Yonason Goldson
I'm a Talmudic scholar and professional speaker, as well as a former hitchhiker and circumnavigator, applying ancient wisdom to the challenges of the modern world. I've published seven books, including, Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for success and happiness from the wisdom of the ages.
Homepage: http://yonasongoldson.com
The Answer
Posted in Culture, Philosophy on September 12, 2008
Intuitively, we believe that it is greater to be virtuous of one’s own initiative than in response to orders. If so, why does Torah tradition consider it more meritorious to follow commandments than to serve without imposed obligation? Here’s the most concise answer I’ve seen.
In the long run — Parshas Ki Seitzei
Posted in Education and Parenting, Weekly Parsha on September 11, 2008
One of the most tragic stories I’ve ever heard was recounted by the late Canadian-Jewish writer Mordecai Richler. Raised in an orthodox Jewish home, Richler worked as a teenager in his family’s store. One day, as he was tidying up behind the counter, he discovered a second set of the weights his father used to measure out goods upon the store’s old-fashioned scales.
Richler immediately recognized these weights for what they were: dishonest. By using a lighter set of weights when selling, his father would have to give his customers less for their money. By using a heavier set of weights when buying, he would get more for his own money.
The young Mordecai Richler immediately recalled the prohibition from this week’s Torah portion: You shall not have in your pouch separate weights – a large one and a small one … a perfect and honest weight you shall have, a perfect and honest measure you shall have, so that your days will be lengthened in the land… (Deuteronomy 25:13-15).
When Richler confronted his father, he was told: “That’s Torah; this is business.”
Mordecai Richler decided at that moment that he would never again have anything to do with Torah. He never did.
The Torah not only prohibits the use of dishonest weights; it prohibits us from even having them in our possession. Rashi comments that, if we violate this prohibition, we will have nothing, implying that one whose business dealings are less than upright will see no profit in the long run.
But Rashi’s words suggest even more. Why does the Torah forbid even ownership of such weights? Because there is no purpose for them other than dishonesty. The temptations of the material world are so compelling and so persistent that it is not enough for us to resist them – we have to distance ourselves from them to the limit of our ability. If we do not, we might escape their influence ourselves, but we will not be able to protect our children who, once exposed, may not have the strength of character or the resolve to follow the path of virtue.
We can always find endless rationalizations for sidestepping the law. It’s only a few pennies per customer; my suppliers are charging me too much to begin with; everybody else does the same thing. In the short term, we may see benefit from our infidelity. But in the long term, when our children either absorb our distorted values or recognize our hypocrisy and reject Torah values altogether, then we will have cut ourselves off from the future. Without the legacy of our children to carry on our defining mission, we will truly, as Rashi tells us, be left with nothing.
By trusting in ultimate justice, by distancing ourselves from dishonest practices, then we will gain more than success in business. “If you do so,” Rashi tells us, “you will truly have everything.” The self-respect that accompanies virtue is its own reward in the short run; the gratification of seeing children grow up with self-respect will be the reward in the long run.
Tripping over my tzitzis — Parshas Ki Seitzei
Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Weekly Parsha on September 11, 2008
There is much symbolism contained in the fringes Torah observant men wear at the waist, and many stories about how those fringes can send a powerful message, sometimes to the wearer and sometimes to the observer. Here’s a little bit of both.
Balancing the Scales of Freedom
Posted in Holidays, Jewish Unity, Politics on September 10, 2008
Originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the week after 9/11, between Rosh HaShonah and Yom Kippur.
It was Judgment Day — exactly one week after the World Trade Center buildings collapsed and so many illusions along with them.
“Judgment Day” is the expression found in the traditional liturgy for Rosh HaShonah, the first day of the Jewish new year. And as I stood in the midst of the congregation intoning the High Holiday prayers, the vision of exploding passenger planes and twin towers crumbling to dust hovered before my eyes.
On Rosh HaShonah we will be inscribed … who will live and who will die … who by water and who by fire … who by storm and who by plague … Who will have peace and who will suffer … who will be cast down and who will be exalted.
The judgment upon Jews became kinder after the United States opened her doors to us a century ago. Where no one else would have us, America took us in, allowing us to live both as Americans and as Jews without persecution.
Yet for all that, American Jews often feel torn by opposing cultural forces, especially approaching our Day of Judgment in a society where there is no greater sin than “judgmentalism.”
Without judgment, however, society cannot endure. As good citizens we must judge others – not based on race or religion but upon actions and behavior. And we must judge ourselves as well, by constantly reexamining our motives and our prejudices and our values and our goals. To condemn even this kind of judgment as a threat to freedom is to retreat from our responsibility to discern right from wrong; it is to embrace the illusion of absolute theoretical freedom – moral anarchy – which is in reality no freedom at all.
September 11 brought us face to face with moral anarchy in the form of incomprehensible evil. Perhaps the first step toward confronting it is to remind ourselves that freedom is not a right – it is a privilege, and privileges carry with them obligations that are often inconvenient and occasionally painful. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that the tree of liberty must sometimes be refreshed with the blood of patriots, he warned that the threat against freedom can only be met by not taking freedom for granted.
Freedom is not democratic, as less than a score of suicidal zealots understood when they commandeered four transcontinental airliners. The duties of freedom are non-negotiable, as New York firefighters and policemen understood when they rushed into crumbling skyscrapers. And the rules of freedom cannot always be legislated: sometimes we have to choose between necessary evils, as the passengers aboard United Airlines flight 93 understood when they drove their plane into a Pennsylvania field.
These are the kinds of judgments we must make, every day and every year, to preserve our society, all the more so in a nation built out of so many cultures and beliefs as ours. Every freedom of the individual cannot be permitted if it threatens the collective, nor can every interest of the collective be observed if it oppresses the individual. But when we share the collective will to make our society stable and secure, then the individual will set aside his personal freedoms for the national good and the nation will bend over backward to protect individual freedom.
This is the mark of a great civilization, and it rests upon an informed and devoted citizenry prepared to debate, sometimes passionately but always civilly, the moral direction of our collective journey.
This Rosh HaShonah I stood shoulder to shoulder with friends and neighbors singing ancient liturgical poems in praise of our Creator, just as so many Americans stood together the week before singing “G-d Bless America.” There were no agendas, no politics, no grudges, no rivalries. All of a sudden we were one nation, indivisible, a people with one noble history and many noble ideals whose differences vanished in the shadow of our many common values and common goals.
As the Jews have had ample opportunity to learn, now America has learned that nothing brings us together like a common enemy. What we have yet to learn is how to continue to stand together even in times of peace.
All the news that fits we print
Posted in Culture on September 9, 2008
Nevertheless, as long as we can count on an enlightened public to make an informed choice come election day we can all sleep soundly at night.
E-murder and the spirit of the law — Parshas Ki Seitzei
Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Weekly Parsha on September 7, 2008
Last week, Federal Judge George Wu refused to dismiss charges against Lori Drew, the middle-aged mother accused of creating a fictitious MySpace persona to befriend and then humiliate 13-year-old Megan Meier, who subsequently took her own life. The indictment stands, and Ms. Drew will stand trial.
What is the Torah view? On the one hand, the sages compare embarrassing another person to murder. All the more so, it might seem, if embarrasment actually leads to loss of life. On the other hand, Jewish law quite clearly imposes punishment only upon the actual perpetrator, and only in the case of direct cause. Neither criterion seems to apply to Ms. Drew.
How United States law should address such cases will be, ultimately, determined by the justice system. But the defending attorney’s assertion that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is “unconstitutionally vague” warrants some discussion.
In Deuteronomy 22:8, the Torah commands, “When you build a new house, you must construct a parapet around the roof, so that you incur no guilt of blood if a fallen one falls from it.”
According to the Jewish understanding of Divine Providence, there are no accidents. If a person stumbles, falls, and dies as a result, then he was already a “fallen one,” i.e., his death had already been decreed on High.
Nevertheless, the Torah obligates us to do all we can to prevent such “accidents.” The more concern we show for our fellows, the more merit we have collectively and the less our society suffers from incidents of apparently random violence. If we are careless, abandoning our fellows to fate without regard for how we are integrally connected to them, we bring upon ourselves the guilt of their blood. It is almost as if we killed them by our own hands.
We all respond with revulsion to the cruelty of psychological harassment, even where it slips through the cracks in the law. But careless disregard for the well-being of our neighbors is only a little better, and nowhere near good enough by the ethical standards of the Torah.
Bribery of the soul — Parshas Shoftim
Posted in Weekly Parsha on September 4, 2008
Do not pervert judgment, do not show favor, and do not accept a bribe, for bribery blinds the eyes of the wise and distorts words of truth.
Deuteronomy 16:19
The Torah’s admonitions, although unsurprising, nevertheless make us wonder. Are not all three injunctions expressions of the same idea, particularly since the preceding verse has already commanded us to judge righteously?
Rashi addresses the question, suggesting that the prohibition against perverting judgment applies to the verdict, the prohibition against showing favor applies to the courtroom (lest one litigant doubt the judge’s impartiality and alter his claim), and the prohibition against accepting bribes applies even to a case where the judge has not altered his verdict on account of the bribe he received.
Even so, in light of the prior mandate to judge righteously, why are further qualifications necessary? And how can we understand Rashi’s case of a judge who accepts a bribe without altering his verdict?
The adage that justice is blind traces its origins to these verses. Rabbi Zev Leff offers the hypothetical case of a man brought before the court and found guilty of murder. Before the judge can order the criminal’s execution, the wife of the offender steps forward and argues that, since she committed no crime, she does not deserve to be made a widow. Then her children step forward and argue that, since they committed no crime, they do not deserve to be made orphans. Finally, the criminal’s creditors step forward and argue that, since they committed no crime, they do not deserve to suffer financial loss.
What is the judge to do? He has no choice but to disregard all the apparent injustices of his verdict and rule according to the law.
Any flesh and blood judge may become so intoxicated with his own power that he begins to see himself as if he is the One Judge sitting upon the throne of Ultimate Justice. He may come to believe that he is not merely an agent of the justice system but the administer of justice, that he is empowered not merely to interpret the law but to engineer civil and social justice. He may eventually view the law as his own personal instrument with which to forge a perfect society. In the end, he may distort legal justice in the misguided belief that he is the architect of a greater justice. By doing so, he plays into the hands of his yeitzer hara – his evil inclination – becoming an agent of corruption in his pursuit of higher justice.
By acting thus, a judge accepts a bribe more subtle and insidious than money. Convinced of the integrity of his own actions, he becomes blind to the wisdom that qualified him from the start to serve as an arbiter of justice as he unwittingly twists the words of true testimony to serve his preconceived notions of right and wrong. When the judge comes to believe he is above the law, there is little hope that justice will be done.
In this warning, however, the Torah does not limit itself to the office of the judge. In many ways, we are all judges, evaluating and passing judgment upon our fellow human beings in the courtrooms of our minds. On the one hand, we may fear to judge at all, indulging the moral equivalence of non-judgmentalism by refusing to acknowledge wickedness no matter what its form. On the other extreme, we may judge too hastily or superficially, passing judgment without adequate information or based upon our preconceptions and stereotypes.
Here especially the Torah warns us against bribery. For whenever we indulge our prejudices, biases, and stereotypes in a rush to moral judgment, we are effectively accepting a bribe from the yeitzer hara – allowing our natural inclination toward evil to win out over our wisdom, our judgment, and our equally balanced inclination toward what is good and what is right.
Celebration
Posted in Education and Parenting on September 4, 2008
We’re celebrating my youngest daughter’s bas mitzvah this Shabbos, so I’m looking back to what I wrote on the occasion of the bar mitzvah of my oldest son, which closesly followed the holiday of Shavuos.
Talk is cheap
Posted in Politics on September 1, 2008
Regardless of one’s party affiliation or political leanings, Charles Krauthammer has articulated with characteristic clarity the credibility gap that threatens Barak Obama’s campaign.
In Torah philosophy, dibur — speech — is the bridge between thought and action. Thoughts unspoken dissipate and come to nothing. Similarly, words that neither stem from actions nor lead to action might as well have never been spoken. What better example do we have than election year promises?
As we begin to reflect upon our own actions in preparation for Rosh HaShonah, let us consider that talking about change is not enough — we have to articulate how we need to change through viduyi, the spoken confession of when and how we have stumbled. We then have to implement a concrete strategy for change if our intentions have any chance of fulfillment. Without both reflection on the past and a strategy for the future, there is no true repentance, without which there can be no change.
RNC blown over
Posted in Politics on August 31, 2008
With Hurricane Gustav poised to strike the Gulf Coast, John McCain cancelled much of the RNC programming, clearly seeking to distinguish his own crisis response from George Bush’s post-Katrina dithering three years ago.
Of course, there are differences. McCain is not (yet) president, and has no power or responsibility to deal with the approaching crisis. And abbreviating the RNC is not going to help anyone two-thousand miles away in the face of the storm.
Nevertheless, McCain wants to communicate the message that Americans cannot go on with business as usual when millions of our countrymen stand in the path of impending disaster. It’s a show of solidarity, with no practical effect except the subtle lesson that every individual is in some way a symbol of every other individual. When part of the country suffers, the whole country suffers. We simply cannot carry on as if everything is normal.
But it’s a tricky call. How many have to suffer before we must pause in our routines to acknowledge their suffering and empathize with their pain? A thousand? A hundred thousand? A million?
Only a few weeks ago, the Jewish community went from the joy and exuberance of Shabbos to the mourning and weeping of Tisha B’Av in a matter of moments, switching our emotional gears from overdrive to reverse in an instant. Judaism teaches us that we have more control over our moods than we might think. But it takes thoughtfulness, focus, effort, contemplation, discipline, and leadership — especially leadership — to show us how to direct our actions in order to awaken the appropriate emotional response.
Empathy is not always convenient, but it is essential to preserving our humanity.
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