Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg
October 28, 2006

A man parks his car in front of the main entrance of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.  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. I have a good alarm in my car.”

The elections are coming – God help us.  And as November 7th draws ever nearer, many of us are not sure what to do.  Widespread discontent and disillusionment with politics and especially with political corruption has chipped away at an already disgruntled American populous.   Across the country, it seems, the upcoming elections may be determined more by a negative reaction to various scandals and abuses of power than by a given politician’s stance on the issues.  Here in Illinois, a recent poll indicated that more than half of registered voters are dissatisfied with both leading gubernatorial candidates.  The race for Cook County Board President has been overshadowed by allegations of cronyism and nepotism.  The Mark Foley scandal still garners ample headlines and it seems that every day we hear a new story of some candidate or incumbent who made poor decisions either personally, professionally or both.  It’s like political mad libs:  “Congressman _(proper noun)_ was _(verb)_ for misusing his _(noun)_.”

Columnist Rex Huppke quipped in his article last Sunday that these elections “will make many feel like acid-reflux sufferers choosing between a bowl of spicy chili and a plate of hot tamales, with nary a bromide in sight.”  And yet the elections are coming.  And while voter apathy and discontent may be a worthy news story, we still live in a representative democracy.  Someone has to run the country.  To paraphrase Hillel, if I am not for somebody, who will be for me?  But, lest anyone think that corruption is a new phenomenon, he need look no further than this week’s parashah.

“The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness” (Gen. 6:11).  

What is God’s response to this widespread corruption? – To start over. God gathers the one decent family, has them build an ark to save themselves and some 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 (ch. 17:14-20), the people are warned that should they set a king over themselves, he is to 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 is not surprising, then, that when the Jewish people come to Shmuel haNavi, Samuel the Prophet, and demand that he appoint a king, Shmuel cautions them of the dangers of the monarchy: the king will draft your sons to 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), Shmuel warns.  And Shmuel’s own family was not immune to political corruption.  When he appointed 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 became 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 is easy to despair.  But, we humans, we Jews, do not have the luxury of simply starting over.  There is no magic button to reboot the world as we would a video game. For us, “game over” means game over.  God promised after the flood never again to destroy the world.  God will not, we must not.  Legitimate ethical considerations aside, we have neither the mandate nor the power to wipe out corruption in torrents of rains.  We must live in a world with deception and injustice.  For better or worse we must play the game, and the game includes politics.  This past week, I taught a class through our wonderful HaZaK program here at the shul.  We discussed the sheva mitzvot b’nai Noach, the 7 Noahide laws.  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 am 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 Chaim Potok explains: 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 chapter eight (v. 21) we are told, “...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 global warming and nuclear warfare, we know that human driven 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 make-up.  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 Yetzer HaRa, the inclination toward evil behavior is learned in childhood.  Children learn what they see, and the obligation of a just society is to teach them the justice that derives from good and fair governance.  The covenant of Noah, then, becomes a pedagogic tool.

And what could be more educational than the rainbow?  Children love rainbows.  I’m guessing that few of us have thought of this phenomenon as a divine weapon of war.  Rather, the rainbow evokes feelings of freedom, beauty and grandeur.  Think about it: who doesn’t feel like a kid again on a rainy April day, when the clouds have broken and the sun beckons to a palate of colors, stretching them across the sky?  Rainbows are a glimpse of the divine, if the light of heaven can be fractured into such a magnificent array, perhaps we too can discover the secrets in that light.  Rainbows, simply because they are so ephemeral, leave us wishing to find that pot of gold or recalling long-forgotten children’s songs. They are a sign of promise, a symbol of hope in a broken world. 

Recently, Miriam and I have fallen in love with a sweet little song (by A. Hamilton) on one of our daughter’s CDs:
Red and yellow and pink and green
Purple and orange and blue
I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow
You can sing one too.

Listen with your eyes, listen with your eyes
And sing everything you see
You can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow
Sing along with me.

Never mind that pink is not really a color of the rainbow....  As I watch Ellie run around our living room, trying the capture the colors cast off by our leaded glass windows or our hanging prism, I am captivated by the notion of listening with our eyes, or singing what we see.  For a covenant (as we know) is not unidirectional, it’s reciprocal.  This bridge to the divine is also our promise not to close our eyes to the world, to fix it when it’s broken and to cherish goodness when we see it.  “Listen with your eyes:” the image makes us smile.  If only all of our children would listen, if only all of our parents would teach us well the dangers of corruption, the world might be a better place, a place filled with hope.  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.  And when faced with candidates who are uninspiring at best, contemptible at worst, how do we choose?  Must we choose? Professor Robert J. Weber of Northwestern University suggests five options when one goes to the polls in a dour mood. 

~Abstain to show both parties you’re unhappy. 
~Vote for a third-party candidate, even if he or she is unlikely to win. 
~Vote for your less-preferred main-party candidate, to encourage the party you prefer to come up with better candidates.
~Vote for the candidate of the party not currently in office (the “throw the bums out” approach).
~Or finally, simply vote along party lines.

Cynical choices for cynical people responding to a corrupted political landscape.  But are protest votes or protest abstentions effective?  Even Weber admits, “given how large a fraction of the voting population abstains in the first place, it’s not clear if the parties would get the message.”  In fact, I would suggest that we have a greater responsibility than to simply “show up.”  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.  A good portion of the Talmud’s tractate Bava Metzia, is dedicated to a discussion 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 indicate to whom the money belongs.  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 becomes reclassified as hefker, ownerless property and the lucky soul who stumbles upon the money may keep it.  The same is true in the political process. When we despair, do ye’ush, with regard to an election, either by casting a protest vote or by not voting at all, 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 a perfect system, I would suggest to you that democracy affords us the best chance at this noble goal. Democracy 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. To properly quote Hillel now, “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.  Perhaps certain government officials are corrupt because they did not have the right kind of guidance in their youth, it’s hard to say.  But democracies 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.  As religious people, we have little time for despair.

“So, nu Rabbi,” you may ask, “If I must vote, who do I vote for?”  The answer is quite simple, I think.  Vote for the best candidate, the one whose positions, record and disposition speak most honestly to your politics, your view of how this city or county or country should be run.  Consider, also, scandals and charges of corruption.  Ideally, you want to vote for someone with integrity, candidates you trust will stand for honesty and human dignity in their voting records as well as in their lives.  If you don’t know the candidates’ stance on the issues or you’d like to read articles and press releases?  Go to www.vote-smart.org.  It’s a non-partisan website with information on many candidates and incumbents across the nation.  Avoid Weber’s fancy, yet mostly ineffective, solutions.  Do your research.  Vote with your heart, your mind, your gut.

And, as you vote for your candidate, keep in mind the following two issues:

First, often times the choices aren’t as bad as they seem.  We have a tendency to view political corruption as contagious, a disease to which all politicians are pre-disposed.  This is not necessarily 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.  It is no longer pointed at earth and the corrupt to be found upon its soil, 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 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.  The sun will surely rise on Nov. 8th and our responsibilities will continue on that day as well.  We must find a way to take active possession of the process, not to despair, throughout our elected officials’ terms in office.

Huppke’s article cites vote-smart.org’s senior adviser Adelaide Kimball who says, “If citizens are frustrated, if they are unhappy with the choices, if they don’t like the way candidates run for office, then they’ve got to speak up – not just during an election year but all the time.  They have to get to candidates and convince them that they have a responsibility to the voters, not to their political consultants.”   This also means that this year your options may not be what you wish them to be.  Make the best choice you can.  Then work hard over the next two years to make sure that the next election includes better candidates.

I don’t have to tell you how to do this.  Each of us knows that enough people making phone calls, writing letters and emails or protesting will make a difference.  We simply have to remind ourselves that it will.  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 endure such power, and to wield it with compassion, wisdom and grace.  As Americans too we learned that lesson, and demonstrated our knowledge of it 233 years ago when a group of citizens dumped tea into the Boston Harbor. Three years later, in July of 1776, the 2nd Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence and bid farewell to the monarchy of King George III.  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.  When we make better choices, on Election Day and every day after that, we help to ensure that next time we will have better options from which to choose.