Lasting stability

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross

Have compassion for my poor kids, growing up. Being the children of a rabbi — i.e., someone who constitutionally takes symbols and ceremonies seriously — is not easy. On the Fourth of July, they had to listen to a reading of the Declaration of Independence before they got to play with the fireworks. Granted, it was only a highly digested version of the declaration to which I subjected my youngsters, book-ending the glorious beginning and inspirational ending while fast-forwarding past Thomas Jefferson’s bullet list of all the indignities imposed upon his American subjects by German George.

But the fact that all those catalogued wrongs are in the original document serves to highlight an important point for us American patriots: In spite of its glorious beginning and inspiring end, this watershed document from a long ago July, which matters so much to us today, was drafted first and foremost as a manifesto of insurrection and a declaration of war. It serves to define the temperament of this great nation as a certain rugged individualism (which can also translate just as well as truculent feistiness).

The American conundrum is that, once independence was secured, the disruptive forces of rebellion are lauded as patriotic heroes. The corollary Jewish conundrum is that our fabulously ancient people, who are the fountainhead from which flows most modern social values, can bear witness from our long history that the most orderly societies are those in which a strong (and even despotic) ruler keeps the disruptive forces of rebellion in check.

That has been the case since the Biblical era, when the prophet Isaiah describes the mailed fist of the arrogant Assyrian Empire as “the rod of God’s wrathful chastisement,” and when Jeremiah lauds the neo-Babylonian emperor N’vuChadnetzar as a stabilizing influence in our corner of Asia.

In Medieval Europe, when Jews were marginalized as both an ethnic and religious minority, our unique social status as servei camera, “property of the crown,” reflects our having been under the direct protection of the king.

The same was the case in the 20th century, when (as a case in point) the island of Rhodes saw the establishment of the Benito Mussolini Yeshivah for Girls — one index of how an ironfisted dictator guarded the welfare of his minority subjects.

Until, of course, he didn’t. In 1943, Mussolini buckled to pressure from his Axis ally north of the Alps and began rounding up and executing the Jews of Italy. This pattern, too, occurred over and over throughout Jewish history. The stability offered by a strong local lord was tenuous, at best, and could readily be reversed in an instant into race riots, massacres and expulsions. Strength makes for stability, perhaps, but strength unchecked weakens the spirit and sickens the society (which is why the Psalmist twice urges us “not to trust in princes, but only in The Eternal One.”).

Our longevity as a people gives us the perspective to recognize this, and to rejoice in the part we and our faith have played in laying the foundation for a social stability that lasts. The founders of this republic were Bible-readers who saw George III as pharaoh; the Americans as Israelites; and this continental nation as a new Promised Land. They saw the Torah as God’s Covenantal Constitution for Israel (they copied the requirement of presidential citizenship in II:1:5 directly from Deuteronomy 17:15), and they looked to the laws of the Torah as a template for a new kind of society built on a balance between personal rights and responsibilities, between individual autonomy and individual responsibility.

Maintaining that balance is the ultimate exercise of strength that makes a society work.

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross serves at Jewish Congregation of Marco Island.