of us who are a mere generation or two down from our Jewish ancestors who showed up in America against their will (fleeing persecution), and were as harshly despised, abused, and excluded as any other minority. Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents started with nothing, worked against the grain of prejudice (anyone who says prejudice against any group has ever been more harsh than that against the Jewish people is ignorant of the facts), and advanced themselves through hard work and discipline to achieve victory over the ghetto in one generation or two. So - frankly - those who, for the most part, stay in the ghetto more than two generations are, all things being equal, simply not choosing to do the work of getting out. Again - not "politically correct" - but accurate. A kid who chooses to put on gang colors instead of reading glasses is choosing something. A man who makes deals for drugs instead of for college loans is making a choice. Flattering people by telling them they deserve anything they want or need just because their great-great-great grandparents had something bad done to them might get you on CNN, and it might get you elected to Congress in the right district - but it will not serve the people you are flattering to get the advantage you seek. Even so in religious communities.
Yeshua of Nazareth told a man with the power to execute him on whim, "Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice." Concerning power, he told the same man, "You have no power but what has been allowed to you from Above." (John 19) Power, position, and authority do not automatically justify their holders, nor exonerate them for their deeds. Power is a passing trait, an illusion. It proves nothing, and in the end, it may end up being part of what defines a person as evil. The ethically superlative (not perfect) Sir Thomas More died unjustly a prisoner, and the perjurer who caused his death became chancellor of England, and died peacefully of old age. Which man do you think is happier now?
Parashat Korakh teaches us that just because something is what some may want to hear, does not mean it is what they need to hear. Moreover, just because saying a certain thing will get you what you want - whether it be a tangible object (wealth, success) or intangible benefit (power, prestige, political position), does not mean it should be said, or that you should get what you want.
Korakh wanted to lead because he wanted prominence and he wanted to avoid the desert journey and the warfare needed to take the land God had promised. It was not really "leadership" he offered. It was self-insulation and it was cowardice. Cowardice and lying go together into the lake of fire in Revelation 21 because they are linked.
A liar will not face the truth: a coward will not act upon it.
All the people were most certainly not holy - as Korach's own behavior proved in short order. All the people were not of the same quality or call as Moses and Aaron - as God's actions showed in short order. Saying everyone is special - everyone is smart - everyone is skilled - everyone is good - is just lying. Everyone is not special, not gifted, not smart, not skilled.
Some people are ordinary - some extraordinary.
As Tom Snyder used to say, "There, I said it, I'm glad."
As Rav Saul said it, "Have I become your enemy because I tell you the truth?"
The truth is - not everyone is holy - not everyone is good - not everyone is wise - not everyone is gifted. All human beings are created equal is a statement regarding their basic civil rights: it is not a global statement that all persons have an equal degree of gifts from On High.
There are some who can look at the image in their mind's eye of themselves riding on a light beam, and discern fundamental truths about how the universe is mathematically constructed - like Einstein; and there are some with acalclia – an architectural defect of the mind's physical construction preventing them from doing the most fundamental of calculations. There are some whose ability to read, think, and comprehend empowers them to make the most courageous of discernments, decisions, and actions - like Columbus or More; and there are some who cannot find their way through the most basic of reading or reasoning to a sound conclusion about safely boiling water.
God meets everyone where they are with what they have.
He does not make everybody in every manner the same.
To say everyman is an Einstein in some way is a lie.
To people desperate for self-esteem, it may get their body in your pew, or their money in your pocket: but it will, in the end, get the source of the lie an eternal stay in the lake of fire (Rev. 21:8).
To say everyman can become Warren Buffet is a lie.
To people desperate for wealth - or even provision - it may get their body in your pew, or their money in your pocket: but it will, in the end, get the source of the lie an eternal stay in the lake of fire (Rev. 21:8).
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest may be attracted.
Without the wise and the honest - we build a constituency by taking advantage of misery and incapacity: and these are not the foundation stones on which a genuine edifice for truth- and the one true God who is the Spirit of Truth - can be built.
"A noble person (or Movement) makes noble plans, and by noble plans he (or it) rises." (Isa. 32:8) Not plans to foster public appearance by contrivance, nor protect political position by connivery and nepotistic collusions – but by noble plans - noble actions - deeds, standards, and ideals that earn first Heaven's approbation - and then that of wise and honest people - who may then pledge to the effort their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors.
Rabbi Bruce Cohen
4 July 2009